federal govt to build nuclear waste dump

Federal govt to build nuclear waste dump

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett says the government will fulfil a Howard-government era policy to build a nuclear waste dump.

The proposal, believed to include several locations in the Northern Territory, was opposed by Mr Garrett before the election.


But on Tuesday, Mr Garrett said he was "fully committed" to a applying stringent environmental checks to any nuclear waste facility that he approved.

"The situation is that the policy commitments that were made before coming into government will be fulfilled," Mr Garrett told reporters in Melbourne.

"When a proposal comes to me I'll treat it as I would in the ordinary course of business.

"We have always said, and I have always said, that our task is to make sure that we apply the appropriate environmental laws scrupulously and diligently.

"We want to have a world's best practice approach on these issues.

"We will have that.

"I am fully committed to it."

Mr Garrett's comments follow Howard-government legislation, the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act, which paved the way for the dump to go ahead.