Enice Marsh remembers the black clouds of "poison stuff" that billowed from the northwest after British atomic bomb tests in the 1950s spread fallout across swaths of South Australia.

Now a new kind of radioactivity could head to her ancestral home in the remote Flinders Ranges — a nuclear waste dump.

"To me, it feels like a death penalty," said Marsh, 73, standing in the cemetery of the outback town of Hawker, where many of her relatives are buried under red earth.