Our government is considering unlocking radioactive waste from secure storage in southern Sydney.
Why? To put it on a truck and haul it all the way to either the Flinders Ranges or the Eyre Peninsula in regional South Australia.
Radioactive waste risks our air, soil and water. It damages the genetic and reproductive systems of plants, animals and people. And this waste lasts for up to ten thousand years.
The waste cannot be trucked through our communities. There are too many risks and too many communities that have had no say.
Double handling this waste means twice the trouble and twice the risk.
Our government has called for input on this decision from “anyone with an interest, no matter where they live."
So let's speak out to protect our communities!
Sign the open letter now asking Resource Minister Matt Canavan to keep the radioactive waste sealed away and out of communities in New South Wales and South Australia:
As people from all across Australia, we call on the federal government and Matt Canavan to keep the radioactive waste securely stored at Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Lucas Heights, Sydney, and out of communities in New South Wales and South Australia.
The waste cannot be trucked through our communities for dumping until a credible storage solution is found.
Latest Supporters
No way this facility should be built in the Beautiful Flinders Ranges! It is a massive no from me! Please let common sense prevail and put this at Maralinga.
Really, there is no safe place to store nuclear waste.At least at Lucas Heights, the waste is being monitored and there is some aspect of security there. Moving it to a remote site is the easy option and means politically it is “out of site, out of mind”.Exactly what you don’t want.
Most of the time, the right thing to do is the harder thing to do, something which seems to have been lost on governments of recent times.
A dear friend of mine (now past on) who was born and lived on the APY lands in SA and witness first hand the bomb testings at Maralinga and was lucky enough to survive but was made blind as a child. Before he passed away, he had a visit from some ministers of Parliament telling him about how they want to build a nuclear dump site in South Australia and tried to expane how safe it would be and wanted his support. Now this man who survived the Maralinga bombings and witnessed many members of his direct family and members of his community die very painful deaths and awful debilitating symptoms, before he himself went blind, 60 years later he still had not forgotten the pain and suffering he and his people went through.
So after the men in power had finished talking at him in great length, sat there waiting for his response, he then calmly said to these men, “Well if it’s so f#¢king safe, why don’t you bury it in your own back yard in Sydney!”
The men in power sat there for a short while, speechless, got up and drove away knowing that they would have no support from this great man or from the people still living on the APY lands.
And I will never support a nuclear dump site anywhere in Australia but especially having it moved around this great country by any form of transport, I mean seriously, have we not learnt anything from our past, are we really going to continue the mistakes off or fore father’s…
South Australia has legislation that bans radioactive waste facilities. It was passed in response to earlier federal moves to dump radioactive waste in SA The objects of the SA Nuclear Waste Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000 are “to protect the health, safety and welfare of the people of South Australia and to protect the environment in which they live by prohibiting the establishment of certain nuclear waste storage facilities in this state.” This law is sensible and we urge all SA state politicians to use it to stop the federal government imposing a nuclear waste dump on SA.