THE AGE Maralinga's clean-up under cloud By PAUL HEINRICHS Sunday 16 April 2000 A breakdown of Maralinga's safety procedure allowed a man working on the nuclear clean-up site to fly to Melbourne wearing a plutonium-contaminated shirt. The plutonium was discovered accidentally when the man was given a final routine lung test in Melbourne. The incident, which took place in February, 1998, was not reported to the airline and radiation control procedures at Maralinga were not reviewed or changed as a result of it. The revelation of the breach came as the Federal Government prepared to hand the former British A-bomb test site back to its traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja Aborigines, after a $108million clean-up. On March 1, the Resources Minister, Senator Nick Minchin, declared the project completed on time and within budget. It meant Aboriginal owners could travel and hunt across the area and reside on all but 120 square kilometres of land at Taranaki, which remained lightly contaminated. But the ABC's Radio National current affairs program, Background Briefing, today raises questions about whether safety had been compromised. Researcher Gregg Borschmann cited documentary evidence and used interview material to show that key insiders, including some of the Government's advisers, believed the job had not been finished properly. Engineer Alan Parkinson, a former government adviser on Maralinga and now the Tjarutja's adviser, was critical of the standards used in the clean-up and compared them unfavorably with those used in the United States' Nevada nuclear-testing site. He challenged whether the 1992 code of practice, used by the Government as a yardstick to allow the burial of the plutonium-contaminated waste, was written with Maralinga plutonium in mind. The ABC program said this concern was shared by other scientists who believed the code they wrote would be applied to industrial, and possibly medical, radioactive material with a shorter half-life than plutonium 239, which is 24,000 years. The program looked at the decision to abandon the technique of "in situ vitrification", known as ISV - which uses high temperatures to stabilise contaminated soil in glass blocks - to dispose of several kilograms of heavily contaminated debris buried in 21 pits at Taranaki. These were the legacy of the so-called Vixen-B atomic trials in the early 1960s involving nuclear weapons placed on stands a few metres above ground and detonated by conventional means. Although $30million was spent pioneering the ISV technique, the process was stopped last year and the remaining hazardous material buried in another pit. The program quoted official notes leaked from a meeting of the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee last August in which a member, Dr Mike Costello, an international authority on plutonium, said he did not believe "this shallow burial is the best we could do as it could be encapsulated in concrete". The program showed that by October 1998, there was conflict between the firm in charge of the ISV, Geosafe Australia, and Gutteridge Haskins Davey, the major engineering firm that assumed project management at Maralinga when it acquired a Commonwealth company that previously had the job. Background Briefing can be heard on ABC Radio National at 9.10am today. It will be repeated on Tuesday at 7.10pm. -- _________________________________ Truth is a pathless land. --- Krishnamurti ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
