Antinuclear

Sealed away in steel and concrete is Australia’s nuclear waste legacy at Lucas Heights in Sydney’s south

ABC News, By political reporter Matthew Doran, 15 July 24

Whenever there is a debate about nuclear power in Australia, one question regularly pops up: What do we do with the waste?

It can’t just be taken to the local dump along with garbage or rubble, and it has to be handled with immense care and stored in particular ways while it remains dangerous — sometimes for decades, and in the case of high level waste up to thousands of years. 

Despite nuclear power generation still being a subject of political debate rather than reality, and nuclear-propelled submarines being decades away from being tied up at local docks, many Australians don’t know we are already producing, processing, and storing nuclear waste.

One of the largest repositories is Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility, in Sydney’s south.

The ABC was invited inside……………………………………………………………………………………………………

The type of contaminated waste coming into the vast warehouse for assessment and processing is what’s classified as “low-level”.

Much of it includes items like rubber gloves, gowns, glassware, and old laboratory equipment from ANSTO’s nuclear medicine facility

It’s still contaminated and needs to be meticulously picked through, categorised, and stored away until it’s no longer dangerous, sealed away in the steel drums lining the shelves of multiple warehouses dotted across the Lucas Heights site.

Decades of legacy

Bags and bags of contaminated material sit in bins at the edge of the warehouse we’re standing in.

All the waste comes from ANSTO itself. While the organisation doesn’t store waste for others, it does assist with the material they produce………………. It’s brought into the warehouse, and scanned with high-tech machinery before ANSTO figures out the best way to store it – and for how long.

…. “A lot of the waste that we bring in is really very quickly able to be sent out to the normal tip, because working with nuclear medicine, which generates most of our waste, we have a lot of short-lived isotopes,” Paula Berghofer, head of waste management , says.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ANSTO’s Lucas Heights site is home to the only nuclear reactor in the country.

It’s a facility used to create radioactive isotopes for use in areas such as nuclear medicine. ……..

Lucas Heights’ OPAL reactor is currently undergoing maintenance.

It’s not used for power generation and doesn’t create waste anywhere near the level of radioactive material that would come from such a reactor.

However, that’s not to say there isn’t decades-old nuclear waste stored at the site.

Some drums and blocks of radioactive material, encased in concrete and steel tombs weighing many tons, have been here for decades.

Among them, are remnants of the original nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights – known as MOATA – which operated between 1961 and 1995, and was decommissioned 15 years ago.

“It will remain here, safely monitored and stored, until Australia has a disposal operation available for us to send it to,” Ms Berghofer says……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Offshore processing

There’s another warehouse, which looks a little different, on the Lucas Heights campus.

It’s newer. It’s taller. It’s wrapped in extra layers of security.

When you walk inside, it’s striking how empty it is. Apart from two huge cylinders, standing on their ends, at one side of the building

“While Australia has a very important role in the nuclear space, we are comparatively small, and we certainly don’t have the infrastructure or really the need or desire to install what is a very large price reprocessing facility here,” Ms Berghofer says.

“So it makes sense for us to have those international agreements, so that we can send this overseas to the experts, where they can reprocess it and send us back an equivalent.”

Again, these canisters are also intended for a national nuclear waste dump, once it is established.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-16/australias-nuclear-waste-legacy-lucas-heights-ansto/104091600

July 16, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | wastes