00:00Whenever there's any discussion in Australia about anything to do with nuclear, one question
00:06always pops up.
00:07What do we do with the waste?
00:10Now we don't have a central waste storage facility in this country, and there is a long
00:14and torrid history associated with that.
00:17But there is nuclear waste being produced, being processed, and indeed stored in corners
00:22of the country.
00:23And that's why we're here today at the Lucas Heights facility in Sydney's south.
00:27One of the biggest storage facilities currently in the country, dealing with low and intermediate
00:33waste like what's behind me, well into the future.
00:42So Paula, this is sort of point one in our tour today.
00:46Talk us through what's actually coming through here on its way into ANSTO.
00:50What sort of waste we're seeing in this spot?
00:53So ANSTO has a very broad range of activities that it undertakes.
00:57We operate the opal reactor, we produce nuclear medicines, and we have a very broad research
01:03activity base.
01:04So there's a lot of radioactive waste that's generated from these activities, and most
01:08of it is actually low-level solid waste.
01:10A lot of the waste is the sort of things that you would see in a typical lab.
01:14So it could be things like gloves, or maybe some glassware.
01:18You know, things that become contaminated in the day-to-day operations that we want
01:22to be able to check, characterise, analyse, and then decide what waste stream it needs
01:26to end up in.
01:28Capacity is certainly one of the things that is front of mind for us.
01:31So we measure it and monitor it very closely.
01:34This is one of our two buildings that hold these red drums, and actually we've got almost
01:3810,000 of them from the entire operations of ANSTO and its predecessor that have spanned
01:43over 70 years now.
01:45We think we have capacity until around about 2040, until we really need to start having
01:50extra buildings to be able to manage the incoming waste past that time.
01:54So Paula, this is more of the serious side of things, and what you're actually keeping
01:58here at Lucas Heights.
02:00We've seen the low-level waste.
02:03This is the intermediate waste that's come from your old reactors?
02:06Yeah, so the fuel that powered the HIFAR reactor was reprocessed overseas.
02:12Some of it went to France, and some of it went to the UK.
02:15And what we see before us is the reprocessed spent fuel residues stored inside two purpose-built
02:22storage and transport casks that we call TN81 canisters.
02:26So these are incredibly thick, reinforced, sort of holding tubes, for want of a better phrase?
02:32Absolutely.
02:33They are designed to hold high-level waste, so they are, for our intermediate-level waste
02:38that we have at ANSTO, they are very, very safe.
02:41While Australia has a very important role in the nuclear space, we are comparatively
02:48small, and we certainly don't have the infrastructure or really the need or desire to install what
02:53is a very large reprocessing facility here.
02:57So it makes sense for us to have those international agreements so that we can send this overseas
03:01to the experts, where they can reprocess it and send us back an equivalent.
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