By Noel Wauchope
The latest news from Germany really shows up this problem. IF conditions are ideal a decision on a site for Germany’s underground nuclear waste repository could be made by 2074.
- That’s – 50 years to find a site.
- Then 20 years to build the underground dump.
- Then many decades for transporting and storing thousands of casks.
That’s just for Germany, which took the courageous decision to just shut down this filthy industry. Germany is not creating any more radioactive trash!
This is a comforting situation for today’s “nuclear experts”
Why is it comforting? Well, because they don’t need to worry about producing ever more of this toxic trash. They’ll be dead and gone long before it all has to get fixed. They can flummox around bleating about the marvels of deep disposal, enjoying their fat salaries, and leave it all for future generations to face.
I have previously written about the concept of “rolling stewardship” advocated by Dr Gordon Edwards. This is a system whereby high level nuclear waste is kept above ground, in very strong containers. The containers are sited away from waterways, and are regularly monitored and repaired. This system, combined with the closing down of all nuclear reactors, would be a practical and honourable way to address the global radioactive waste threat.
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T Abbott talked of suppositories of wisdom, so nuclear waste by-products could be made into those little sphinctre intrusive objects for conservative supporters of the stupid, filthy industry, archaic,unnecessary. Just to sharpen their little intellects…
Thanks Noel.
My money is on Oz to be pressured to become a global dump for nuclear waste.
I note that defence minister Richard Marles has stated that “there is no circumstance where Australia would accept radioactive waste from foreign nations”.
“Nuclear waste won’t end up in Australia, other than the waste that is generated by Australia,” Mr Marles said.
PM Albanese said “There will be no nuclear [waste] transfer from either the US or UK.”
The Greens say legislation already before parliament would allow the UK and US to dump high-level nuclear waste in Australia from their nuclear submarines, and the Greens want a ban on nuclear waste dumping written in to legislation as, a future Liberal government may have a different take and may wish to allow US and UK nuclear waste in.
I think I side with the Greens on this one as this whole AUKUS thing was a brain fart from Scott Morrison and who knows what he may have committed us to expressly or by implication : we know that both US and UK are desperately looking for somewhere to dump their waste.
Be anti-nuclear, but please don’t be anti-common sense. Do you really think homo sapiens is such a reliable species that it can be trusted every day for the next 100,000 years to safely ‘steward’ our nuclear waste, guaranteed against any human failure or screw up, compared to burying the waste in deep geology in rock that has not changed in a billion years and won’t change again in the next billion? It is not ‘experts’ holding up the German repository, but well-intentioned environmentalists peddling the nonsense that if something goes wrong with nuclear waste better that it happens on the surface where it can immediately harm everyone rather than deep underground where it can harm no-one. The German Green Party support geological disposal, on basis nobody wants this waste, but we now have to be more mature and responsible than the previous generations who bequeathed us this inheritance of nuclear poop.