Reports indicate France is soon to return reprocessed nuclear waste generated at Lucas Heights to Australia. The federal nuclear agency says the waste is "intermediate level", small in volume, and to be stored temporarily at Lucas Heights. These assurances are misleading in all three respects: the volume of the waste, its toxicity, and its future disposal.

Australia's first research reactor, the high flux Australian reactor, went critical in January 1958. It was fuelled by highly enriched bomb-grade American uranium. Although small compared with power reactors, it discharged 37 spent fuel rods a year, each containing the same weapons-grade uranium, plutonium and fission products as its big brothers.

By 2002, it had produced 1665 such rods. Some were sent to Britain and the US for reprocessing. But by 2003, four metric tonnes remained in temporary storage at Lucas Heights.

When political pressure forced Britain to cease reprocessing in Scotland, Australia's nuclear agency arranged with the French company COGEMA to reprocess the rods. Australia is legally bound to take the lot back - plus, one assumes, the separated plutonium and uranium-235. The problem is there is no agreed permanent place in Australia to put it.

In 2007 the old reactor was decommissioned and replaced by one designed by the Argentine company INVAP. Before construction began, the government stipulated a high-level waste site was to be identified and a feasibility study completed. No site was found and the stipulation was modified to a strategy for disposal.

The situation becomes more complicated. Argentina initially agreed to take back the spent fuel rods from the reactor for reprocessing, returning the waste to Australia and keeping the weapons-grade uranium-235 and plutonium-239 under full-scope international safeguards. But its officials asserted such reprocessing was in violation of Argentina's constitution. Australian officials appear not to be worried because they say the reactor has a storage pool with capacity for nine years' worth of spent fuel rods. A solution, they imply, will turn up.

But like the rapidly filling storage ponds at all civil reactors around the world, this is a short-term solution. The problem of ultimate disposal of irradiated fuel continues unresolved. Australia does not even have a designated repository for low-level nuclear waste such as contaminated clothing and discarded radio pharmaceutical equipment from hospitals.

In 2002, three possible low-level sites were identified in South Australia. But the sites were judged too risky because an errant missile could land on the dump, scattering radioactive debris in all directions. The state's then premier, Mike Rann, strenuously opposed it. South Australia, he declared, would not become Australia's "nuclear waste state".

Nor, according to their premiers, would any other Australian state. Australians seem complacent about exporting uranium but become unsettled about storing its end products here, even waste generated by our reactors.

By February 2010, the only site still under consideration as a nuclear waste dump was Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory, where the federal government can overrule the Legislative Assembly in Darwin. But deciding on Muckaty was controversial.

First, although a small group of traditional owners of the land supported the decision, a greater number opposed it. They launched a case in the Federal Court opposing it.

Second, the site is meant to take low- and intermediate-level waste. But intermediate waste is a narrow definition based on calorific output. If heat is dissipated, runs the argument, high-level waste becomes intermediate. But whatever its temperature, the waste still contains all the fission byproducts and actinides of high-level waste.

Storing the reprocessed nuclear fuel that is to come back from France at Lucas Heights seems the best of a poor set of alternatives. There are at least suitable storage facilities and chemists and physicists who know how to handle the material.

But what Australia needs urgently is a solution. We are stuck with highly radioactive material for which we are responsible. Like all countries with nuclear reactors, we should not have produced it in the first place until safe storage technology existed.

Richard Broinowski is a former Australian diplomat and author of Fact or Fission? The Truth about Australia's Nuclear Ambitions.