It seems possible Australia will take advantage of its extraordinary good fortune to have major deposits of uranium at a time when a number of countries are planning to expand their electricity generation with nuclear power.
It is surely time to consider a solution for the disposal of the spent fuel from these reactors by deep geological burial. The time scale for general agreement, site selection, planning, negotiation and construction is likely to be 10 to 20 years. If we start now, it could be the beginning of a major contribution to the Australian economy and a contribution to regional and global concerns about the use of nuclear power.
It's an irony that despite Australia possessing a large proportion of the world's uranium reserves and making major technical contributions to disposal and enrichment, it reaps no economic benefit beyond mining. Especially since the greatest economic opportunity comes from the re-interment of the uranium as spent fuel or waste. This takes advantage of our continent's geology.
Australia possesses a research reactor at Lucas Heights and a solution is required for the long-term disposal of its waste. If this problem has to be dealt with at the level of a few tonnes then it provides the reason to start serious consideration of the problem on a larger scale.
The present cost of nuclear fuel reprocessing corresponds to about 4¢ per kilowatt hour for a nuclear power plant. This equates to a disposal cost of $1 million per tonne of spent fuel.
About 12,000 tonnes of waste are generated annually worldwide. Even restricting the waste to Australian-sourced uranium would be a substantial annual market of 1000 to 2000 tonnes of spent fuel. The disposal system for the repository, which is essentially a deep underground mine, would cost between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion with revenue of between $1 billion-2 billion. The optimum geology occurs in remote regions of South and Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Such a mine is essentially an underground driveway with access to a number of chambers for the disposal of thousands of tonnes of material. This is not major bulk material handling but rather a high-quality material handling operation.
We would not be alone in this enterprise; Finland and Sweden are well advanced and the first repository may be operational by 2010 in Germany. South Korea is also examining deep disposal.
There are very good reasons to host spent fuel and waste from any source. Australia's twin stabilities, geological and political, offer important advantages.
However, bipartisan support will be necessary if this project is to succeed. International agreements may also be necessary, particularly with the issue of title to the spent fuel.
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