Will central Australia be the new site for world nuclear waste storage, mostly from the US, and serve to displace Aboriginal Australian communities in the Northern Territory outback? An interesting piece from my teaching colleague Alison Broinowski, published in NewMatilda in two parts, speculates about such a possibility.

Recently extended, the north-south railway that cuts vertically through the Australian continent may also be related to the sudden federal government intervention into indigenous communities, Alison writes. The rail link happens to run past remote Aboriginal communities in which Native Title has been suspended by the federal government (ostensibly on welfare grounds which have long existed), and seen as a land-grab.

The strategic significance of the railway extension—built by Halliburton subsidiary KBR—is that it passes between the largest uranium deposits in the world. The vertical rail link across the Australian landmass has long been considered economically unviable, but its construction for transporting loads of radioactive uranium—to as yet unannounced nuclear waste dumps along this axis—would explain its sudden commercial and/ or strategic viability.

In part one, Alison writes:

Always considered uneconomic, the rail link from Alice Springs to Darwin was suddenly found to be viable in 1999. A government/business partnership undertook to build it for $1.3 billion. FreightLink, a consortium of foreign and local investors that owns the railway, with a 50 year contract to run its freight operations, is a joint venture between 11 participants including Kellogg Brown Root (KBR, 36.2 per cent), Barclay Mowlem (13.9 per cent), and John Holland (11.4 per cent). Read the rest of this entry »