WOOMERA, Australia -- The desert landscape of remote South Australia is so vast, uninhabited, flat and featureless that Hollywood filmmakers have used it as a stand-in for Mars in the film Red Planet.
Now, these same qualities are attracting the Australian government, but not as a film set.
It wants to use the area as a nuclear waste dump. The dry, geologically stable and isolated region is hundreds of miles from any sizeable population center. It's a nice place if you're looking for peace and quiet for, say, thousands of years.
But the proposed dump is encountering opposition from conservationists, Aboriginal groups and other denizens in the vacant, ethereal beauty of Australia's Outback. Supporters and opponents are gearing up for a test of wills over a place many would deem the end of the Earth.
To the federal government, remote South Australia is an expedient place to consolidate decades of accumulated low-level hospital and research waste stored haphazardly around the country. But opponents see the proposed waste project as the "thin end of the wedge" that will pave the way for storage of higher-level nuclear waste. They see any low-level dump as merely an icebreaker for a larger, more toxic dump that may also soon be created.
To put the low-level waste dump into some Outback perspective, the underground facility would be roughly the length of an American football field. This football field would be located on a military reservation roughly the size of England. And the edge of this England-sized military reservation would be 270 miles away from the closest major city, Adelaide.
Flat, rock-strewn plains and blinding white salt lakes surround the proposed dump location. Three small towns dot the area.
The first is Woomera, a sleepy military missile range service town that's now found a second life as a detention center for illegal immigrants. A second, Andamooka, hosts a motley crew of iconoclastic wildcatters seeking their fortune digging for gem-quality opal. The third is Roxby Downs, a company town that serves a nearby copper mine. Few come to this area by choice, serendipity or wanderlust.
"Clearly, this is a huge and isolated area," says Carolyn Coleman, spokeswoman for Nick Minchin, Australia's federal minister for industry, science and resources. She said the site was selected after exhaustive study of several sites around the country.
But to anti-nuclear activists, this "end of the Earth" location misses the point. To them, it represents sweeping a nuclear problem under an Outback rug. They assert that out in the "big empty," people are better trained at keeping out of the sun at noon than handling radioactive waste.
Australia has built up supplies of low-level nuclear waste from a series of sources, including hospitals, junked defense equipment and a heap of contaminated soil from research tests done in the 1960s. The country has one nuclear reactor, which produces radioisotopes for research and for medical and industrial use. The reactor creates intermediate nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for thousands of years. But the current reactor is getting old, and the government plans to build a replacement.
That, in turn, will create additional amounts of intermediate-level waste. Both the old waste and the new waste will need to find a home, and the government is still looking for a place to put it. Opponents of the low-level waste storage project believe it's the first step toward creation of a more toxic waste dump for this intermediate-level waste.
"The two projects are fundamentally linked," believes David Noonan, spokesman for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) in Adelaide.
Like other opponents, the ACF argues nuclear waste should be kept close to where it's produced so constant monitoring can take place.
For its part, the government says its choice of South Australia for storage of low-level waste will have no bearing on any decision for any separate, intermediate-level nuclear depository for its reactor waste.
"Both decisions will be made on the merits of what's best for each," Ms. Coleman said.
As the low-level nuclear storage issue heats up (so to speak), more groups are coming out to express their views. For instance, a group of Aboriginal women opposed to the dump idea have teamed up with webmasters versed in bytes and HTML to create a website called Irati Wanti.
The aim of the site is to express the women's deep ties to the land, and to provide historical linkages to a series of 1960s-era U.K. nuclear bomb tests in South Australia's Maralinga area, about 300 miles west. A government project to decontaminate that area only concluded last year, some 40 years after the fact.
Like others, the Aboriginal women believe any new nuclear waste should be kept close to where it is produced.
"Instead of just trucking the nuclear waste off into the distance, we're saying that the waste should be kept close to the scientists who claim they have the technology to look after it," said Lucy Brown, a spokesman for the Irati Wanti project.
But the government says Australia's growing pile of low-level nuclear detritus is now being handled on a messy ad hoc basis by universities and hospitals, mostly in the nation's cities. A better solution is needed, and the Outback is it, the government claims.
Clearly, a battle is looming between the desert denizens and the city lab coats. At this point, it's too early to call a winner.
