The problem

What any pro-nuclear government does not tell you about are the three big, unresolved problems of the nuclear fuel chain:

• Nuclear waste
• Safety
• Nuclear weapons

Nuclear waste

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?

• Vitrified fission products which is high level waste
• Compacted residues, the hulls and end pieces from the metallic casings, also high level waste
• Uranium and plutonium

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

Safety

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.

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Nuclear Weapons

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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