The Northern Endeavour – that seemingly endless source of stories and reports – has been back to its old tricks this week, generating more column inches than the rivets holding it together.

First up we had some new images of the former FPSO released courtesy of Greenpeace Nordic, who used the photo-call as an opportunity to bang the drum for the establishment of a centralised, specialist, large-scale decommissioning hub in Australia.

At present – as the government and Australia's decom experts will tell you – there is no where in Australia capable of dealing with the dismantling of vessels such as the Northern Endeavour. Faced with this predicament, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) contracted Modern American Recycling Services (MARS) to do the job, necessitating the vessel's dry tow over to Denmark.

But – perhaps understandably – Scandinavian environmentalists aren't too chuffed about another nation's somewhat hazardous industrial infrastructure ending up in their waters. And they have a point. Putting mercury and NORMs aside (and we'll definitely come back to them), one of the reasons the soon-to-be scrapped vessel was given a paint job during its Singapore layover was due to the presence of chemicals in the existing paintwork which are forbidden in European waters.

And so the antipodean Greenpeace group – in cahoots with their Australian cousins -have said we should be able to deal with our own decommissioning needs.

And again, they have a point.

The decommissioning workload that is coming down the road for Australia (not to mention APAC) is literally immense and worth billions of dollars and would gainfully employ many thousands of people in the extensive supply chain it would create.

Of course, creating such a massive facility would cost billions too and take many years but there's a growing collective of interested parties including unions, state governments and industry insiders who think this is the way forward.

And is if to prove the point and add more fuel to the fire, this week we heard from Andre Veder, the energetic CEO of the Onslow Marine Support Base (OMSB) in Western Australia (WA).

The OMSB is a fantastic facility and has many attributes which are contributing to its continued and growing importance in the state's and country's decom sector.

However, as Veder himself admits, it cannot compete for size with the likes of the Danish yard in which the Northern Endeavour is being slowly pulled apart.

When asked this week if OMSB – the most fully formed decommissioning hub in WA – could theoretically handle decommissioning floating facilities such as the Northern Endeavour, he conceded size does matter.

"It's not the site itself, but the port, and we've put a 5,000 tonne module limit on our ecosystem because that's indicative weight or size that the Port of Ashburton can accept," Veder said.

"We can't have a proponent come to us and be told that they're going to be able to bring in a 10,000 tonne module when we haven't actually solved how that's going to work and delivered a pathway of how that capability is going to be run."

Cue more calls for a dedicated, large-scale facility.

And then finally this week we had the Northern Endeavour's coup de grace – the news that the NORMs recovered from the decommissioning of the vessel would be safely packaged up, loaded on to another ship and brought all the way back to Australia for responsible disposal.

Not only does this again add weight to the calls for that envisaged Australian facility, but it really does show those pesky Danish environmentalist had a good point.

Now, it was the US president Thomas Jefferson who said "By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind," but this scenario is bizarre to say the least.

DISR would have undoubtedly been made well-aware a long time ago of the need to repatriate the NORMs during this process and ultimately, if MARS was deemed to be the world leading facility, then perhaps bringing the radioactive material safely back to Australia is making the best of a bad job.

But one thing that's frustrated me (from a purely selfish, journalistic point of view) is the degree of cloak and dagger around it all.

I first got a whiff of this story back in March when I spoke to MARS' CEO Kym Thygesen.

Since then I have spent many hours trying to chase it down, submitting many freedom of information requests and dealing with DISR's media teams (not to mention those at the Department Of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) and Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO)) trying to get to the bottom of the matter.

Then this week the D&A 2026 conference rolls into Perth and Shane McWhinney, the DISR exec leading the Northern Endeavour division, happily volunteers the information when I asked him in a Q&A at the end of his presentation.

Go figure.

I'm not expecting any sympathy for my ‘wasted' time and efforts but the Kafka-esque bureaucratic maze is a little worrying.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Just wait for the next Northern Endeavour titbit to fall into our laps.