The federal government has scrapped plans to build the nation’s first radioactive waste storage facility on farmland near Kimba in South Australia. Frankly, it was never going to work. The plan was doomed from the start.
That’s because the “decide and defend” model, where a government decides to put radioactive waste somewhere and then attempts to defend it against the community, hasn’t worked anywhere. It hasn’t worked in the United Kingdom. It hasn’t worked in the United States. Those countries still don’t have any process for long-term management of radioactive waste.
The only country to successfully manage the process is Finland, where the community was engaged. Over a period of several years, the government worked with its people to find a place where the community as a whole was happy to have the radioactive waste, in return for compensation. They’re now building a deep underground repository for permanently storing their radioactive waste.
