Nuclear waste and nuclear medicine in Australia

Need for an independent inquiry

The current plan for a waste facility at Kimba should be scrapped. It is unacceptable to be disposing of nuclear waste against the unanimous wishes of Barngarla Traditional Owners, and ILW storage at Kimba makes no sense for the reasons discussed above.

Australia needs a thorough independent inquiry of both nuclear waste disposal and production. We need a long-term disposal plan that avoids double-handling and unnecessary movement of radioactive materials and meets world's best practice standards.

An inquiry should include an audit of existing waste stockpiles and storage. This could be led by the federal nuclear regulator ARPANSA in consultation with relevant state agencies. This audit would include developing a prioritised program to improve continuing waste storage and handling facilities, and identifying non-recurrent or legacy waste sites and exploring options to retire and decommission these.

An inquiry would also identify and evaluate the full suite of radioactive waste management options. That would include the option of maintaining existing arrangements until suitable disposal options exist for both ILW and lower-level wastes.

Radioisotope production options

We also need to thoroughly investigate medical radioisotope production options with the aim of shifting from heavy reliance on reactor production in favour of cyclotrons (a type of particle accelerator). Among other advantages, cyclotrons produce far less radioactive waste than research reactors.

PET scanning is the fastest growth segment in nuclear medicine. Overwhelmingly this is used in cancer diagnosis and increasingly in therapy, and relies only on cyclotrons for supply.

We have a choice: whether we follow ANSTO's expensive business model to ramp up reactor manufacture of radioisotopes -- and the long-lived radioactive waste that goes with it -- or collaborate with Canada and other countries to develop cyclotron manufacture of radioisotopes that does not produce long-lived nuclear waste.

ANSTO is a taxpayer-funded organisation. The decision to ramp up reactor waste production will leave many future generations with radioactive materials that last hundreds of thousands of years.

Clean cyclotron production of technetium-99m was approvedi n Canada last year, and should become the future of radioisotope production. It avoids the accident and terrorist risks of nuclear reactors, has no weapons proliferation potential, and creates very little nuclear waste.

Cyclotron radioisotope manufacture at multiple sites will also be more reliable than our single reactor, which has a record of multiple unplanned outages.

We should be leaders in this field, not laggards.