WASTE
• All nuclear activities generate radioactive waste.
• Radioactive waste poses unique difficulties because of the extensive time it remains a hazardous.
• No nation on Earth has a permanent disposal facility for high-level nuclear waste.
Wasting the Future
Author: David Sweeney energyscience.org.au
Radioactive waste presents long-term public health and environmental risks, and some forms also represent a proliferation risk because they contain fissile material such as plutonium.
There is not a single permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste anywhere on Earth, and the most advanced project, Yucca Mountain in the USA , has been a $10 billion fiasco that is 19 years behind schedule.
FACTS ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE
TYPES OF WASTE
Australia produces two types of radioactive waste, low level radioactive waste and intermediate level radioactive waste. The national repository project will establish a national, near-surface repository for the disposal of low level radioactive waste. The national store project will establish an above-ground, secure facility for the storage of intermediate level waste prior to deep geological disposal.
NUCLEAR DUMP NO SOLUTION
An existing nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, south of the Sydney CBD and built to manufacture plutonium for an Australian nuclear weapons program in the 1950's will, if common sense does not prevail, be replaced by a larger reactor currently under construction (in what is now a residential suburb and on a fault line). Falsely claimed to be necessary for nuclear medicine, it will generate both low and high level nuclear waste for at least 40 years.