Australia has agreed to take sole responsibility for the management, security and storage of all nuclear waste from its fleet of proposed nuclear-powered submarines, including the spent fuel from the submarines’ reactors – high-level nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millennia once the submarines are decommissioned from the early 2050s.

The spent fuel is also a nonproliferation risk: Australia’s nuclear submarines will run on highly enriched uranium which can be reprocessed to make nuclear weapons.