Moral Responsibility of All

Former Labor Prime Minister, Robert Hawke, raised the issue of nuclear waste and its recycling. He suggests that it would be a great economic boon to Australia if we took the world's nuclear waste and buried it in the deep, dark recesses of the great outback. There's nothing out there, nobody lives there, it's empty - except of course for indigenous flora and fauna.

The current Labor Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, smugly assured the populace that the issue was not one of Labor policy. Even the current Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, demurred on the subject. But should they?

A former Greenpeace head has tentatively broached the subject of Australia's moral responsibility of uranium export. His reasoning is that if we are willing to sell yellow cake to the world, we should accept the resulting plutonium and other radio-active tailings.

And herein is the dilemma: nuclear waste is dangerous; yellow cake is not. Should we, as a nation, bear responsibility for what other nations do with our uranium?

When I first heard of this, I said a loud, mental 'no', 'not on your life'. Now, though, I'm thinking that Greenpeace - who I don't support because of its bloody minded arrogance - may have the right of it.

There are many who protest the shipping of our own nuclear waste to France aboard supposedly secure ships. But these are people who protest the nuclear facility just outside of Sydney, but refuse to come up with a viable alternative.

It's like prisons. Yeah, everybody is for law and order, but a prison in their neighbourhood? No way, no how, put it somewhere else. If these people had their druthers, we wouldn't have nuclear power at all, which means importing nuclear medicine at the very least.

There's no doubt nuclear substances are dangerous, but we cannot put the genie back into the bottle; we cannot unknow the science of it, we can't turn our back on it. What we can do is accept that it is our yellow cake out there being turned into nuclear energy and we can accept that because of that, we must make sure that the waste is disposed of in a suitable fashion.

In the outback? Buried in cement barrels under hundreds of metres of earth? I honestly don't know. Polluted groundwater is what immediately springs to mind.

Nuclear fusion is one of those things that I wish scientists had stopped to think whether they should develop it, before they thought of whether they could. It's a technology that is feared even as it's applauded, but never truly controlled until we can dispose of it in a safe manner.

This is a debate that can and should go on for some time before a decision is made.