ADELAIDE — About 100 people attended a public debate on April 6 concerning the federal government's plan to build a national radioactive waste dump near Woomera, in northern South Australia.

Organised by the Campaign Against Nuclear Dumping and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the meeting was addressed by federal government MPs Nick Minchin and Barry Wakelin, the SA Labor government's environment minister John Hill, federal senators, SA Trades and Labor Council secretary Janet Giles and representatives from CAND and the ACF.

Liberal MP Barry Wakelin, whose electorate includes the Woomera region, asserted that low-level radiation poses “no known harm to human beings”. That will come as a considerable surprise to epidemiologists who have found an increase in radiation-related cancers among uranium mine workers in SA (and elsewhere).

Wakelin's claim will also come as a surprise to every radiation protection agency on the planet, all of which base their work on a model which assumes that there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

Doubters were reassured by Wakelin: “I've spent some considerable time looking for the research. There was an incident at Lucas Heights in 1950, a serious incident, but that's all that I can uncover.”

The Lucas Heights nuclear agency, known in its early years as the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, wasn't formed until 1953! Wakelin's claim about the complete safety of low-level radiation also begs the question: if the waste poses no risk whatsoever, why not leave it where it is? Why override state legislation banning the dump, ignore the opposition of about 80% of South Australians, annul native title rights and use scab labour (to overcome the union ban), if the waste poses absolutely no risk? No intelligible answer was forthcoming from Wakelin.

Another debate on the dump proposal was hosted by the South Australian division of the Institution of Engineers Australia on April 8.

Meanwhile, Mrs Eileen Kampakuta Brown, a Yankunytjatjara elder, collected an Order of Australia medal in a ceremony in Adelaide on April 9 for service to the community “through the preservation, revival and teaching of traditional Anangu (Aboriginal) culture and as an advocate for indigenous communities in Central Australia”.

Mrs Brown is a member of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a group of women from northern SA fighting to stop the nuclear dump through their campaign Irati Wanti (“The poison, leave it”).

From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

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