Washington, Apr 2 (Agency) The United States and the United Kingdom may get an opportunity to send nuclear waste to Australia under the AUKUS deal, while the two nations themselves have difficulty disposing of radioactive materials due to a lack of relevant facilities, The Guardian reported, citing a parliamentary inquiry into nuclear safety legislation. There are two draft bills subject to the Australian upper house’s inquiry. The first one is a naval nuclear power safety bill presented by the Australian government in November 2023. The document provides for setting up a nuclear safety regulator and building nuclear propulsion facilities, but also those for storing or disposing of radioactive material from AUKUS submarines, the newspaper reported on Monday.
The second bill, also submitted in November, relates to a license issuance mechanism for the regulator.David Sweeney, a nuclear-free campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation, warned about the danger of this legislation, saying that the US and the UK could regard Australia as “a little bit of a radioactive terra nullius [nobody’s land].” “Especially when it’s viewed in the context of the contested and still unresolved issue of domestic intermediate-level waste management, the clear failure of our Aukus partners to manage their own naval waste, the potential for this bill to be a poison portal to international waste, and the failure of defence to effectively address existing waste streams,” Sweeney was quoted as saying by The Guardian. The US, the UK, and Australia announced the new trilateral defence partnership, AUKUS, in September 2021. The first initiative concerns the creation of an Australian fleet of nuclear submarines using US and UK technology, under which Canberra expects to see eight submarines, with the possibility of the first ones going on active duty around 2036. The second initiative involves the development of a range of technologies, including underwater robotics, quantum electronics, cybersecurity and electronic warfare capabilities, supersonic weapons, and defence mechanisms against them.