By mid-2006, uranium mining in Australia had produced 135 million tonnes of radioactive tailings waste. This waste will remain toxic for 4.5 billion years.
But this is not Australia’s only radioactive waste problem. Highly dangerous waste from Australia’s research reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney is coming back to Australia, after being reprocessed in France.
What’s left after reprocessing?
After reprocessing the waste from Australia’s Lucas Heights research reactor, France
is keeping the uranium so it can use it again. Australia is getting back
everything else - all the waste,
including the plutonium. For more information about nuclear waste
and the Howard Government’s plans
Nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous. There is no such thing as safe nuclear power. The potential for another great catastrophe like Chernobyl is real and present.
Every year since Chernobyl there have been safety incidents, accidents and near misses at nuclear power plants around the world. In 2006, Sweden was forced to shut down 4 of its 10 nuclear plants due to a serious safety incident.
Many of the world’s nuclear reactors are growing old. In many cases, their owners want to extend the life of the plants for another 20 years, to continue to earn profits from their operation. Reports of cracked and leaking pipes are becoming more and more common in the UK.
In January 2007, scientists around the world put out a statement saying: We are on the brink of a second nuclear age. They turned the Doomsday Clock forwards by 2 minutes, to five minutes to midnight.
In 2006, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr El Baradei, said that 30 countries could soon have the technology to develop nuclear weapons. These would join the nine countries that already have nuclear weapons.
The world still has 27,000 nuclear weapons: 2,500 of these are on hair trigger alert. This means they are ready to fire in a few minutes.
With the power of nuclear weapons today, just 50 could kill 200 million people. Nuclear weapons are an obscenity and should be eliminated from the face of the planet.
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The challenge is not to research and develop new technologies but to scale up the utilisation of existing clean energy technologies.
Governments must be willing to remove barriers and create incentives for a dramatic uptake of clean energy technologies.
And they must be willing to:
We could make Australia a renewable energy powerhouse and a smart energy saver,
right now with the right policies in place.
We believed the Howard Government would push as far as it could go to develop a full scale nuclear industry in Australia.
If we don't continue to stand up for our environment, we could see large areas of inland Australia targeted for uranium mining - including high conservation value areas - and a nuclear waste dump.
A big part of our job in 2006 and 2007 was to raise awareness of the dangers of the nuclear industry and the Howard Federal Government’s real intentions.
During this campaign our major focus was nuclear waste. Waste is produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Yet the management of long-lived radioactive waste is unresolved after 60 years of military nuclear programs, and after 50 years of the nuclear power industry.
In March-April 2007 we organised a national speaking tour with Mr Kevin Kamps, the nuclear waste expert with the Nuclear Information Resource Service, based in Washington. We met with Federal, State and Local Governments and community activists.
We worked with other environmental organisations who are campaigning against the expansion of the nuclear industry in Australia.
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