Managing Australia's radioactive waste

An independent Commission of Inquiry is necessary to untangle the mess created by successive governments. It needs to address basic issues that remain unresolved after all these years − such as a comprehensive inventory of existing waste stockpiles, and the adequacy (or otherwise) of existing waste stores. It needs to thoroughly explore all options for radioactive waste management.

The alternative option is that Canberra could try yet again to impose a repository on an unwilling Aboriginal community, stripping that community of its land rights in the process. In addition to the immorality of that approach, it simply hasn't worked − it failed in SA and it failed in the NT.

A Commission of Inquiry should learn from overseas experience. Around the world, opinion is shifting in the direction of bottom-up, consultative, consensual approaches to radioactive waste management.

The UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management notes: "Experience in the UK and abroad clearly demonstrates the failures of earlier 'top down' mechanisms (often referred to as 'Decide−Announce−Defend') to implement long-term waste management facilities. It is generally considered that a voluntary process is essential to ensure equity, efficiency and the likelihood of successfully completing the process. There is a growing recognition that it is not ethically acceptable for a society to impose a radioactive waste facility on an unwilling community."

The new approaches emphasising consultation and consent clearly represent a qualitative step forward yet they raise challenges of their own. Examples include:

• Situations where community consent is forthcoming but proposed sites are sub-optimal on other criteria (meteorological, geological, etc.).
• Impoverished communities offering land for toxic waste facilities to receive benefits which they ought to be entitled to in the first place (sometimes called 'radioactive ransom').
• Governments may not accept informed community decisions, such as the recent political manoeuvring following a decision in north-east England to reject a proposal for a radioactive waste repository.