NT dump could 'open door' to foreign waste

A proposed nuclear dump near Alice Springs could open the door to the Northern Territory storing other countries' high-level waste, a concerned environment group says.

The federal government has short-listed six sites for Australia's first permanent nuclear waste dump for low-level and intermediate domestic waste.

One of the sites is the Hale region near Alice Springs.

The government says Australia would not be storing high-level waste from countries buying its uranium, but that has not assuaged the concerns of the Arid Lands Environment Centre.

"When or if they do have a centralised and supposedly low-to-intermediate level nuclear waste repository, it very much opens the door to a high-level waste repository," the group's director Jimmy Cocking told AAP.

"This (has) the potential to have significant environmental and social impacts, particularly when nuclear waste dumps in the past have been pushed onto communities which don't have much political sway."