Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 (repealed 2012)
About the Act
The Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 (the 2005 Act) is past legislation that facilitated the siting of a radioactive waste facility in the Northern Territory from 2005 until its repeal in 2012.
On 14 July 2004 the then Prime Minister announced that the Australian Government had abandoned the National Repository Project and the National Store Project for establishing facilities to manage low and intermediate level radioactive waste, respectively. Instead, the Government decided it would construct co-located facilities on Commonwealth land for management of low and intermediate level radioactive waste produced by Australian Government agencies.
On 15 July 2005 the then Government announced that three sites on Defence land in the Northern Territory would be investigated to determine their suitability for siting a co-located low level waste repository and intermediate level waste store.
The Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 was enacted in December 2005. The three Defence sites are specified in Schedule 1 to the Act. The Act also provided for the nomination by an Aboriginal Land Council in the Northern Territory of Aboriginal land within its jurisdiction for consideration as a potential facility site. A nomination of a site on Ngapa Clan land at Muckaty Station (NT) was accepted by the then Government in 2007.
In April 2012, the 2005 Act was repealed and replaced by the National Radioactive Waste Management Act 2012, which requires a facility to be sited on volunteered land.
Related documents
In February 2009, Parsons Brinckerhoff finalised a series reports on the preliminary site characterisation investigations for a radioactive waste management facility on the previously identified sites in the Northern Territory.
The results of these investigations and findings are provided in the following documents.
Please note: these documents are of a large size. It is recommended to first save the document before opening. To download, right click the link, choose ‘Save Target As’ (Internet Explorer), or ‘Save Link As’ (Firefox or Netscape), select a location on your computer, and click ‘Save’.
More information
For further information about the potential sites and concept designs considered under the Act, see Potential sites considered under the 2005 Act.
For more information about the Act, see the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 page on the Comlaw website.
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