Nuclear waste and nuclear medicine in Australia

Scare-mongering

Regardless of the outcome of the current push for a national waste facility -- and bearing in mind that all previous plans have been abandoned -- there will be an ongoing need for hospitals to store clinical waste. After nuclear medicine is used in a patient, the vast majority is stored on site while it decays. Within a few days, it has lost so much radioactivity that it can go to a normal rubbish tip. There will always be multiple waste storage locations even if a national facility is established.

The government's claim that a national waste facility is urgently required lest nuclear medicine be affected amounts to scare-mongering. Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at Melbourne University, notes: "The emotive but fallacious claim that provision of nuclear medicine services needed for diagnosis and treatment of cancer will be jeopardised if a new nuclear waste dump is not urgently progressed is being dishonestly but persistently promoted."

Likewise, health professionals noted in a joint statement in 2011: "The production of radioactive isotopes for nuclear medicine comprises a small percentage of the output of research reactors. The majority of the waste that is produced in these facilities occurs regardless of the nuclear medicine isotope production. Linking the need for a centralised radioactive waste storage facility with the production of isotopes for nuclear medicine is misleading."

Nigel Scullion, then a Coalition Senator, said in 2005 that "Australia will not get access to radiopharmaceuticals" if a nuclear waste repository site was not quickly cleared of any impediments.

Indeed Scullion claimed that access to medical radioisotopes would cease by the end of 2006. Fifteen years later, access to radioisotopes has not been affected and the sky hasn't fallen in -- but Coalition MPs continue with their cynical scare-mongering.

Go back another decade, and the Howard government was scare-mongering to win support for its plan to replace the HIFAR research reactor at Lucas Heights with a new reactor. It wasn't at all clear that a domestic reactor was required for medical radioisotope production. After all, countries such as the US, the UK and Japan had sophisticated nuclear medicine with little or no reliance on domestic reactor supply.

Indeed there were expert views that a new reactor would adversely affect public health. Prof. Barry Allen, a former chief research scientist at ANSTO, Head of Biomedical Physics Research at the St. George Cancer Care Centre, and author of over 220 publications, toldRadio National's Background Briefing program in 1998:

I mean it's reported that if we don't have a reactor, people will die because they won't be getting their nuclear medicine and radioisotopes. I think that's rather unlikely. Most of the isotopes can be imported into Australia; some are being generated on the cyclotron. But on the other hand, a lot of people are dying of cancer and we're trying to develop new cancer therapies which use radioisotopes, which emit alpha particles which you cannot get from reactors. And if it comes down to cost benefit, I think a lot more people would be saved if we could proceed with targeted alpha cancer therapy, than being stuck with a reactor when we could in fact have imported those isotopes.

ANSTO's Lucas Heights site

ANSTO's Lucas Heights site cannot be used for disposal of nuclear waste. It is unlikely that the site would meet relevant criteria, and in any case federal legislation prohibits waste disposal there.

But nuclear waste can be (and is) stored at Lucas Heights; indeed much of the waste destined for a national facility is currently stored there.