Australia's First Nuclear Dump - and It's Welcomed By Site's Neighbours

The Australian government is completing its examination of two outback sites, 25 miles apart, for its first nuclear waste repository.

The news, released this week, has dismayed politicians, environmentalists and Aboriginal groups.

Oddly, however, the people of the South Australian opal mining settlement of Andamooka are ready to welcome it on a spot 12 miles out of town.

"It's not going to hurt anything," says Max Franklin, a 55-year-old retired miner. "Everybody talks about uranium, but I've worked underground.

"I worked [in the uranium mines] at Radium Hill. It didn't do me any harm."

"We should have it," says Bev Bagley, 57, enjoying a Sunday bush barbecue at Bill's Ettamogah pub.

"Everyone just thinks: 'Not in my backyard,' but if you've got to put it somewhere, this is a great backyard for it."

The government agrees. After more than a 10 years of deliberation it has decided on Andamooka and Arcoona, 37 miles to the south, as the prime candidates for the repository.

But the proposal has been vigorously opposed by a coalition of environmental, community and indigenous groups, local politicians, and even a uranium mining company.

Most of them are exercised by the feeling that South Australia is the Cinderella state, expected to shoulder the problems of the rest of the country.

"We're happy to deal with our own material, but we don't want to be the bunny again for everyone else's waste," the state's Labor premier, Mike Rann, says.

He has threatened to hold a referendum if Canberra tries to foist another dump on the state. "The [John] Howard government will not want to fly in the face of a vote of South Australians telling them where they can stick their nuclear waste dump," he says.

Little more than a well-appointed shanty-town scattered among the tailings from the opal mines, Andamooka has long attracted misfits and chancers who have little truck with the views of those they call do-gooders and greenies.

Their casual attitude towards a nuclear dump is perhaps not as surprising as it at first seems: the north of the state has had a long association with nuclear technology.

The British government carried out nine atom bomb tests at Maralinga and Emu Plains, to the north-west of Andamooka, between 1954 and 1957, and the world's biggest deposit of uranium ore lies less about 30 miles away at the Olympic Dam mine.

The mine produced nearly 5,000 tonnes of uranium oxide in 2000, but even its owners, the Western Mining Corporation, are opposed to siting the dump at Andamooka, on land it jointly owns.

"We already have to spend a lot of money on security because of protesters targeting the mine site," its spokesman Richard Yeeles says.

"We don't need to be dealing with the same problems somewhere else."

By international standards, Australia's nuclear industry is small. France generates more than three quarters of its energy by atomic power: Australia's only nuclear pile is at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney, which is used mostly to generate isotopes for x-ray machinery, sterilisation equipment and smoke alarms.

The government says there is 3,500 cubic metres of nuclear waste to dispose of, compared with 25,000 cubic metres of comparable waste produced by Britain or France in an average year.

Most of it will consist of low-level waste contaminated by contact with nuclear material: protective clothing, glassware, instruments and soil.

But if that has left some older Andamooka residents indifferent to the prospect of a waste dump, it has galvanised others into opposition to the site.

Irati Wanti, an anti-nuclear group set up by Aboriginal women affected by the Maralinga and Emu Plains tests, now dedicates most of its time and resources to fighting the repository plans.

Eileen Unkari Crombie, an Irati Wanti member and Aborigine elder who experienced the Maralinga tests, said: "We've got water and bush tucker and bush medicine out on the land. It would poison our country.

"We don't want this stuff: we had enough at Maralinga. Wherever they make the poison, they should keep it there. If they make this poison in Sydney [at Lucas Heights] they should keep it in their own communities."

In particular, environmental groups object to the government's decision to bury the waste in trenches up to 20m below the ground, saying that it will risk contaminating the groundwater in the great artesian basin, a vast water catchment covering 680,000 square miles.

But the government says the site was specifically chosen because of its low water table, high ground stability and scanty rainfall: 20cm (8 inches) a year.

A decision on which site to use is expected in a fortnight.