Source: Reuters
HAWKER, Australia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Enice Marsh remembers the black clouds of “poison stuff” that billowed from the northwest after British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s spread fallout across swathes of South Australia.
Now a new kind of radioactivity could head to her ancestral home in the remote Flinders Ranges – a nuclear waste dump.
“To me, it feels like a death penalty,” said Marsh, 73, standing in the cemetery of the outback town of Hawker, where many of her relatives are buried under red earth.
“We are one big family and the land also is family to us. We care for the land just in the same way we care for our family.”
South Australia is at the heart of a debate over the nation’s nuclear future that highlights a familiar tension between quick economic gain and long-term custodianship of land occupied by Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years.
Two separate proposals divide opinion in the state with the country’s biggest uranium mine and a history going back nearly 20 years of saying “no” to nuclear dumps.
A recent Royal Commission report argues that South Australia could profit by storing high-level waste from nuclear reactors overseas, buried deep underground at a location still to be chosen.
As that recommendation is put to a “citizens’ jury” for further debate, the government is pushing ahead with plans to build a storage facility for less toxic waste generated domestically, mainly from industry and medicine.
It’s this above-ground dump for domestic waste that affects the Flinders, known for its haunting landscapes and home to the Adnyamathanha people, one of several hundred indigenous groups in Australia.
For the first time, the government says it has found a community — at least among non-Aboriginal people — willing to host a repository for the 40 cubic meters (125 square feet) of radioactive waste Australia generates annually.
Surveys show two-thirds of people in and around Hawker, gateway to the Flinders, favor construction of a dump on scrubland around 30 km (18 miles) northwest of the town.
The facility would create at least 15 permanent jobs in a town of just over 200. The government will also put A$10 million ($7.6 million) into local projects if the dump goes ahead after a year of community consultation and environmental studies.
Categories: Australia, Environment, Nuclear waste, The Muslim Times