For years Australia and other remote Pacific islands have been used for nuclear testing and included in routes for ships dumping nuclear cargo. The major reason for this is that these places are far away from densely populated continents like North America and Europe.

Two years ago, France conducted extensive but needless tests with atomic bombs. These experiments carried many risks and made the area around Mururoa Atoll uninhabitable for decades to come. More recently, France shipped forty canisters of waste past the western coast of Australia on a journey to a treatment plant in Japan. The forty containers had 100 times the amount of radioactivity of one Mururoa test. If this much radioactivity were released into the environment, the damage would be catastrophic. The canisters were made of weak steel and continuous contact with the nuclear waste and salt water would cause the containers to corrode quickly. This was just the first of many planned shipments.

The Australian government is not protesting this shipment because it is also searching for countries to export uranium to and wants to appeal to everybody. If the government isn't going to do anything about this, it is up to us to find a solution.

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