Australia 'world's best' for nuclear waste dump
By Jim Green
The federal government and the nuclear industry might have hoped the leaked video identifying Australia as the "world's best" site for an international nuclear dump would have made the more modest plan to dump Australia's waste on Aboriginal land in SA more palatable. However, the speculation about an international dump has had the opposite effect.
Aboriginal groups were shocked by the video, produced by the US-based company Pangea Resources, which identifies land in SA and WA for a massive underground dump for nuclear waste. Some of the land is freehold Aboriginal land, and other areas are subject to native title claims.
The federal government has been bullying Aboriginal groups in SA to gain permission for test drilling in the Billa Kalina region, with a view to finding a dump for Australia's stockpile of nuclear waste.
Aboriginal groups — already sceptical — have been all the more reluctant to allow drilling since the Pangea plan was revealed. The prospect of a dump for Australian nuclear waste becoming an international one is not welcome.
The Pangea video was not meant for public viewing. It was obtained by Friends of the Earth in the UK and released to Australian media in December by nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley.
The likelihood of Australia becoming the world's nuclear waste dump in the near future is slim. As the eccentric conservationist David Bellamy says, just try putting that proposal in the electoral pipe and smoking it.
Nevertheless, the proposal has attracted support from scientist Sir Gustav Nossal (who accepted a consultancy with Pangea to push the project forward), right-wing think-tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and a number of right-wing media commentators. Most politicians have distanced themselves from the Pangea project, but SA Premier John Olsen said he would "have a look" at any firm proposal put to him.
Another supporter is Robert Galluci, President Clinton's special envoy on weapons of mass destruction. US officials confirmed that the Pangea plan is one of three waste proposals being circulated in Washington. The others are to dump nuclear waste on Wake Island (in the Pacific) or in Russia.
"The project would have a profoundly beneficial economic impact. Thousands of jobs would be created", the Pangea video promises. Mike Nahan, executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, says nuclear waste storage could generate $25 billion annually on a global scale.
Like the prime minister, Nahan appears to have been bitten by the reconciliation bug: "It [the Pangea dump] would probably need to be located on Aborigines' land which would require their permission and, if given, provide much-needed income and jobs".
An accident could give the economy quite a boost, too. An accident involving a release of radioactivity from a container in an urban area could have economic "consequences" in the order of US$2 billion, according to a 1980 study by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
'Catastrophic impact'
After around 200,000 years, nuclear waste is no more radioactive than many natural geological formations, the Pangea video says.
The video notes that the major risk with geological disposal is waste dissolving in rainwater and migrating. Vast areas of inland Australia are flat, remote, arid and extremely impermeable, and there is very little ground water, according to Pangea. Hence Australia's "world's best" billing.
However, the CSIRO has published research which paints a very different picture. According to scientists Dr Jon Olley and Dr Peter Wallbrink, new scientific evidence indicates that since European settlement, Australians have had a "far more catastrophic impact on their landscape than previously suspected".
European settlement "unleashed an episode of erosion, sediment deposition and change in river systems orders of magnitude greater than we have assumed to date", they say.
"There's little doubt modern Australians have underestimated the extent of change we have inflicted on our landscape", says Dr Wallbrink. "In some cases the rates are staggering. We're talking about changing the very face of Australia in comparatively few years, so dramatic is the scale of these events."
Ironically, the CSIRO scientists have used new research techniques, including measurements of caesium-137 deposited by nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s.
These findings do nothing to inspire confidence in the stability or safety of an underground dump. They also cast doubt on the wisdom of the federal government's plan to dump Australia's nuclear waste in unlined trenches in the Billa Kalina region.
Nuclear power
Worldwide, nuclear power plants generate about 14,000 tonnes of spent fuel annually. The current stockpile amounts to some 160,000 tonnes. According to Mary Olsen, from the US Nuclear Information and Resource Service, nuclear power accounts for 95% of the radioactivity generated in the last 50 years from all sources, including nuclear weapons production.
"There is a good degree of consensus worldwide by governments and scientists that geological disposal is the most viable option", the Pangea video claims. But if there was scientific and political consensus on the wisdom and safety of "geological disposal" (underground dumps), they would be operating successfully overseas and there would be no push to establish an international dump in Australia.
So-called "disposal" in underground dumps is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind con job. The least problematic of a bad bunch of options is engineered, above-ground storage at the point of production/use. On-site storage beats centralised stores or dumps because it avoids the risks associated with transportation. On-site storage also forces producers/users to deal with their own mess, and this encourages the minimisation of waste production.
Above-ground storage beats underground dumps because: it is easier to monitor above-ground stores; there is a better chance of effective remedial action if problems are discovered; and a greater number of future management options will be available.
Above-ground storage is the best option, but not a good or permanent one. There are security risks, and greater exposure to weather conditions and other hazards. The useful life of dry stores is measured in decades, not millennia. As Jean McSorley says, "There's no environmentally proven way for disposal — nuclear waste means eternal vigilance."
Whose problem?
Pangea Resources, and other supporters of the project, have adopted a moralistic tone. Nuclear waste is a "world problem", they say. Rubbish. Just three countries — the US, France and Japan — account for almost 60% of all nuclear power plants. For every country with nuclear power plants, there are five without.
Another line of argument is that Australia chooses to sell uranium so "we" should accept the waste. But according to a 1998 Newspoll, two-thirds of the Australian population oppose the Jabiluka uranium mine, yet the mine proceeds.
Another attempt at guilt-tripping is the argument that the dump would be a safe resting place for plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. There's no doubt that the world inventory of plutonium — hundreds of tonnes and increasing steadily — represents a major risk. But only a portion of the stockpile is from dismantled weapons. Japan, for example, has amassed a huge stockpile of plutonium, ostensibly for its nuclear power program.
All of the eight nuclear weapons states — the US, UK, France, China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan — intend to maintain and in some cases upgrade their arsenals.
The argument that dumping a portion of the plutonium stockpile will be a step towards the global disarmament of nuclear weapons is dishonest and opportunistic. Dumping plutonium would represent a technical fix — more accurately a technical non-fix — to political problems such as the intransigence of the nuclear weapons states, and the political and economic causes of militarisation.
In terms of immediate steps, the first demand must be to deactivate the 5000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert around the world — preferably before the millennium bug bites. The next step is immobilisation of fissile material using solid matrices such as concrete or glass.
The dump proposal is not driven by concerns about weapons proliferation. It is an attempt by the nuclear power industry to dump its waste problems on isolated and politically vulnerable communities in order to increase its chances of survival.
Australia's high-level nuclear waste — the spent fuel from the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney — is to be sent overseas. Now we have a plan to bring the rest of the world's high-level nuclear waste into Australia. Make sense? This is the logic of the nuclear industry: got a problem — shift it somewhere else, stall for time, make it look like something's happening.