Traditional owners have reopened the case for siting Australia’s first nuclear waste dump at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory, just months after a bitter seven-year dispute appeared to have ended.
In June the Northern Land Council abandoned its nomination to the federal government to store low and intermediate radioactive waste in the area north of Tennant Creek after a lengthy legal dispute launched by four clan groups reached the federal court. Local councils, unions and community groups opposed the dump.
But now the owners have put forward another parcel of land for the same purpose.
The original site had been nominated in 2007 after a South Australian proposal folded in the face of local opposition.
Other traditional owners had said the dumped waste would destroy their lands and environment, that the proposed area was near a sacred site, and claimed a lack of consultation during the process. The chief executive of the NLC, Joe Morrison, stood by the process leading to the nomination but said the proposal had been dropped to avoid further “division and argument” in the community.
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The former prime minister Bob Hawke said at the Garma festival in August that opening up traditional lands to nuclear dump sites could end Indigenous disadvantage.The Northern Territory chief minister, Adam Giles, told Guardian Australia the location of any waste plant was a matter for landowners and the federal government to negotiate. “A number of Territory traditional owners have expressed an interest in potentially nominating their land as a new site for a nuclear waste repository,” he said.
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How infuriating that those in power propose the siting of a “nuclear waste dump” as a solution to indigenous economic inequality; how tragic that some indigenous peoples wish to, or feel no alternative to, agreeing.