Friday 21 April 2006
78.3 ABC Alice Springs
Reporter: Katya Quigley

REPTR Nat Wasley is from the Arid Lands Centre's Beyond Nuclear Initiative. Good morning Nat.
WASLEY Good morning.

REPTR Do you enjoy a beer now and then, do you see yourself sitting down with the Senator and nutting it out?
WASLEY I wouldn't mid sitting down with Senator Scullion again to talk about this issue, sure.

REPTR Now you've heard what the Senator has to say, doesn't he have a point if the Northern Land Council is willing to take on a dump why wouldn't the government put it there?
WASLEY Well so far no community has put up their hand to welcome the dump onto their land. And what I'm wondering is at what point in the process is this community going to put their hand up. The sites have been nominated, the company's been chosen to start the site assessments, the process is ready to start and at what point will these secret sites come into play in the process.

REPTR Do you think that the senator knows something that we don't?
WASLEY Maybe or maybe not, I'm not sure. But the point he made anyway that if a community can nominate a site and welcome it onto the land, that's not necessarily scientific criteria either for a waste dump to be located on a position. So he was right in saying the department of defence sites were chosen only because they're commonwealth land. That was the big problem when the commonwealth was trying to put the dump in South Australia, they had to go through the land acquisition process, and that was a lot of stumbling blocks for them. So they have chosen these purely because they are commonwealth land and they can override that process.

REPTR So do you have any information as to what sites the NLC will be putting forward?
WASLEY Nothing's been made public and actually the whole process has been really secretive up until this point. The announcement for the company doing the site assessments was one small mention on the website, you know, so far there's been no accountability or transparency and we're really hoping that from this stage on there will be thorough community consultation.

REPTR I think one of the concerns that I raised with the senator, he wasn't able to answer my question, was that a nuclear waste dump surely needs to be somewhere that's environmentally stable where it won't be at risk of floods and other things that can happen in the wet season in the top end. If it goes somewhere in the top end, surely that's an environmental concern.
WASLEY Absolutely, we just need to look at the Fishers Ridge site near Katherine, and people actually could not get in to assess the site during the floods that just happened up near Katherine to actually see if the site was flooded or not, because every single access road was blocked. So even if the actual site was okay then there was no way to access that site.

REPTR So say for instance a nuclear waste dump was built somewhere that was unstable and it flooded, what's the potential environmental impact of that?
WASLEY It depends on the type of facility that's built. The idea that's floating at the moment is there could be two types of storage onsite, and one is a shallow burial, which is basically a big hole in the ground with waste barrels in it, and that's an unlined trench. The idea being that if there was a concrete lined trench and the flood, then we could have floating barrels. So at the moment that's the plans for an unlined trench. Eventually there's potential for those waste barrels to rust, to decay and for that radioactive material to disperse.
REPTR .to leach.
WASLEY .absolutely.

REPTR Nat what kind of strategies have people got to keep the campaign against the nuclear waste dump going, because we really haven't heard much about it for several months now.
WASLEY Well it's a really good opportunity, by the 28th April there's the opportunity for public to make the final round of submissions to ARPANZA, which is the nuclear regulatory body. And we have the chance to actually comment on the guidelines that are given to the company doing the site assessments. And one of the things we're really pushing is that they need to do a lot more community consultation. The international atomic energy agency really state for worlds best practice nowadays it's recognised that it's just as important to really have a strong level of community acceptance as well as having good scientific criteria. So we want them to follow these worlds best practice.

REPTR Just finally Nat, will anti dump groups be trying to persuade Aboriginal traditional owners that a nuclear waste dump isn't in their interests?
WASLEY We won't be trying to persuade anybody about anything - but definitely supporting what the community wants. And what I would just like to think about if a community was to welcome a waste dump, how long will the government be taking care of that waste dump, because the waste will be radioactive for thousands of years and many, many generations to come. So will they have the guarantee that that will be looked after for as long as the waste is radioactive.

REPTR What's the website that people can go to for more information or to make a submission?
WASLEY Sure, you can look at www.alec.org.au that's the Arid Lands Environment Centre. If you want to look at the ARPANZA website, the government website, it's www.arpansa.org.au and that has all the details about making submissions. Or if you come into the Arid Lands Environment Centre, we have a form letter you can simply sign and send away.

REPTR Thanks for chatting to us this morning Nat. WASLEY Thank you.