Alexander Downer says South Australia can reap billions if it embraces nuclear waste

Hospitals, roads, schools and everything else on SA’s wishlist could easily be paid for if the state makes a hard choice, the former foreign minister and Liberal leader says.

Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has reignited the nuclear dump debate, saying South Australia can earn tens of billions of dollars by hosting a repository for waste from AUKUS submarines and hospitals.

In the first of regular columns for The Advertiser, Mr Downer says SA is the only place on Earth with the geological, political and security attributes necessary to safely store nuclear waste.

A nuclear waste storage facility servicing Australia and other parts of the world could reap tens of billions of dollars in revenue, Mr Downer says, citing a state Labor-commissioned 2016 royal commission report.

Former United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair in 2019 with the-then executive chair of the International School for Government at King’s College London Alexander Downer, Picture: David Tett

Mr Downer, who was foreign affairs minister from 1996-2007 and Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 2014-18, says achieving net zero by 2050 and building AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide will both “require hard and often unpopular decisions”.

“So far politicians, state and federal, have repeatedly back tracked on the issue of nuclear waste in the face of a hurricane of abuse from far left political activists. That we still haven’t even settled on a tiny site for low-level waste is testament to the fecklessness of the political class,” Mr Downer says.

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“But don’t underestimate the common sense of the general public. Nuclear waste, including from our hospitals, should be safely disposed of. Add to that the AUKUS program and surely it’s common sense to store – at a price – waste for our allies.”

A 2016 royal commission report by former governor Kevin Scarce found a high-level nuclear waste dump would pump $445bn into state finances over at least 70 years, through proceeds from a state wealth fund that invested $257bn in revenue from the repository.

But the-then opposition leader Steven Marshall later that year ditched bipartisan support for the proposal, which had been initiated by the-then Labor premier Jay Weatherill.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer (left), Prime Minister John Howard (second from right) and Treasurer Peter Costello (right) at a Cabinet meeting in Parliament House, Canberra, on November 27, 2001.

Mr Downer was a key figure in the Howard Coalition government, which in mid-2004 abandoned long-held plans for a national repository for low and intermediate-level nuclear waste near Woomera, in SA’s far north.

Premier Peter Malinauskas in March last year rebuked fellow Labor premiers for indulging in “domestic political tit-for-tat, or some state-based parochialism” about where nuclear waste from Adelaide-built AUKUS submarines would be stored in decades to come.

“We are building submarines in South Australia because we are the best place in the nation to do this. What should inform whether nuclear waste goes is where it is in the nation’s interest,” Mr Malinauskas said, when touring the shipyard producing the United Kingdom’s nuclear submarines.

Opposition Leader David Speirs, speaking from the UK, repeated the Liberal Opposition’s calls for a “non-ideological and open-minded investigation into nuclear energy generation in South Australia”. He urged Mr Malinauskas to “stop playing the fence and make up his mind on this one”.

“What’s the harm in committing to an investigation into nuclear energy opportunities for our state? South Australians are paying some of the highest electricity prices in the world and we should be looking at every option to produce affordable and reliable power,” Mr Speirs said on Tuesday.

Originally published as Alexander Downer says South Australia can reap billions if it embraces nuclear waste