The resuscitated push for nuclear waste importing has pretty much died the death already. The discussion has been all about social consent -which clearly is lacking.

However, equally important are the legal obstacles. State, national, and international laws are formidable barriers to overcome, see https://antinuclear.net/2016/11/19/legal-obstacles-statenational-and-international-to-australia-importing-nuclear-wastes/

Europe has just set out regulations about exporting nuclear wastes. Such regulations would clearly forbid the South Australian Nuclear Royal Commission scheme, which involves importing wastes FIRST, and building the repository LATER. Those regulations state:

"The third country must have a final deep geological repository in operation when the waste is shipped"

Albie,

Yes, indeed. The country is riddled with abandoned mines, some huge holes in the ground, some leaking toxic wastes. The managements and shareholders who made their fortunes from those mines are long gone and beyond any justice. The taxpayers are stuck with the clean up bill.

Given the cost cutting, risk taking capitalist culture It would be monumentally naive to assume that there wouldn't be, sooner or later, a major accident. Of course the shareholders and management would evade responsibility and hide behind their lawyers. The public should remember that the Fukushima disaster didn't occur in some Third World country but in one of the world's most technically advanced societies.

As always, fact mixed with fiction to tell loathsome lies?

Yes gamma radiation can and does kill! Yellow cake is not particularly radioactive!

Alpha radiation as in radioactive isotope, bismuth 213, saves lives of folks otherwise waiting out the final months on death row!

A Banana, more radioactive than thorium!

Mr wetherall could arrange it? Get a team and camera's to India and another guided tour of their new nuclear facility.

Take a tested accurate geiger counter. Then be deafened by the silence coming from that machine!

Given I'm likely the only poster commenting here who has worked with radioactive material on a daily basis? I'm here to say, there's a lot of fear mongering going on here by clinically dishonest folk, who believe they can hijack the community response and presume to speak for the blackfella?

Who cannot be allowed to decide anything on the economic merit on their land, but rather, on a highly flawed geopolitical green agenda?

I for one have never advocated burying waste as is. Just burning it!

To then combine it with a silica product, invented by our own CSIRO! Rockcrete, inert even when exposed to acid or alkaline liquids! More than safe enough to return to a worked out mine? Or, fired into space, with a large rail gun, when there is nothing between us or Mercury; hundreds of years from now, when we've created a payload; given most of the mass inherent in waste would have been converted to energy!

Yes correct on one point Mac. We'd need to crack on building hundreds of thorium reactors, which we can do, and then ship them in shipping containers, to an energy starving world, to desalinate their water, grow their crops and power the obligatory washing machine, currently missing in some 60% of this planet's homes!

Or is that just too good for the poor and downtrodden? What are we waiting for? Environmental armageddon?

We have the technology and the fuel!

Stop giving the decision makers excuses for doing nothing! Enough already!
Alan B.

Taking the waste goes together with the taking the money to excavate over the 10 or 11 years to then store the stuff underground. It is not the same shipment that sits above-ground for 100 years or so, but tranches that will be moved below in turn as the excavation is completed to house them.

It makes business sense to take profit in tranches, doesn't it, always with the option of withdrawing from the business should profitability fall? But good Greens always want tidy, gift wrapped, absolute certainty of the business case, just like they did over the Malaysian Solution, where they were so pleased to take the high moral ground at the expense of people drowning. Fascists.

There was no attempt to hide the simple fact of tranching waste. Only simpletons point to it as if the emperor is naked, including ABC online reporters (who thought they had the smoking gun).

PS. Nuclear repositories elsewhere were closed down by Green scare-mongers affecting public opinion (a la SA), not economic viability. Further to, Greens love to say how expensive nuclear is when it is they that make it so in all sorts of sneaky ways, such as levies upon nuclear electricity to subsidize renewables.

Meanwhile, Rome burns.

Noel,

The LNT has been accepted as a precautionary principle, not as a scientific reality. In fact the levels of cancer from areas of radiation exposure after Chernobyl differed very little from other non exposed areas compared to what LNT predicted.

Alan B, "fact with fiction"...?

Please tell my 2 co workers who were covered in raffinate pumped from the SX area of Ranger ERA, that the stuff isn't too harmful after they spent 3 days in the Jabiru clinic. The fact of a young engineer who physically removed 9 Personal Danger tags and locks with a bolt cutter (that's 3 of my locks and 3 each of my co workers) doesn't matter I suppose mate?

As your own experience would tell you Alan, raffinate is the Yellow Cake in solution "no more dangerous than 'Coke a Cola'..." we were told. Your Thorium reactor proposition is a great idea, as is steam power, but both have been done to death.

Instead, let's see the rise of the renewables, let's see the cartels of fossils and their fossil/ionising radiation utilising devices go in the direction the dinosaurs that created them did.