Monday 7 November 2005
News Limited
by Dan Box and Tom Richardson

AUSTRALIA is the best country to build an international nuclear waste dump, says the former head of Pangea, the British-backed company that tried to build one in outback South Australia.

As pressure grows on Australia to build a desert facility, Charles McCombie, now executive director of the Association for Regional and International Underground Storage, a lobby group campaigning for an international nuclear waste site, plans to visit Sydney next year "and deliberately try to stir the pot regarding Australia," he said.

"You could put a map of Australia on the wall, throw a dart at it and have a 99% chance of finding a site," Mr McCombie said.

His arrival is part of a renewed campaign to re-establish Australia as an international waste site. The secretary of the Australian Nuclear Association is lobbying for the country to establish a 'cradle to grave' nuclear industry - where uranium is mined, refined and sent overseas as fuel for nuclear reactors then brought back and buried in the Australian desert.

Legislation will be tabled in the Senate this week aimed at stripping the Northern Territory of the ability to resist federal Government pressure to accept a nuclear waste storage site.

"You have the best country in the world for the disposal of high-level waste, let alone low-level waste," Mr McCombie said.

"If Australia just said tomorrow, 'Let's look at this seriously', I would be there, heart and soul, trying to make that take place, and I wouldn't be alone," he said. Pangea's plans for a commercial waste dump won high-level political backing before collapsing in the face of public opposition in 1998.

While the proposed storage site in the Northern Territory is intended to handle only commonwealth waste, many in the industry see it as a necessary step towards establishing an international dump. One senior banking source said foreign companies had expressed interest in such a site, but would need government backing to move forwards.

In September, former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke told an audience of business leaders in Sydney: "What Australia should do, in my judgment, as an act of economic responsibility is say: we will take all the world's nuclear waste."

His speech had reawakened international interest in Australia as a waste dump site, Mr McCombie said.

George Fox, chairman of the Engineers Australia nuclear engineering panel, said: "If we said we are happy to receive nuclear waste from any part of the world that would obviously generate much export revenue."

Roger Goldsworthy, who was a Liberal mines and energy minister in South Australia in the early 1980s, has also thrown his weight behind the idea.

Mr Goldsworthy granted the 1982 lease to Western Mining Corporation to run the Olympic Dam uranium mine.

Australian Nuclear Association secretary Clarence Hardy said: "There will be some public resistance but more importantly it will make Australia billions of dollars."

Economic modelling done on the failed Pangea proposal showed it would generate about $US100 billion ($136 billion) in export revenues over 40 years.

Any dump site is likely to meet fierce local resistance, however.

A delegation of traditional owners of two of the three proposed sites in the Northern Territory has travelled to Canberra to lobby senators against the plans.

William Tilmouth of the Alcoota Aboriginal Corporation, said: "That land is not vacant. There is over 5000 people living within that area and the people don't want it poisoned."