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REVIEWS @ HIGH & DRY the coalition government or the Labor Party by Guy Pearse and looks to community leadership and indi- Viking/Penguin Books, Australia, 2007 vidual action in creating a better future. ISBN 978-0-670-07063-3 (480pp tpb) oy Available: http:/Avww.penguin.com.au; © MARALINGA: Australia's Nuclear also see http://www.highanddry.com.au Waste Cover-up t's unusual for a card-carrying Liberal by Alan Parkinson Party member, government adviser and ABC Books, Sydney, Australia, 2007 lobbyist to turn whistleblower, but that's ISBN 978-0-7333-2108-5 (231 pp tpb) exactly what Guy Pearse did when he went Available: http://shop.abc.net.au public on 13 February 2006 on ABC TV's lhe Australian government may have Four Corners current affairs program. He announced in 2000 that the clean-up of declared that behind Australian Prime the former British nuclear test site at Minister John Howard's intransigence in not Maralinga in South Australia was a success, ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and in refusing —_q "world first" and "world's best practice", to insist on tighter carbon emission controls but the site is still riddled with plutonium was the industry collective he calls "the and other deadly radioactive materials. greenhouse mafia". In league with these Contaminated soil and debris were buried at “quarry visionaries" are former public ser- shallow depth (2-3 metres) in unlined vants and ministerial staffers, neoliberal trenches, and radioactive dust is scattered think-tankers and conservative media com- across thousands of hectares of landscape. Mmentators, economists and lobbyists. Now, _ It's certainly not safe for the Tjarutja people Pearce has written High & Dry, which grew _{o return to and reclaim their tribal lands. English-born mechanical/nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson worked from 1989 in devel- all & DRY oping options for the site clean-up and was appointed by the federal Department of Primary Industries and Energy in 1993 to oversee operations. He was a member of MARTAC, the Minister's advisory commit- tee, but was removed from the project and committee by the beginning of 1998 after he objected to the project management tender for in situ vitrification (ISV) being awarded to a company with no experience in the field. Nor did senior public servants know anything of the technology or requirements. Parkinson holds that the government was only ever interested in the cheapest option of shallow burial, and a debris pit explosion at the start of the ISV phase sounded the death knell for this safer, longer-term option. Maralinga is Parkinson's hard-hitting account of his work (which was held in high regard by his colleagues), the realities of the project, the gross understatement by the British as to what they'd left behind after their 1956-63 tests, the bungling of bureau- crats, the blinkered attitude of politicians (except for federal Democrats senator Lyn Allison), the betrayal of the traditional own- ers (whom he represented in 1998-2000) and the creation of a disastrous radioactive legacy for the future. Parkinson blew the whistle on ABC Radio National's Background Briefing on 16 April 2000, which then spawned more media cov- erage, public outrage and the expected offi- cial denials. At a time when the Howard government (under which the project came unstuck) is going gangbusters on nuclear power and is hell-bent on establishing nuclear waste dumps in remote desert areas, Parkinson's book is an important exposé. out of his PhD thesis preparation in 2001-05 and a series of interviews he conducted. Environmental science and policy were Pearse's specialities ahead of his appoint- ment as an adviser in 1997-98 to the then environment minister, Robert Hill. He was soon to learn that the government had no intention of agreeing to reduced carbon emissions and that the situation would only get worse. Indeed, by May 2006, Howard was on the nuclear bandwagon and had fur- ther aligned his greenhouse policies with those of the US Bush administration and against Australia's national interest. Pearse laments that Howard's greenhouse policy is protecting those who are causing the pollution—a corporate cabal with inter- ests in coal, uranium, aluminium, oil, lique- fied natural gas and steel—and that renew- able energy technologies/programs are being deliberately undermined and underfunded. In the final part, Pearse analyses the 2007 "election year equation" in terms of a win by the coalition government or the Labor Party and looks to community leadership and indi- vidual action in creating a better future. MARALINGA: Australia's Nuclear Waste Cover-up by Alan Parkinson ABC Books, Sydney, Australia, 2007 ISBN 978-0-7333-2108-5 (231pp tpb) Available: http://shop.abc.net.au lhe Australian government may have announced in 2000 that the clean-up of the former British nuclear test site at Maralinga in South Australia was a success, a "world first" and "world's best practice", but the site is still riddled with plutonium and other deadly radioactive materials. Contaminated soil and debris were buried at shallow depth (2-3 metres) in unlined trenches, and radioactive dust is scattered across thousands of hectares of landscape. It's certainly not safe for the Tjarutja people to return to and reclaim their tribal lands. English-born mechanical/nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson worked from 1989 in devel- oping options for the site clean-up and was appointed by the federal Department of Primary Industries and Energy in 1993 to oversee operations. He was a member of MARTAC, the Minister's advisory commit- tee, but was removed from the project and committee by the beginning of 1998 after he objected to the project management tender for in situ vitrification (ISV) being awarded to a company with no experience in the field. Nor did senior public servants know anything of the technology or requirements. Parkinson holds that the government was only ever interested in the cheapest option of shallow burial, and a debris pit explosion at the start of the ISV phase sounded the death knell for this safer, longer-term option. Maralinga is Parkinson's hard-hitting account of his work (which was held in high regard by his colleagues), the realities of the project, the gross understatement by the British as to what they'd left behind after their 1956-63 tests, the bungling of bureau- crats, the blinkered attitude of politicians (except for federal Democrats senator Lyn Allison), the betrayal of the traditional own- ers (whom he represented in 1998-2000) and the creation of a disastrous radioactive legacy for the future. Parkinson blew the whistle on ABC Radio National's Background Briefing on 16 April 2000, which then spawned more media cov- erage, public outrage and the expected offi- cial denials. At a time when the Howard government (under which the project came unstuck) is going gangbusters on nuclear power and is hell-bent on establishing nuclear waste dumps in remote desert areas, Parkinson's book is an important exposé. 72 * NEXUS www.nexusmagazine.com OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2007