A nuclear waste jobs bonanza for regional South Australia?

That estimate comes with caveats: "the final workforce design and structure will be based on a number of factors including advice from security agencies, the views of the independent regulator and the details of the final business case, with inputs from across government."

Overseas comparisons

Is the estimate of 45 jobs credible? Not if overseas radioactive waste facilities are any guide.

The Centre de Stockage de l'Aube (CSA) radioactive waste facility in France handles over 200 times more waste per year compared to the proposed facility in SA yet it employs only four times as many staff as the proposed facility in SA. CSA processes 73 cubic metres (m3) per employee per year (13,164 m3 / 180 staff).

The El Cabril radioactive waste facility in Spain has a staff of 137 people and processed an average of 1,395 m3 per year from 1993 to 2016. That equates to 10.2 m3 per employee per year.

Yet the Australian government estimates a workforce of 45 people to process 45 m3 per year: 1 m3 per employee per year compared to 10.2 in Spain and 73 in France. The government evidently has a dim view of the productivity of Australian workers, or, more likely, its jobs estimate is grossly inflated.

Will the government pay staff to do nothing?

Measuring jobs-per-employee doesn't account for some jobs required whether a facility processes 1 m3 or 1 million m3 per year: administration, security and so on. As a government official stated: "There are a base number of jobs related to the management of the waste which are not linear with volume and a number of jobs that would scale with larger volumes."

Nevertheless, productivity at the proposed Australian facility would be dramatically lower than comparable facilities overseas.

If we assume that Australia matched the lowest of the figures given above - 10.2 m3 per employee per year at El Cabril in Spain - then the staff at an Australian facility would be processing waste for just one month each year and they'd have 11 months to play ping-pong.

The current government might be willing to pay 45 staff to play ping-pong for 11 months each year, but it's not a sustainable situation. The Department of Finance wouldn't tolerate it. If staff at the waste facility are paid by the federal government to do nothing for most of the time, what sort of a precedent does that set, and why shouldn't the rest of us be paid to do nothing for 11 months out of 12 at a cost to taxpayers of several million dollars each year?

Almost certainly, staffing would be dramatically culled. Almost certainly, a future government would revert to the plan pursued by previous governments: keeping the waste facility closed most of the time, and opening it occasionally for waste disposal and storage. In the jargon, this is called a campaign-based approach with occasional waste disposal 'campaigns'.