Eyes on Asia / Radioactive waste experts -
NUCLEAR DEAL IN SA FIRM'S SIGHTS

An Adelaide company is bidding for a nuclear waste management contract that it says could bring up to $270 million to the state.

Linkforce director David Osborne said winning the deal for a Taiwanese nuclear power station’s radioactive waste management could lift his company’s workforce from three to 30 engineers and bring $200 million to $270 million into the SA economy.

Design and construction engineers would be taken on in the export of expertise for managing waste on-site.
Mr Osborne said China also offered burgeoning business opportunities from its nuclear power industry.

“They’ve made provision for funding waste management of it. The Chinese was of thinking is providing for the future,” he said.

Linkforce, a Hong Kong and SA-owned company with an Asia-Pacific licence to use Geomelt technology, is looking to Australia to contain hazardous chemicals and low and medium-level nuclear waste. Geomelt technology was first used in the late 1990s to contain 18 of 22 radioactive pits at former British bomb-testing site Maralinga in the South Australian Outback.

It used electrodes in the ground to vitrify, or turn contaminated soil into rock, to trap radioactive material.

The Maralinga contract ended in controversy after an explosion on the site.

Mr Osborne worked for Linkforce’s forerunner, AMEC, on the Maralinga project but has also worked with Geomelt technology in the U.S. to clean up former nuclear-weapons testing and production facilities.

He said Australia was well behind the U.S. and Asia in developing a strategy to deal with nuclear waste,

Linkforce had secured a contract to manage hexachlorobenzene (HCB) waste, a source of cancer-causing dioxin, from Orica’s Botany Bay site in Sydney but this had been indefinitely delayed by politicians, he said.

“The problem to a large extent with any technology is nobody wants to be the first to use it,” Mr Osborne said.

Political reticence to deal with nuclear and other hazardous wastes also made tendering for contracts in Australia a drawn-out process, a reason why the company was focusing on Asia.

Mr Osborne said it was a shame SA had not grasped potential nuclear waste opportunities.

SA Chamber of Mines and Energy chief executive Phil Sutherland said he was confident the State Government would consider and reasonable project that would bring investment to the state.

“As far as nuclear waste is concerned, our geology is very stable and the far north of our state features large areas of land that are remote and desolate,” he said.