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Nuclear dumps: misrepresented and compulsory
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Australia is now an international dump for radioactive waste, and we're not even getting paid for it! On October 10 2024 The Federal Government and the Opposition passed the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Act 2024 that will allow high-level nuclear waste from American and British nuclear submarines, along with any future Australian nuclear submarines should any ever be delivered, to be dumped anywhere in Australia, without any debate or community consultation.
The bill creates two nuclear dump zones, one at the HMAS Stirling naval base on Garden Island, 50 kilometres south of the Perth CBD in Western Australia, and one at a shipping yard in Osborne near Port Adelaide in South Australia.
The bill allows the dumping of nuclear waste from US and UK submarines, but not "spent nuclear fuel" unless its from Australian submarines. So this now depends on whether the submarines are deemed Australian or not for the purposes of the legislation, given that the Howard Government excluded Australia from our own immigration zone to get out of our international obligations under our treaties to accept people seeking asylum. It also depends on whether "spent nuclear waste" which isn't defined in the Act, can be interpreted to mean that UK and US end-of-life submarine nuclear reactors can be dumped in Australia as high level waste anyway.
The Greens have raised concerns about the lack of community consultation, the lack of protections for communities, and the lack of transparency.
The Osborne shipyard is in federal Health Minister Mark Butler’s safe Labor electorate of Hindmarsh. In an interview with ABC's 7.30, he said residents would be consulted closer to when the facility would be established but stated the waste facility would go ahead even if residents did not want it.
That is the opposite of the definition of consultation. The shipyard is on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, who don't want any radioactive waste.
Greens senator David Shoebridge told 7.30 “Neither the UK or the US have any permanent solution for their nuclear waste, and the UK is the one that’s in the most trouble … and they have seen with AUKUS a potential sucker down here in Australia...”
There is also opposition to the waste facility at Perth’s naval base, which needs to be up and running as early as 2027 when one UK nuclear submarine and up to four US boats start regular rotations.
South Australians are sensitive to nuclear issues. In the 1950s and early 60s the British exploded atomic bombs in Maralinga in the South Australian outback, despite the fact that people lived there.
We still don't have a plan for what to do long term with the intermediate level waste produced by the OPAL research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney. At present, spent fuel is sent to France for reprocessing while nuclear waste is now being returned to Australia, where it is held in a temporary store near the reactor.
This waste needs to be permanently isolated from ecosystems and human society, given it will take tens of thousands of years for the radiation to decay to safe levels.
There's quite a history of business groups and Governments pushing for Australia to be the nuclear dump for the world, regardless of what the people living here want.
From the late 1990's to the early 2000s, an international business consortium called Pangea secretly planned to establish a high-level nuclear waste dump in Australia. Their efforts were exposed when their corporate video was leaked to Friends of the Earth and broadcast on Four Corners in 1999, leading to widespread public opposition and the abandonment of the plan.
In the early 2000s the then-South Australian Labor government ran a successful campaign against the first proposed dump.
In 2015 the South Australian government, under Premier Jay Weatherill, initiated a Royal Commission to investigate business opportunities in the end of the nuclear fuel cycle. This led to a proposal for importing high-level nuclear waste as a money-making venture. However, the plan was rejected by a Citizens' Jury in November 2016 and subsequently abandoned.
Since the time of Prime Minister Bob Hawke, the Commonwealth government has made multiple attempts to locate nuclear waste facilities on remote Aboriginal lands. These efforts have been ongoing, with the most recent attempt targeting Napandee, near Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula, which the High Court rejected in 2024 after the Federal Government excluded local Aboriginal people from community consultation. So far no alternative site for civilian nuclear waste has replaced Napandee.
While Sweden and Finland are building secure storage systems in stable rock layers 500 metres underground, neither the UK nor the US have moved beyond temporary storage.
UK efforts to manage waste from decommissioned nuclear submarines is still at the community consultation stage. At present, high-level waste from sub reactors is removed and taken to Sellafield, a long-established nuclear site near the border with Scotland. But each submarine still holds around one tonne of intermediate level waste, which, according to the UK government, has to be temporarily stored until a long-term underground storage facility is built some time after 2040.
In the US, spent fuel and intermediate waste from nuclear submarines is still in temporary storage. After the Obama administration scrapped the long-debated plan to store waste underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, no other option has emerged. As a result, nuclear waste from their military and civilian reactors is just piling up with no long-term solution in sight. Successive administrations have kicked the can down the road, assuring the public a permanent geological disposal site will be developed some time in the future.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has repeated false claims that waste from nuclear submarines is “no different” from waste produced by nuclear medicine.
In an ABC 7:30 story on Port Adelaide local’s opposition to the planned storage and disposal of nuclear waste at the Osborne shipyard, Mr Butler claims that “the low-level waste associated with the construction and with the rotation of these submarines is no different to the low-level waste that we’ve managed very confidently, very expertly over many, many years in nuclear medicine.”
Federal Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy incorrectly stated that there was no risk to the community.
"This is akin to what occurs in 100 other sites around the country, anywhere that has a hospital that deals with medical imagery that involves radioactive isotopes has exactly the same level of waste," Mr Conroy incorrectly said.
The Medical Association for Prevention of War Australia have issued a press release on their website calling out these scientific untruths with the title "Government continues to misrepresent nuclear waste. They write:
"This is not correct. The vast majority of nuclear waste from hospitals is very short-lived waste (VSLW) or very low level waste (VLLW), both of which go to normal rubbish streams after a month or two.
The proposed submarine waste is low level waste (LLW), which needs isolation from the environment for 300 years.
MAPW has repeatedly raised concerns about false equivalencies being drawn between the waste produced by life-saving nuclear medicine and the waste produced by nuclear powered submarines, including by the Australian Submarine Agency. "
I checked with The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency and they agree that Low Level Waste needs to be stored for a minimum fo 300 years. The Agency then gets coy about Intermediate Level Waste and High Level waste permament storage times and just talks about them needing longer times and tens of metres greater depth of storage. I had to look to the UK Government's documents online to confirm that Intermediate Level Waste needs to be stored for thousands of years and High Level Waste needs hundreds of thousands of years to be safe, based on their respective half-lives and radioactivity levels. This is not even remotely comparable to hospital level waste from nuclear medicine. At the end of their life, nuclear submarine reactors weigh 100 tonnes and contain about 200 kilograms of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium and potentially tonnes of irradiated material. The reactor and waste are removed as one sealed unit for permanent storage under the rems of the AUKUS treaty. Because the fuel is weapons-grade material, it will need military-scale security for longer than human history. Nuclear waste is not just for Christmas, its a very long term committment from Governments that specialise in avoiding long term commitments.
This waste is considered similar to other High Level Waste and requires the same long-term storage solutions.
The UK temporarily stores submarine Intermediate Level Waste and High Level Waste in an above ground storage building designed to operate for just a hundred years, until the long-term underground storage facility is built, expected sometime after 2040, finally accepting waste in 2050. Of course if the UK can just transport their radioactive waste to Australia like they did their convicts, then they may never build the deep underground long term geological vaults.
For comparison, if Neanderthals had used nuclear power, we would still be looking after their glowing nuclear waste, because all of human history is less than a hundred thousand years old.
The timing of the legislation is interesting, because safe storage of radioactive waste and military protection of nuclear-weapons grade uranium have been missing from public debate on nuclear power in Australia.
In South Australia, the Port Adelaide Community Opposing AUKUS said it was prepared for a fight ahead of the next federal election. Eileen Darley said.
"We don't want our children, our grandchildren, to have to deal with this in the long run."
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Government continues to misrepresent nuclear waste
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