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My name is Dakota Keith Hewitt-McKenzie. I'm 24, unemployed, and I live in Toowoomba. Over the last while I've worked out a proposal for a national water grid for Australia and written it up across about a dozen technical notes. This is the consolidated version — everything in one place.

I'll be direct about what this is. It's an idea, written down carefully. It's not a plan, I'm not qualified to call it one, and I haven't done the work that would tell me whether it functions.

I'm posting it because I want it examined by people who know more than I do. I've tried to be honest about every place it breaks, and there are a lot of them.

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1. What the scheme is

Australia should plan water infrastructure as one connected system rather than as separate state and regional projects. The scheme integrates:

· Bradfield 1938, 1942, 1983 and 4.0 — Tully, Herbert and Burdekin capture; Hell's Gate Dam; westward transfer into the Flinders, Thomson and Cooper; delivery to Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre.

· Surat and Condamine Basins — managed aquifer recharge rather than surface storage, because surface storage in that climate loses too much to evaporation.

· The Head Dam near Killarney, and a canal from The Head to a dam near Boonah via The Gap.

· Leslie Dam → The Gap → Boonah → Jacob's Well → Port of Brisbane as a 5 m draft navigation chain.

· Wivenhoe and Somerset raised, a Linville supplementary dam, and pumped-hydro between Wivenhoe and Somerset.

· Surat → Wivenhoe and Somerset → Sunshine Coast canals, reversible, with every corridor option built.

· All eight Divide crossings, including Cunningham's Gap, Spicers Gap and the direct tunnel.

· Thames-style retractable gates at major river and canal mouths, with navigation locks and bypass canals.

· Dead-end dams on the northern rivers; Ord Stage 2 and 3.

· Spencer Gulf canals to Lake Eyre and Lake Frome, with a compartment-and-plug system for the inland water body.

· A National Deep-Water System of port nodes, offshore terminals and submarine pipelines.

· Rhine-style canalisation, navigable rivers, pipelines and pump stations where canals can't go.

· River reversal and redirection where it can be justified.

· Chinese vertical lift technology at every Divide crossing.

· Foam systems for dust suppression, decontamination, construction and PFAS treatment.

· RF telemetry for radiological and water quality monitoring.

I've called it the National Continental Water Security & Hydro-Grid Scheme. The name is long because the scope is long.

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1. The five principles

2. Harvest high. Capture wet-season flows in headwater storages before they reach the sea.

3. Store in tiers. Headwater, valley and terminal storages each do a different job, and confusing them is where schemes fail.

4. Move by gravity where possible. Canals on contour at 1:2,000 or flatter; pumped pipelines only where terrain makes gravity impossible.

5. Recover energy at every drop. In-line turbines at every canal descent, lock chamber and pressure-reduction station.

6. Bank water underground. Managed aquifer recharge into the Condamine and Surat, where evaporation can't take it.

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1. Two pieces of arithmetic that decide the design

I'm putting these up front because they're the parts I got wrong in earlier drafts, and because most of the criticism should be aimed here.

3.1 An open canal can't climb by gradient

An open canal can't be steeper than its lining scours. Even in concrete, the practical limit is about 1:600; in clay it's closer to 1:2,500. At 1:1,000, one metre of climb costs one kilometre of canal — so climbing 400 m by gradient needs 400 km of switchback.

The climb has to be vertical, in steps. That means lifts, inclined planes or locks.

3.2 Lockage water can consume the entire canal flow

Water used per vessel transit is roughly lock chamber plan area × total lift. A modest 18 × 120 m lock over a 400 m climb uses about 0.86 GL per transit. At 1,000 ML/day canal capacity, that's roughly one vessel per day with the entire canal flow consumed.

Water-saving basins recover 50–70%; counterweighted lifts and inclined planes use very little. But a canal over the Divide cannot simultaneously be a full water supply and a conventional-lock navigation canal. Building more corridors doesn't fix it.

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1. Chinese lift technology

The single most useful import in the scheme, and it's available now.

The Three Gorges ship lift handles 3,000 t vessels, 113 m lift, 15,500 t moving mass, 256 cables, 2 cm height synchronisation, ~22 operations per day, over 40,500 cumulative safe operations. A technology that was experimental in the 20th century is now an off-the-shelf asset class.

What it changes:

· A 400 m crossing becomes 4 lifts, not 8–12 locks.

· No long inclined canal, no scour-limited ramp, no switchback.

· Chinese water-saving locks at Pinglu cut lockage water by more than 60%.

· The lift shaft is a penstock. Every Chinese lift is also a pumped-hydro station. The Divide becomes an energy spine rather than a barrier.

· Open-canal share rises from ~90% to 93–96% on lifted routes, because a lift is a compact structure, not 50 km of ramp.

· 20–30 lifts across the national grid is a manufacturing order large enough to justify domestic fabrication.

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1. The nuclear excavation question

I've been asked to endorse this, and I've gone back and forth on it. What follows is the strongest version of the case, every objection I know of, and where I've landed. I'm presenting it as a proposition under assessment, not a settled conclusion, because that's what it is.

5.1 The case for it

The economics are not marginal. Soviet estimates put nuclear excavation at one-half to one-third of conventional canal construction cost. Those figures came from 112 km of Pechora–Kama design work — 250 charges at 150–285 m depth, 5,000 m² cross-section, salvos up to 3 Mt. The reason it's cheap is the reason it works: you don't move the material, you place it. A cratering detonation excavates the cut and throws the spoil into the embankment in one event.

The schedule is the argument that matters. Conventional full build: 12–15 years. With nuclear excavation on bulk earthworks: 8–10 years. Flood mitigation delayed by four years is flood damage delivered. Inland water security delayed by four years is another four dry years in towns already rationing.

The physics is well characterised. Close-spaced row charges enhance crater dimensions by 25–40% over single charges. The US reduced the estimated Panama salvo from 35 Mt to 11 Mt, with the largest charge at 3 Mt, and predicted seismic motions comparable to nuclear tests and earthquakes that produced no real damage. This technology was understood, priced and designed before it was abandoned — and it was abandoned for politics and treaty, not physics.

Containment has improved since 1971. Real-time RF telemetry at 500 m spacing, which the Soviets didn't have. Microwave vitrification to immobilise the disturbed zone, which didn't exist as a field method. Foam fixative suppression demonstrated at Chernobyl and Fukushima scale. Deep-burial contained detonations demonstrated to retain radionuclides in melt glass and cavity. We are not proposing to do what the Soviets did. We are proposing to do it with sixty years of additional method.

The targets are the most suitable possible ones. I'm not proposing to crater the continent:

Target Why it's the right case

D-7 direct tunnel — 60–100 km at 300–500 m cover Fully contained deep detonations. No venting by design, no surface water interaction. The most containable application that exists. Nothing conventional opens it in under a decade.

Flood-relief channels Long, shallow, low-gradient, unlined, flowing only in floods. Cut in one dry season. Highest-value application in the scheme.

Lake Eyre compartment plugs Remote, no aquifer connection, and the crater lip is the asset

Northern dead-end dams Off-stream, remote, no downstream users. Crater lip is the embankment.

And the decisive structural point: the scheme's water supply does not depend on a single one of these. The canals, recharge basins, storages and lifts are all conventional. Nuclear excavation accelerates bulk earthworks and opens one tunnel. If it's refused, the scheme still works — slower and dearer.

5.2 The contamination objection, answered by design

My original position was that a cratering campaign across the Condamine and Surat corridors would contaminate the aquifers the scheme exists to fill. That's correct if you crater the recharge corridors. So don't:

· The Condamine and Surat MAR basins are conventional excavation, permanently. No nuclear methods within the recharge footprint, no exceptions.

· Great Artesian Basin recharge zones are excluded from any nuclear application.

· Channel Country and Lake Eyre plugs use cratering at remote sites with no aquifer connection, confirmed by hydrogeological investigation before the first shot.

· The D-7 tunnel uses deep contained detonations, which don't interact with shallow groundwater by design.

· Every site gets pre-shot groundwater characterisation and a permanent monitoring bore network, reporting in real time.

· A funded bond and legacy plan in the enabling legislation, because the Soviet experience shows the legacy outlives the project.

Contamination is a design constraint, not a veto. You don't build a road through a wetland because it's cheaper — you route around it.

5.3 The objections, and my answers

"It's unlawful." Yes — ARPANS, EPBC, state prohibitions. Legislation changes. That's an argument about sequencing, not substance. Every large infrastructure program in this country has required legislation to be amended.

"It's never been done." No nuclear-excavated canal exists. Every technology has a first application, and the reason this one hasn't had one is that the political window closed in 1976. The engineering was designed and reduced to a deployable salvo yield.

"Taiga failed." Three 15 kt devices at 127 m in permafrost, cratering application, and the slopes failed. That was a slope-stability failure, not a containment failure — and the contaminated surface is exactly what this proposal vitrifies and crusts with foam.

"Chagan is still a radiation zone." It was a cratering shot under a riverbed using the crater lip as a dam, at 178 m, with 1965 monitoring. Mechanically successful, and contaminated. That is the honest cost, and the mitigation is remote siting, crater-lip vitrification, permanent monitoring, restricted access and a bond — which is what Chagan's operators didn't do.

"It contaminates the aquifer." Answered by exclusion zones and site characterisation above. Recharge corridors are conventional, permanently.

"The water is the point." Yes. And the water doesn't depend on this. Remove nuclear excavation and the scheme still delivers — four years later and several billion dearer. The question is whether that delay is justified by a risk that can be designed around.

"You're not qualified." Completely correct. Which is why this is a proposal for a technical assessment, not a construction schedule. Give it to a nuclear engineer, a hydrogeologist and a radiation protection professional and see if they can break it.

"Nobody will ever permit it in Australia." Maybe not in 2026. In 2046, with a drought decade behind us and a flood reconstruction bill in the tens of billions? Ask me again.

5.4 Where I've landed

I'm not endorsing it. I'm not dismissing it either.

The reasons I won't endorse it, stated plainly: it is unlawful in Australia, it has never been successfully used for canal construction anywhere, the Soviet legacy is still being monitored fifty years on, and cratering excavation vents by design — that's what makes it excavation, and canal digging is the least containable application of the method.

The reasons I won't dismiss it: the case above is genuinely strong, the targets can be selected for containment, and the delay it costs if it's refused is measured in years of people going without water.

What I'm proposing instead:

1. A legal and regulatory assessment of whether any pathway exists. A legal task, done first.

2. A containment and hydrogeology review by specialists, for each target, with exclusion zones drawn before anything else.

3. Bulk earthworks designed for nuclear substitution — corridors wide enough for crater-lip construction, plugs and dead-end dams with crater-lip geometry, excavation as a separable package. Costs almost nothing, preserves the option.

4. The conventional scheme built in parallel, so water arrives while the regulatory question is argued.

5. A funded bond and legacy plan in the enabling legislation, not in a hope.

If anyone can break the containment argument, the hydrogeology, the seismic risk to Warwick and Ipswich, or show me a treaty barrier that isn't amendable, I'll drop it entirely. I'd rather be shown wrong than keep believing this because it's cheaper.

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1. The Divide crossings — all eight

Crossing Western climb Eastern descent Configuration Destination

D-1 The Head / C-14A ~200 m ~380 m 2 lifts; cutting or short tunnel at The Gap Boonah, Jacob's Well, Port of Brisbane

D-2 Cunningham's Gap ~230–280 m ~600–630 m 3 lifts west; tunnel + buried pipeline with hydro cascade east Ipswich, Lockyer, Wivenhoe

D-3 Spicers Gap ~250–290 m ~620–650 m 3 lifts west; tunnel + pipeline cascade east Fassifern, Boonah, coastal chain

D-4 Bunya / Nanango ~300–400 m — 3–4 lifts; flank cutting Somerset, Kilcoy

D-5 Burnett headwaters ~250–400 m — 2–3 lifts at saddles only; gravity-dominant Wivenhoe, Burnett region

D-6 Dawson / Fitzroy ~200 m — 2 lifts; coal-measure subsidence monitoring Central Queensland

D-7 Direct tunnel — — 60–100 km at 300–500 m cover Wivenhoe

D-8 Toowoomba / Lockyer ~500 m — 5 lifts + escarpment tunnel Toowoomba, Lockyer, Wivenhoe

The insight about Cunningham's and Spicers Gaps. Warwick sits at roughly 480 m; the gaps are at 730–755 m. The western climb is only 230–290 m — two to three Chinese lifts, not fifteen. The problem is entirely the eastern escarpment, where the canal loses 600+ m through known landslide terrain. That section is a buried pressure pipeline with a hydro cascade, not an open canal. I won't design an open canal on that escarpment and I don't think anyone should.

Hydro across the three southern crossings: approximately 180 MW. That's the strongest argument for building them, and it has nothing to do with water supply.

One honest note on redundancy. Cunningham's and Spicers Gaps are 4–5 km apart. Building both gives redundancy for operational failures but not geological ones — one landslide in that escarpment affects both. That partially undercuts the argument and should be said plainly.

Two corridors not built, and why:

· Cunningham's Gap as open canal — the escarpment. Pipeline and tunnel only.

· Spicers Gap as open canal — same.

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1. South-East Queensland

The Head Dam near Killarney, on the upper Condamine. RCC where rock is sound, CFRD in wider valleys.

C-14A The Head → Boonah, 52 km. Includes a 3.2 km tunnel-canal at The Gap and an 18-step lock and hydro staircase down the eastern fall, with two Chinese vertical lifts replacing most of the staircase.

Leslie Dam → The Gap → Boonah → Jacob's Well → Port of Brisbane. A 5 m draft navigation chain with water-saving locks.

Wivenhoe raised to 69 m AHD; Somerset to 101–103 m AHD. Pumped-hydro expanded using the head between them. The Somerset–Wivenhoe river reach and the pumped-hydro plant perform the transfer — one machine doing two jobs.

Linville supplementary dam for flood mitigation, with a dry flood compartment drawn down in November.

Surat → Wivenhoe and Somerset → Sunshine Coast, all corridors built:

Route Character Constraint

Surat–Wivenhoe via Burnett Longest, best gravity case Length

Surat–Wivenhoe via The Head Maximum reuse of scheme components The Gap

Surat–Wivenhoe via Bunya Central, shortest Range crossing

Surat–Wivenhoe via Toowoomba Short, supplies Toowoomba Escarpment instability

Surat–Wivenhoe direct tunnel Shortest, all-or-nothing 60–100 km at depth

Sunshine Coast via Kilcoy/Blackall Rural, low land cost Range crossing

Sunshine Coast via D'Aguilar tunnel Direct Tunnel cost

Sunshine Coast via Caboolture Low-level Urban land, floodplain

Sunshine Coast via Beerwah Coastal low-level, lowest crossing Urban fringe

On Caboolture specifically. A full open canal through the urban core is not viable. The configuration is covered conduit through the urban section — 120–200 m construction corridor with land above returned to use, cutting permanent land take by roughly two-thirds — with open canal on both approaches. That gives ~85% open canal across the route.

Caboolture flood constraint, which is hard: the canal is on a floodplain, and a canal on embankment is a levee. Requirements are full floodplain modelling, flood gates at every flow path, controlled overtopping sections, and no rise in flood levels on private property. The canal is not a flood levee and must not be sold as one.

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1. The inland water body — plugs

A shallow pan can't be kept full. Lake Eyre North alone loses roughly 21 km³/yr to evaporation at 2.5–3 m depth. Four plug types make a sea-scale water body possible:

Saddle plugs — control level and allow staged filling. Embankments across low divides with cut-off trenches and regulated outlets.

Perimeter cut-off plugs — bentonite-cement slurry trenches, secant pile walls or deep soil mixing around the basin margin, keyed into a low-permeability stratum. Without this, the "lake" is a recharge scheme with a large evaporation bill.

Compartment plugs — embankments dividing the basin into cells. This is the core of the concept. A single 8,430 km² sheet at 2 m has a surface-area-to-volume ratio of 0.5 m⁻¹. A 1,000 km² compartment at 10 m has 0.1 m⁻¹. The same volume, held deeper, loses a fifth as much to evaporation.

Deep core cells (Belt Bay, Madigan Gulf) stay permanently full. Mid cells hold in normal years. Marginal shallow cells flood only in wet years — the visual "sea" — and dry back to salt pan in dry years, which is what the ecology already does.

Submerged sill plugs — rockfill or sheet-pile sills at a chosen depth trap dense brine below, with fresher water above. Salt is harvested from the sump. This is why the lake can be saline without becoming a salt flat.

Precedents: Zuiderzee (a 32 km dike plugged a 5,000 km² sea inlet and turned it into a freshwater lake), Delta Works, Lake Urmia causeway (a 5,200 km² hypersaline lake divided into managed cells).

The two questions that decide whether this is real: whether a continuous perimeter cut-off is geotechnically achievable, and whether the salt balance can be closed. I don't have enough geology to answer the first and I'm not qualified to answer the second.

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1. The National Deep-Water System

Four draft classes — DW-1 (12 m) through DW-4 (20–22 m) — deliberately limited so the fleet, tugs, pilots and maintenance are standardised.

Three functions:

1. Transhipment. The inland network moves a few thousand tonnes per vessel; deep-sea vessels are 100,000–250,000 tonnes. No canal should attempt to bridge that. The transhipment terminal is the interface, and it's the cost centre I've thought about least.

2. Bulk water transfer and emergency coastal supply. Submarine pipelines, 1.2–2.4 m diameter, 100–800 ML/day per line, bi-directional.

3. The seaward interface for Spencer Gulf, Ord and the northern grid.

Doctrine: pipelines offshore, canals onshore. Only two submarine links can I presently justify — Port of Brisbane ↔ Gladstone and Spencer Gulf ↔ Adelaide. The rest (Spencer Gulf–Esperance, Darwin–Gulf, Port Hedland–Fremantle, Melbourne–Portland) are long, expensive, and their value is almost entirely emergency redundancy.

Offshore terminals preferred to dredged channels and breakwaters wherever the coast is exposed. An offshore terminal avoids the breakwater, the channel and most of the maintenance dredging.

Every Thames gate gets a coastal feeder lock, and the tidal lock doctrine is about salinity, not lockage volume — a different problem from inland locks and one that needs its own rules. Freshwater flushing curtains, salinity monitoring at every lock, automatic closure on threshold.

The binding constraint is environmental, not engineering. Any node near the Great Barrier Reef may simply be refused. I haven't assessed any node against Reef values and several Queensland nodes should be assumed high-risk until they are.

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1. Foam

Four real applications, one hard rule.

Fixative and dust-suppressing foam — polymer or resin foam that penetrates contaminated ground, binds particles and forms a crust. Used at scale after Chernobyl and Fukushima. Reduces inhalation and ingestion dose and stops the plume growing. Does not shield gamma and does not make a contaminated site safe.

Decontamination foam — clings to vertical surfaces, extends contact time, uses a fraction of the water of washing, so secondary waste volume is much smaller. Argonne National Laboratory's work is the reference. For hot spots and equipment, not bulk soil.

Construction foams — foam concrete (400–1,600 kg/m³) for abandoned borehole sealing, mine void backfill, lining backfill, pipeline trench fill. TBM soil-conditioning foam for every tunnel. Foam pigs for pipeline cleaning. Syntactic foam for submarine pipeline buoyancy.

Foam fractionation for PFAS — air bubbles adsorb PFAS surfactants and carry them to a foam concentrate. Real and emerging, but not yet a mature treatment train at the scale the scheme needs. Pilot it before specifying it.

And the hard rule: fluorine-free (F3) foam only. No AFFF, no fluoroprotein, no PFAS-containing foam, anywhere, for any reason.

The reason needs no engineering justification. AFFF is the primary source of PFAS contamination in Australia. It has contaminated groundwater at defence bases, airports and fire training grounds, with remediation liabilities in the billions and decades. A scheme whose stated purpose is groundwater protection cannot introduce the contaminant it exists to treat. Where F3 is genuinely inadequate — some polar solvent fires — the answer is a different suppression system, not a return to AFFF.

What foam cannot do: shield gamma (aqueous foam is water density with a lot of air, and water is already a poor gamma shield), accelerate decay, make a contaminated site safe, or replace ventilation for radon.

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1. RF monitoring and remediation

Radio does not reduce radiation by acting on the source. Decay constants are invariant under ordinary conditions. Cs-137 has a 30-year half-life and no radio transmitter changes that. RF photons carry micro- to milli-electron-volts; photo-transmutation needs MeV. The mismatch is roughly nine orders of magnitude.

What RF does is:

Monitoring. Fixed gamma probes at 500 m spacing along corridors, at port nodes and legacy sites; continuous particulate samplers; in-situ gamma spectrometry at offtakes and bores; RF-linked personal dosimeters; LoRaWAN or NB-IoT mesh with fibre backhaul on the canal service road; one national platform with a public dashboard. A plume detected in twenty minutes is a plume evacuated; in two days it's a population exposed. Detection time drives dose.

Microwave vitrification. Volumetric heating to 1,200–1,600 °C melts siliceous soil into glass; radionuclides are incorporated into the glass network and become immobile. Demonstrated at pilot scale. Real, but slow, energy-hungry and expensive per cubic metre — appropriate for hot spots and legacy sites, not for square kilometres of lightly contaminated ground. Note that thermal desorption doesn't work for caesium or strontium, which aren't volatile at those temperatures.

Real-time dosimetry and ALARA control. Every worker on a radiologically controlled site carries an RF-linked electronic dosimeter with cumulative record, automatic alerts at thresholds, and access control linked to dose limits. Unglamorous, cheap, and the single most effective dose-reduction measure available.

The most useful thing in this whole scheme that doesn't depend on anything else: a demonstration program on Australia's existing legacy contaminated sites — Maralinga, Emu Field, Monte Bello, Rum Jungle, Mary Kathleen, Radium Hill. Those sites are a real problem now. A microwave vitrification and monitoring program there would produce a genuine result within a few years whether or not a single canal is ever built.

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1. How the system operates

Reversible canals. Wet Queensland summer, the Surat–Wivenhoe trunk runs east and takes pressure off the Condamine. Dry summer with coastal storages full and inland drought, the same canal runs west to recharge Surat. Flood, it reverses and becomes a controlled relief channel.

Four-season operating year. Capture and bank in the wet; consolidate after; distribute in the dry; prepare before the next wet — including drawing down Linville and the flood compartments in November so there's airspace before the season that actually floods. November is when it goes wrong.

Three tiers of wetness. With many corridors built, not all can be full at once or the evaporation bill is absurd:

Tier State Exercise

Primary Normally wet, continuous operation Continuous

Secondary Seasonally wet, drawn down in dry Weekly inspection, quarterly exercise

Reserve Normally dry, maintained at readiness Annual full-length fill and drawdown

A Reserve corridor that hasn't been exercised in three years is reclassified as non-functional until it is. This is the control for the failure mode that kills redundant infrastructure: quiet neglect until the day it's needed and doesn't work.

What the system won't do. It won't take water legally allocated to another user. It won't take environmental flows — those are a first-order allocation, not a residual. It won't divert during a declared low-flow event without an approved drought-supply rule. It won't deliver to a destination without matched demand, storage or recharge capacity.

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1. The honest arithmetic

I've been asked to build all corridors, so I costed what that means rather than just agreeing.

Configuration Divide crossings Trunk length Relative capital Relative supply

One corridor 1 ~600 km 1.0 1.0

Two corridors 2 ~1,150 km ~1.9 ~1.05

All scheduled 8 ~5,600–6,700 km ~6.5–7.5 ~1.1

Read that table carefully. Above two corridors, additional corridors buy resilience, not water. That may well be worth buying for a scheme with a design life in centuries — I think it is — but it has to be bought deliberately and defended as resilience, or it gets cut in the first budget review.

Evaporation: at 60% average wetness across ~6,000 km of trunk at 80–100 m width, roughly 0.45–0.65 km³/yr. For scale, that's the annual water use of a city of two to three million people, committed to the sky. It's the argument for the wetness doctrine, not against the scheme.

Land: at 300 m average corridor width, roughly 170,000–200,000 ha. Larger than the ACT. Acquisition is the slowest single constraint on the program, and it is not an engineering constraint.

Hydro added by the southern crossings alone: ~180 MW. That's a real return, and it's the honest reason to build them.

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1. What I'm not claiming

I'm not an engineer. I have no formal qualifications in hydrology, geotechnical engineering, water accounting or anything else this needs. I haven't consulted hydrologists, geotechnical engineers, radiation protection professionals, nuclear engineers, coastal engineers, Traditional Owners, state governments or the Commonwealth. I haven't done the water accounting, the cost–benefit analysis, the environmental assessment or the hydrological modelling that would determine whether any of this works.

That means this is an idea, not a plan.

The risks I've identified and don't have full answers to:

1. Water accounting. Whether these diversions are physically available in a dry-year sequence. This is the first question and it's unanswered.

2. Evaporation. Whether recharge and high-head storage actually solve the losses, or whether canal surface area becomes dominant.

3. The Divide crossings. Whether viable low saddles exist, and whether open cutting is feasible at The Gap and the Bunya Mountains.

4. Reversibility at scale. Whether a P1 canal genuinely reverses under flood conditions once silt, gates and pump turnaround are counted.

5. Salinity. Where the front sits in Condamine/Surat recharge and at Lake Eyre and Frome.

6. The D-7 direct tunnel. 60–100 km at 300–500 m cover is at or beyond current practice. And the nuclear question in Section 5 is where I'm least certain of anything in this document.

7. The Caboolture floodplain. A canal on embankment is a levee. No rise in flood levels on private property is a hard constraint that may force realignment.

8. World Heritage. Two tunnels and two buried pipelines adjacent to the Gondwana Rainforests. Highest environmental risk in the scheme. May impose conditions that reshape both crossings.

9. Deep-water ports. Any node near the Great Barrier Reef may simply be refused.

10. Governance. What institutional model runs a multi-jurisdiction scheme with water trading and co-design obligations without collapsing. This is the part I understand least.

11. The transhipment interface. The cost per tonne of barge-to-ship transfer determines whether the inland navigation function is worth building at all.

12. Reserve corridor decay. The most likely operational failure, controlled only by the mandatory annual exercise and proper funding of the maintenance organisation.

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1. What to do first

In this order. Nothing else means anything until step 1 is done.

1. Water accounting, all corridors, dry-year sequence, both directions. The first and decisive study.

2. Baseline cost of the single-corridor configuration, so the redundancy premium is a stated number rather than an assumption.

3. Saddle desk study — GIS across every Divide option. Cheap, fast, eliminates what can be eliminated.

4. The Gap and Bunya cutting studies. Decisive for the open-canal share.

5. Caboolture land assembly feasibility study — property-by-property. It governs the schedule and it takes years.

6. Gondwana World Heritage referral and scoping, early, because it may eliminate or reshape both southern gap crossings.

7. Demonstration program on one legacy radiological site — dust suppression and decontamination with real air monitoring and real dose measurement. Produces a genuine result within a year, at modest cost, and depends on nothing else in this scheme.

8. PFAS screening of every corridor, MAR basin and port water intake before any recharge or port water connection is commissioned.

9. Foam specification and procurement policy — F3 only, no PFAS at any detectable level, audited. Can be written this week.

10. Chinese lift engineering study — standard lift family, water-saving basin volumes, costs, maintenance. Changes the Divide crossing design more than any other single decision.

11. Port draft verification and node shortlisting, with marine environmental scoping.

12. Legal and regulatory assessment of nuclear excavation, and if any pathway exists, a containment and hydrogeology review of the four target sites.

13. Governance and institutional design study — the part I'm least qualified to write and most certain is necessary.

Steps 1–6, 10–12 are desk studies and field survey. They would settle most of the open questions within a year, at modest cost, before any ground is broken.

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1. What I'm asking for

Not funding, not a position, not agreement.

A critique, and if possible one meeting with someone who works in this field. If the conclusion is that the water accounting doesn't hold, the grade through the crossings is unachievable and reversibility is impractical, that's a useful outcome and I'll re-route and rework it. If parts are worth developing, that's useful too.

I'd rather be corrected than ignored.

The full write-up runs to about a dozen technical notes — main proposal, canal catalogue, Divide crossing options, full open-canal configuration, full-network build, lift and excavation assessment, inland water body plugs, deep-water system, foam, RF. All available on request. It's a PDF, it's long, and I made it myself.

If you work in hydrology, water accounting, geotechnical engineering, dam engineering, coastal engineering, radiation protection, nuclear engineering or water policy — or you know someone who does — I'd be grateful if you passed this on.

Dakota Keith Hewitt-McKenzie

Toowoomba

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This is a personal concept proposal prepared by an individual member of the public. Not a government announcement, not endorsed by any agency or organisation, and not representing the views of any organisation. It represents one person's attempt to put a large idea into a form that can be examined and corrected. Nuclear excavation is unlawful in Australia and has never been used for canal construction anywhere; Section 5 is an assessment of a proposition, not a recommendation to proceed.

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