Tuesday 5 August 2014

Nuclear Waste Storage in Australia? Yes, please.

Recently former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke has called for Australia to store the world's nuclear waste.

In a speech at the indigenous Garma festival in the Northern territory, Hawke claimed he had already gotten a favourable response from the Northern Territory chief minister.

Arguing that Australia's outback has lots of open space and some of the most geological stable land on the globe, Hawke pointed out the significant economic gains Australia could make from such storage. He also pushed the idea that indigenous communities could be transformed by this as much of the resulting money could be funneled into addressing serious issues in the country's aboriginal communities.

Unsurprisingly, the suggestion produced a raucous response, much of it negative. The comments section of this Guardian article  gives a sense of the lively debate; pro-storage commentators seem to be rather outnumbered.

However this is an incredibly good idea.

Australia could store this stuff, at little cost after the initial investment, and rake in some serious money. That money could be used for anything, though there is no doubt that indigenous people would be fair claimants to a large chunk, being owners of the land being used.

Environmentally the idea is completely sound. Anybody in any doubt of this should start by reading this. Nuclear waste if properly stored is completely safe and much much less dangerous than other industrial wastes (heavy metals, chemical solvents etc), which are routinely kept in the middle of cities. There is in fact no reason to put nuclear waste out in the desert 100s of kilometers away from the nearest hamlet, other than the fact the anti-nuclear lobby has convinced the public it is excessively dangerous.

The only irony is that in fact nuclear waste doesn't need long-term storage; it should be recycled, which would reduce its volume (and its radiation) by about 95%

Australia, in fact, should by all rights be leading the worldwide nuclear wave. We are blessed with vast amounts of uranium (about a third of the world's known deposits), a high level of development, and a history of energy resource export. We should be exporting the world's uranium, building our own nuclear plants, and happily accepting the waste.

The 'Greens', sadly but not unexpectedly, are outraged, as can be seen in the Guardian article.

Now if they actually were green...