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February 6, 2003
The story on the nuclear waste dump in SA continues to break. The angle now is the conflict between the needs of the nascent space industry in the Woomera Prohibited area and the Commonwealth's proposal to build a radioactive waste dump next door to the missile testing range.
What is being sacrificed by the Commonwealth in pursuing this nuke dump is the possibility of SA's regional development being partly clustered around a space industry. SA's regional growoth is to be sacrificed.
Rebecca DiGirolamo writing in The Australian here states that the space industry has concerns. These concerns undermine the claims by Peter McGauran, the federal Science Minsiter, that future space projects would not be affected by the location of the nuke dump at site 52a.
One of the space industries is National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan. NAL have invested $6 million in upgrading the infrastructure in the Woomera Prohibited Area, and they want to use the area until 2005. NAL's tests, which involve firing a massive rocket carrying a model jet, are part of a Japanese government-funded project to develop a supersonic passenger jet.
NAL is quoted Rebecca as saying that the boundary of the proposed nuclear repository---site 52a---is less than 1km from it plans to land a model jet in trials in 2002 and 2003. Kimo Sakata, NAL's project director, said that the repository was too close to their landing area and added that the landing area could not be easily changed.
And Allan Paull of the University of Queensland said that their HyShot project, which tests high-speed scram jets in the Woomera Protected Area, would be hindered by the federal government's nuke dump proposal.
There is a bright space industry future in South Australia. For instance, the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science plan to use Woomera to recover a small re-entry capsule containing sample material from a distant asteroid. NASA may test the future X-38 prototype crew return vehicle for the International Space Station
It all makes you wonder. Should not the federal government be facilitating the development of a nascent space industry, rather than trying to close it down by placing obstacles in its way.
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Gary
Are you a strictly no dumps man altogether, or simply concerned about the location of a dump? ie you just want to see it moved a bit further away from the Space facilities on economic grounds.