Pangea Resources Australia Pty Ltd was a company notable for a proposal for an international
high-level
High-level and low-level, as technical terms, are used to classify, describe and point to specific goals of a systematic operation; and are applied in a wide range of contexts, such as, for instance, in domains as widely varied as computer scienc ...
radioactive waste
Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. It is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear ...
repository in Australia.
Pangea Resources was a
joint venture
A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acce ...
of
British Nuclear Fuels Limited
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.
* British national identity, the characteristics of British people and cultur ...
,
Golder Associates and Swiss radioactive waste management entity Nagra.
James "Jim" W. Voss was the company's managing director.
In 1998-1999 it put forward a proposal for a high level radioactive waste repository to be built in remote central Australia. The proposal was highly controversial, and elicited opposition from Australian state and federal parliaments. This included actions by two parliaments to prevent the progress of such a proposal. These were the Western Australian Parliament's passage of the ''Nuclear Waste Storage (Prohibition) Act 1999'', and the South Australian Parliament's implementation of the ''Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000''.
The
anti-nuclear movement in Australia
Nuclear weapons testing, uranium mining and export, and nuclear power have often been the subject of public debate in Australia, and the anti-nuclear movement in Australia has a long history. Its origins date back to the 1972–1973 debate ove ...
lobbied against the idea of such a facility. When the federal minister responsible for the issue,
Minister for Industry Science and Resources Senator
Nick Minchin
Nicholas Hugh Minchin (born 15 April 1953) is an Australian former politician and former Australian Consul-General in New York. He previously served as a Liberal member of the Australian Senate representing South Australia from July 1993 to J ...
, indicated that ‘the Pangea proposal will go nowhere’, Pangea ultimately abandoned its advocacy.
[Ian Holland, 'Waste Not Want Not? Australia and the Politics of High-level Nuclear Waste', ''Australian Journal of Political Science'', Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 283-301.]
References
{{reflist
External links
The company no longer operates or has a website: the domain name is now owned by an unrelated Australian consultancy firm.
Association for Regional and International Underground Storage
* ttp://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/wa/consol_act/nwsata1999555/ Western Australia's ''Nuclear Waste Storage (Prohibition) Act 1999''br>South Australia's ''Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000''
Defunct companies of Australia
Nuclear technology in Australia