this NIMBY proposal seems a bit rich in view of Olympic Dam's continued exporting of uranium yellowcake to all and sundry.

So David, a paid campaigner against nuclear power and anything else nuclear is given space for an article. That's fair enough - he has admitted his bias.

What is not fair is his attempt to close down the SA Royal Commission into nuclear options and to demand that others in the federal sphere not conduct reviews.

What has he against knowledge? Is his case so feeble that he believes that the only way he can win the discussion is by banning all opinion which is contrary to his own?

I look forward to the Royal Commission's enquiries, as should we all. The report will be evidence-based and unbiased and might influence the debate for a decade or more.

Bring it on!

Arcoona Station is near Olympic Dam so that would be returning some actinides close to where their uranium precursor was originally mined. Quite poetic. The Lucas Heights material sent to France will be vitrified (turned to glass) and stored in large clay packed metal cylinders. It can't be used for anything or attacked without heavy machine tools. It could be safely stored on the city outskirts. Or maybe my backyard since a $12m annual fee was mentioned at one stage.

We don't have any plutonium yet but it could be reprocessed in a 3rd gen heavy water reactor or 4th gen when they become commercial. Again big bucks involved. Given that we get 65% of our electricity from troubled coal and 21% from increasingly expensive gas I'd say nuclear is the way to go.

It has to go somewhere and hardly a better place for it, and the millions it could earn a cash strapped state?

Look there has already been enough hypoventilated hysteria, mostly on the back of a mountain of misinformation!

The green movement needs to stop and smell the Co2 in the morning, which is where the real annihilation threat is coming from!

Not only do they say no, nay, never to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, but developing our own vastly less carboniferous indigenous oil products as well!

And all at the behest of the same illogical or misinformed grounds or moribund mindset!
Rhrosty.

If the technology is already available and cheap, making it is so easy to store high risk waste, one wonders why Obama is up to his ears in problems and debt trying to manage nuclear waste in the tech-savvy and rich First World US of A?

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/25/senators-energy-department-float-nuclear-waste-proposals

Some here might remember when John Howard was feted by the US State Department to become converted overnight to Australia winning the short straw as the World's nuke dump. Howard went to the US with the opposite opinion, 'Nek Minit' he was preaching Nuke Waste Storage to the shocked Canadians. His own front bench ministers back home were even more surprised and some said so.

The US State Department had even worked up a rationalisation, a spin, along the lines of waste returning to from whence it originated, forgetting of course that it left as low risk and would be returned as a very dangerous and easily forgotten by the US and others.

As for the ethics of the US. Brits and others, one only has to consider the atomic bomb testing waste they left behind and their refusal to do better.

The simple, incontrovertible truth is that if nuke waste was so easily stored, safe and profitable, Uncle Sam, the canny Brits and others would already have developed the business opportunity and would be jealously guarding their $$ interests.

So here we have South Australia, the Greece of Australia, waffling along down there living off the earnings of the eastern states, & demanding the east's water to fill their artificial water sky lake, typically refusing another opportunity to earn it's own living.

It makes nothing but sense to stick the now depleted nuclear waste back in the holes it came out of, & push the dirt back over it, but our author only wants to carp on about nothing.

Time to close the handout programme, & make the South Australians live off their own earnings. They would damn soon want to get projects like this up & running, as they got sick of a bread & water diet.

Interesting that the two failed states, South Australia & Tasmania, with ratbag green support, will do anything to prevent themselves becoming productive. Timber industry & paper mills anyone?