AUSTRALIA’S minister for resources and energy has begun another chapter in the 22-year saga of his country’s effort to establish a national repository for low-level and intermediate radioactive waste.

Minister Martin Ferguson has introduced the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 to replace the previous government’s Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005. The new legislation withdraws Canberra’s power to impose its will over siting a waste repository, rules out three sites on Defence land which had been identified as options, and retains the right of traditional Aboriginal landowners to volunteer a site in return for financial incentives.

It also recognises that a site on land owned by the Ngapa people in the Northern Territory near Tennant Creek was volunteered in 2007 for around A$12m (S10.8m) in compensation and that the Commonwealth entered a preliminary agreement with Ngapa representatives.

The new bill revives a process begun in 1988 to establish a national repository for waste from medical procedures and other sources that is now stored in multiple sites.

“I don't believe it's appropriate that we go forward with, for example, a hundred different repositories around Australia in cabinets in universities, in shipping containers in car parks in hospitals,” Ferguson says.

The repository is also needed for intermediate waste from reprocessed spent fuel from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s research reactors, now stored in Scotland and France and due for return by 2015.

A senate committee is mounting an inquiry into the new legislation while the Northern Territory government has signaled its opposition to any site within its jurisdiction. Local resistance was also highlighted by a public meeting in Tennant Creek this week  at which members of different Ngapa clans disputed the validity of the 2007 agreement, local residents raised concerns about safety and land values, and pastoralists claimed a repository could threaten the viability of the local beef industry.

Gerry McCarthy, who represents the area in the Northern Territory’s Labor government, said he was “shocked, dismayed, and disheartened” that a Labor government in Canberra was pushing for a dump in the Northern Territory.

"We've got a fight on our hands," McCarthy said.