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"A blighted site is handed back to the people displaced by British bombs FROM the air, Maralinga looks much like the rest of Australia's outback: vast, red and empty. Up close, there are differences. Its long, quiet airstrip recalls a time when this was an unlikely epicentre of the cold war. Parrots and wedge-tailed eagles cruise above a desert still littered with radioactive plutonium and other fragments of atomic weapons that Britain exploded more than 50 years ago. Newspix Staking claim on a humble plot of Hiroshima Once teeming with nuclear scientists and British and Australian servicemen, Maralinga fell into eerie silence when the tests ended, in the early 1960s. Then just before Christmas 2009, it returned to life."

"As a 21-year-old, Ric Johnstone drove 150 miles daily across the scorching vastness of the Australian outback to work. A motor mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), he spent 1956 servicing military vehicles in the Great Victorian Desert. He lived with 300 other men in a tent town, eating dinners of bullied beef with the occasional vegetable. Johnstone described his first six months as similar to being a prisoner in a chain gang: "There was no church, no women, no entertainment, nothing.""

"Greens' Senator Scott Ludlam said scrapping the Napperby uranium project is a win for the people of central Australia. Toro Energy has announced it will not be acquiring the Napperby project, north-west of Alice Springs, from Deep Yellow Limited. Mr Ludlam said as well as long-term environmental impacts, uranium mining offers no economic benefits to any community. "You'd would be looking at almost entirely a fly-in, fly-out operation which does very little for regional economics and the costs are enormous," he said. "Whether it be to culture and heritage from Aboriginal people, long-term damage to water resources, worker health and safety issues and not to mention the larger issues of what happens to this material once we export it. "It's an industry with a lot of costs and not many benefits.""

MiningWatch Canada (MWC) is a pan-Canadian initiative supported by environmental, social justice, Aboriginal and labour organisations from across the country. It addresses the urgent need for a co-ordinated public interest response to the threats to public health, water and air quality, fish and wildlife habitat and community interests posed by irresponsible mineral policies and practices in Canada and around the world.

"Traditional land owners from the Northern Territory have visited Australia's only nuclear reactor to see what they are in for if a radioactive waste dump is built on their land. The owners come from Muckaty Station, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek. They say they want the waste site because it will provide jobs now and for generations to come - but they are insisting on a thorough environmental assessment."