AFTER more than five years of planning and trying to foresee every conceivable problem, officials were confident a shipment of nuclear waste could be trucked from Port Kembla to Lucas Heights without incident.
The one thing they didn’t think of provided some rare smiles during a tense night-time operation, which ended with the cargo’s safe arrival at 3am on Sunday.
About 1.30am, as the one-kilometre-long convoy made its way along the M1 through the Royal National Park, two deer jumped out of the bush in front of the leading vehicle.
After providing a momentary scare, the deer scurried off into the darkness.
Twenty-five tonnes of waste was returned to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) facility at Lucas Heights, from where it originated, after processing in France.
The waste was unloaded from the BBC Shanghai after its arrival in Port Kembla on Saturday morning and placed on semi-trailers, which left for Lucas Heights at midnight and arrived at 3am.
The major part of the waste was in a 6.5-metre-long forged steel cylindrical container with walls more than 20cm thick.
Fully laden, it weighed 112 tonnes, and ANSTO said it could withstand extreme conditions such as intense fire, shocks and drops, missiles and airstrikes.
The police Public Order and Riot Squad escorted the convoy, which included spare prime movers, tow trucks, fire engines, ambulances and other police vehicles.
ANSTO spokesman Philip McCall said an ‘‘extraordinary amount of planning’’ went into what was code-named Operation Cormorant.
It had involved about 300 police and another 200 people from various federal and state agencies and the private sector.
"It was always going to be a safe operation," he said.
Mr McCall said radiation checks of the waste, which were carried out when the cargo arrived and left Port Kembla, and when it reached Lucas Heights, gave readings that were no higher than background levels that would be found anywhere in Sydney.
Mr McCall said the Lucas Heights campus was fully activated for the weekend, and up to 200 staff "with all sorts of skill sets" were on hand when the cargo arrived.
There had been no celebration when the waste arrived.
"Many staff had been awake for more than 24 hours, so, after having something to eat at the ANSTO cafe, they just went home to bed," he said.
Independent Australian Senator John Madigan said on Sunday that he found it unacceptable that a ship carrying radioactive waste could sail into an Australian harbour when little was known about its ownership or crew. It followed expressions of disbelief from major party parliamentarians that the bureaucracy did not check the ownership of foreign vessels operating in Australian waters.
WHY IT’S BACK HERE
Eight-five per cent of the waste is associated with nuclear medicine production at Lucas Heights, and the remainder stems from nuclear research.
Spent nuclear fuel was sent to France for reprocessing in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the waste was required by French law to be removed from that country by the end of 2015.
The processed waste will be held in a specially built storage facility at Lucas Heights until the federal government establishes a national permanent repository on a site yet to be chosen.
