Maralinga: 'old test sites never die'
BY JIM GREEN
On April 16, ABC Radio National's Background Briefing lifted the lid on the troubled clean-up of the Maralinga region of north-west South Australia, contaminated by British nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s.
The tests at Maralinga, under the control of the British government, included seven atomic blasts and hundreds of "minor" trials. The tests dispersed radioactive material over hundreds of square kilometres.
In the 1960s, Britain conducted a token clean-up of the test sites. In 1985, a royal commission into the tests recommended that the test sites be cleaned up so as to be fit for unrestricted habitation by the Aboriginal owners and that all costs should be borne by the British government.
Eventually, in the early 1990s, an agreement was struck. The British government agreed to pay almost half of the $108 million cost of the latest clean-up of the Maralinga region. The aim was to decontaminate the region to the extent that 90% of it would be suitable for unrestricted access, with the remaining 450 square kilometres at the Taranaki test site suitable for limited access.
The most recent clean-up has mainly involved the remediation of areas contaminated with plutonium during the minor trials. The project involved two components — the removal of surface soil from the more contaminated areas and its burial in trenches, and the treatment of a number of pits containing contaminated debris.
In-situ vitrification
The method used to treat some of the pits is known as in-situ vitrification (ISV), a thermal treatment process that uses electricity to melt the soil and contaminated debris, leaving a big, fused rock-like structure which is then covered by soil.
An unexplained explosion on March 21 last year was at least partly responsible for the cessation of ISV. The Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) was divided on the decision to end ISV treatment and there was further disagreement as to whether the remaining wastes should simply be dumped in unlined trenches and covered with soil (shallow burial), or whether the wastes should first be encased in concrete. Shallow burial was the chosen method.
Senator Nick Minchin, the federal minister for industry, science and resources, said in a May 1 media release, "As the primary risk from plutonium is inhalation, all these groups [the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, ARPANSA, the Maralinga Tjarutja traditional owners and the SA government] have agreed that deep burial of plutonium is a safe way of handling this waste".
However, according to Democrats Senator Lyn Allison, the Tjarutja were told, not consulted, about the shift from ISV to shallow burial. Moreover, it was not deep burial that was used but shallow burial.
The Maralinga Tjarutja wrote to Minchin disassociating themselves from the decision to abandon ISV in favour of shallow burial.
A May 3 media release from Allison said, "The Government said there was no need to cost concrete-encasing even though it is a minimum requirement for disposal in the US and the UK. The option of exhuming the pits and vitrifying the most highly contaminated debris was also rejected in favour of the cheaper option."
Safety
The government says that despite the problems with the Maralinga clean-up, the result has been satisfactory. However, it has been openly acknowledged that radiation levels in the test regions remain elevated despite the clean-up.
ARPANSA's CEO, John Loy, says the pits would have to be inspected up to four times a year, but that it has not been determined whether this will be carried out by the local people, the SA government or the federal government.
Loy said that ARPANSA would issue rules on the inspection process but that it would be ludicrous to try and enforce a law for the thousands of years that the pits will remain contaminated. "I think it's only realistic you can only throw out that as a rule for ... 100 years or 200 years. And then what happens after that, I guess, is for future generations to decide", Loy said.
Ongoing surface radioactive contamination continues to be found in the test site. Minchin says that "minor contamination was discovered in late February", and noted in an April 17 media release, "In the last few weeks ARPANSA detected further minor contamination at an area which had been used for biological testing".
Minchin also acknowledges, "At a complex site like Maralinga, where the historical records are poor, there is the possibility of further future discoveries".
The government and ARPANSA made much of the clean-up's consistency with the National Health and Medical Research Council's "National Code of Practice for the Near Surface Disposal of Radioactive Waste". However, as the ABC radio expose noted, the national code was designed for low-level, short-lived wastes only, not for situations like the plutonium contamination at Maralinga.
In response, the government and ARPANSA have argued that the clean-up followed guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency and that, in addition, it was decided to follow the NHMRC's national code even though it was not applicable to the plutonium clean-up at Maralinga. If the clean-up failed to meet the national code, so much the better that the code was not meant to cover such an operation.
Leaked minutes from a MARTAC meeting last year quote a senior officer from ARPANSA saying it was not necessary to meet the letter of the national code since it was not meant to apply to situations such as the Maralinga clean-up.
"The Government has always made clear that the Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992) does not formally apply to this clean-up", Minchin said in an April 17 media release. This is false: that fact was rarely if ever publicly acknowledged prior to the ABC expose.
Government responsibility
A 1996 government report on the Maralinga clean-up said, "The project is aimed at reducing Commonwealth liability arising from residual contamination". This continues to be a primary objective for the government.
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), when the federal Department for Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) applied to ARPANSA for a nuclear facility licence for the Maralinga Rehabilitation Section 400 lands, as it is required to do, it made clear its preference that a license should not be granted.
DISR's application to ARPANSA sought two scenarios whereby the federal government could divest itself of future legal responsibilities to the Maralinga Section 400 lands: either, in transferring the lands to the Maralinga Tjarutja, ARPANSA legislation would no longer apply, thus avoiding future liability (ARPANSA regulates only commonwealth government entities) or, if retaining the lands, DISR would apply to ARPANSA to accept the risk assessments of the plutonium burial trenches and would make the case that "no further remedial work can be justified" and that "a licence would no longer be required".
ARPANSA is currently reviewing DISR's application for a site license.
According to Minchin, the Maralinga Tjarutja are "thrilled" with the clean-up. However, tribal elder Archie Barton says the Tjarutja will not return to their lands until they are convinced the land has been decontaminated.
After hearing about the latest discoveries of contaminated land at Maralinga, Barton said, "It really makes me tired. I have been at it for about 20 years, right from the Maralinga land fight, the clean-up for 15 years. I was really hopeful of getting everything sorted out and making sure everything is clean and proper for the people to take over. To hear what I heard, it really knocked the wind clean out of you."
Lawyer Andrew Collett, who has been working on the Maralinga issue since the royal commission in the mid-1980s, told ABC radio, "There's a very, very heavy burden on the community to weigh up how effective this clean-up will be, so the issues include how good is the clean-up, what does that mean in the future, will there be problems in the future, will the proposed burial of plutonium in a deep burial trench last quarter-of-a-million years, what happens if it doesn't, who's going to meet the cost if it doesn't."
The ACF has called for a full parliamentary inquiry into the Maralinga clean-up, which would complicate the government's plans for an environmental impact assessment into the government's planned national nuclear waste dump in South Australia.
Alan Parkinson, a former government adviser on the Maralinga clean-up, told the ABC of a photograph he received of the Nevada test site in the US, with a caption which read, "Old Test Sites Never Die".
The ABC radio expose can be found at .