SUNS4370 Tuesday 9 February 1999

Environment: Australian aboriginals say no to nuke dump plan

Melbourne, Australia, Feb 8 (IPS/Andrew Nette) - Until it decided on her desert homeland of Billa Kalina, Rebecca Bear-Wingfield had not even heard of the company which for five years had been scouring the
world looking for sites to dump high-level nuclear waste.

The company, US-based Pangea Resources, is proposing to the Australian government that Billa Kalina in northern South Australia be the site for an $8 billion disposal dump for nuclear waste, possibly including
radioactive material from dismantled nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War.

Supporters of the plan, including elements of the scientific community and Australia's conservative government, say by offering a long-term home for nuclear waste from around the world Australia will be doing it a great service. It would also reap substantial economic gains, they say.

Bear-Wingfield, a member of the Arabunna and Kokatha Aboriginal clans, and official representative of a group of senior Aboriginal women from the Billa Kalina region, disagrees.

"Billa Kalina is the final straw," she says. "The government have taken our land and mined it for uranium, taken our kids, and tried to break us as a nation."

"Now they want to give us back the waste from the uranium all neatly packaged in the form of this proposal. We are saying enough is enough."

The planned dump has also been condemned by green groups in Australia and overseas, concerned over its environmental impacts.

The possibility of a central repository for the country's nuclear waste has been on the government's agenda since at least the early nineties.

According to government documents, Australia has accumulated some 3,500 cubic metres of "low level waste" over the last 40 years, much of it from the country's only nuclear reactor, a small research facility at
Lucas Heights, 35 kilometres from central Sydney.

This is stored in more than 50 sites around the nation, many of which the government says are a potential contamination risk.

After assessing potential sites across Australia, early last year a team of government scientists chose Billa Kalina, a 67,000 square kilometre desert region in northern South Australia.

Under the government's plan, the waste would be stored in concrete vaults inside a secured building monitored by surveillance equipment, on a 2.25 square kilometre area.

Pangea was reported to have approached the Australian government and potential Australian investors last July with plans to privatise the scheme.

Quoted in the media at the time, the company's head, James Voss, said Pangea was only interested in maximising the project's private ownership, and that the idea of taking waste from overseas was the
"remotest of remote possibilities".

Pangea was forced to go public with the full extent of its potential involvement in the project in early December, when a promotional tape by the company extolling Billa Kalina's virtues as a waste dump was
leaked to Friends of the Earth UK.

After years of looking, the video said, the company settled on Australia as possessing a "unique combination of natural, political, infrastructural factors, which make it the world's best for the task".

Pangea's proposal would involve an enormous underground repository dug into the desert in the Billa Kalina region. The waste would be transported to Australia from nuclear facilities overseas by ship, then taken by rail to the dump.

The video's discovery coincided with comments by Robert Gallucci, a special envoy on weapons of mass destruction to US President Bill Clinton, urging Canberra to consider an international plan to put up a
waste disposal site in Australia.

Although Washington said Gallucci was speaking on his own behalf, a US official confirmed that the Pangea plan was one of three international proposals on nuclear waste being circulated in Washington. The other
two reportedly entail the dumping of nuclear waste on remote Wake Island in the Pacific or in Russia.

The proposed waste dump is part of an expansion of the nuclear industry in Australia, including new uranium mines, since the victory of the conservative government in 1996. It is keen to complete the dump by the
year 2000, stating if necessary it will use its powers of compulsory acquisition to take land for the project.

"The government has basically told us they will go ahead with the scheme regardless of whether or not we give our permission," says Bear-Wingfield. "The Aboriginal people of this area have been dealing
with the nuclear industry for so long," she says. "The older people are tired and just want to be left alone."

Billa Kalina was part of land ceded by Australia to the British governments who conducted nuclear tests on it between 1952 and 1963.

It plays host to key US satellite global eavesdropping facility, Nurrunger, as well as a joint Australian/American military rocketry and weaponry development and testing base. It is home to Australia's
largest operating uranium mine at Roxby Downs.

Bear Wingfield tells stories from the older women in her clan of Aboriginal children playing in the fall-out from the British nuclear tests, and of deformed babies born to Aboriginal women in the bush.

"Before they exploded the bombs, the authorities put up a sign saying 'Danger - Radiation: do not pass'," she recalls angrily. "The Aboriginal people in the area could not even speak English... Radiation
is not a black-white issue," she adds, "it's a health issue that concerns everyone regardless of their skin color".