I’m not saying we should just ignore the rights of traditional land owners, but it’d be a shame if this issue – of a nuclear waste dump up in the NT – can’t be resolved with all parties walking away happy.
For starters, Australia has almost non-existent seismic activity, a lack of volcanoes, and is the oldest, driest, and least populated continent after Antarctica. It’s the best place on Earth that we can store nuclear waste – short of shooting it out to space.
And both sides of the nuclear power argument should at least admit, right or wrong, that there’s a lot of waste out there – 60-odd years worth – that needs proper storing.
It’d be a great money-maker for Australia, and if people can just keep their heads without screaming Chernobyl or whatever, and realise that the procedures we’d put in place for storing it are second-to-none, then a lot of good could be done.
Noted, the current NT proposal is only for low and intermediate level waste, not the high-end stuff. But this is all part of the same debate.
Regardless, the protests are mounting. And on the surface, it does look like more than just one of the traditional land owner groups should have been consulted (although the group who were consulted, the Ngapa, all for the propsal).
However, I’m wary but when I hear that the lawyer involved in the opposition to this is a former Labor candidate for Wentworth, and whose speciality is in human-rights – a factor arguably being abused lately.
