BY JIM GREEN
The federal government's plan to build a new nuclear research reactor in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights hit another hurdle on March 15 when a French court banned a ship from unloading 360 spent fuel rods from the existing Lucas Heights reactor.
After a complaint by Greenpeace France, the court banned French company Cogema from unloading the spent fuel at Cherbourg and taking it to its nearby reprocessing plant at La Hague. The court ruled that Cogema does not have a licence to reprocess the spent fuel, and that storage of the waste on French soil is illegal under the French Radioactive Waste Management Act (1991).
The court ruling, which Cogema is expected to challenge, is backed up with the threat of a FF113,000 (A$28,237) fine for each article of waste unloaded and for each week it remains in France without authorisation.
The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the operator of the Lucas Heights reactor, claimed that the court ruling amounted only to a "delay".
Protracted problems with spent fuel management, combined with public pressure, could force the federal nuclear regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, ARPANSA, to reject an application from ANSTO to begin construction of the new reactor. ANSTO is expected to lodge the application in the near future.
It is unlikely that an alternative overseas reprocessing plant could handle the Lucas Heights spent fuel in the event that the Cogema option was blocked, partly because there are so few reprocessing plants, and partly because the companies that run those few plants have little interest in reprocessing research reactor fuels which require techniques specific to the fuel type, along with additional licensing requirements.
Since no viable contingency plan exists as an alternative to reprocessing at Cogema, the federal government and ANSTO have denied the need for one. The minister for industry, science and resources, Nick Minchin, said at a Senate estimates hearing in February 2000 that, "because there is no likelihood whatsoever of any repudiation (of the Cogema contract), no contingency has been entered into".
Last year it was revealed that it may be necessary to use a silicide fuel type in the planned reactor for the first 1-2 years of operation, and that the resulting spent fuel might be reprocessed in Argentina under the provisions of the contract between ANSTO and the Argentinean company INVAP to build the planned Lucas Heights reactor.
ANSTO said in October that INVAP "has satisfied ANSTO that they already have the basic facilities and technology that would be required should processing by INVAP be needed". However, INVAP later acknowledged, in a letter to anti-nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley, that it has no such facilities.
INVAP representatives added that the Argentinean company CNEA has developed a "novel" method to "eventually" reprocess spent fuel, with a "demonstration" program scheduled for anytime between 2001 and 2005. Moreover, a site for a spent fuel treatment plant has not been identified (and is likely to be contentious).
The Australian government will do anything possible to get spent fuel from Lucas Heights out of the country and to delay the return of reprocessing wastes for as long as possible. But as overseas reprocessing options become more limited, the likelihood of a domestic reprocessing plant increases.
Reprocessing is illegal under Australian federal law, but "nukespeak" can solve this problem — the government would build a "conditioning" plant instead. Conditioning and reprocessing involve dissolving irradiated fuel rods in acid among other processes; both pose similar environmental and public health risks.
ANSTO's chief executive Helen Garnett said in 1997 that Lucas Heights would be a "reasonable" location for a pilot reprocessing plant. A confidential 1998 Department of Industry, Science and Tourism (DIST) briefing paper, obtained under freedom of information legislation, quoted a Canberra bureaucrat saying, "We may look at new technologies to deal with spent fuel at a later date. Do not mention a reprocessing plant."
Another confidential 1998 DIST document describes Lucas Heights as a "more than adequate" site for both a new reactor and a reprocessing plant, but also discusses the possibility of building a reactor and/or reprocessing plant at numerous other locations around Australia.
The DIST document ruled out a number of sites on the basis of urban encroachment, which poses the question why the government decided to pursue its plan to build a new reactor in the rapidly growing southern suburbs of Sydney.