The Australian Democrats motion below - contrasting the Maralinga method of disposal of long-lived, highly radioactive material with the Government's proposals to store low-level waste in purpose-built lined trenches 20 metres deep - was passed in the Australian Senate on 21 August 2002:

ENVIRONMENT - MARALINGA - DISPOSAL OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL

Senator Allison, pursuant to notice of motion not objected to as a formal motion, moved general business notice of motion no. 131

That the Senate:

(a) notes:
(i) that the clean up of the Maralinga atomic test site resulted in highly plutonium-contaminated debris being buried in shallow earth trenches and covered with just one to two metres of soil,
(ii) that large quantities of radioactive soil were blown away during the removal and relocation of that soil into the Taranaki burial trenches, so much so that the contaminated airborne dust caused the work to be stopped on many occasions and forward area facilities to be evacuated on at least one occasion, and
(iii) that americium and uranium waste products are proposed to be stored in an intermediate waste repository and that both these contaminants are buried in the Maralinga trenches;

(b) rejects the assertion by the Minister for Science (Mr McGauran) on 14 August 2002 that this solution to dealing with radioactive material exceeds world's best practice;

(c) contrasts the Maralinga method of disposal of long-lived, highly radioactive material with the Government's proposals to store low-level waste in purpose-built lined trenches 20 metres deep and to store intermediate waste in a deep geological facility;

(d) calls on the Government to acknowledge that long-lived radioactive material is not suitable for near surface disposal; and

(e) urges the Government to exhume the debris at Maralinga, sort it and use a safer, more long-lasting method of storing this material.

Question put and passed.

THOUSANDS of top secret documents on the British nuclear tests at Maralinga have surfaced 17 years after they should have been presented to a royal commission. The Australian Democrats have demanded the documents be tabled in the Senate, saying they contain valuable information which could help veterans seeking compensation.

The Federal Government has requested more time, saying many of the documents must be cleared by the UK Government before they are made public.

References to the documents were unearthed in the Australian National Archives by researchers investigating the long-term impact of the nuclear tests on the health of more than 25,000 servicemen and civilians.

They include files dealing with how much radiation was ingested by the men, chemical warfare sites in Australia, the clandestine introduction of nuclear weapons into Australia, radiation dosage records and official investigations into the health effects of the nuclear tests.

Democrats nuclear spokeswoman Lyn Allison had asked for the documents to be tabled in the Senate by March 20 so they could be made available to veterans.

A reply from Defence Minister Robert Hill said preliminary advice from the Department of Defence was that they could not be released.

"National Archives records indicate some of the documents have restrictions on access that may prevent tabling," he said.

"Apparently, some documents were provided in confidence by foreign governments and disclosure would require consultation and consent."

Senator Hill said other documents were under the control of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as they were provided to the 1985 McClelland royal commission into the nuclear tests.

"I have requested that Defence liaise with Prime Minister and Cabinet to advise me which documents may be tabled," he said.

"Unfortunately, this process will delay a final response to the Senate's request."

The existence of the latest documents follows the discovery last year that the Defence Department withheld more than 240 files from the McClelland royal commission.

Veteran groups regard the latest documents as critically important as they appear to deal directly with the health effects of radiation exposure at Maralinga.

Their researcher, Ann Munslow-Davies, said it was time all documents relating to the nuclear tests were made public.

"We are talking about 50 years now that these documents have been hidden and kept secret," she said.

"The question must be asked what is in them and what are the British and Australian governments trying to hide."

"What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn't be adopted on white-fellas land". So said nuclear engineer and Maralinga whistle-blower Alan Parkinson on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National on 5 August.

Parkinson was intimately involved in the latest "clean-up" of the Maralinga nuclear weapons test site in South Australia, contaminated by a series of British nuclear tests from 1956-63. He was the federal government's senior representative on the project from 1993 until January 1998, at which time he was removed from the project after criticising mismanagement and cost cutting. For the next two years, Parkinson advised the traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja, and since then he has adopted the role of a public whistle-blower.

The media has recently taken an interest in the problematic "clean-up" of Maralinga, and a resolution was passed in the federal Senate on 21 August which "urges the Government to exhume the debris at Maralinga, sort it and use a safer, more long-lasting method of storing this material."

The first phase of the "clean-up" involved collecting a large volume of contaminated soil and burying it. During this phase of the project, dust suppression was inadequate, as is clearly evident in photographs and in the government's video record. Malcolm Farrow, a federal government bureaucrat, told a Senate hearing on 3 May 2000, that "some grams" of contaminated dust blew away. Billions of grams in fact - many thousands of tonnes. On several occasions, work had to be suspended because thick dust clouds inhibited visibility. On at least one occasion, the dust was so thick that the forward-area facilities - over a kilometre from the work site - were evacuated by health physicists.

Vitrification of contaminated debris

In the later stages of the soil collection and burial phase of the project, dust suppression was markedly improved. But far bigger problems were looming. The second phase of the "clean-up" involved plutonium-contaminated debris dumped in and around pits during previous "clean-ups".

Of particular concern was debris resulting from 15 Vixen B trials carried out from 1961-63 at a site at Maralinga called Taranaki. In these "minor" trials, bombs were detonated in a manner which would not allow them to explode as atomic bombs. Instead, the tests simply melted the plutonium and uranium, shooting it into the air and allowing it to spread far and wide. Ironically, these "minor" trials created greater local contamination than the seven atomic blasts in 1956-57, whose yield ranged from 1-27 kilotons.

One of the legacies of the Vixen B trials was many tonnes of contaminated debris such as steel joists, cables, lead bricks, and concrete firing pads. The government decided to treat the debris using a process called in-situ vitrification (ISV), a thermal treatment process which uses electricity to turn the soil and pit contents into a hard glass-like rock which contains and immobilises the plutonium for many thousands of years. All of the 21 debris pits at Taranaki were to be treated by ISV, and a contract for this work was signed with the U.S.-based company Geosafe. ISV began in May 1998.

Cost cutting

Before ISV began, it was discovered that a greater volume of debris was contained in and around the pits than was initially estimated and consequently ISV would cost more. In September 1998, the federal government announced its decision to continue with ISV for some of the Taranaki pits, but to exhume and sort the contents of other pits and to treat some of the contents by ISV and to simply bury the rest in another trench.

According to Parkinson: "Amazingly, the sorting was done on the basis of size, not by the level of radioactivity; the larger pieces were to be treated by vitrification and the smaller items and soil buried. The most radioactive thing I saw at Maralinga sent the monitors off scale from a couple of metres distance. It was a sphere about a millimetre in diameter."

In 1999, ISV was terminated altogether in favour of shallow burial of contaminated debris. Claims that this decision was motivated by cost-cutting continue to provoke fierce responses. During a 3 May 2000, Senate hearing, former science minister Nick Minchin refuted the "scurrilous suggestion which I see floating around in the media that suggests that this decision was made on cost grounds."

Current science minister Peter McGauran said in a 19 August letter in the Australian Financial Review that "claims that the Government cut corners at Maralinga and abandoned the in situ vitrification process because of cost concerns are completely wrong." But cost-cutting was clearly and demonstrably the motivation for the decision to terminate ISV - a point made in letters published in the AFR the following day (along with a cartoon depicting the science minister with an extended Pinocchio nose from telling lies about Maralinga). Undaunted, McGauran asserted in an AFR letter on August 22 that: "It is outrageous to suggest that the in-situ vitrification was dropped due to cost considerations ..."

That the decision to terminate ISV was made largely or solely on cost grounds is repeatedly spelt out in the Maralinga project documentation. To give a few examples:
* an October 1998 paper by the government's advisory committee, the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC), said: "The recent consideration of alternative treatments for ISV for these outer pits has arisen as a result of the revised estimate for ISV being considerably above the project budget."
* a 17 July 1998 paper written by the chair of MARTAC gives the following criteria for considering options for the Taranaki pits: time savings; cost savings; nature of waste form; potential for exposure of waste; and efficiency of operation. Cost savings rated highly, whereas worker safety and the long-term risks posed by the radioactivity do not rate a mention.
* at a 13 April 1999 meeting, Garth Chamberlain from GHD, the construction company which was appointed as project manager (despite having little knowledge about ISV and no experience with the technology), said it was a much easier, quicker and cheaper option to exhume and bury debris rather than using ISV.

The government came up with various spurious reasons to justify terminating ISV, including alleged safety concerns. On March 21, 1999, as ISV treatment of one Taranaki pit was nearing completion, there was an explosion. According to Parkinson, writing in the February 2002 edition of the IPPNW's journal Medicine and Global Survival, "The Department used this incident as an excuse to cancel the ISV contract... This decision was taken long before the investigation of the incident was complete. The Department claimed that it could not be sure that the cause of the accident was not due to the process, but both the report of the investigation and the audit of that report agreed that the cause was something in the pit, not the process."

The government falsely claimed that Geosafe was not prepared to continue with ISV after the explosion. The government falsely claimed that vitrification was abandoned because the Taranaki pits were not as highly contaminated with plutonium as originally expected; all credible estimates were between 1-5 kilograms of plutonium. The government falsely claimed that the Maralinga Tjarutja agreed with the government's decision to terminate ISV.

Shallow burial

Once vitrification had been abandoned, debris from the pits that had not been treated was placed in a shallow trench and covered with just a few meters of soil. Worse still, the trench was unlined and the geology totally unsuitable - limestone and dolomite with many cracks and fissures.

ISV had been described as "world's best practice", but since 1999 history has been rewritten and the government now considers shallow burial of plutonium-contaminated debris to be world's best practice. But far from being world's best practice, shallow burial of long-lived radioactive waste is a clear breach of the government's own guidelines, which state that long-lived waste should be disposed of in a deep geological facility. Nor would shallow burial of plutonium-contaminated waste be acceptable in countries such as the UK or the USA.

Another ploy by the government has been to pretend that the debris has been subject to deep burial even though it is under only a few meters of soil. The burial is not "deep", no matter how loose the definition. Another ploy was to invent a mongrel category of "deep" near-surface burial.

Remediation

The large volume of debris in shallow burial at Taranaki certainly needs to be remediated, either by ISV treatment or possibly by encasement in concrete. There may be scope for further remediation at Maralinga; for example, in areas where collection of contaminated soil was problematic. An inquiry needs to be instigated to determine an appropriate course of action.

However, the federal government persists with the mantra that the "clean-up" was world's best practice. To do otherwise would necessitate another clean-up. The back-down, and the clean-up, would jeopardize the government's next nuclear assault on South Australia - a national radioactive waste dump. Further delays with the dump project could in turn jeopardize one of the government's pet projects - a new nuclear 'research' reactor in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights (see WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor 571.5427, "Sydney's reactor rumbles").

Fifty years ago this month, Britain began testing atom bombs in Australia. The tests left thousands of Australians with serious health problems, and those who are still alive are struggling to get compensation. Aidan Windle reports.

At 8am on October 3, 1952, Britain detonated its first atom bomb aboard the HMS Plym, which was anchored offshore of the Montebello Islands, 80 nautical miles off northern Western Australia. The 25 kilogram [JG - kiloton?] nuclear fission device vaporised the Plym and its surroundings in a test codenamed Operation Hurricane.

It was the beginning of a series of 29 British nuclear tests in Australia and several South Pacific islands from 1952 to 1958, in which more than 22,000 British, 14,000 Australian and 500 New Zealand servicemen were involved.
The Menzies government supported the tests until 1957, when scientist Hedley Marston revealed that radioactive fallout was widespread. The tests were then moved from Maralinga to Christmas Island, where the last six explosions of the program took place.

During the tests, these servicemen and the many civilians who took part were exposed to ionising radiation that left many with serious and often life-threatening health problems. Bill Paterson, 69, a stoker on board HMAS Karangi, took part in the ship's mission to recover materials from around the Plym following Operation Hurricane. His home - among the wooded hills of Milgrove, east of Melbourne - is a long way from the desolate Monte Bello Islands, which members of the Karangi's crew explored during recreation breaks.

Today, radiation contamination on the islands prohibits visits of longer than one hour. But back then, the crew spent extended periods of time feasting on fish caught near the nuclear test site - despite the fact that the fish had levels of radiation that would now be designated as unsafe.

"They told us you could just wash it off. But if the stuff's inside you ... ?" Paterson asks.

While his own health has thankfully been unaffected, Paterson feels betrayed for those many veterans who have died or are dying of radiationrelated illnesses.

"Somebody must have known how dangerous it was," agrees Walter Diston. The 71 year old Vermont veteran served as a cook aboard HMAS Warrego, which surveyed the Monte Bello area after the explosion. "We were just doing the job - we didn't think any more about it."

Operation Hurricane was the first of Britain's 21 bomb tests in Australia and on Christmas Island. Each blast spread radioactive fallout over areas up to 160 kilometres from ground zero. Atmospheric radiation levels increased throughout Australia and as far abroad as New Zealand and Fiji. Local indigenous people were also at risk, as authorities made only token efforts to protect them from fallout. After the first nuclear test at Emu Field, in outback South Australia, a black mist of oily radioactive dust passed over Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara communities camped nearby. They reported deaths and sickness from the cloud and its noxious drizzle. While scientific understanding about the dangers of radiation was less developed than today, many involved in the tests were not given even the most rudimentary of lessons in how to protect themselves because secrecy dictated that information be kept to the bare minimum required for workers to fulfil their tasks.

The Karrangi's captain, Richard Taudevin, knew as little about radiation as Paterson, and he later died of cancer. Service personnel working under the scorching sun at desert test sites often shed their suffocating protective outfits, unaware that one millionth of a gram of plutonium could cause cancer in anyone who inhaled it.

Perhaps the most sinister component of the testing program was experimentation into the ability of service personnel to endure the physical and psychological conditions of nuclear war. Professor Sue Rabbitt Roff, from the University of Dundee, last year unearthed a document from the Australian National Archives confirming that Australian service personnel were deliberately exposed to radiation during the second test at Maralinga in 1956.

The British Government admitted that 24 of the 280 service personnel comprising a Commonwealth Indoctrination Force were ordered to march and crawl across radioisotope-laced dust and shrubbery.

But it has continually denied that troops were treated as guinea pigs, arguing that the tests were designed to examine what sort of protective clothing was most effective rather than assessing the damage inflicted by exposure to radioisotopes.

Ric Johnstone, 69, remembers the year he spent at Maralinga - 850 kilometres northwest of Adelaide - as a time of hardship. His job was to travel into the "hot" area around ground zero after each explosion during Operation Buffalo in 1956 and assess the damage and contamination to target response vehicles placed to gauge the bomb's power.

When a bomb was detonated, most of the service personnel and civilians watched the awesome spectacle from a nearby compound. They turned their backs to the bomb and listened to a countdown. On zero they pressed their palms into their eyes.

"Your skull seemed to light up. The whole world was going up in a fireball," Johnstone says.

There was a moment of silence before an extraordinary shudder and a blast of hot air that knocked many off their feet.

"It made you feel like an ant under a boot."

Johnstone runs the Australian Nuclear Veterans' Association (ANVA) from his home in Gosford, NSW. He wears the stubborn smile of an almost beaten soldier refusing to surrender.

What he is fighting to change is the fact that nuclear test veterans have been excluded from the health care and welfare provided to veterans of wartime, peacekeeping or hazardous operations under the Veterans' Entitlement Act.

The surviving veterans of Britain's nuclear tests in Australia in the 1950s have had to endure the terrible effects on their health over the years.

For example, Ric Johnstone has endured openheart surgery, a nervous disorder, a blood condition and has had his gall bladder removed.

A variety of musculoskeletal, skin and gastrointestinal problems are common in nuclear test veterans, although doctors are divided on the extent to which radiation is to blame. Cancer is the big killer.

Like many veterans he knows, Johnstone must have "half a pound of meat cut out" every six or so months to fend off carcinomas that he knows will some day overpower him. Hundreds of service personnel who suffered the devastating legacy of radiation contamination have died angry. Johnstone says veterans often call him from their deathbeds, one lamenting, "The f-ing government has killed me and now they won't even give my wife anything".

While the Australian Government offers compensation to nuclear test veterans for illness or injury through the Military Compensation and Rehabilitation Service, just nine of 358 claims to date have succeeded, while seven claims remain unresolved. Consequently, some veterans pursued their claims through the courts.

The British and Australian governments hold most nuclear test documentation and the onus of proof is on victims. Without medical records and personal radiation exposure measurements, victims have found it difficult to prove that their cancers were caused by the nuclear tests rather than other potential causes, such as poor diet or sun damage.

Johnstone won his compensation claim in the NSW Supreme Court in 1989, but only after a 17-year legal battle. He says each time the case was about to reach trial, his legal aid was withdrawn. A doctor's report stating that he was suffering from radiation sickness clinched the case.

Many veterans believe that the stalling tactics employed by successive governments are designed to outlast them. If this is the case, then it is working. All the ANVA members with court cases pending have died. A vociferous body of 2000 ANVA members has withered to 600 as veterans have died or given up hope of receiving recognition and compensation for their service.

For his part, Johnstone was awarded $900,000, about $200,000 went to pay his legal costs. Just $20,000 was allocated for future loss of income, because, as he puts it, "they didn't expect me to last long".

Some widows of veterans have successfully claimed compensation. Peggy Jones was the first, receiving an $8600 lump sum under the Compensation (Australian Government Employees) Act in 1974. Her husband, Warrant Officer William Jones, died of cancer 13 years ago, after spending two days working near ground zero after an explosion as part of the Operation Totem nuclear tests at Emu Field, South Australia, in 1953.

Veterans have welcomed a planned study by the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) into cancer and mortality and the nuclear tests. The study finally comes after years of calls for such an investigation from veterans who began to notice patterns of radiogenic maladies among their ranks several years after the tests.

Shadow veterans' affairs minister Mark Bishop says the study has taken too long to get underway, particularly since many veterans are suffering from cancer. But a spokesman for Veterans' Affairs Minister Danna Vale says the Howard Government is the first government to respond to the nuclear test veterans' concerns.

Meanwhile, the DVA is awaiting the report of the Independent Committee to Review Veterans' Entitlements, due in mid-November. The review received more than 100 submissions for health and welfare support for nuclear test veterans like that available to war veterans and their families.

After their decadeslong struggle for recognition of their service and its legacy, nuclear test veterans are hoping the findings will deliver symbolic justice in the survivors' final years.

 -- Aidan Windle is a Melbourne writer.