Anticipating a report scheduled to be released by the office of federal resources minister Martin Ferguson in about a month, NT Labor Senator Trish Crossin told the ABC on June 10 that the Northern Territory could be home to a nuclear waste dump.
Crossin said: "We have never said that the waste dump would not be in the Northern Territory. We've never said that. In fact, we've alluded to people that it may well be in the Northern Territory, what we have said is that there will be consultation and a fair and proper process."
However, the ABC reported, according to Warren Snowdon, MP for the NT electorate of Lingiari, the ALP will repeal the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act even though NT sites are still being considered. The act, which forced the NT to accept a federal decision to build a nuclear waste dump, was widely criticised after it was passed in 2005.
ABC Online reported that both Snowdon and Crossin agree with the previous Howard government that there's a national obligation to have a nuclear waste facility. Federal Liberal MP Grey Rowan Ramsey has volunteered an area near the town of Roxby Downs for the storage of nuclear waste. Roxby Downs, with a population of 4000, has one of the youngest populations in country, with almost one third of the town under 15 years of age. The massive BHP-operated Olympic Dam uranium mine is situated close to the town. Ramsey told the ABC that "it should be science, not politics that determines where waste ends up".
"If Ramsey wants to talk about science then he should look at the endless science that tells us we need to stop the nuclear chain, right here, right now!", Ty Pedersen, an organiser for the Adelaide branch of the socialist youth organisation Resistance, told Green Left Weekly. "The whole industry is a negative debt for ordinary people. We will pay for it for years to come, but the rich make big profits now."
In February, with the support of the Adelaide University environment collective, the Young Greens and the Socialist Alliance, Resistance held an anti-nuclear protest outside the BHP offices in Adelaide.
Pedersen told GLW that Resistance is committed to stopping the mining and export of uranium. Recent drilling has revealed that Olympic Dam is the site of the largest ore body of uranium in the world, and an expansion due to take place this year would expand the mine to a 3km wide and 1.5km deep hole in the ground. "We need to start here to build a people's movement capable of stopping this profit-driven madness!" Pedersen said.
Resistance members are helping to develop plans for a "Climate Emergency — No More Business as Usual" conference to be held in Adelaide later this year.