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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2149 ..

MS TUCKER: Mr Speaker, I am very offended by Ms McRae's interjections.

MR SPEAKER: I did not hear them.

MS TUCKER: I think she could leave if she does not want to hear this. She does not have to interject.

MR SPEAKER: You are using up your time, Ms Tucker. Keep going.

MS TUCKER: Basically, uranium has a very short useful life, whether it is for weapons or nuclear power plants. It has a very long life as radioactive waste. Waste or tailings left by processes along the way remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Just to give you a little bit more information on tailings, they are a particular problem due to the volumes produced, their radioactivity and their long life. Large quantities of tailings are produced by uranium mining. For example, in the lifetime of Roxby about 180 million tonnes, or 400 hectares, of tailings, equal to about 150 football fields each 30 metres high, will be produced. The tailings contain over 80 per cent of the radioactivity of the original ore in a form that can be easily dispersed into the environment. The longest lasting element in uranium tailings is thorium 230, which has a half-life of 80,000 years. Over time it decays into radium 226, which in turn decays to produce radon gas. The time taken for the radon output to dwindle to insignificant quantities could be 100,000 years or more. It is an inescapable fact that the tailings will in fact remain hazardous for extremely long periods of time, hundreds of thousands of years, and that no assurances could be given that they would remain completely isolated. Thus they also represent an enormous risk of contamination to local communities and ecosystems via land, rivers, air and groundwater. Shame on the Federal Government!

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Assembly adjourned at 7.04 pm

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