Nuclear waste in SA

Dear Premier Weatherill
Nuclear waste in SA

While the Kevin Scarce’s Royal Commission report does briefly put some numbers to the risks of accidents and terrorist attacks on nuclear waste while it is being transported on ships, and shows it later being transferred by road and rail – NO numbers are put to the risks of accidents there.
Scott Ludlam’s ‘Let the facts speak’ highlights the 12 major failures that have happened in nuclear reactors, there have been hundreds more. Chernobyl ‘a safety test went wrong’. Windscale ‘The reactor being operated beyond its design limits’. Chelyabinsk ‘Failure to repair a cooling system’ etc etc. http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/sites/default/files/let-the-facts-speak.pdf
A litany of failures, part human and part terrorist induced.
I am a Mechanical Engineer and suggest that with the volume of nuclear waste & time span being suggested for South Australia to accept the world’s nuclear waste, the chance of a series of accidents happening transporting the waste within SA is a certainty.
We have been made very aware of the damage done by dozens of accidents in the oil industry – from the Gulf ‘spill’ to the Torrey Canyon. Each terrible but in time dealt with by detergents and the work of mother nature herself.
Nuclear waste does not offer us those options – it is effectively permanent. Any accident here will poison that part of SA for thousands of years. Any nuclear accident will torpedo our tourist industy.
The Ghan & the Indian Pacific both run through Port Augusta. An accident anywhere near will scupper those lines.
The accounting in Scarce’s report is highly questionable and a real risk exists of the waste being taken at a loss. No company can say what its product price will be in a few month’s time – let alone hundreds of years. http://www.tai.org.au/sites/defualt/files/P222A%20Digging%20for%20answers%20-%20SA%20Nuclear%20Royal%20Commission%20Submission%20FINAL.pdf
To even consider SA taking nuclear waste is complete madness. Leave it where it is & let its generators deal with it as best they can – the Russians for a start will take theirs straight to Chernobyl rather than pay SA a fortune to take theirs. European countries like Finland are taking responsibility for their own waste, poor Asian countries wouldn’t pay those huge prices that are suggested.
Do not accept Nuclear waste into SA.
Yours sincerely

Sir Charles Madden Bt
BSc MTech MBA