Should South Australia be home to the world’s largest nuclear waste dump?
SHOULD South Australia become home to the world’s largest nuclear waste dump? Advertiser journalists David Valente and Michael McGuire debate the merits of the venture.
Play it safe to protect the world
By David Valente — CASE FOR
I’M an environmentalist. I commute by bike to reduce my carbon footprint, I put in a rainwater tank at home to conserve water, I minimise packaging, buy local, loathe gas-guzzling urban 4WDs and energy-ravenous McMansions and ... I am 100 per cent, passionately in favour of a nuclear waste repository for South Australia.
Because I am an environmentalist.
Because to be a true environmentalist means to care about the health of the whole planet Earth, the whole biosphere and everyone and everything that depends absolutely on it.
And the scientists — scientists mind you, not politicians or profit-driven corporate bully boys — have already told us more than once that the SA Outback is the best, the safest, the most geologically and environmentally stable place on the planet to store the nuclear waste that already exists in stockpiles around the globe.
Stockpiles that, by definition, are in far less safe places than we can provide here.
It is because I want the whole big, wide beautiful world to be as clean and as safe as it can be for my children and their children after them that I advocate doing the very best we can by the environment in every situation.
And in this case — as the leading minds in the field stipulate — that means bringing nuclear waste here and burying it in the deepest, most stable and impermeable bedrock available anywhere.
Not perfect, maybe, but still the best there is, and how can anyone passionate about protecting the environment not want dangerous materials stored in such a place?
The piles of toxic sludge exist, we can’t wish them away. We can’t safely send them off into space or destroy them. We’re stuck with them so all we can do is make the very best of a bad situation.
And I’m not underplaying for a moment the potential hazards of bringing these noxious materials here from halfway round the world but those reasons are exactly why they should be stored in the most secure location possible.
Every possible safeguard should be taken, regardless of cost, at every stage of preparation of the facility and throughout transportation and storage of these dangerous, deadly materials.
And the prospect of colossal financial gains to our economically threatened state should take a very distant back seat to environmental care but the best place is the best place.
The environment is worldwide and in situations like this so should be the concerns of environmentalists.
Those making a kneejerk “no nuclear, no way” argument against this plan I believe have fallen into the trap of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) environmentalism. There’s nothing wrong with passionately protecting your own patch but doing it without considering the rest of the interdependent biosphere is counter-productive.
If we as environmentalists keep shouting “The Earth is sick, something must be done!” but at the same time steadfastly refuse to make the hard call to do something in our back yard, how and when will anything change?
To be a true environmentalist means to care about the health of the entire planet and sometimes that means putting your money where your mouth is and your waste where it will do the least harm.
Like it or not, that’s here.
It’s a sure sign that we’ve given up
By Michael McGuire — CASE AGAINST
IS there any greater sign that we have given up as a state than to volunteer to become a receptacle for some of the most dangerous material on the planet? Is there anything that says “We have completely run out of ideas” quite like becoming the place where nuclear waste fuel rods spend their retirement years?
There is a famous quote on the Statue of Liberty that proclaims “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’’. Perhaps we could put something similar on the Mall’s Balls.
“Give me your poison, your chemicals, your radioactivity, we’ll breathe them for you.’’
Look, I understand the cool-headed intellectual analysis of why some people want South Australia to become home to a nuclear dump. Or a high-level nuclear waste repository to give the thing its full Orwellian moniker.
Ridiculous sums of money are mentioned. One report mentioned $445 billion being pumped into the state’s economy over 70 years. Although, that argument was slightly undermined by a later report where Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commissioner Kevin Scarce admitted “there is no existing market to ascertain the price a customer may be willing to pay’’.
It is the focus on the dollars that underlines our own desperation. With the state’s unemployment rate stubbornly remaining the highest in the nation, with job and economic growth worryingly low, we are well disposed to latch on to any magic beans that a kindly stranger may offer.
There has been recent good news on the defence front but it’s not enough to banish the crippling fear that SA is stuck in a long-term downward trend. If the economy was flying, if the unemployment rate was 3.5 per cent, do you think this proposal would have ever seen the light of day?
Making decisions while desperate rarely produces a good outcome. Look at the prime ministership of Julia Gillard. Or Malcolm Turnbull.
You would have to be desperate to host waste from other countries that could be dangerous for another 100,000 years.
Put that time frame in some perspective. It was only 2000 years ago or so that Jesus Christ was wandering the planet. Does that seem recent?
The Royal Commission did say most of the really dangerous stuff will have dissipated in 500 years. So South Australia should be relatively OK somewhere around 2600. Five hundred years ago in 1516, Nostradamus was a young lad, and it seems South Australians are about to make some similar magical thinking leaps to determine what the future will look like.
But maybe this is a bit harsh, a bit emotional, a bit insular. I acknowledge it pains me to think that in the future if this state is known for anything globally, it will likely be as “that place that takes all the world’s dangerous crap’’.
Perhaps, I should be assured the whole process is in the hands of the Citizen’s Jury. You know, the same process that gave us the much-loved new cycling laws, and expounded on such life and death decisions as deciding how to fizz up Adelaide night-life and what to do about cats and dogs.
It’s an impressive leap to go from how best to look after Kitty to deciding whether we want to become known as the place Chernobyl might send its leftovers.
