I'm surprised that the RC made this their main recommendation. Recent events suggest SA could do with a small to medium size nuclear power plant as replacement for imported or local coal baseload. When built it would be cheaper than gas baseload. Commissioner Scarce later clarified the $40.2 bn estimated cost of the waste facility saying foreign customers would put up the capital cost upfront, presumably as well as on ongoing fees. Later statements suggested spending $2.4bn a year for 10 years, presumably from the Australian public purse.

Japan is going broke paying for gas imports and will fail to meet emissions targets. They are also investigating building a MOX plant for reprocessing spent fuel as well as a geological repository for unusable waste. After the submarine rebuff I'd think they want little to do with SA.

However I think SA could build a repository much cheaper than other countries. Use the depleted Challenger Mine in the fork of the Adelaide-Darwin and Adelaide-Perth rail lines. Start small with home grown nuclear waste. If Hazelwood and Liddell coal plants are replaced by light water nuclear baseload plants then SA could reprocess the spent fuel in a heavy water (Candu) or 4th generation reactor. If that goes well in the public's mind then maybe think about taking in foreign waste 20 years from now.

Answer to ttbn from Noel Wauchope.

You have got it all wrong. My name IS Noel Wauchope, and I am not notorious on activism nor on anything else. My middle names ARE Christina Macpherson, and I adopted those names some years ago, tweeting as ChristinaMac1 only because I did not want any embarrassment in my then rather responsible job.

So I don't know where you got your facts on my "anonymity", but I think that you need to do your homework better.

To Trisha Dee from Noel Wauchope

I completely respect your comments about South Australia being offered up as a guinea pig, or as some sort of sacrificial place for taking in Japan's nuclear wastes. Indeed, I regret mentioning South Australia in this context.

I should have just said "Australia", as, in the extremely unlikely event of such an ethical choice being made, there is no reason at all why that State should be singled out as the host of another country's radioactive trash.

I don't seriously believe that this kind of ethical decision would ever come to pass. I was really trying to show the unethical nature of the Weatherill government's nuclear waste import plan, as well as the eye-boggling economic risks of it.

From Philip White of Friends of the Earth Adelaide

The idea of helping other countries shut down there nuclear industries by accepting their nuclear waste might have some theoretical appeal—some sort of global solution to the nuclear waste problem that involves exiting from nuclear power around the world—but it is not anywhere near the current reality and the nuclear industry would just try to have its cake and eat it. It would twist any well meaning agreement to its own purposes and leave us with the waste without the desired exit from nuclear power.

We dig up and export uranium as yellow cake. When we could export is as ready to use power grade, enriched uranium, (fuel rods,) which we could take back when depleted to reprocess, burn, burn and burn again and again, until all the available energy inherent in that nuclear waste had been extracted and distributed as ridiculously cheap power via slow breeder reactors! (Walk away safe molten salt thorium) And have other nations pay us billions as we do so, for services rendered!

Leaving completely depleted waste, with a half life of just 300 years!

And even with any and all foreseen known unknowns, unknown knowns known knowns, unknowable unknowns, diverse difficulties, even village idiots like us could safely store that stuff in abandoned/worked out, uranium mines say, for 300 years!?

We invented the vastly cheaper pulsed laser light method of uranium enrichment! Yet continue to export yellow cake! Which could still be enriched to weapons grade or used to make plutonium, both of which can be used in thermonuclear devices! Neither of which could happen if we took back the depleted fuel rods!

And as an a major exporter of uranium, our manifest ethical responsibility/duty!

Moreover, given current mindless outcomes, typical of the dig it up and sell mindset of our, give it and all the inherent advantages away, (useful Idiots) leaders. When nothing we export to the rest of the world should leave here, without some measure of very doable value adding!

And then we wonder why Australia always needs foreign capital, and indeed the foreign masters who come part and parcel with it?

IT'S TIME to cut all those apron strings and chart our own course/make or own decisions, rather than allow others, wrong headed political activists and a highly manipulated market to do it for/to us!
Alan B.

Noel,

Well, I've still got the same person, have I not? You can be Noel or Christina. A bit 'slippery' of you! You are best known as Christina Mac, notorious activist, where I live. Can't think why you are "embarrassed" by your own opinions, and need to hide your identity on certain occasions.

The Dee person might - or might not- be a member of the citizens' jury, but she has revealed her anti-nuclear stance for us. I wonder if she is prepared to advise us how so few people on this joke jury can decide for all South Australians. We didn't vote for them, and don't know them from a bar of soap. I also wonder if she is using her real name so that I can track her down, and make representation to the government concerning her bias, and her idealogical idiocy of being against nuclear power, full stop.