By Jim Green
The federal government has three options to deal with the stockpile of 1600 highly radioactive spent fuel rods currently stored at Lucas Heights and the 300 that will be generated over the remaining life of the HIFAR reactor. Two options are inadequate. The chosen option is worse.
There's no doubt something has to be done with the highly radioactive, highly toxic spent fuel rods — and quickly. ANSTO will run out of storage space by the end of next year. Revelations that some of the "airtight" containers at Lucas Heights are taking in water, with fuel rods corroding as a result, only add to the urgency.
No-one wants to take responsibility for the management of the spent rods. The September 24 Financial Review quotes ANSTO's executive director, Helen Garnett, as saying, "That's not our problem — ask the government". The journalist asked science minister Peter McGauran, who said go ask the resources minister, Warwick Parer!
Anyway, said McGauran, the problem will not have to be addressed until the year 2010 at the earliest. This is because the government's plan is to ship 1300 fuel rods from Lucas Heights to Scotland, where they will be reprocessed (to extract and reuse the uranium). The reprocessed wastes will be shipped back to Australia.
The remaining 600 fuel rods will be shipped to the USA for long-term storage in facilities that are no more or less adequate than facilities which could easily be built in Australia.
This plan means transporting the fuel rods through Sydney. Regulation and responsibility are an open question. When a box of radioisotopes fell off the back of a truck recently, ANSTO and the NSW Environment Protection Authority had a public brawl, each claiming the other is responsible for regulating transport of radioactive materials.
Transporting this toxic cargo half way around the world involves public health and safety risks and environmental risks. It also carries a risk of terrorism or sabotage — a small risk for any particular shipment, but one which is magnified the more frequent the shipments.
In short, the government's "strategy" is to shift the problems from one country to another and one generation to the next.
Of course it suits ANSTO and the federal government to get rid of the waste for the time being. All the better if a new reactor can be built while the waste is overseas.
The US Department of Energy has its own convoluted reasons for being prepared to accept spent research reactor fuel from numerous countries. In essence it is a diplomatic strategy designed to shore up support for the US government's (selective) non-proliferation policies and perhaps also to shore up business for the commercial arm of the US nuclear industry.
The Scottish Dounreay plant is financially troubled and is only too happy to secure business from Australia. But no-one else in Scotland (or the USA) wants Australia's radioactive waste any more than we want theirs.
Scottish opposition
An editorial in a Scottish paper, the Herald, is scathing about the plan to ship Australian waste to Scotland. According to it, operators of the Dounreay plant are attempting to push through contentious proposals before the new Scottish legislature is established.
The plant operators, having failed to secure contracts from the USA, are very keen to obtain Australia's waste. "The prospective Australian contract is a particularly worrying one and it is becoming more disturbing by the day", says the Herald.
One bone of contention is how long the waste will remain in Scotland before the reprocessing wastes are shipped back to Australia.
The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) says the waste should remain in Scotland for as short a time as possible, and no longer than 10 years in any event. SEPA also says that prosecution could follow unless every effort is made to return imported wastes as soon as possible.
How the waste can be returned to Australia within 10 years is difficult to imagine. The plan is to ship the fuel rods to Scotland in the next two years, but reprocessing will not begin until 2001 or 2002.
There will be strong pressure in Scotland to return the waste as soon as possible, but the Australian government will be equally determined to delay the return, for the simple reason that the government has nowhere to put the waste.
Another contentious issue is the past record of the Dounreay plant. According to the Herald, the plant regularly leaks pollution into the environment. Radioactive discharges from Dounreay contaminate waters well beyond UK territorial limits.
The UK government's pledge to reduce radioactive discharges to the marine environment, given at the Oslo-Paris Convention in early September, also casts doubt on future operations of Dounreay.
A committee representing numerous local councils in Scotland has also voiced its objections to the shipping of Australian waste to Dounreay.
The committee notes that radioactive discharge authorisations, necessary for the reprocessing to be carried out, have yet to be granted by the relevant UK authority. The committee also expresses concern about on- and off-site contamination at the Dounreay plant.
Long-term storage
There are two alternatives to shipping spent fuel rods abroad — neither of them attractive, but both preferable to the current plan.
One option is to transport the spent fuel directly to a waste repository in remote Australia. First, such a repository would have to be established — no small task.
Successive governments have been attempting to establish a low-level waste repository for the best part of two decades. Progress has been painfully slow. It will be much harder to find somewhere to put the long-lived intermediate level waste arising from reprocessing.
If a remote location is chosen, it may be on Aboriginal land. And it may not be remote in future — after all, Lucas Heights was remote when HIFAR was built.
The other option is long-term, above ground, dry storage at Lucas Heights. This would have two main advantages. First, it would force ANSTO to take responsibility for its own mess, and ANSTO's nuclear expertise (such as it is) can be drawn upon to manage the waste.
Secondly, it would mean no transportation of the fuel rods. While both these advantages are important, there is the obvious problem that ANSTO's Lucas Heights facility is situated amongst the 200,000 residents of the Sutherland Shire.
Clearly the management of the existing stockpile of radioactive waste in Australia will pose enormous problems for many years to come. As for the waste from the proposed new reactor, the government has a firm policy: it's not a problem, let some future government deal with it.
The only vague suggestion as to what to do with future wastes is that the possibility of a pilot reprocessing plant, to test the Synroc glass encapsulation technology, is still being considered by ANSTO and the government.
There is only one solution to radioactive waste problems: stop producing it. No uranium mining: it can only end up in bombs or as toxic waste. No new reactor. Develop safer, cleaner alternatives.