uranium to russia, page-6

i would have to be backing somewhere in SA for a national storage area. Some likely areas that come to mind would be around Beverly, Honeymoon, Maralinga, Olympic Dam, Radium Hill, and Woomera.

But my best picks would have to be Beverley, Olympic Dam and Radium Hill. All these locations already have good infrastructure in place and are easily accessable by road, and they already have low level radioactive waste stored there anyway. Here's some figures:

Radium Hill's tailings dam contains some 225,000t of tailings and some 233m3 of LLRW, which was placed on top of the tailings dam in the period 1981-1998. The LLRW material disposed of primarily comprises material and equipment from the testing of radioactive ores and contaminated soil.

Beverley's stores all LLRW from there in-situ mining and uranium processing.

Woomera currently stores 2010m3 of LLRW from CSIRO ore processing research.

if you dont like any of these places why dont we look at where waste is currently being stored at the state level:

WA
Waste is currently not stored in a central location but is disposed of at Mt. Walton.

QLD
Has a facility at Esk for the storage of radioactive waste, which is located in the Wivenhoe Dam catchment area.

NT
Mt. Todd mine site houses about 15 contaminated industrial mining gauges. The Royal Darwin Hospital is also storing 2m3 of waste. And what about the numerous shipping containers that were full and sitting in Kakadu National Park back in 2004, are they still there?

NSW
Lucas heights stores the spent fuel rods on site before being sent overseas.


There are 100+ more sites that already store low level waste; it is stored in Universities, Hospitals, Factories, Car Parks all over this country. So really it is already in everyones backyard.

How about the federal government pull the finger out and make the hard decision. Not everyone will be happy but it will definately move the problem to a much safer area free of all external elements.