Sisters of St Joseph make a powerful case against radioactive trash dumping

Why would any reasonable society actually WANT to expose themselves to danger and the
greatest known risk to human kind and for a completely incomprehensible time of at least
100,000 years till the danger of contamination of earth, waters and human beings subsides!!!
For money? For jobs?
What substitute is money and jobs for some at the cost of clean air, uncontaminated water,
uncontaminated land for food growing, a safe environment to bring up children, a healthy
environment to bring up children, a clean environment for every generation?
What extraordinary motivation is driving those who want to risk all this to involve South
Australia our homeland further into the contamination from which there will be no return?

Josephite SA Reconciliation Circle
Royal Commission into the Nuclear Fuel Cycle
SUBMISSION TO ISSUES PAPER 4 “…Regarding the storage of high level (or nuclear long lived) waste, the Royal Commission must
• accept and
• make perfectly clear to the citizens of South Australia
that there are simply NO World’s Best practice for the storage of high level (or nuclear long
lived) waste.
The material is simply too dangerous, will live on dangerously for an outrageous 200,000
years (CCSA 2015) – and despite the fervent hopes ofthe nuclear industryIlobby- there are
no technological solutions to its safe storage – now or likely to be in the foreseeable future
and quite possibly never.

Unfortunately there is no safeguard in the assurances of those who claim that the situation is
safe and weapons proliferation won’t happen ‘because we say it won’t ‘.

As long term South Australian citizens our members are well placed to know that –
in the Ernul Maralinga nuclear explosions and the later even more damaging so called ‘minor
trials’ which contained plutonium there were ready assurances given by those whose vested
interests were served by the nuclear explosions going ahead. (as quoted in 1.8. above)

The effects of the Emu and Maralinga fallouts affected many South Australians particularly
those living in the remote Far West and North West of our state and in the areas around
Coober Pedy. Many were Aboriginal and their life style of ground cooking and other factors
placed them in an extremely vulnerable position. This experience – personal in most cases
and to their families in others – is what galvanised the Senior Women Elders of Coober Pedy,
known as the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta (KPKT) to lead what became the national successful
campaign of 1998-2004 against the Federal Government’s imposition of a national radioactive
dump on their land.

All of us were living when the Government used the country for the bomb…Some were living at
Twelve Mile, just out ofCoober Pedy… Whitefellas and all got sick. When we wereyoung, no
women got breast cancer or any other kind ofcancer. Cancer was unheard of with me either and
no asthma. We were people without sickness.
The Government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now again they are coming
along and telling us poor blackfellas, ‘Oh, there’s nothing that’s going to happen, nothing is going
to killyou.’And that will still happen like that bomb over there. KPKTApril 1998
In 1998 information was leaked about the Pangea consortium’s plan to ride in on the coattails
ofthe Federal Government’s plan to impose the national radio-active dump on what they saw
as the politically weak state of South Australia. At the time throughout SA andWAat least, at
this proposed imposition, there was an absolute uproar that reverberated overseas. For their
part the KPKT published the following: A dump for the whole world – They must really want to
kill us!

They really are aiming to wipe the country out, not just us but all living things in the whole
earth. They might as well come and kill us straight out Kill us like a dog in the days oflong ago
instead ofthis sneaky way ofkilling us. Kill us straight out…. (Dec 1998)
Sixteen years later, with the introduction of a Royal Commission by our own State
government seeking a respectable way of bringing up the same proposal, our )osephite SA
Reconciliation Circle including our Aboriginal members, asks with something of the same kind
of amazement WHY?
That’s the one question that springs to mind. WHY?
Why would any reasonable society actually WANT to expose themselves to danger and the
greatest known risk to human kind and for a completely incomprehensible time of at least
100,000 years till the danger of contamination of earth, waters and human beings subsides!!!
For money? For jobs?
What substitute is money and jobs for some at the cost of clean air, uncontaminated water,
uncontaminated land for food growing, a safe environment to bring up children, a healthy
environment to bring up children, a clean environment for every generation?
What extraordinary motivation is driving those who want to risk all this to involve South
Australia our homeland further into the contamination from which there will be no return?
Ifthe movers of this plan and their government colleagues think that South Australia is a poor
state now, what currency will SA have when known as the radioactive state – the depository
for the world’s nuclear waste?

Farewell to the tourism industry, to the wine industry, to the food industry.
What reasonable traveller will want to expose themselves and their families to travel along
roads or train tracks when there is real risk of meeting with trucks or trains travelling 100s of
kilometres to reach a radioactive dump for the world’s waste including high level waste.
What responsibility are the protagonists to bear when a nation jstate with comparatively
clean breathable air, lands and waters is forced by the few who will make a huge profit from
the dispossession of the rights ofthe many to safety and to live in a healthy environment?
There was immediate opposition to the proposal for SA becoming the site for the national
radioactive waste dump when proposed in 1998. When Pangea Resources then appeared on
the scene to raise the stakes to Australia becoming a site for the world’s radio-active waste,
ordinary citizens were outraged at this incredulous scheme. So much so that the WA State
Government refused to allow the company to remain in its state.
86% of South Australians were opposed to our state becoming the dumping ground for the
nation’s radioactive waste. Why should we have to accept what was transparently a political
decision to burden what was seen a politically weak state of the nation?

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