Last November, two-thirds of the 350 members of a South Australian-government initiated Citizens' Jury rejected "under any circumstances" the plan to import vast amounts of high-level nuclear waste from around the world as a money-making venture.1
The following week, South Australian (SA) Liberal Party Opposition leader Steven Marshall said that "[Labor Party Premier] Jay Weatherill's dream of turning South Australia into a nuclear waste dump is now dead."2 Business SA chief Nigel McBride said: "Between the Liberals and the citizens' jury, the thing is dead."2
And after months of uncertainty, Premier Weatherill has said in recent weeks that the plan is "dead", there is "no foreseeable opportunity for this", and it is "not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government".3
So is the dump dead? The Premier left himself some wriggle room4, but the plan is as dead as it possibly can be. If there was some life in the plan, it would be loudly proclaimed by SA's Murdoch tabloid, The Advertiser. But The Advertiser responded to the Premier's recent comments ‒ to the death of the dump ‒ with a deafening, deathly silence.
Royal Commission
It has been quite a ride to get to this point. The debate began in February 2015, when the Premier announced that a Royal Commission would be established to investigate commercial options across the nuclear fuel cycle. He appointed a gullible nuclear advocate, former Navy man Kevin Scarce, as Royal Commissioner. Scarce said he would run a "balanced" Royal Commission and appointed four nuclear advocates to his advisory panel, balanced by one critic.5 Scarce appointed a small army of nuclear advocates to his staff, balanced by zero critics.
The final report6 of the Royal Commission, released in May 2016, was surprisingly downbeat given the multiple levels of pro-nuclear bias.7 It rejected ‒ on economic grounds ‒ almost all of the proposals it considered: uranium conversion and enrichment, nuclear fuel fabrication, conventional and Generation IV nuclear power reactors8, and spent fuel reprocessing.
The only thing left standing (apart from the small and shrinking uranium mining industry9) was the plan to import nuclear waste as a commercial venture. Based on commissioned research, the Royal Commission proposed importing 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel from power reactors) and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste.
The SA Labor government then established a 'Know Nuclear' statewide promotional campaign under the guide of 'consultation'. The government also initiated the Citizens' Jury.
The first sign that things weren't going to plan for the government was on 15 October 2016, when 3,000 people participated in a protest against the nuclear dump at Parliament House in South Australia's capital, Adelaide.10
A few weeks later, on November 6, the Citizens' Jury rejected the nuclear dump plan.1 Journalist Daniel Wills wrote: "Brutally, jurors cited a lack of trust even in what they had been asked to do and their concerns that consent was being manufactured. Others skewered the Government's basic competency to get things done, doubting that it could pursue the industry safely and deliver the dump on-budget."11
In the immediate aftermath of the Citizens' Jury, the SA Liberal Party and the influential Nick Xenophon Team announced that they would actively campaign against the dump in the lead-up to the March 2018 state election. The SA Greens were opposed from the start.
Premier Weatherill previously said that he established the Citizens' Jury because he could sense that there is a "massive issue of trust in government".12 It was expected that when he called a press conference on November 14, the Premier would accept the Jury's verdict and dump the dump. But he announced that he wanted to hold a referendum on the issue, as well as giving affected Aboriginal communities a right of veto. Nuclear dumpsters went on an aggressive campaign to demonise the Citizens' Jury though they surely knew that the bias in the Jury process was all in the pro-nuclear direction.13,14
For the state government to initiate a referendum, enabling legislation would be required and non-government parties said they would block such legislation. The government didn't push the matter ‒ perhaps because of the near-certainty that a referendum would be defeated. The statewide consultation process led by the government randomly surveyed over 6,000 South Australians and found 53% opposition to the proposal compared to 31% support.15 Likewise, a November 2016 poll commissioned by the Sunday Mail found 35% support for the nuclear dump plan among 1,298 respondents.16
Then the Labor government announced on 15 November 2016 that it would not seek to repeal or amend the SA Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000, legislation which imposes major constraints on the ability of the government to move forward with the nuclear waste import proposal.17
Economic claims exposed
Implausible claims about the potential economic benefits of importing nuclear waste had been discredited by this stage.18 The claims presented in the Royal Commission's report were scrutinised by experts from the US-based Nuclear Economics Consulting Group (NECG), commissioned by a Joint Select Committee19 of the SA Parliament.
The NECG report said the waste import project could be profitable under certain assumptions ‒ but the report then raised serious questions about most of those assumptions.20 The report noted that the Royal Commission's economic analysis failed to consider important issues which "have significant serious potential to adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes"; that assumptions about price were "overly optimistic" in which case "project profitability is seriously at risk"; that the 25% cost contingency for delays and blowouts was likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had "little support or justification".
The farcical and dishonest engineering of a positive economic case to proceed with the nuclear waste plan was ridiculed by ABC journalist Stephen Long on 8 November 2016: "Would you believe me if I told you the report that the commission has solely relied on was co-authored by the president and vice president of an advocacy group for the development of international nuclear waste facilities?"21
The economics report was an inside job, with no second opinion and no peer review ‒ no wonder the Citizens' Jury was unconvinced and unimpressed.
Prof. Barbara Pocock, an economist at the University of South Australia, said: "All the economists who have replied to the analysis in that report have been critical of the fact that it is a 'one quote' situation. We haven't got a critical analysis, we haven't got a peer review of the analysis".22
Another South Australian economist, Prof. Richard Blandy23 from Adelaide University, said: "The forecast profitability of the proposed nuclear dump rests on highly optimistic assumptions. Such a dump could easily lose money instead of being a bonanza."24
The dump is finally dumped
To make its economic case, the Royal Commission assumed that tens of thousands of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste would be imported before work had even begun building a deep underground repository. The state government hosed down concerns about potential economic losses by raising the prospect of customer countries paying for the construction of waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA.
But late last year, nuclear and energy utilities in Taiwan ‒ seen as one of the most promising potential customer countries ‒ made it clear that they would not pay one cent towards the establishment of storage and disposal infrastructure in SA and they would not consider sending nuclear waste overseas unless and until a repository was built and operational.25
By the end of 2016, the nuclear dump plan was very nearly dead, and the Premier's recent statement that it is "not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government" was the final nail in the coffin. The dump has been dumped.
"Today's news has come as a relief and is very much welcomed," said Yankunytjatjara Native Title Aboriginal Corporation Chair and No Dump Alliance spokesperson Karina Lester. "We are glad that Jay has opened his ears and listened to the community of South Australia who have worked hard to be heard on this matter. We know nuclear is not the answer for our lands and people – we have always said NO."
Narungga man and human rights activist Tauto Sansbury said: "We absolutely welcome Jay Weatherill's courageous decision for looking after South Australia. It's a great outcome for all involved."
Reflections
The idea of Citizens' Juries would seem, superficially, attractive. But bias is inevitable if the government establishing and funding the Jury process is strongly promoting (or opposing) the issue under question. In the case of the Jury investigating the nuclear waste plan, it backfired quite spectacularly on the government ‒ jurors knew they were being pushed to vote 'yes' and they responded by voting 'no ... not under any circumstances'.26 Citizen Juries will be few and far between for the foreseeable future in Australia. A key lesson for political and corporate elites is that they shouldn't let any semblance of democracy intrude on their plans.
The role of the Murdoch press needs comment, particularly in regions where the only mass-circulation newspaper is a Murdoch tabloid. No-one would dispute that the NT News has a dumbing-down effect on political and intellectual life in the Northern Territory. Few would doubt that the Courier Mail does the same in Queensland. South Australians need to grapple with the sad truth that the state's Murdoch tabloids ‒ The Advertiser and the Sunday Mail ‒ are a blight on the state. Their grossly imbalanced and wildly inaccurate coverage of the nuclear dump debate was ‒ with some honourable exceptions27 ‒ disgraceful. And that disgraceful history goes back decades; for example, a significant plume of radiation dusted Adelaide after one of the British bombs tests at Maralinga in the 1950s but The Advertiser chose not to report it.
The main lesson from the dump debate is a positive one: people power can upset the dopey, dangerous ideas driven by political and corporate elites and the Murdoch press. Sometimes. It was particularly heartening that the voices of Aboriginal Traditional Owners were loud and clear28 and were given great respect by the Citizens' Jury and by many other South Australians. The Jury's report said: "There is a lack of Aboriginal consent. We believe that the government should accept that the Elders have said NO and stop ignoring their opinions."1
Conversely, the most sickening aspect of the debate was the willingness of the Murdoch press29 and pro-nuclear lobbyists30 to ignore or trash Aboriginal people opposed to the dump.
Another dump debate
Traditional Owners, environmentalists, church groups, trade unionists and everyone else who contributed to dumping the dump can rest up and celebrate for a moment. But only for a moment. Another dump proposal is very much alive: the federal government's plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump in SA, either in the Flinders Ranges or on farming land near Kimba, west of Port Augusta.32
In May 2016, Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Regina McKenzie, who lives near the Flinders Ranges site, wrote:33
"Last year I was awarded the SA Premier's Natural Resource Management Award in the category of 'Aboriginal Leadership − Female' for working to protect land that is now being threatened with a nuclear waste dump. But Premier Jay Weatherill has been silent since the announcement of six short-listed dump sites last year, three of them in SA.
"Now the Flinders Ranges has been chosen as the preferred site and Mr Weatherill must speak up. The Premier can either support us ‒ just as the SA government supported the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta34 when their land was targeted for a national nuclear waste dump from 1998-2004 ‒ or he can support the federal government's attack on us by maintaining his silence."
Perhaps Premier Jay Weatherill will find his voice on the federal government's contentious proposal for a national nuclear waste dump in SA, now that his position on that debate is no longer complicated by the parallel debate about establishing a dump for foreign high-level nuclear waste. He might argue, for example, that affected Traditional Owners should have a right of veto over the establishment of a national nuclear waste dump ‒ precisely the position he adopted in relation to the international high-level dump.
References:
1. South Australia's Citizens' Jury on Nuclear Waste, November 2016, 'Final Report', http://assets.yoursay.sa.gov.au/production/2016/11/06/07/20/56/26b5d85c-...
2. Tom Richardson, 11 Nov 2016, 'DUMPED: Nuclear repository "dead" as Marshall draws election battleline', http://indaily.com.au/news/local/2016/11/11/dumped-nuclear-repository-de...
3. Tom Richardson, 7 June 2017, '"There's no foreseeable opportunity for this": Jay declares nuke dump "dead"', http://indaily.com.au/news/politics/2017/06/07/theres-no-foreseeable-opp...
4. Friends of the Earth Australia, 7 June 2017, 'Premier Weatherill unclear on nuclear dump', media release, https://www.facebook.com/jim.green.77920526/posts/10154485903460896
5. Conservation Council of SA, the Australian Conservation Foundation and Friends of the Earth, Dec 2015, 'A Critique of the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission', www.archive.foe.org.au/rc-critique
6. Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission Report. May 2016, http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/system/NFCRC_Final_Report_Web.pdf
7. 4 Nov 2016, 'Bias of SA Nuclear Royal Commission finally exposed', http://reneweconomy.com.au/bias-sa-nuclear-royal-commission-finally-expo...
8. 2 Nov 2016, 'The slow death of fast reactors', http://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
9. Nuclear Monitor #837, 31 Jan 2017, '2016 in Review: "It has never been a worse time for uranium miners"', www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/837/2016-review-it-has-never-b...
10. https://vimeo.com/187622136
Lauren Waldhuter / ABC, 15 Oct 2016, 'Nuclear waste dump protesters bring the fight from outback South Australia to the city', www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-15/nuclear-waste-dump-protesters-bring-the-f...
11. Daniel Wills, 6 Nov 2016, 'Nuclear waste verdict from citizens' jury leaves Government's grand plan in tatters', 
www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/daniel-wills-nuclear-waste-verdict-f...
12. Daniel Wills, 7 Nov 2016, 'Citizens' jury overwhelmingly rejects nuclear waste storage facility for South Australia', www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/citizens-jury-overwhelmingly-re...
13. Benito Cao, 3 Nov 2016, 'Manufacturing consent for SA's nuclear program', www.crikey.com.au/2016/11/03/manufacturing-consent-for-sa-nuclear-program/
14. Tony Webb, 18 Nov 2016, 'One small voice from inside the recent SA Nuclear Citizen's Jury', http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18669&page=0
15. Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission Consultation and Response Agency, Nov 2016, 'Community Views Report', p.19, http://assets.yoursay.sa.gov.au/production/2016/11/11/09/37/34/0c1d5954-...
16. https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-FV2558KN/
17. SA Government, 15 Nov 2016, 'Government delivers response to Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission Report', http://nuclear.yoursay.sa.gov.au/news/get-to-know-nuclear-discover-discu...
18. Richard Blandy, 7 June 2016, 'How a high-level nuclear waste dump could lose money', http://indaily.com.au/business/analysis/2016/06/07/how-a-high
19. SA Parliament ‒ Joint Committee on Findings of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, www.parliament.sa.gov.au/Committees/Pages/Committees.aspx?CTId=2&CId=333
20. Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, 11 Nov 2016, 'Review of Jacobs MCM Report Commercial Model', http://nuclear-economics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2016-11-11-NECG-...
21. Stephen Long, 8 Nov 2016, 'SA nuclear waste dump plans based on questionable assumptions and lacks public support', www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-08/should-south-australia-be-storing-nuclear...
22. Stephen Long, 3 Nov 2016, 'Critics argue Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission skewed by advocacy group's evidence', www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-03/radioactive-waste-dump-would-boost-sa-eco...
23. Prof. Richard Blandy, Submission to SA Nuclear Fuel cycle Royal Commission, http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/app/uploads/2016/04/Blandy-Richard.pdf
24. Stephen Long, 3 Nov 2016, 'Critics argue Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission skewed by advocacy group's evidence', www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-03/radioactive-waste-dump-would-boost-sa-eco...
25. Daniel Wills, 14 Dec 2016, 'Taiwanese energy firm rejects Martin Hamilton-Smith's claim it would help set up SA nuclear waste dump', www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/taiwanese-energy-firm-reject...
26. Daniel Wills, 11 Nov 2016, 'The people have skewered a political class they feels governs for itself instead of them', www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/daniel-wills-the-people-have-skewere...
27. www.adelaidenow.com.au/search-results?q=daniel+wills+nuclear
28. 'Statements from Aboriginal Traditional Owners regarding the plan to import high-level nuclear waste to South Australia', Oct 2016, www.anfa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Traditional-Owner-statements-...
29. Tory Shepherd, 15 Nov 2016, 'Tory Shepherd: Deriding experts as 'elites' is a pinheaded attempt at equality, pretending that everyone's views hold the same worth', www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/tory-shepherd-deriding-experts-as-el...
30. 1 July 2016, 'Radioactive waste and the nuclear war on Australia's Aboriginal people', www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987853/radioactive_waste_and_th...
31. https://www.facebook.com/groups/344452605899556/
32. https://www.facebook.com/No-Radioactive-Waste-Facility-for-Kimba-Distric...
33. Regina McKenzie, 6 May 2016, 'Premier silent while Flinders Ranges threatened', http://indaily.com.au/opinion/2016/05/06/premier-silent-while-flinders-r...
34. Irati Wanti, http://web.archive.org/web/20080718193150/http:/www.iratiwanti.org/home....