Mrs Vale asked the Minister for Science and Technology upon notice, on 20 March 1997:

(1) Will a reprocessing facility be sited at Lucas Heights, NSW; if so, is he able to say whether there are post-cold war comparable examples of siting a facility in a residential area at the edge of a major city anywhere else.

(2) Has his attention been drawn to statements attributed to the Minister for Resources and Energy claiming that to process all the accumulated spent Hifar fuel to Synroc would involve significantly lower levels of radioactivity than those associated with ANSTO's current radiopharmaceutical production; if so, is the documentation supporting this claim available to the public.

(3) Would facilities from a pilot plant remain at Lucas Heights if a commercial scale facility was subsequently built elsewhere.

(4) Are there instances elsewhere where a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, not just a reactor, has been decommissioned and completely de-contaminated; if so, what are the details.

(5) What is the long term business plan for Synroc development.

(6) Will the details of the Synroc project stage schedules, engineering specifications, costs and projected savings or returns of the project be publicly available.

(7) Was the proposal discussed at the ANSTO Community Consultation Meeting prior to media announcements; if not, why not.

(8) Has consideration been given to developing an Australian built and funded demonstration Synroc plant at a contaminated overseas site where high level liquid waste is stored.

Mr McGauran —The answer to the honourable member's question is as follows:

(1) The Government is still considering the management options for ANSTO's stockpile of spent fuel rods. It is too early to be able to give a definitive answer as to what management option the Government will take and where a facility, if any, would be built.

(2) Yes I am aware of the statement made by Senator Parer. The statement that processing the spent fuel rods would involve significantly lower levels of radioactivity than those already associated with ANSTO's current radio-pharmaceutical production is based on calculations by ANSTO that radio-pharmaceutical production on site involves processing 30kg of irradiated uranium containing 1017 Becquerels of radioactivity each year, while processing one hundred spent fuel rods a year would involve only some 14kg of irradiated uranium and about fifty times less radioactivity. These calculations do not appear in any publicly available document or report.

(3) See answer to 1. The Government does not have under consideration the building of a commercial scale facility anywhere in Australia.

(4) The recent OECD publication, `The NEA Co-operative Program on Decommissioning—The First Ten Years 1985-95', lists three irradiated uranium processing facilities that have been decommissioned and completely decontaminated, and a number of others are in various stages of decommissioning. The three completed decommissioning operations are the AT-1 reprocessing plant in France, the BNFL Co-Precipitation Plant in the UK and the Tunneys Pasture Facility in Canada.

(5) Synroc business plan is a Commercial-in-Confidence document which I am not at liberty to disclose.

(6) Should the Government choose the processing option, the proposal would undergo environmental assessment in accordance with the Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) ACT 1974. Under this process various details on the Synroc project would become available to the public.

(7) No. It would be premature for ANSTO to discuss a proposal for siting a reprocessing facility at Lucas Heights before the Government has given the matter its due consideration.

(8) Yes, consideration has been given to developing a Synroc plant overseas. For example, ANSTO has held discussions with UK, French and US organisations active in waste remediation; details of these discussions are however commercial-in-confidence.