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The waste will be reprocessed by French company COGEMA, and then returned to Australia for dumping.
Greenpeace is concerned that highly enriched uranium, which will be extracted during reprocessing, has the potential to be used in the construction of nuclear weapons.
New laws recently passed in France mean that all information relating to the nuclear industry will be classified as defence secrets.
Greenpeace campaigner James Courtney said that France was a weapons state with an ongoing weapons development program.
"There is no way of absolutely guarranteeing that highly enriched uranium extracted from Australian waste won’t end up in French weapons."
Recent amendments to Australia’s Nuclear Non-proliferation and Safeguards Act have even further restricted information relating to Australian waste being sent overseas.
Once the radioactive waste returns to Australia it will need to be dumped. The Australian government is not revealing where this will be exactly just that it could be in Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria or the Northern Territory.
“State governments that don’t want to become a radioactive dumping ground should be pursuing all possible legal and political measures available to them to block the Federal government plans,” Courtney said.
Take action: Email the minister for science, The Hon Peter McGauran MP, to tell him that repocessing Australian waste is not only a waste of taxpayers money that does nothing to solve the problem but also an unacceptable proliferation risk.
Email him at: Peter.McGauran.MP@aph.gov.au
Greenpeace is concerned that highly enriched uranium, which will be extracted during reprocessing, has the potential to be used in the construction of nuclear weapons.
New laws recently passed in France mean that all information relating to the nuclear industry will be classified as defence secrets.
Greenpeace campaigner James Courtney said that France was a weapons state with an ongoing weapons development program.
"There is no way of absolutely guarranteeing that highly enriched uranium extracted from Australian waste won’t end up in French weapons."
Recent amendments to Australia’s Nuclear Non-proliferation and Safeguards Act have even further restricted information relating to Australian waste being sent overseas.
Once the radioactive waste returns to Australia it will need to be dumped. The Australian government is not revealing where this will be exactly just that it could be in Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria or the Northern Territory.
“State governments that don’t want to become a radioactive dumping ground should be pursuing all possible legal and political measures available to them to block the Federal government plans,” Courtney said.
Take action: Email the minister for science, The Hon Peter McGauran MP, to tell him that repocessing Australian waste is not only a waste of taxpayers money that does nothing to solve the problem but also an unacceptable proliferation risk.
Email him at: Peter.McGauran.MP@aph.gov.au
