Close Lucas Heights!
The federal government should not allow nuclear waste to be reprocessed at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility south of Sydney. It should close it down altogether, and withdraw completely from the nuclear fuel cycle.
The Coalition government has to decide what to do about the lack of storage space for the 1600 plus radioactive spent fuel rods and other nuclear waste which has been accumulating at Lucas Heights over the past 39 years. A $2.5 million review commissioned by the Labor government in 1992 concluded that the construction of another reactor at a cost of $200-400 million could not be justified and that a decision to build a new one should be deferred for five years.
That time is up, and while the Howard government has not yet outlined its plans, last month science and technology minister Senator Peter McGauran indicated it was considering expanding Lucas Heights to enable it to reprocess nuclear waste.
News of this, and the option of storing reprocessed nuclear waste in Synroc (a synthetic material developed in Australia) and buried somewhere in outback Australia, has been made public to test the political reaction.
No-one knows if Synroc is safe, because it hasn't been sufficiently tested. Apart from that, the reprocessing of nuclear waste is the most polluting stage of the nuclear fuel cycle: it increases the volume of radioactive waste by up to 85 times. Another major concern with the reprocessing of spent fuel rods is that it separates the plutonium 239 and uranium elements, which can then be used in nuclear warheads.
However, the government is being coy about its real intentions. It would make no financial sense for the government to spend at least $1 billion on a reprocessing facility, if it is only to reprocess waste produced at Lucas Heights.
It's more likely that the government is seriously looking at developing Lucas Heights into a nuclear waste reprocessing plant for the region. This makes more sense for a profit-hungry government which is gunning for a slice of the action when the first of Indonesia's 12 planned nuclear reactors comes on line.
Since beginning operations in 1958, the Lucas Heights High Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR) — a British sop to the Menzies government in return for nuclear testing rights in Australia — has been dogged by controversy.
The reactor has had a notoriously poor safety record. A nuclear engineer with the London-based consultancy Large and Associates claimed in 1993 that Lucas Heights' radioactive waste discharges to the air were "extraordinarily high" and that the Australian Science and Technology Organisation's (ANSTO) environmental monitoring program was "poorly planned and of an ad hoc nature". It warned of an "overriding and quite erroneous assumption that a 'research' nuclear facility ... could not possibly create environmental and health concerns".
Successive governments and ANSTO claim that the Lucas Heights reactor is necessary for the production of medical isotopes (although this function alone would hardly account for the amount of waste now in storage). This is wrong. The most commonly used medical isotopes can be produced by a non-nuclear device called a cyclotron (which costs about one third the price of a reactor) and without the waste problems incurred by spent nuclear fuel rods.
The only short- and long-term solution to the nuclear waste problem at Lucas Heights is to close the reactor down. The waste should be stored on site because it is too dangerous to shift it elsewhere, and inspections by independent organisations must be made regularly to ensure that there are no leaks.
As the broad-based anti-nuclear alliance in Germany shows, a growing number of people do not believe the lie that nuclear energy can be safe. Accidents can and do occur, including at Lucas Heights in 1992; the safest reactor is a decommissioned one.