THE NUCLEAR DEBATE

    * The Howard Government wants more uranium mines and to increase uranium exports to take advantage of booming international demand.
    * Mining uranium to fuel nuclear energy is considered by some Australian and international politicians as one solution to greenhouse gas emissions.
    * Environmentalists argue you cannot increase uranium mining without having a plan to store nuclear waste.
    * Canberra and the states have been unable to agree on building a low-level nuclear waste dump despite years of argument.
    * Low-level nuclear waste in Australia is stored at about 100 sites.
    * Bob Hawke wants Australia to take high-level nuclear waste from the rest of the world.
    * The Australian public is strongly against taking nuclear waste.

But, politically, the idea is nothing short of a suicide mission. One federal Labor politician told The Australian yesterday: "There might be method in Hawke's madness but, believe me, he's on his own on this one."

The public simply won't buy it, at least not yet and not before the need to move away from traditional energy sources and gamble on new ideas becomes much more acute.

A recent Newspoll taken for SBS television has found that Australia may be slowly warming up to nuclear power but we are a long way off thinking it's a good idea to bring waste home. More than 80 per cent of a national survey group of 1200 say they oppose accepting nuclear waste from countries that buy Australian uranium. Hawke knows he has put his finger firmly on the key fault line in this growing debate.

Australian Conservation Foundation campaigner David Noonan recently challenged Australia's politicians to submit to the postcode test: who would support a nuclear waste dump or a reactor in their electorate? He suspected there would not be many takers, despite signals from many players in the Howard Government that they support nuclear energy in principle.

Environmentalists argue you can't divorce the uranium and nuclear power industry from the problems it creates: waste, the increased risk of nuclear proliferation, damage to the environment and risks to the health and welfare of workers and the wider community.

Despite years of wrangling, Australia has not yet been able to resolve the problem of where to locate a low-level waste facility to store the waste generated by government departments, agencies and hospitals.

After an unseemly squabble, Howard announced in July he would shelve plans to build a low-level radioactive waste repository at Woomera in South Australia.

Now Canberra wants to build a facility on commonwealth land at one of three potential sites in the Northern Territory. Science Minister Brendan Nelson's department will shortly issue a request for tender for field studies to take place at the sites.

The continuing failure to resolve this issue means that low-level radioactive waste is scattered across the country at more than 100 locations, an arrangement that is no doubt less than suitable for the purpose.

According to Nelson's response to a recent question on notice from Ferguson, waste is stored in many places, starting with Woomera and Lucas Heights in outer Sydney. The Department of Defence stores waste in Melbourne, Ipswich, Wodonga, Adelaide, Newcastle, Darwin, Sydney and Nowra. The CSIRO has waste stored in Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Mt Gambier, Brisbane and Melbourne. The Australian National University in Canberra also stores nuclear waste.

Even in its proponents' best-case scenario, it's unlikely there'll be a low-level waste dump up and running with all the necessary approvals before late 2011. Meanwhile, the Howard Government is busy pulling out all stops to expand uranium mining to take advantage of the world price for uranium, which has tripled in recent years.

Australia has the largest low-cost deposits of uranium in the world. Australia also sits on the doorstep of the huge Chinese market. China is pressing ahead with building nuclear power stations and markets are opening up in Southeast Asia.

Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane wants Australia's resources giants to be able to cash in on the boom. Many senior figures inside federal Labor and some within the trade union movement agree. But both sides of politics are acutely aware that public anxiety over nuclear waste can bring this push to expand uranium mining undone.

The minerals industry argues Australia should be able to get to a point where uranium is treated like any other commodity.

The chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, Mitch Hooke, says Australia doesn't routinely take back fly ash generated by coal-fired power stations or slag from steel making. Not surprisingly, the chief lobbyist for Australia's resources companies says the pain should not be borne exclusively by the uranium mining industry.

Hooke says the industry is committed to "material stewardship", where all elements of the production chain, from miners to manufacturers through to consumers, take their share of responsibility for the environmental consequences of the industry.

Hooke says Hawke's backing for a new high-level dump is "a matter for debate" and that companies will pursue the idea if it is a commercial venture. But he warns any proposal will have to run the gauntlet of complex federal and state government regulations.

Of course you'd be ignorant of the media blitz by Bob at the time too wouldn't you.

here's a link to the ABC interviews.

http://www.oba.com.au/uploads/downloads/media/AM%20-%20Hawke%20nominates%20Australia%20as%20worlds%20nuclear%20waste%20dump.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1469734.htm

Why do you talk about stuff if you are ignorant of the facts.

call yourself a greenie...  even all the green groups were up in arms against him...

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/32704/story.htm

just google... hawke nuclear dump...

Who the hell cares whether it's a Right Wing or a Left Wing thing anyway?

I just don't follow what one political party says on one issue over another. I tend to examine the issue itself and make up my own mind. I will never get a perfect fit with the policies of any political party, and by the way, I agree that One Nation had some good policies. They were a shambles otherwise but they did come up with some good ideas by not following the party line.

It's a pity that the Democrats have gone downhill, because I admired the fact that individuals were almost encouraged to hold individual opinions that differed from the Party line. Apart from that, I really miss Natasha Stott Despoya   as leader of the Dems.

I just can't understand how people can blindly follow party lines. For example if they don't have a strong opinion on an issue,  do they think, "I'm ALP so my opinion must be ALP's party line. Maybe I should read it so that I know what my opinion is" (Substitute Liberal, and it's the same thing)

Who gives a flying f^&* what past Prime Ministers did? What's important is to examine the issue now on its own merits.

Bob Hawke? Give me a break. So nothing has changed with the world since Bob Hawke was PM?

Go back to 2005

21 July 2005
Proposed NT nuclear dump to receive highly radioactive waste for next 40 years

The Environment Centre NT (ECNT) says the proposed NT radioactive waste dump is intended to go on receiving long-lived, highly radioactive waste from the new Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney for the next 40 years.

“This waste, from reprocessed spent fuel rods, is likely to be shipped to the NT via Darwin Harbour, some of it arriving in 112 tonne ‘casks’. An unspecified amount of this most dangerous waste will be arriving periodically over the next 40 years. It will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

“The waste from a single reprocessed spent fuel rod is far more radioactive than ALL the waste the Commonwealth proposed to dump in SA, and spent fuel rods from the new reactor will be twice as radioactive as spent fuel from the current reactor, as ANSTO has acknowledged.

“Furthermore, contrary to Howard government assurances that only ‘low’ and ‘intermediate’ level radioactive waste is destined for the NT, spent fuel rods from Lucas Heights are classified by the NSW EPA and US regulatory authorities as HIGH LEVEL radioactive waste – and even when reprocessed remain highly radioactive.

ECNT has called on the Howard government to come clean on the full range and volume of radioactive and toxic materials likely to be transported each year to the proposed NT nuclear waste dump.
ECNT Coordinator Peter Robertson said, “Based on our research, there is a wide range of highly dangerous, long lived radioactive materials and other toxic substances that are likely to be included in shipments to the NT dump on an ongoing basis, were it established.

“After years of waste dump debate, the Howard government has never fully disclosed the full range and volume of materials involved. As with all things nuclear, secrecy is the order of the day, along with linguistic tricks designed to conceal the full extent and risks of what is being proposed.

“According to reports including the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney, the construction of which is the main reason the Howard government is desperate for a waste dump, there are at least twelve categories of radioactive material that are almost certain to end up at a NT dump.

“These include:
·      Approx. 50 cubic metres of highly radioactive waste produced from reprocessing more than a thousand existing and future spent reactor fuel rods (Lucas Heights) – arriving over the next 40 years in containers probably via Darwin Harbour; ·      Approx. 130 drums per year of radioactive ‘compactable low level solid waste’, e.g. vials, gloves etc (Lucas Heights); ·      Approx 20 drums per year of solidified radioactive ‘sludge’ produced in the treatment of reactor wastewaters (Lucas Heights); ·      Hundreds of tonnes of radioactive ‘non-compactable contaminated items’, e.g. materials from the decommissioned old Lucas Heights reactor, pipes, machinery etc; ·      A stockpile of over 5,000 drums of ‘low level radioactive waste’ (Lucas Heights); ·      A stockpile of over 200 cubic metres of ‘intermediate level solid waste’ some with ‘unknown radioactive inventory’ (Lucas Heights); ·      Over 800 drums of ‘historical wastes’ including radioactive thorium, beryllium and uranium (Lucas Heights); ·      Over 2000 litres of radioactive contaminated charcoal (Lucas Heights); ·      Hundreds of used air filters containing radioactive contamination (Lucas Heights); ·      Around ten cubic metres of highly dangerous solidified molybdenum ‘long lived intermediate level waste’ (Lucas Heights); ·      Over 2000 cubic metres of radioactive contaminated soil currently stored at Woomera; ·      Other Commonwealth Defence Department and CSIRO ‘historic’ radioactive waste.

“It must be stressed that radioactive waste in many of these categories will be produced and transported to the NT on an ongoing basis if and when the new Lucas Heights reactor is activated, so the volume of radioactive material will go on increasing every year.

“An analysis by Friends of the Earth shows that just to transport the existing stockpile of waste from Lucas Heights would involve over 130 truckloads of material. To transport all waste, current and ongoing, will require an initial 160 truck loads, another 200 truckloads for material from the decommissioned old reactor, and about 7 truckloads of new waste per year for the next 40 years.

“Once again it must be reiterated that the safest and only responsible way to deal with the problem of Australia’s radioactive waste, most of which is from the unnecessary Lucas Heights reactors in Sydney, is to store it in the safest possible way near the source of the waste, and to stop producing more and more of it.”

References: ANSTO Replacement Nuclear Research Reactor Draft EIS, Vol 2; Commonwealth Department of Science (DEST) Radioactive Waste Information Service, July 2005; Friends of the Earth Australia, “Some things you should know about a national store for nuclear waste”, 2003

cont..

I did go back to 2005  when do you think hawke was hawking the project?

Bulls#it...  tied to the intervention...  your tin hat is on too tight.  You need psychological intervention re your Howard hatred.

I wish I could get Jack Nicholson to scream down at our pollies;

"You can't handle the waste"

For me this is, still, after 40 years of interest in the subject, THE, sticking point for me, we really can't handle the waste.
We have some drilling into mountains, some stacking leaky old 44 Gallon drums, into huge toxic mounds in the wilderness, all hoping for the silver bullet fix, to be supplied by science, and so far, we have not got it.

I am not keen on signing up our kids, and grandkids, etc, etc, into the next 100 generations, or so, with the responsibility for looking after a massive pile of toxic waste, which may have pretty drastic potential.

Get the waste issue sorted, and I am on board, and do not try and sell me the idea that they can solve it next week, I have heard forty years of that, and I am getting a tad sceptical about it.

Mantra, although the point you make about the economic viability of Nuclear power, was correct, previously, most are factoring in massive rises in energy costs, which would make it economically viable, in the near future.

Therefore, that argument starts to look weaker, however, the de-commissioning costs, and especially the waste management costs, are very much open ended expenses, that no-one can accurately assess, because we have too many unknowns involved, to even make a vaguely definitive costing model.

If they can sort out the waste issue, then it really may be a viable option for future power generation.