Jews on either side always have to gloat
Should use your real last name Benny
Nuclear waste. AUKUS agency’s reckless indifference
The Australian Submarine Agency deals with high-level Defence secrets and fissile material, yet it has been caught ignoring security obligations while threatening Rex Patrick, who reports on their conduct.
Last Friday, government solicitors acting for the Australian Submarine Agency sent me a warning against publishing some embarrassing information about their conduct.
Neither I nor MWM will be subject to their bullying, however.
Nuclear fuel waste
The Australian Government has undertaken to accept responsibility for the spent nuclear fuel from our planned AUKUS submarines. This is no light undertaking. It’s more than a lifetime obligation; indeed,
it’s an obligation that will last tens of thousands of years.
The Government has announced that this high-level radioactive waste will be stored on Defence land.
As reported by MWM, in February 2023, the Australian Submarine Agency awarded a contract for nearly $400K to former Defence Department Deputy Secretary Steve Grzeskowiak to find a suitable Defence location.
The very expensive irony that lurked behind this contract was the fact that Grzeskowiak had, when he was inside Defence, looked for a location on Defence land to store low-level radioactive waste and had been unable to find a suitable site.
According to Grzeskowiak, there wasn’t a single spot anywhere across the vast Defence estate that was suitable for storing low-level radioactive material. Yet he was now the go-to person who would, through some miraculous divination, find the Australian Submarine Agency a location across the very same territory
where it would be safe to dump a pile of the highest level, most radioactive nuclear waste.
Go figure.
Document request
In December 2023, I requested Mr Grzeskowiak’s report under our Freedom of Information laws. I was refused access on the basis the report was a Cabinet document.
But here’s the interesting thing. I knew that the report had been being worked on by multiple agencies, so I requested related documents from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), Geoscience Australia (GA), the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).
What those documents showed me was the report was not, at least until after I made my FOI request, developed on the Government’s CabNet+ system.
I’m now in a legal fight at the Administrative Review Tribunal, pressing my case for the report to be made public.
CabNet rules
The Cabinet Handbook, the bible for Cabinet’s processes, makes it crystal clear that cabinet documents must be prepared on a special CabNet+ system.
https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-agency-reckless-on-nuclear-waste/