Despite nuclear power generation lining up as a key election issue, many people do not realise Australia is already producing, processing, and storing nuclear waste. The ABC has been invited into the largest repository in the country, at Lucas Heights in Sydney’s South, to see how it is managed.
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00:00Whenever there's any discussion in Australia about anything to do with nuclear, one question
00:06always pops up.
00:07What do we do with the waste?
00:10Now we don't have a central waste storage facility in this country, and there is a long
00:14and torrid history associated with that.
00:17But there is nuclear waste being produced, being processed, and indeed stored in corners
00:22of the country.
00:23And that's why we're here today at the Lucas Heights facility in Sydney's south.
00:27One of the biggest storage facilities currently in the country, dealing with low and intermediate
00:33waste like what's behind me, well into the future.
00:42So Paula, this is sort of point one in our tour today.
00:46Talk us through what's actually coming through here on its way into ANSTO.
00:50What sort of waste we're seeing in this spot?
00:53So ANSTO has a very broad range of activities that it undertakes.
00:57We operate the opal reactor, we produce nuclear medicines, and we have a very broad research
01:03activity base.
01:04So there's a lot of radioactive waste that's generated from these activities, and most
01:08of it is actually low-level solid waste.
01:10A lot of the waste is the sort of things that you would see in a typical lab.
01:14So it could be things like gloves, or maybe some glassware.
01:18You know, things that become contaminated in the day-to-day operations that we want
01:22to be able to check, characterise, analyse, and then decide what waste stream it needs
01:26to end up in.
01:28Capacity is certainly one of the things that is front of mind for us.
01:31So we measure it and monitor it very closely.
01:34This is one of our two buildings that hold these red drums, and actually we've got almost
01:3810,000 of them from the entire operations of ANSTO and its predecessor that have spanned
01:43over 70 years now.
01:45We think we have capacity until around about 2040, until we really need to start having
01:50extra buildings to be able to manage the incoming waste past that time.
01:54So Paula, this is more of the serious side of things, and what you're actually keeping
01:58here at Lucas Heights.
02:00We've seen the low-level waste.
02:03This is the intermediate waste that's come from your old reactors?
02:06Yeah, so the fuel that powered the HIFAR reactor was reprocessed overseas.
02:12Some of it went to France, and some of it went to the UK.
02:15And what we see before us is the reprocessed spent fuel residues stored inside two purpose-built
02:22storage and transport casks that we call TN81 canisters.
02:26So these are incredibly thick, reinforced, sort of holding tubes, for want of a better phrase?
02:32Absolutely.
02:33They are designed to hold high-level waste, so they are, for our intermediate-level waste
02:38that we have at ANSTO, they are very, very safe.
02:41While Australia has a very important role in the nuclear space, we are comparatively
02:48small, and we certainly don't have the infrastructure or really the need or desire to install what
02:53is a very large reprocessing facility here.
02:57So it makes sense for us to have those international agreements so that we can send this overseas
03:01to the experts, where they can reprocess it and send us back an equivalent.