By Mike Foley
The search for a site to store high-level radioactive waste will begin in the next year after the government confirmed details of its plan to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact.
While Defence Minister Richard Marles said there were decades to select the site, which would be on current or future Defence land, its location could prove controversial.
The government will not begin the disposal of nuclear waste generated by the submarines until the 2050s.Credit: ADF
Marles told the ABC the location would need to be remote, in an area with geological stability, and one that the government could keep secure.
“We’re blessed with large parts of the country where that’s possible. We have made clear this will happen on Defence land, be it current or future Defence land,” he said.
The commitment to using Defence land was a key difference to the decades-long debate over a site for the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility, he said. That facility, planned for Kimba in South Australia, will permanently house low-level radioactive waste and temporarily store intermediate-level waste, which is largely generated by medicine production.
The AUKUS program assumes the government will not begin the disposal of nuclear waste generated by the submarines until the 2050s, when the reactor from the first of the boats will be due to be decommissioned.
“We are talking about more than 30 years from now when one of the first of the reactors would need to be disposed of. We will in the course of the next year announce a process by which that site will be identified,” Marles said.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said Australia had a stable environment to store nuclear waste and declared the Coalition would not politicise the selection of a site.
Australian National University honorary associate professor Tony Irwin said the fuel from a nuclear submarine became high-level radioactive waste that had to be permanently stored in a deep geological repository at the end of the vessel’s life.
Irwin said waste facilities had been built about 500 metres underground in France, Canada, Sweden and Finland. It would take around 120,000 years for the spent submarine fuel to decay back to the same radioactivity levels of the original uranium. The US does not have deep geological storage.
Each submarine would generate less than one shipping container’s worth of low-level radioactive waste a year, Irwin said, including cleaning materials, filters, resins and disposable clothing.
Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear analyst Dave Sweeney said storing high-level nuclear waste raised the risk of environmental disaster in Australia from a radioactive leak and the prospect that future governments could look to raise revenue by handling international waste.
“AUKUS presents by far the biggest threat yet that Australia will become a dumping ground for the world’s worst nuclear waste,” Sweeney said.
Friends of the Earth national nuclear campaigner Jim Green said any future storage site would likely meet resistance from Aboriginal communities, which have a long history of opposing government plans for nuclear waste sites.
“There’s no consent from Aboriginal traditional owners who are likely to have this nuclear waste foisted on them,” he said.
“They’re putting the cart before the horse, you need to have a credible plan for management and disposal of nuclear waste before you down this path of nuclear submarines.”
Rowan Ramsey, who represents the electorate of Grey in SA, where the Kimba storage facility is slated for development, cautioned against any assumption that it could be the location for nuclear submarine waste.
“In terms of the Kimba site, it was never envisaged that it would handle high-level waste,” Ramsey said. “I don’t think we should be jumping at those shadows.”
The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission in 2016 found South Australia had a unique combination of attributes to enable the safe storage of radioactive waste.
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