It’s a telling comment on the recent political climate that a
Budget that does virtually nothing for science and technology
is welcomed. As Dr Alan Duffy of Swinburne University of
Technology wrote: “Scientists around Australia breathed a sigh
of relief” that there was “at least funding for the coming year”.
Senior science journalist Leigh Dayton noted in Sciencethat
there is “little to suggest any recovery from the $2.2 billion
decline in support for science, innovation and research since
2014”.
There was some good news in a small number of speciic
areas that probably indicate overall government priorities.
Geoscience Australia got about $100 million to fund explo-
ration for minerals as part of the “Exploring for the Future”
scheme. Given the declining importance of mining, that looks
more like exploring for the past.
The $83 million “to support Australia’s presence in Antarc-
tica” is driven by geopolitical considerations rather than the
importance of polar science.
The next biggest new allocation of $37 million went to the
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation to
“ensure nuclear waste is disposed of more eiciently”. The
whole area of nuclear waste management remains a serious
political embarrassment, which this funding will do relatively
little to defuse.
The $15 million for the National Carp Control Plan and the
similar sum for cyber-security small business grants look more
like industry assistance than science, while the $12.6 million for
the Australian Astronomical Observatory seems to have been
found from savings in the Cooperative Research Centres scheme.
Dayton noted that “the government appears to support
CSIRO head Larry Marshall’s drive to refocus on industry-
oriented research”.
The fundamental problem is that governments see research
funding as an expense rather than recognising it as an invest-
ment in our future. Duffy noted that discoveries and innova-
tion from the past 20 years in the physical and mathematical
sciences “directly contribute $145 billion to the economy”
while advances in the biological sciences over the past 30 years
add a further $46 billion.The South Australian government’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal
Commission has submitted its inal report. As anticipated, it
is optimistic that South Australia could make money by taking
radioactive waste from other countries.
The report sees no prospect of nuclear power being economic
in the state, and also discourages consideration of processing
uranium before export. It supports expanding the uranium
industry, even though approved mines have been mothballed
in response to the reduced use of nuclear power since the
Fukushima accident, saying there is now relatively little oppo-
sition locally to mining and exporting uranium.
The industry still has the problems identiied 40 years ago
by the Fox report: management of radioactive waste and the risk
of issile material being used to produce nuclear weapons.
The report sees the irst of those problems as an economic
opportunity. It argues that some countries have accumulated
used fuel from nuclear reactors without having developed agreed
schemes for long-term management of this radioactive material.
Sweden and Finland have advanced projects for burying
their radioactive waste. Finland estimates the cost of disposal
at $0.65 million per tonne, Sweden at $1.13 million/tonne.
Estimates of disposal costs in Taiwan and Japan are even higher.
As the inventory of used fuel in countries with no disposal
schemes is about 90,000 tonnes, the Commission argues that
there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity if South Australia
built a waste repository and offered to take in the used nuclear
fuel of other countries.
Apart from the obvious question of whether there would
be support in the local community for such a scheme, there is
an obvious chicken-and-egg problem. No country is going to
contract to send their used fuel to South Australia unless there
is evidence of a secure facility with solid political and social
support. But without hard evidence of other countries being
willing to pay the billions of dollars that would be needed to
recover the costs of building a waste repository, it would be a
huge gamble with public money for the South Australian govern-
ment to go ahead.
The discussion in South Australia will be very interesting.
It’s hard to see the proposal getting the broad community
support and bipartisan political backing that would be needed
for it to go ahead.JUNE 2016| | 49LOWE TECH Ian Lowe
Is Nuclear Waste More Valuable than Scientific Research?
The federal Budget treated science as an expense while the Royal Commission identified
nuclear waste as a potential momey-spinner.
Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University.facebook.com/austscience
Follow us @austscience
Register for email updates
at austscience.com