REPORT: Toxic Threat. The danger of nuclear waste in Australia

Summary

Opposition leader Peter Dutton wants to build nuclear reactors at seven sites across Australia: One or more conventional reactors at former coal power station sites Liddell and Mount Piper in New South Wales, Tarong and Callide in Queensland, and Loy Yang in Victoria; and at least one “small modular reactor”—which are still unproven technically and financially—in Port Augusta in South Australia, and Muja in Collie, WA each.

In total, the Coalition hopes to deliver up to 14 GW of nuclear energy by 2050,¹ which is equivalent to 14 conventional, large reactors.

In this report, Greenpeace Australia Pacific warns that not only has the Coalition grossly understated the quantity of nuclear waste that would be generated in Australia, it has also not addressed the myriad risks of transporting and processing this waste.

The Coalition has also kept the Australian public in the dark about where the hundreds of billions of dollars required for nuclear waste and risk management measures will come from.

The Coalition’s nuclear plans could produce 14 billion Coke cans of waste a year.

While Mr Dutton has sought to downplay the risks by saying that a small modular reactor would produce only one Coke can’s worth of waste², the Coalition’s plans to build 14GW of nuclear would actually produce the equivalent of, at minimum, 14 billion Coke cans of waste every year—for 80 to 100 years.³ This means that over the planned lifetime of the Coalition’s nuclear reactors, Australians will be saddled with the equivalent of 1.18 trillion to 1.47 trillion Coke cans. This is equivalent to the entire volume of water in Sydney Harbour. If stacked end to end, the total number of Coke cans would stretch well past the sun.

The Coalition’s nuclear plans would subject Australians to the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident, especially in regional areas.

In countries with a significant nuclear industry, nuclear waste transport accidents and incidents are commonplace, and Australia is not immune to the risk of accidents. From a meltdown to a leak to a transportation accident, an accident at any point in the waste management value chain would be devastating. A nuclear accident would have complex and far-ranging consequences, including the disruption of the livelihoods of communities close to nearly 12,000 farms⁴, the contamination of waterways and people with high-level nuclear waste, which is severely harmful to human health. Almost 200,000 Australians⁵ could be at risk of a nuclear accident under the Coalition’s proposed plans, while emergency service leaders have warned that Australia’s emergency services, which are already bearing the strain of responding to more frequent and severe climate disasters, are not equipped to deal with nuclear emergencies.

The Coalition has not shared a plan on how it will deal with or fund the safe management of high-level radioactive waste.

The Coalition has also not laid out any plan to safely process, transport, and permanently store the large amounts of toxic radioactive waste that Australians would have to manage for many generations to come. Australia has a track record of failure when it comes to dealing with even low-level nuclear waste, which undermines confidence that we are adequately equipped to handle high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors. We have failed to establish a shallow national repository to safely store this material, and have a spotty history of existing and former radioactive waste repositories failing safety audits, the illegal dumping of radioactive waste by corporations going undetected by governments, and bungled clean-ups of nuclear waste.

Peter Dutton has only made vague statements to say that the waste from a standard-sized reactor would be “stored on site under our proposal, and then at the end of the life of that asset, it’s moved to a permanent home.”⁶ Mr Dutton has shed no light on what this “permanent home” might be, instead kicking the can down the road, saying that it would be the same location “where the government decides for the waste from the submarines to be stored.” The Coalition’s nuclear costings, which have been discredited by experts,⁷ also do not factor in related costs that the taxpayer will bear, including waste management, emergency response capability, and insurance.

Nuclear is too risky, too slow, and too expensive for Australia.

In addition to the many deep and serious risks and costs associated with the Coalition’s nuclear plans, experts have also said that nuclear power is too slow for Australia—and little more than a smokescreen to prolong the use of coal and gas in our energy system for as long as possible. For instance, an interim report from a House Select Committee on Nuclear Energy⁸ found that it could be “well into the 2040s” before nuclear energy could be generated in Australia, a timeline that is too late to “support Australia’s critical energy transition targets and climate commitments, or to assist the coal workforce and communities in their transition away from the coal industry.” Australia does not need to risk Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan. We are already almost halfway towards powering Australia with clean, safe and affordable wind and solar power, and should be accelerating progress towards 100% renewable energy, backed by storage, instead.