Pangea Exposed

In November 1998 anti-nuclear activist Jean McSorley was given a video that promoted Australia as a site for an international nuclear waste dump. The video was produced by the US company Pangea Resources. It had been leaked to Friends of the Earth in the UK, and they had passed it to Jean for release in Australia, which she did in November 1998, with the support of the Canberra-based Campaign for a Nuclear Free Future.

The video extolled the virtues of a privately run, long term, high-level nuclear waste dump for outback South or Western Australia. The 15-minute video built an argument that nuclear waste is a problem that will not go away, that the best way of dealing with it is putting it somewhere in stable rocks, that these rocks must be away from population centres, in a country with strong democratic institutions, and that there are only a few places in the world where these conditions apply, and ... Australia seemed to be the best choice!

Although the proposal had been on the table for several years, discussions had been behind closed doors. Until the "unauthorised" release of the video, Pangea’s operations had been "private business."

Despite clear opposition from Federal and State Governments Pangea continues to conduct a feasibility study in Australia.

The Pangea Proposal

In putting forth Pangea’s case, Dupont and Bergin, a consulting firm, argue that:

• there are about 200,000 tonnes of high level waste from the nuclear power industries throughout the world;
• in addition, about 10,000 tonnes are added each year; and
• plutonium stocks are in the order of 1,400 tonnes throughout the world.

Pangea proposes that:

• the site will "dispose" of about 75,000 tonnes of spent fuel over about 40 years, i.e., 2,000 tonnes per year;
• imports to Australia will be a combination of high-level waste, spent fuel assemblies from old reactors and intermediate-level waste;
• there will be a series of underground tunnels at a single level, over an area of about 7 x 2 kilometres, at a depth of several hundred metres;
• transport to Australia will be by ship in steel casks in around 70 ships built for this purpose;
• there will be dedicated port facilities;
• transport over land will be by rail line;
• all of this will be state of the art technology; and
• after 40 years "ultimate responsibility will rest with the Australian Government."

Three More Concerns Regarding the Pangea Proposal

The safe transporting of this toxic material around the globe over a period of 40 years defies the laws of probability. Accidents can and do happen, and just one plutonium accident has enormous capacity to damage life.

Potential leakage from the underground site could contaminate the groundwater and eventually enter the food chain. We suspect that such an isolated burial site for nuclear waste would mean that before too many years advanced, the repository could be forgotten.

The "dump" will be sited on indigenous land. Whichever bit of Aboriginal land is chosen , the result would be another insult in a long and shameful line to indigenous peoples who have suffered at the whims of the nuclear industry — from uranium mining to testing nuclear weapons and now to burying the waste from use in nuclear power.

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