What will we do with all the potential nuclear waste from the Coalition's plan?

Considering the Coalition's proposal to build nuclear reactors all around the country, one of the many questions that comes up is: what would we do with all that nuclear waste?

To understand the situation fully, lets break down the different types of nuclear waste and they are handled.

If you’d prefer to watch out investigation as a video, just check out the clip below.

The three types of nuclear waste

Low-level nuclear waste

• This includes items like clothing, syringes from medicine, and other equipment and tools.

• Australia does produce low-level waste, which we currently keep at the facilities where it’s generated, including hospitals and universities.

Intermediate nuclear waste

• Intermediate waste is also produced in Australia and is stored at the reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.

  • Note: that reactor is used only for research and for producing nuclear medicine to treat cancer – it’s different from chemotherapy.

  • Australia's intermediate waste comes from spent nuclear fuel, which is essentially uranium that’s been processed and enriched so it can be used in a reactor.

• For several years we have been sending the used fuel to Europe where it’s mixed with molten glass, encased in large cylinders, and then returned. Because it is dangerous, it’s kept temporarily at the reactor in Sydney, as we currently don’t have a permanent solution for dealing with any nuclear waste in Australia.

High-level nuclear waste

• These are the extremely dangerous materials coming from the core of a reactor – the waste product from the nuclear facilities proposed by the opposition.

• To put it into perspective, high-level waste accounts for only 3% of the world’s nuclear waste, but it contains 95% of the radioactivity.

• Typically, such waste is stored at the site of the nuclear reactor: first in pools for a few years, then in cylinders.

• Australia will have to work out what to do with the high-level waste produced by the Aukus submarines by the 2050s, as we’ve committed to storing that waste in the land down under. However, if proposed reactors are built by 2035, we’ll need a solution much sooner.

So, how have we gone with storing the waste we do have? Not very well.

In 2012, the Gillard Labor government passed an act that started to plan Australia’s national radioactive waste management facility.

The closest we’ve come to establishing a facility was when a site in South Australia was chosen by Scott Morrison in 2021. Community members argued they hadn’t been properly consulted over the site, and the Barngarla traditional owners successfully challenged the decision in the Federal Court. As a result, the $100 million plans to build the waste dump were scrapped – and it’s been crickets since.

There is one private facility in Western Australia that’s dealing with a small amount of low-level nuclear waste.

The big question

If it’s taken over a decade to unsuccessfully find a spot for our current waste—because no-one wants it in their backyard and people don’t want trucks of waste driving through their town—how are we going to store materials that are even more dangerous?

Maybe we could look at other countries.

As of a 2022 report, 0 percent of the world’s high-level nuclear waste is in permanent disposal. Only one country has built a facility for it – Finland, which has just completed its first trial of storing waste 430 metres underground after 20 years of construction and an investment of over 1.7 billion Aussie dollars.

So, what’s the fallout?

If we go ahead with Peter Dutton's nuclear plan — which is more expensive and, compared with a renewables rollout, less environmentally friendly — we’re going to end up producing a lot of highly dangerous nuclear waste that we not only don't have a plan to deal with, but that no one wants stored in their backyard.

And it’ll be our problem for the short span of “millions of years.”