Alan Parkinson - Maralinga: Australias Nuclear Waste Cover-up

Contents

In less than two decades, British military aspirations turnedover 100km2 of pristine Australian bush at Maralinga in South Australia into plutonium-contaminated scrub. The landscape was also scarred by scrapes and mounds, dumps, roads, tracks, and discarded equipment. And the clean-up added lines of heaped soil over bare patches, and large mounds covering burial trenches. The importance of the Maralinga clean-up cannot be overstated, not only because it was supposed to be the final chapter in a decades-long sorry story, but also because it was atest of the effectiveness of a new organisation, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

In the preface to a book by Roger Cross, you can read, In March 2000 the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Senator Nick Minchin, declared Maralinga safe after $108 million had been spent on another clean-up. However, in 1997 a nuclear engineer, Alan Parkinson, was sacked for raising concerns about the clean-up, and in April 2000, he blew the whistle. Roger was referring to the clean-up of the old atomic bomb test site at Maralinga in South Australia.

Well that was not quite what happened, as this book will explain. Yes, even though I was the key person on the project from mid-1993 until my removal in January 1998, being the governments representative for the project and a member of the Ministers advisory committee, MARTAC, I was removed from both appointments. And yes, the future management arrangements were a factor in that event.

After my removal, I became an adviser to the Maralinga Tjarutja, the traditional owners of the land, and I made two more visits to Maralinga.

In April 2000, I expressed my views of the project in a program on ABC Radio National. Following that program, I decided that I should have no further involvement in the project and wrote to the Maralinga Tjarutja to tell them that I could no longer be one of their advisers.

I believe the Maralinga project should be allowed to be judged solely on its merits. That would not be possible if the only account available were that published by the government. The problem for me was how to get the truth into the open. I have published a few articles and contributed to a couple of books, but none gave the complete story. So I was left with putting the whole into one volume this book is the result.