For the best part of a century, Australia had no local solution to the wicked problem of where to dispose of some of its most hazardous material – low-level radioactive waste. At Sandy Ridge, Tellus has changed all that.
Leading nuclear lawyer and Adjunct Lecturer in Nuclear Law at the University of Adelaide Kirsty Braybon recently addressed this point directly at the AUKUS Forum’s inaugural Nuclear Taskforce Series. When discussing the options open to the Australian Government after cancelling its Kimba project in 2023.
“Waste disposal is a priority of the Government but there is currently no policy position on it with the Minister Madeleine King ruling out the Kimba site last year… Since then nothing has been said about the waste disposal pathways,” said Ms Braybon.
Officially, the Government is now committed to building two waste facilities of its own – one for civilian government waste and one for defence purposes. But without a site for either project, based on international precedent and Australian experience it could easily take another 15-30 years before this is achieved.
In the meantime, at Tellus we’re getting on with cleaning up our country. In our first 15 months of being licenced to accept radioactive waste for disposal, we have safely removed more than 5,700 cubic metres of low-level radioactive material from across Australia for disposal.
Outlining the Government’s options to solve its own challenges, Ms Braybon, the former Legal Counsel at the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency, suggested:
“leveraging the existing infrastructure” operated by Tellus, which is “licenced to take low level radioactive waste, which is the largest amount of radioactive waste that we hold in Australia.”
Further, she noted: “…there are legal frameworks in place for Tellus to dispose of the Commonwealth’s radioactive waste inventory, given they are licenced and do dispose of low-level radioactive waste today.”
The full article is below at page 14 of the AUKUS Forum News, May 2924 issue.
AUKUS Forum News