Radioactive materials scattered across SA with no long-term storage plan
South Australia’s environment safety regulator has revealed how many sites across the state house radioactive materials with no long-term solution after plans for a national waste facility at Kimba were dumped.
An image of the cancelled nuclear waste storage facility planed for Napandee near Kimba. Image: Tom Aldahn/InDaily
The official Environment Protection Authority register shows there are currently 87 South Australian sites holding sealed radioactive sources used in industrial radiography, mining, construction and manufacturing process control.
Another 38 sites are home to unsealed radioactive material used in nuclear medicine and mining ores.
But there is no long-term plan for any waste storage after the federal government scrapped its plans for a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility on the state’s Eyre Peninsula.
The list of sites includes the University of Adelaide, dental surgeries, veterinarians and hospitals that are using “new and innovative applications of radiation to treat disease”, according to an EPA spokesperson.
“The EPA does not keep an inventory of cumulative waste amounts, however volumes of radioactive wastes from medicine, science and industry remain relatively small, estimated at about 20 cubic metres,” she said.
“Innovation in medicine is resulting in radiation procedures becoming increasingly important. The number of medical and research organisations using radioactive material continues to increase annually.”
The spokesperson said the EPA is the state’s radiation safety regulator under the Radiation Protection and Control Regulations 2022, but does not release specific names or locations of where radioactive materials are held for security reasons.
Nor does the organisation have a separate inventory of premises where waste material is held, but it said there are strict regulations for waste disposal.
Higher activity industrial sources used or stored in SA that are classified as intermediate level waste must be disposed of at a licensed facility and “generally this means transport to interstate or overseas facilities”, the spokesperson said.
Very low-level waste such as smoke detectors is deemed safe to go into landfill.
Mining companies manage radioactive waste from naturally occurring radioactive ores, including in mining uranium, and this is disposed of on licensed mine sites.
“Of note is the medical sector, specifically the treatment of disease where new and innovative application of radiation is an expanding area,” the EPA spokesperson said.
“An example of recent developments in SA is the actinide radionuclide studies at the University of Adelaide, aiming to make targeted actinide therapy cancer treatment more readily accessible.
“The EPA has an important role to enable medical services to provide the health care benefits while assuring safety of radioactive material.”
Resources Minister Madeleine King revealed this week that $108.6 million has been spent on preparations for establishing the now scrapped National Radioactive Waste Management Facility near Kimba between July 1, 2014, and August 11, 2023.
Work on the facility that was supposed to store waste from across the nation was dumped after a Federal Court ruling in favour of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation’s battle to stop the low-level waste repository on the Eyre Peninsula.
The future of nuclear waste across the country is now unclear after seven years of consultation and promises of around $31 million in incentives for the Kimba region.
