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The Forum > Article Comments > Outback SA is a target for both international and national nuclear wastes > Comments

Outback SA is a target for both international and national nuclear wastes : Comments

By David Noonan, published 20/7/2015

The Abbott government is short listing sites in SA for a National Nuclear Store as Premier Weatherill’s Nuclear Royal Commission investigates High Level International Nuclear Waste Storage in Outback SA.

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this NIMBY proposal seems a bit rich in view of Olympic Dam's continued exporting of uranium yellowcake to all and sundry.
Posted by SHRODE, Monday, 20 July 2015 8:20:48 AM
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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!
Posted by JohnBennetts, Monday, 20 July 2015 9:39:07 AM
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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.
Posted by Taswegian, Monday, 20 July 2015 9:57:53 AM
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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.
Posted by Rhrosty, Monday, 20 July 2015 11:12:06 AM
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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.
Posted by onthebeach, Monday, 20 July 2015 12:41:55 PM
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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?
Posted by Hasbeen, Monday, 20 July 2015 1:26:37 PM
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An excellent article David Noonan

Its only right that South Australians receive the toxic nuclear chemicals that no-one else wants.

I mean these toxic nuclear chemicals are far from the centers of population - except South Australia's.

After all dumping customers (like the US) can always rip-up multi thousand year(?) "we will pay" contracts once these toxic nuclear chemicals are dumped in South Australia.

Australia should finance the dump for $$Billions of Australian taxpayer's money. Then South Australians can watch fly-in fly-out foreign and Lucas Heights experts reap the high pay.
Posted by plantagenet, Monday, 20 July 2015 1:35:19 PM
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"Onthebeach" is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts. The US is not unable to finance its waste facilities - the industry levy was collecting $US750M annually and the balance held was $31B when collections were suspended in 2014. The eventual facility might not be constructed at Yucca Mountain due to ongoing political and geological problems, but other options exist. See: http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059999730

Meanwhile, the waste is stored on various sites quite safely in dry storage casks, so overexcited scare-mongering is not needed.

Let's stay calm and wait for the royal commission's report - it will be the best informed report available in the Australian context.
Posted by JohnBennetts, Monday, 20 July 2015 1:43:49 PM
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JohnBennets,

Likewise, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

I referred to Obama and by anyone's measure, his administration has been strapped to provide funds for the storage and management of nuclear waste.

What was meant as you would be perfectly aware, is that the US President is forever between a rock and a hard place, constantly being forced to take funds from pressing essentials, such as health and aged care, only to WASTE it on expensive 'short-term' (sic) storage of nuke waste.

Yucca Mountain, not so settled is it?

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/474/seek-safe-disposal-of-nuclear-waste-/

Tons easier to ship it across oceans for those dumb-ass Aussies to 'store'.
Posted by onthebeach, Monday, 20 July 2015 2:35:21 PM
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<How George W. Bush left the taxpayer with a crippling nuclear waste debt
These new contracts will only add to that crushing burden.

With hasty stroke of a pen, Bush DOE transferred billions of dollars in radioactive waste liability onto taxpayers

Beyond Nuclear, 27 March 2020, Between November 4, 2008 (the day Barack Obama was elected President) and January 22, 2009 (two days after he took the Oath of Office), the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) hurriedly signed new irradiated nuclear fuel contracts with utilities proposing 21 new atomic reactors.

This obligates U.S. taxpayers to ultimate financial liability for breach of contract damages if DOE fails to take possession of these estimated 21,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste by ten years after the new reactors’ licenses terminate.

DOE signed these contracts despite the fact that it has already cost taxpayers $565 million in damages for past breached contacts involving old radioactive waste at commercial reactors, with $790 million more soon to be transferred from the U.S. Treasury to atomic utilities.

In fact, DOE estimates that by 2020, taxpayers will have paid $12.3 billion in damages to nuclear utilities for waste contract breaches, while the nuclear industry itself estimates the ultimate taxpayer damage awards will top $50 billion. These new contracts will only add to that crushing burden.>
http://nuclear-news.net/2010/03/27/how-george-w-bush-left-the-taxpayer-with-a-crippling-nuclear-waste-debt/

However, the main issue is that after years of the best minds and technology in the world being applied to it, the safe storage of nuclear waste has NOT been resolved to the satisfaction of the American people. There are always the promises of the light over the horizon though.

Send it all to those dumb-ass Aussies? What a great idea! What doesn't work in 'Merica will be quite OK there.
Posted by onthebeach, Monday, 20 July 2015 2:47:41 PM
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OTB:
$31B is a much larger sum than $12.3B. So your concern about funding is misplaced. The money is in the bank - so much, in fact, that they stopped adding to the fund last year.

Panic is not necessary, whether regarding USA's or Australia's nuclear waste storage.

Stay calm. Meanwhile, the waste that is of such concern to some is safely stored in casks, on site, for a small (relatively) cost of hundreds, not billions, of dollars annually. Deferring an 11-digit sum of money by expenditure of an annual 9 digit sum sounds prudent to me. There is certainly no reason for declaration of emergency.

Wait for the royal commission to report. It will address these issues under oath and governed by the laws of evidence, with the best available brains and from all possible points of view. What's not to like about that? It is about time that the air was cleared.
Posted by JohnBennetts, Monday, 20 July 2015 3:08:02 PM
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Well said onthebeach

The nuclear industry are experts at relying on taxpayer money to:

- pay for the building and costly running of waste dumps including round the clock security guards

- paying for the high cost of police, security service and military planning, surveillance and reactions to possible terrorist or legitimate protest action against waste dumps, carriage of nuclear material ships/trucks/trains and nuclear reactors (eg. Lucas Heights)

- underwrite nuclear accident insurance and premiums

- clean up after nuclear accidents, and

- decommissioning nuclear reactors

Inexpensive cost-plans of nuclear reactors versus hydrocarbon power stations conveniently forget the above costs.
__________________________________________________

Hi JohnBennetts

On the legitimacy and likely findings of South Australia's Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission lets not forget the above costs and the background of the Commission's Chief Kevin Scarce.

An anti-nuclear expert observed

"Nor is it reassuring to read the background nuclear industry links of Scarce and his research team. Kevin Scarce is a shareholder in Rio Tinto Group – the owner and operator of Ranger and Rossing uranium mines in Australia and Namibia.

...Four of the five members of the research team named on the [Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission] website have known prior or current associations with nuclear industrial entities."

see http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17489&page=0
Posted by plantagenet, Monday, 20 July 2015 4:48:23 PM
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Apparently, if you can do no more than keep repeating the same old long-falsified assertions, the strategy is to Capitalise the words you want to make sound really Scary. Or even underline or italicise them when you really want to amp the emoting to 11. Alas, no amount of formatting amounts to a scientifically well founded and constructed argument.

So what's your solution, Noonan? One can only Conclude you don't actually want one. Much more fun and profitable just to try to Frighten people. Fortunately, it's not the 1980s any more, increasingly people are seeing through this.
Posted by Mark Duffett, Monday, 20 July 2015 11:44:39 PM
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