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NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP IN AUSTRALIA

MacFarlane Burnett would be turning in his grave. Why would Gus Nossal, his successor and eminent biologist propose that international nuclear waste be transported to Australia for permanent disposal? With this proposition in mind he has, for the past two years negotiated and accepted a consulting assignment with an American, Seattle based nuclear waste disposal company named Pangea.

This comes as a surprise to most Australians. How could a private individual negotiate with a private US company on an issue that will affect this and all future generations. 70% of Australians are currently opposed to uranium mining.

But Pangea had already approached Government ministers earlier this year with a proposal to own and operate an Australian national waste facility. Violating a 1996 bipartisan Senate hearing on the Dangers of Radioactive Waste stipulating radioactive waste be stored above ground for monitoring, Pangea plans to bury this material. Apparently the Federal Government has recently been pressuring 4 or 5 traditional Aboriginal land owners in South Australia seeking their permission to cede their land for a high level radioactive waste dump as well as a possible reprocessing facility. The Land Acquisition Act of 1989 allows the government to drill on Aboriginal land with impunity, acquire the site, and the acquisition annuls the Native Title.

The location of the land is near Roxby, Coober Pedy and Maralinga where the principle of terra nulis allowed the British to contaminate the area with 44 pounds of plutonium (one millionth of a gram is carcinogenic).

Australian high level radioactive waste is located at Lucas Heights where spent fuel rods are currently buried in the ground awaiting transport to some distant place. Nowhere in the States is high level waste permitted to be buried in the ground. Dounray in Scotland recently refused to accept our high level waste and it is quite possible that the US will also refuse.

Meanwhile the Australian Government has decided behind closed doors to construct a new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, twice the size of the old one. This project is clearly not viable if ANSTO cannot relocate this ever increasing radioactive material from within the suburbs of Sydney.

What then to do with this extraordinarily potent cancer causing material?

It would seem obvious that the solution is to stop making it, to close down the forty year old dilapidated nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, and to immediately cancel plans for the new reactor.

As Pangea is an American company, it will obviously be mainly interested in transporting US nuclear waste to Australia, over 90% of which has been made by the civilian nuclear power industry.

Currently this industry is running full page ads in major newspapers such as the New York Times describing the great benefits of nuclear power accompanied by photos of babies and wooded landscapes. But the truth is that nuclear power both adds substantially to global warming as well as manufacturing huge quantities of long lived radioactive waste materials that are tasteless, odorless and invisible and which concentrate thousands of times at each step of the food chain, accumulating most highly in human organs, thereby inducing mutations of genes in sperm and eggs and cancers in this and future generations.

The nuclear industry in America is gearing up to construct a new generation of �advanced� nuclear reactors. But high level radioactive waste has accumulated in the cooling pools of the nations 105 nuclear reactors and there is no legitimate program for the disposition and �disposal� of this carcinogenic material. If this serious problem is not solved in the near future, many nuclear reactors will be forced to close and the nuclear industry, despite their PR campaign will be unable to proceed with their new reactors.

This is where Australia enters the picture. A distant land with huge deserts and low population base, if we are foolish enough, we may become the recipient of the most dangerous, biologically toxic material known to the human race.

However we are talking about geological and meteorological time frames of hundreds of thousands of years - plutonium 239 has a half life of 24,400 years and is radioactive for 500,000 years, and iodine 129�s half life is 17 million years. Ice ages, earth quakes come and go, and global warming could ensure that the centre of Australia eventually develops such a high rainfall that we could be growing pineapples and bananas at Alice Springs.

Underground aquifers permeate the proposed desert site in South Australia and increased rainfall would ensure radioactive pollution of drinking wells and possible new rivers and lakes over huge areas.

What is happening to our country? In the 70s, the ACTU banned the mining, transport and export of uranium, Australians were and are ardently opposed to French nuclear tests in the Pacific, and most are opposed to uranium mining. This government�s pronuclear push to expand uranium mining from three to 28 mines, to build a large reactor in the suburbs of Sydney and to make Australia the radioactive waste dump of the world will have medical ramifications for thousands of generations.

We need a national plebiscite on these most serious of issues, and not nuclear policies made by a few men behind closed doors.