Four casks of spent nuclear fuel made their way through the city of Wollongong in the early hours of Sunday.
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The casks – each of which weighs 23 tonnes (most of which is shielding) – were driven by truck to Port Kembla in an operation that involved as many as 250 police officers.
The exercise required partial lane closures – the trucks travelling around 80km/h – along the route and the cargo left Port Kembla by ship at 7am Sunday.
A spokesman from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) said the operation was substantially smaller than one in December 2015 where a 95-tonne container was delivered to Port Kembla.
The Sunday morning exercise was completed under a partial veil of secrecy; in April ANSTO announced it planned to take rods from the Lucas Heights facility some time in 2018.
For security purposes it would not name the time, date or even the port where the cargo would be offloaded.
Some of the spent fuel rods were used to deliver around “5.5 million doses of nuclear medicine”, which treats cancers as well as heart, lung and musculoskeletal conditions.
An ANSTO spokesman said it was also used to irradiate 45 tonnes of silicon a year for use in high-powered electronic devices like solar farms, hybrid cars and wind farms.
The rods are being taken to France where kilograms of uranium and plutonium will be recycled for use in energy and research programs.
The non-recoverable waste will be immobilised in glass, which ensures safe and stable behaviour.
“The valuable and useful materials will be recycled, and the remainder will be treated so that it is suitable for eventual storage back in Australia,” said ANSTO chief nuclear officer Hef Griffiths.
He said the casks used to transport the rods were “purpose-engineered to safely transport this type of material without risk to people or the environment”.
... the remainder will be treated so that it is suitable for eventual storage back in Australia.
- ANSTO's Hef Griffiths on the spent fuel rods delivered to Port Kembla on Sunday morning.
“Spent fuel export is a process that’s been undertaken 10 times now in Australia and thousands of times around the world, safely and without incident, thanks to the dedication of the people involved and highly-engineered containers used,” Mr Griffiths said.