> > I can guess one reason. It's probably very expensive to bury
> your poop in
> someone elses yard, and I'll bet the Netherlands has no good
> place in their
> own yard.
> >
> > Doug
> >
>
> That leads to the question of whether the lack of a suitable site is a
> technical or political question.
>
> Dan M.
>
Political.
One industry I think Australia really ought to set up is
reprocessing/storage of nuclear waste, using sites such as Maralinga, which
was used in the 1950s for British nuclear tests. After all, we're a major
exporter of uranium oxides, so we should take back the residue - at a price.
Central Australia is one of the oldest and most stable geological areas on
Earth. It's not as if a few thousand square kilometres of land wouldn't be
available.
And whether vitrification or Synroc is used after the couple of decades of
initial settlement/decay, a site likely to be rarely visited for centuries
is easy to locate in the region. It would take absolutely massive shifts in
climate to make much of Central Australia easily habitable. It has already
been largely desert for about 100,000 years.
But the State government of the most likely areas (South Australia) has
already passed legislation to ban any such industry after a British company
started surveying the area for a waste dump a few years back. And all major
Australian political parties have written off reprocessing/storage as
options. Hasn't stopped the two major ones from helping sell Australian
uranium, but.
I know that longterm storage of nuclear waste is always going to carry
risks, but I wish the politics here would let people see that we could both
profit and set up a tightly controlled and very longterm solution for a
major problem. And meanwhile, barrels of nuclear wastes lie rotting all over
the world, and whole fleets of nuke warships lie rusting away.
Brett
