Australia mulling nuclear waste storage

CANBERRA, Australia, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- An Australian government official is advocating storing nuclear waste generated by the country's uranium exports.

The Australian reported Tuesday that former Labor Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's point man on nuclear non-proliferation, echoed last month's assertion by former Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Bob Hawke that the country had to view the establishment of a nuclear waste industry as a moral, financial and environmental response to climate change by expanding its role in the atomic energy fuel trade and taking back all waste generated in foreign nuclear power plants derived from the uranium it sells on the global market.

Evans' proposal is at odds with the current policies of the Rudd government, which maintains that it will not import nuclear fuel waste, although Rudd's Labor Party has yet to repeal earlier legislation passed by the government of former Prime Minister John Howard, which allows a nuclear dump to be opened in Australia's Northern Territory.

In defending his proposal Evans said that it was "difficult to argue with the principle that uranium producers should be responsible for the ultimate disposal of waste products that flow from them. It may be that in future it just comes with the territory of being a major uranium supplier -- that more countries are going to accept that responsibility. That's not the same as being a repository for the entire universe."