Science Minister Brendan Nelson said the federal government had drawn up a short-list of three military sites in the huge outback region for locating the dump, which will hold low and intermediate-level waste.

The choice was made after local authorities in South Australia won a court battle last year preventing the government from building the nuclear dump in their state.

Although opposition parties quickly attacked the new plan, arguing that nuclear waste should be stored in smaller repositories located near where it is produced, Nelson said the government would push ahead regardless.

"We've got to proceed with this now, there will be no further mucking about," he said.

"The Australian government is absolutely determined to make sure once and for all that one of these three sites are chosen and that we proceed through the environmental impact statement and then to the construction of the facility," he said.

Nelson said the waste dump had to be operational by 2011 for Australia to meet contractual and international treaty obligations.

Most of the waste to be stored will come from Australia's sole nuclear reactor, a research facility located at Lucas Heights in suburban Sydney. Other waste will come from federal medical, industrial and research facilities.

Two of the three short-listed sites are near the town of Alice Springs in the deserts of central Australia -- 2,300 kilometers from Sydney -- and the other lies on the Fishers Ridge Defense Property a further 1,000 kilometers away in the tropical north of the country.

All the land is owned by the federal government, but officials in the Northern Territory -- the most untamed of Australia's eight states and territories -- said they would fight the plan.

The territory's chief minister, Clare Martin from the Labor Party which is in opposition on the federal level, overwhelmingly won reelection earlier this year after campaigning against the waste dump.

Senator Lynn Allison of the opposition Democrats party said the government chose the Northern Territory because the local government there has fewer powers than their counterparts in Australia's full-fledged states.

"(The Commonwealth) has more control over the Northern Territory government because it's a territory not a state and that's clearly why it's chosen the NT," Allison told the Australian Associated Press.

"But I'm sure the NT government won't give in without a fight, so we're going to have another stoush and this will worsen Commonwealth-state and territory relations," she said.

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