Cowboys and Indians: Australia reviews its uranium export policy

India is using CHOGM to lobby Australia hard to sell uranium to the growing Asian superpower. According to The Hindu, Vice-President Hamid Ansari has already met Tony Abbott who said he supported selling uranium to India. Ansari is now conducting behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the current government to get Australia — which has the world's largest reserves of uranium — to export the mineral to India. Labor will review the matter at its national conference, with much talk of a possible policy shift to come. A confidential briefing note in February to the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson (exposed by Wikileaks) said the dialogue "may prove a useful avenue to communicate any policy shifts on the issue."

Writing in the Australian today (behind the firewall so no link), Paul Kelly calls the policy “obsolete and discredited” and it is difficult to argue with his assessment. Currently Labor does not support uranium sales to India because that country is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India along with Pakistan, Israel and North Korea have never signed the NPT which came into place in 1970. They make the valid argument that because the treaty restricts the legal possession of nuclear weapons to those states that tested before 1967 (US, Russia, UK, France and China) it creates an unfair system of haves and have nots. Nowhere does the treaty explain why this is a valid distinction.

India has been a declared nuclear power since 1974. According to the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, nuclear power has very important short term and long term roles in the country’s energy needs. They said their nuclear power program would sustain resources manage radioactive waste and make an important contribution to minimisation of greenhouse gas emission. The Department said local supplies of uranium are “modest” however an AFP report in July said a new mine in south India could contain the largest reserves of uranium in the world. The Tumalapalli mine in Andhra Pradesh state could provide up to 150,000 tonnes but it is mostly low grade compared to the high grade uranium produced in Australia.

Australia is the world’s third largest producer of uranium after Kazakhstan and Canada with 16% of the world’s market in 2009. Its market share is declining due to lower than expected mined ore grade. But in terms of reserves, Australia is the largest in the world with 23%. With Labor now abandoning its three mines policy, production is expected to pick up beyond the existing mines at Ranger in NT and Olympic Dam and Beverley in South Australia. BHP recently won environmental approval to expand the largest mine at Olympic Dam.

These new and expanded mines will need a market and India is obvious location, particularly with other countries closing down nuclear operations in the wake of the Japanese tsunami disaster at Fukushima. Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said he remains opposed to changing the policy. Rudd avoided mention of the NPT and instead justified his stance on the fact India did not need Australian uranium. "There is no problem in terms of global supply,” Rudd said. "If you hear an argument from an Indian businessperson that the future of the nuclear industry in India depends exclusively on access to uranium, that is simply not sustainable as a proposition.”

Groups such as the Australian Conservation Foundation remain opposed to a change in the current policy which they say is “prudent and sensible”. ACF campaigner Dave Sweeney said the NPT, while imperfect, was a key international legal mechanism in restricting the spread of nuclear weapons technology. Australia, as a significant global uranium supplier, has a responsibility to acknowledge that India is a nuclear-armed state that obtained its weapons capacity in breach of international commitments,” he said. “Adding Australian uranium to the mix would not ease the long standing tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbours or improve the effectiveness of the global nuclear safeguards regime.

But the NPT is not just imperfect, it is illogical and unfair. If Labor truly wanted to avoid the spread of nuclear weapons, it would refuse to export uranium to all nuclear weapon states including Russia and China. It would also stop exporting uranium to the US which is Australia’s biggest customer taking 38.4% of local reserves according to 2004 data. Australia says its uranium is explicitly for use in civilian reactors but it has no way of stopping it ending up in weapons programs. It shows up a national hypocrisy about the mineral, particularly when Labor is in power. As Helen Caldicott wrote, Australia was like a heroin dealer, “pushing its immoral raw material upon a world that is hungry for energy."

Why now is not the time to oppose nuclear technology

With Fukushima No 1, 2 and now 3 plant on the verge of meltdown now might not seem to be a good time to be advocating nuclear power. Yet I am coming to the conclusion that environmentalists like Lovelock are right. If we don’t go nuclear, we are toast. When scientists have good data that says the planet’s temperatures are heading into unknown territory and we don’t seem to want to change our ways, then at the very least we should have a bloody good Plan B. Despite the longer-term potential of solar and wind power, nuclear power is the best proven Plan B we currently have. (picture NTV Japan)

As Japan is proving, nuclear fission is a flawed technology. Yet Chernobyl aside, it has killed only a handful of people since the 1950s despite providing now 15 percent of the world’s electricity and 6 percent of the world's energy. Ever since the CND and Greenham Common, nuclear power has been an emotional talisman for the green movement. Opposition to it is one of its fundamentals and an almost taboo subject of discussion. The Greens, who in Australia are the most steadfast voices for recognising the problem of climate change, refuse to acknowledge the single most advanced technology we have for solving it in the short term.

Unassailable reams of climate data tells us that severe consequences are coming in the next 50 years if we don't do anything about our emissions. Green technologies are not quite ready to step up to the plate to fix the problem. Protectionism of fossil fuel technologies hasn’t helped but the best evidence is that we are 50 years away from renewable sources providing base load electricity that supports our current lifestyle. Renewable power stations will also be just as expensive and will face the same NIMBY issues as nuclear ones do.

Rebellion against that lifestyle motivates many Greens. But most humans, a majority of Greens included, are not yet prepared to give away improvements in technologies such as cheap international travel, internet access, or private transport. Short of some sort of human catastrophe we can all agree is attributable to global warming, the history of climate change international negotiation shows that change will be painfully slow.

Nuclear power is a way of confronting this problem, now. As Crikey editorialised today, the expense of setting up nuclear power is the biggest issue the industry has (though nuclear waste is not far behind as illegal dumping of radioactive waste by mafia groups such as the 'Ndrangheta is a huge law enforcement issue). Nuclear power has nothing to do with morality. What is moral or ought to be, is consistency with uranium and waste policy.

Both problems of creating nuclear power and disposing of its after effects could be resolved with the proceeds of a carbon tax though as yet no one is advocating this. The Libs would be the obvious candidate to suggest this possibility, but their implacable opposition to the tax means no one dares suggest that publicly.

Labor is just as equivocal as the liberals and their party website studiously avoids policy discussion on the subject. Only party extremists on either end such as Martin Ferguson and Peter Garrett could claim to have a coherent policy on nuclear power. Those in the middle equivocate according to the arguments du jour.

Regardless of what The Australian newspaper thinks, the Greens have been a very positive force in politics with their positions on climate change. It’s never a popular position to stand up as a Cassandra and warn of the problem if we don’t change our ways. For this reason, the Greens will never be popular enough to form Government in their own right without significantly ditching many core parts of their agenda.

Their ideological purity allows them to carry most ideas through to logical conclusions without the need for compromise. It’s no surprise to find they are the most inherently coherent party on most aspects of the conversion to a green economy. Yet there is one blind spot to their argument.

The near religious hold “no nuclear power” has on the green movement and many in the Australian Labor Party means we are considerably weakening our options to deal with the problems when they will inevitably arise. The Opposition is no better. The Australian right only seriously considers nuclear power as a wedge to taunt Labor. Together the three major parties perpetuate the fiction Australian is not a nuclear power despite its uranium exports, Lucas Heights facility and the likelihood of nukes at Pine Gap and visiting American warships. The Australian Greens policy remains a monument to pious thinking and not a solution to real world problems.

The Greens have five principals that deal with nuclear power worth exploring in more detail.

1. "There is a strong link between the mining and export of uranium and nuclear weapons proliferation."
This is true enough but is a weak first principle. It seeks to show that people can’t be trusted with nuclear power which is a fault of the people and not of the tool. Mutually assured destruction is not much fun for anymore, but it remains an important tactic for smaller powers to threaten larger ones. Take away nuclear power and they will find other weapons to achieve the same result. As alcohol prohibitionists found out, banning something is not the way to stop it.

2. "The consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, or of catastrophic accidents at, or terrorist attacks on, nuclear power stations, are so great that the risks are unacceptably high."
Much of this is a repeat of the first principle. The rest is hyperbole despite the current crisis. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war since 1945 though many times as exercises (see Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto’s astonishing 14 minute timelapse of all 2053 nuclear explosion between 1945 and 1998). There have been a few catastrophic accidents. But no deaths or serious injuries have ever been attributed to radiation from a Western civil nuclear power plant. Three Mile Island is one of only two meltdowns in the US (Fermi 1 was the other) and neither suffered loss of life.

The IAEA’s International Nuclear Event Scale goes from 0 (no safety issues) to 7 (major accident). The 1986 failure of Reactor 4 at Prypiat, Ukraine, better known as the Chernobyl Disaster is the only INES 7 accident yet recorded with a possible 4,000 deaths recorded caused directly or indirectly by the incident. This was a tragedy of the first rank but it says more about Soviet industry standards than it does about nuclear power. Other power sources in Russia are just as vulnerable. In the 1999 disaster at the largest hydroelectric power station in the country Sayano-Shuskensky in southern Russia seven people died. If the 240m dam had collapsed, hundreds of thousands in the cities below the dam would also have been in jeopardy. Yet there is no talk of The Greens wanting to ban hydroelectrical power because of the possibility of accidents.

The third part of that second policy principal deals with terrorist actions, which remains a potential threat. But again, banning something simply because terrorists use it, is not a problem limited to nuclear power.

3. "Future generations must not be burdened with high level radioactive waste.” This is a noble gesture but it begs the question: what is the extent of the burden? Waste comes from both the front and back end of the nuclear process. The front end waste depleted uranium is used in highly destructive weapons that are morally repulsive but it also has practical applications such as in the keel of yachts. The back end waste, spent fuel rods, is the heavy hitting stuff. The amount of High Level Waste worldwide is increasing by 12,000 metric tons a year, which says nuclear power company Marathon Resourcing is the equivalent to about 100 double-decker buses 100 double-decker buses. As an industry body, it is no surprise to hear them say it is “modest compared with other industrial wastes.” But they might be right. London currently has the largest of double decker buses with about 1200 buses which if put together would amount to 12 years of high level nuclear waste. The burden seems small on this evidence.

4. "Nuclear power is not a safe, clean, timely, economic or practical solution to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions".
The fear factor of safety returns to the ideas in the first three principles. How safe is not addressing global emissions by use of nuclear power? The word “clean” is a platitude presented without any evidence. “Timely” is questionable but has some merit. A nuclear power plant would take 12-15 years to commission and build, a small period of time given the consequences of inaction. They are expensive to build but so will be any solution that envisages humans keep up their energy usage-intensive lifestyles. As for nuclear being not a “practical solution”, go ask any of the world’s 440 commercial nuclear power stations in 30 countries, even those ones that are built on geological faultlines.

5. "Australia's reliance on the US nuclear weapons 'umbrella' lends our bases, ports and infrastructure to the US nuclear war fighting apparatus."
This final argument has nothing to do with nuclear power. Australia’s ANZUS agreement lends our bases to US nuclear war fighting apparatus regardless of our policy on nuclear power. The agreement needs to be understood in what it purports to be protecting Australia from and not what it protecting Australia with. Fight the agreement if this is wrong and not a tool used to enforce it.

These five principals are not wrong individually. It’s just that they are weak arguments given the current deck of cards we’ve been dealt with. Longer term, renewable energy is easily the most sensible solution. But we’ve got to get to that longer term first. Until we overcome the variability of solar and wind power production, land area required, and the NIMBY fights to get there, nuclear power is far and away the best proven technology to achieve base and peak load in an emission-free way. Nuclear reactors will never kill as many people as a nature’s earthquakes or tsunami, they just need to be a bit better built on the Pacific Rim.

Obama gets a good start in Nuclear Security Summit

The Washington Nuclear Security Summit ended yesterday after two days with a 12 point communiqué and an agreement to meet again in 2012 in South Korea. The 47-nation summit agreed to lock up the world's most vulnerable nuclear materials within four years to keep it out of terrorist hands. The communiqué said nuclear terrorism was one of the most challenging threats to international security and strong nuclear security measures were the most effective means to prevent “terrorist criminals or other unauthorized actors” from acquiring nuclear materials. The conference also issued a call to all nations to work collectively "to strengthen nuclear security and reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism."

The conference follows in the footsteps of the recent US-Russia agreement to reduce nuclear weapons. The outcome will see an renewed role for the International Atomic Energy agency who will inspect sites where fissile material is stored (including in the US). Other positive outcomes include Chile, Ukraine and Mexico agreeing to ship out their entire stock of highly enriched uranium, which can be used in weapons. The Guardian judged the summit a reasonable success, partly thanks to a narrow focus on a field that is more technical than political.

However, the Christian Science Monitor said while the conference objectives were reassuring, a “global reality” will make the goal difficult. It said worldwide production of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium is going to increase in coming years as civilian nuclear programs grow. Experts such as David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington see contradictions in the approach. Albright said France blocked limiting the production of separated plutonium, which is a core element of the French nuclear energy industry. But there were also successes including the US/Ukraine agreement to secure Kiev’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and the North American agreement to remove Mexico’s supply of highly enriched uranium to the US for conversion to low-enriched uranium.

This was Obama’s first major international conference on home soil and he used the full force of his personality to bear on events. He held 15 bilateral meetings with regional leaders. Several European diplomats told the Washington Times the large number of attendees reflects Obama's popularity abroad. Nuclear weapons were not a huge issue for many of those leaders and Obama’s challenge was to make them care about securing the military sites, research reactors and universities where nuclear materials are stored. "Coming into this summit, there were a range of views on this danger," Obama said. "But at our dinner last night, and throughout the day, we developed a shared understanding of the risk."

In the president’s closing speech Obama outlines four major planks to the agreement that came out of the meeting. Firstly he declared nuclear terrorism to be one of the most challenging threats to international security. To stop this threat, Obama said, requires action to protect nuclear materials and prevent nuclear smuggling. Secondly he said the conference had endorsed the US position to secure the world’s vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. Thirdly the conference reaffirmed the fundamental responsibility of nations to secure its nuclear materials and facilities. Lastly it acknowledged international cooperation was required to maintain effective security.

Security was quite effective at the conference itself with almost 50 world leaders in attendance. However not everyone was happy about it, with Dana Milbank in the Washington Post complaining of excessive media management. Most sessions were closed to the press, foreign media were given short shrift and no questions were allowed in bilateral meetings with only anodyne readouts available. It wasn’t until the end of the conference that Obama allowed tough questions from his own media corps, including pointing out the nonproliferation agreements weren't binding, the failure to curb North Korea's weapons, and the notable absence from the conference of nuclear rogue state Israel.

But the most notable questions were about Iran. According to Tony Karon in Time the goals of the summit were so modest it could hardly have failed. Karon says the real action took place off the main stage with Obama doing one-on-one lobbying with world leaders over sanctions against Iran. Neither Russia nor China seem prepared to support the US on the matter. China in particular as Iran’s largest energy partner is reluctant to support measures such as shutting down investment in the energy sector, blocking access to international credit or punishing companies associated with the Revolutionary Guard. China and Russia’s veto powers seem destined to defeat any significant move to hobble Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

2010 election: Much ado about nothing

Sometime later year Australia will go to the polls to elect a federal government. Following previous precedents, the incumbent Labor administration will be returned to office with a similar majority it gained in 2007 or slightly less. Both sides of politics will portray this is a victory. For Kevin Rudd, there is the obvious success of being returned as Prime Minister a second time at an election – a feat only ever achieved by three Labor leaders (Andrew Fisher, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke). Meanwhile the Coalition will paint a narrow defeat as a success for their strategy of appealing to the right-wing base when it handed Tony Abbott the leadership in a three-way ballot on 1 December last year.

But first to Rudd, for whom the result will be the end product of three years of communications discipline and dedication to the task. This is something he learned from his predecessor John Howard, an equally ruthless electioneerer. Nothing else – be it the GFC, climate change, or reform in education and industrial relations - has come remotely close in Rudd’s everyday calculations. Ever since 25 November 2007, Rudd’s Government has been devoted to one task: how to stay in office in 2010.

Rigid control of communications is the key and Rudd’s closest acolytes are in his PR machine and kitchen cabinet (Gillard, Swan and Tanner). The downside of such a tightly-run communication strategy is that it has left Rudd looking inflexible, remote, humourless and without charisma. Having personally seen Rudd in action at one of the community cabinets in 2008, I can confirm that he is flexible, engaging, and humorous though he is never quite charismatic. But Rudd has been perfectly willing to sacrifice these attributes when dealing with the medium that still most decides elections: television.

His Government deserves credit too for mastering the strategy. With the possible exception of Peter Garrett (whose previous life allows him frequent gaffe credit points which he continues to spend at an inordinate rate), they have been a superbly efficient team that has also managed to successfully communicate the message du jour. And despite the fact that Rudd is a somewhat isolated figure within the party and not attached to any of the factions, they have offered resolute and unquestioning support for his leadership.

It is the matter of leadership which has been the Achilles Heel of the Opposition and a direct consequence of Peter Costello’s refusal to go down with the ship in 2007. Brendan Nelson was a lightweight who offered only comic value as leader. Malcolm Turnbull was a brilliant mind but too out of touch with the zeitgeist of the party and too arrogant to even see there was a problem. Joe Hockey ruled himself out with his ETS conscience vote (though I happen to agree with him that voting on climate change ought to be a primary matter of conscience) and fell between the two precarious stools of the party room.

That left Tony Abbott as last man standing. So far he has enjoyed a good run in the media which is keen to run with his pitch as a virile outdoorsy leader standing in stark contrast to the nerdy PM. It is a risky strategy that could alienate as much as it attracts but so far it is working well. Each photo op of Abbott's pre-dawn lycra excursions or weekend “budgie smuggling” manages to exude an air of virility that was lacking in previous Liberal leadership teams. It also acts as a distraction to the fact that the extreme right has taken over the party and he is surrounded by a bunch of ageing has-beens that looked tired in the Howard era and doesn't look any more inviting five years later.

Abbott is the same age as Rudd so will feel he has plenty of mileage ahead of him. It is unlikely he will want to stand aside as leader in defeat and if he manages to keep the majority of his comrades in office he will be regarded with affection by sitting MPs who thought they were heading to the slaughterhouse as recently as six months ago. But the net result of Abbott retaining power in the party is to make a Coalition victory in 2013 more unlikely. Though the 2010 political narrative has been about the success of Abbott’s aggressive “opposition to everything” approach, it cannot be sustained in the longer run and will make the party seem obstructionist and negative. No one will be listening to him in 2012 if he is still spouting on about a “great, big tax”.

Of course on one level, Abbott is on the money: an Emissions Trading System is indeed a “great, big tax”. But working properly, that is what it is designed to do. It is designed to make traditional means of creating power more expensive so that we move away to non-carbon alternatives. If he was really serious about tackling this problem, Abbott could go further and attack Labor’s hypocrisy over nuclear energy it is prepared to sell but not use. But Abbott is heart a populist without the stomach for a campaign against the large NIMBY opposition it would attract.

Make no mistake, if Australia is to have any chance of getting to 2050 with 80 percent emissions reductions it has to go nuclear - and soon, given the long lead times to build power stations. It may only be a temporary measure for 20 to 30 years while the technology to convert solar or wind energy for mass baseload is ironed out. But that doesn’t make it any less urgent. Or unfortunately any more likely. Rudd is perfectly aware of nuclear possibilities but his dedicated eye to election mechanics stops him from looking too closely at it. The Greens are also too blinded by their environmental purity to actually do anything concrete to solve the problem (witness how they dealt themselves out of the ETS debate last year). And so when scholars of the future look back on the 2010 election, all they will see is squandered opportunity and rank political hypocrisy across the spectrum. Happy voting.

Non-Proliferation report calls for 90 percent reduction in nuclear weapons

The International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament used today’s meeting of the Japanese and Australian Prime Ministers to release a report asking the US and Russia to drastically reduce their nuclear arsenal. The report calls for the two biggest nuclear powers to reduce the number of warheads from 22,000 to 500 each by 2025. Australian and Japanese Commission Co-Chairs, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, presented the report to Kevin Rudd and Yukio Hatoyama at a ceremony at the Japanese Prime Minister’s residence. Former Australian foreign minister Evans said the report set a target date of 15 years “to achieve a dramatic 90 per cent reduction in the world’s nuclear weapons.” (photo of Titan Nuclear Missile Museum, Tucson, Arizona by jmuhles)

The 230-page report entitled “Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers” (see synopsis) says its finding are timely for four reasons. Firstly it says nuclear weapons are most inhumane weapons ever conceived and as serious a problem as global warming. Secondly it is sheer dumb luck they have not been used since 1945 and as long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them. Thirdly, the status quo increases the possibility of nuclear weapon falling into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups. Lastly, there is a new opportunity presented by new US and Russian leadership “committed to disarmament action”.

The report concentrates on the US and Russia as together they own 96 percent of the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons. The remaining 1,000 are owned by France, UK, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. Iran and North Korea may also have the technology. Half of all warheads are deployed and the two major powers have 2,000 weapons ready to deploy with a decision window to launch of five to ten minutes. The possibility of nuclear terrorism or a “dirty bomb” combing conventional explosives and radioactive isotopes can also not be discounted.

The report endorses the use of civilian nuclear energy as proven method of providing base load power without carbon emissions but says its likely expansion in the coming decades will present proliferation and security risks. The dangers will be exacerbated if accompanied by enrichment facilities at the front end of the process and reprocessing at the back end. The result could be “a great deal more fissile material becoming potentially available for destructive purposes”.

The key to success, says the report, is delegitimizing nuclear weapons as something marginal and unnecessary to national security. The authors prefer a phased approach to getting to zero nuclear weapons admitting it would be a ‘long, complex and formidably difficult process”. The short term goal to 2025 is to reduce warheads to 10 percent of current levels with agreed “no first use” doctrines among all players. The report was unable to specify a timeframe for complete elimination but argued “analysis and debate” on the matter should commence immediately.

The key policies from the document are: Next year’s Non-Proliferation Treaty review should agree on a new 20-point consensus for action replacing 2000’s “Thirteen Practical Steps”; the US and Russia should reduce their combined arsenal to 1,000 warheads and no other nation should increase its arsenal; all states should have a “no first use doctrine”; reduce the instant usage of warheads; Conventional weapons imbalances may need to be addressed; all countries (including the US) should ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban treaty immediately; and all nuclear-armed states should stop the production of fissile material for weapons production.

The report said the non proliferation efforts also needed to be beefed up. Key policies included: application of the IAEA Additional Protocol; IAEA compliance to concentrate on technical matters and stay out of politics; the UN Security Council should regard withdrawal from the NPT as a punishable threat to peace; and the IAEA should make full use of its powers. The report also acknowledged that that the three non-NPT states Israel, India and Pakistan are not likely to become members soon and they should be encouraged to participate in “parallel instruments and arrangements” to meet similar obligations to the NPT countries.

It also looked at the threat of terrorism. It recommended the adoption of the 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material which insists on greater information sharing between nuclear powers. It also urged a Code of Conduct for safety of radioactive sources to control “dirty bomb” material and supported the emerging science of nuclear forensics. The report supported civilian nuclear power and called for assistance to extend it to developing nations. It called for new technologies for spent fuel treatment, increased plutonium recycle and spent fuel take-back by suppliers (including Australia) to reduce accumulations in a large number of countries. It strongly supported spreading the fuel cycle process across nations to build global confidence and aid verification of sensitive fuel cycle activities.

Evans and Kawaguchi acknowledged the political difficulties of doing something that was difficult, sensitive and expensive. They said it needed leadership to prevent inertia, knowledge of the magnitude of the problem, confidence in the strategy moving forward, and having an international process to back it up. All will be difficult to achieve. While it was no surprise that non-nuclear nations Japan and Australia welcomed the report, the US and Russia were ominously silent. Getting the two major powers to see its sense will be a herculean task for the coming years. Nevertheless the report is welcome as a road-map, however optimistic, of how to get to a future without nuclear weapons. It is an important vision as nuclear weapons remain a deep and dangerous threat the world has taken too much for granted since the end of the Cold War.

ACF calls for public to oppose Olympic Dam uranium expansion

The Australian Conservation Environment is calling on Australians to challenge BHP Billiton’s (BHPB) uranium expansion plan at Olympic Dam by making public submissions in the next two weeks. The proposal will represent another difficult decision on uranium mining for Environment Minister Peter Garrett. Having approved the new Four Mile mine last week, it will be his job to make the final decision on BPHB’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project. The ACF says Australia should not become the uranium quarry to the global nuclear industry. “Our uranium exports fuel unacceptable nuclear risks and unresolved nuclear waste management around the globe,” says its statement calling for public submissions.

The ACF call is supported by local indigenous groups who have labelled the expansion “environmental genocide”. Rebecca Wingfield is a Kokatha custodian and an international human rights campaigner for Aboriginal people. She is also a traditional owner of the land around the Olympic Dam site. Wingfield disputes the claim of the SA government and BHPB that there is no scientific research proving the environmental harm of uranium mining. She also referred to the Manila Declaration signed by Indigenous organisations from 35 countries which says that mining exploitation without consent has led to “the worst forms of environmental degradation, human rights violations and land dispossession and is contributing to climate change.”

Unsurprisingly BHPB don’t quite see it that way. Their Olympic Dam is already a massive copper, uranium, gold and silver mine situated south of Lake Eyre in remote northern South Australia, about five hour s drive north of Adelaide. According to the Draft EIS for the expansion project, Olympic Dam is the world’s largest known uranium deposit and world' fourth largest reserve of copper. The massive 11 year expansion project involves the creation of a new open pit mine, an upgrade of the smelter and new concentrator and hydrometallurgical plants to process the additional ore. There would also be a desalination plant at Whyalla, a new rail network, a new airport, a new port at Darwin, a new barge landing facility at Port Augusta, and 270kms of additional electricity transmission lines also from Port Augusta.

The company town 14km from the mine will also be expanded. Roxby Downs was established in 1988 by Western Mining Corporation to service the uranium mine. BHPB bought out the mine in 2005 and with it the town. According to the 2006 census 4,054 now live there with continued growth expected. It is a young population – only 150 are over 55 and the town’s cemetery is empty. The residential population is supplemented by a fly-in/ fly-out workforce which brings the population up to 5,000. The local council claims that theirs is the most affluent postcode in the state: in 2006, the median individual weekly income was $1,103, more than double the national average.

But not everyone there seems very interested in the plans BHPB have for the town. The blog Stories from a Communist Lemon Factory reported that at the end of May the company held an EIS information session at the Roxby Downs leisure centre. However hardly anyone from the community attended. But the town won’t escape the development. The expansion will double the workforce to 8,000 and the new arrivals will need homes, shops, schools and other infrastructure.

Pro-development South Australian Premier Mike Rann also says the mining expansion will have big flow-on effects for the Roxby Downs community. “From the childcare to the local school, to a big increase in the size of the police station, particularly to do with the construction camp that will be part of the process of shifting a million tonnes of rock a day,” he said. The South Australian government is keen for the plan to go ahead. Rann has already given a go-ahead for a $10 million police station for an extra 30 officers to be operational by September.

The ACF does not dispute the economic growth the new project brings to Roxby but says that uranium is not the only option. ACF Nuclear Free Campaigner David Noonan says that the mine should expand with copper. “Setting out a path for Olympic Dam to process all its copper products in South Australia, instead of processing a bulk radioactive copper concentrate in China, would boost local jobs and be much better for the global environment,” he said. Noonan says the risks associated with uranium mining are too great. He says the EIS must explain how BHPB will manage the expanded mine’s bulk radioactive tailings waste for the 10,000 years they remain a radiological hazard. The writer behind the Communist Lemon Factory had similar concerns. “I have to wonder if Olympic Dam will become the next Woomera, forever haunted by its relationship with radiation,” she said.

Public submissions on the EIS must be in by Friday 7 August.

The Lows of Lucas Heights: nuclear power in Australia

The operators of Australia’s only nuclear reactor have announced today it will make 80 staff redundant and trim costs by $10 million. Federal budget cuts have bitten into ANSTO - the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation who operate Lucas Heights in southern Sydney, ANSTO have asked its thousand-strong staff to volunteer for redundancies, but expects they will have to sack some people. The $10 million shortfall is split almost evenly between a reduction in funding and a curtailing of a graduate program.

The news comes as Lucas Heights was re-started after ten months off the air with technical problems. ANSTO shut down its 20 MegaWatt Open Pool Australian Lightwater (OPAL) reactor in July last year when it was discovered several uranium fuel plates had come loose from their original position. ANSTO was forced to shut down the $400 million plant until it could approve a new fuel plate design.

ANSTO’s acting chief executive Ron Cameron says the job cuts will not impact on safety at Lucas Heights. He said the organisational focus would remain on safety, security and compliance of regulations. "We are committed to ensuring that we operate safely all the time,” he said. “We will ensure that in making the reductions that we need to make we will maintain our ability to deliver on our core scientific research areas."

But Shadow Minister for Innovation Science and Research, Eric Abetz was not impressed. He said today it was “anti-nuclear payback”. He blamed the cuts on “ideology” saying ANSTO copped the biggest cuts of any Abetz is still hurting from the Labor wedge campaign on nuclear power in the last election as he told the ABC today: “the Labor Government saw something with the name “nuclear” in its title and thought this is a fair cop for a cut.”

It is no surprise Abetz is so defensive of the industry. Lucas Heights was a project dear to the heart of Liberal hero Robert Menzies. It celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in January this year. In 1958 Australia was gripped in Cold War hysteria and the nuclear reactor was seen to give the country a seat at the nuclear table. Menzies approved the 10 MW High Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR) based on a British model.

But by the 2000s HIFAR was aging and in need of replacement. But situated just 31km from Sydney, Lucas Heights should have been the home of serious nimbyism. As Kevin Rudd exploited so successfully in the last election campaign no one wants a nuclear reactor in their back yard. Yet although OPAL was twice the size of HIFAR, it was opened in April 2007 with barely a minimum of fanfare. Like its media treatment, the plant too fell silent two months later due to its loose plates.

The question remains why ANSTO is funded at all. ANSTO claims its focus is on “science and medicine.” While its 20 Megawatts industry is a tiny fraction of Australia’s overall 50 GigaWatts capacity (mostly coal), it cannot be totally ignored as interim solution to global warming. But although the likes of James Lovelock have proposed nuclear power as a climate change solution, it seems unlikely that fission will ever be considered as a major power source in Australia.

The current Labor government seems to be hedging its bets. It won’t shut down OPAL but won’t fund ANSTO to upkeep it. Similarly it won’t introduce nuclear power in Australia, but is quite happy to export uranium overseas. Its uranium policy “recognises that the production of uranium and its use in the nuclear fuel cycle present unique and unprecedented hazards and risks” but Labor seems happy to export as much uranium as NNPT countries can accept. Perhaps the paranoid Abetz is right - this is nuclear payback. But it doesn't pay to be vindictive. As Russia only too well knows, there is only one thing worse than a nuclear industry and that is an underfunded nuclear industry.

Chernobyl's new ring of steel

Ukrainian authorities have approved a new $1.4 billion steel cover for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site. Ukraine has hired a French company to build the casing over the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that was put over the reactor in the wake of the 1986 explosion. The original casing was a hastily built interim measure designed to last 20 to 30 years. The new cover will take five years to complete after which authorities will then be able to dismantle the reactor inside the casing.

The 105 m high cover is urgently required to replace the old casing which has been leaking radiation for more than decade. The reactor still contains 95 per cent of the original nuclear fuel from the plant. Ukraine is concerned that if the sarcophagus collapses another cloud of lethal radioactive dust could escape. A French construction firm, Novarka, will build the structure and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has provided the bulk of the funding for the project.

Prior to the explosion Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian) was an obscure city on the Pripyat River in north-central Ukraine. 25kms upstream of the city lay the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant. On 26 April 1986 the city’s name became known across the world. At 1.21am that morning, inexperienced plant nightshift workers turned off the safety switches while doing a test prior to a routine shutdown. A dramatic power surge caused the fuel elements to rupture. The resultant explosion lifted the cover from the No. 4 reactor. Several explosions followed which released thirty to forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The graphite in the reactor blazed for ten days. Helicopters dropped 5000 tonnes of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead onto the burning core to extinguish the fire and limit the release of radioactive particles. Most of the released material was deposited close by as dust and debris, but the lighter material was carried by wind over the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and to a lesser degree over Scandinavia and Western Europe.

While Soviet authorities sent in several hundred thousand “liquidators” (most of who received near lethal doses of radiation) to attend to the fire, they released no news to the outside world. The first evidence emerged on 28 April, two days after the explosion. Workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes. Forsmark is approximately 1,100 km from Chernobyl. Sweden’s investigation into the source of the radioactivity showed it was coming from the East. Although the Soviets initially denied anything had happened, finally the official Tass news agency reported briefly that an accident occurred at Chernobyl with “some casualties”.

On 2 May, authorities evacuated everyone within 10km of the plant, including the plant workers village of Pripyat. Two days later, all those living within a 30 kilometre radius including the city of Chernobyl itself - a further 116 000 people from the more contaminated area - were evacuated and later relocated. About 1,000 of these have since returned unofficially to live within the contaminated zone.

Four months after the disaster, the Russians finally came clean at an IAEA conference in Vienna. The Soviet Union's chief delegate Valery Legasov stunned his audience with a detailed and frank expose of what went wrong. British government representative Professor John Gittus (document link) received a thick package of carefully prepared documents containing details such as copies of chart recorders at Chernobyl's stricken reactor at the time of the blast. "For me this was the beginning of perestroika," he said. "We didn't realize that at the time, of course, but Chernobyl was a turning point -- a punctuation mark in Russian history."

However information was slow in getting to those nearest the disaster site. It wasn’t until 1989, that the local public gradually became more aware of the extent of the catastrophe. The number of newspaper articles about Chernobyl tripled and pressure on the Soviet leadership grew to co-ordinate a second wave of resettlement began. In 1991, the third phase of Chernobyl policy was determined by the successor states of the Soviet Union in the contaminated area: Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Official Chernobyl committees were set up in Belarus and Ukraine to compensate and resettlement victims.

There is no consensus over the death toll. After the initial explosion 28 people died, mostly fire-fighters, from radiation or thermal burns, another 60 or so died in the years that followed. A 2005 UN health agency report estimated that about 9,300 people will die from cancers caused by Chernobyl's radiation. Some groups, such as Greenpeace, say the toll has been grossly underestimated. Their report, based on Belarus national cancer statistics, predicts 270,000 cancers and 93,000 fatal cancer cases directly attributable to the nuclear explosion. Radiation has had a devastating effect on survivors; damaging immune and endocrine systems, leading to accelerated ageing, cardiovascular and blood illnesses. With the temporary sarcophagus likely to leak for its remaining five years of existence, the total death toll could reach over 200,000.

Howard defends Australia-India nuclear deal

John Howard has defended his Government’s controversial decision to overturn the ban on Australian uranium sales to India. Howard finalised the deal by phone with Indian PM Manmohan Singh on Thursday. India was previously off-limits to Australian uranium because it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) and opponents of the move say it will lead to an increase in nuclear weapons. Howard says the deal is based on the condition the uranium is used for peaceful purpose and India signing safeguard agreements with Australia and the UN's nuclear watchdog. "It's a different approach and India is not signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he said. “But we believe that these arrangements will deliver effectively the same outcome."

But Opposition leader Kevin Rudd has pledged to overturn the deal if he wins the forthcoming federal election. Rudd said the safeguards were not sufficient and India's refusal to sign the NNPT should prevent the deal. "This is a significant breach from the consensus of Australian governments in the past. Now we have a government of Australia pulling the rug from under the NNPT," Rudd said. Labor said it was impossible to lock in a safeguards framework with New Delhi.

The Australian Greens labelled the Government’s decision a “seismic shift in foreign policy” with major implications for global security. Senator Christine Milne said the Government was only seeking safeguards to cover uranium from Australia and the plants that that uranium is sent to. This means the international community would have access to only select nuclear plants. According to Milne “this farce leaves a loophole you could fire a nuclear missile through”.

Australia has 40 percent of the world's known reserves of uranium and is a major exporter of the material. India has been lobbying Canberra for access to it after an India-US nuclear deal was agreed in principle two years ago. Existing Indian atomic facilities account for just three per cent of its total power output and the energy-hungry country is desperate to increase that figure.

The deal between the US and India was confirmed when Bush visited New Delhi in March 2006. India will get access to US civil nuclear technology in exchange for opening its nuclear facilities to inspection. On a visit to India, President Bush hailed the deal as historic but acknowledged it would be difficult to get US Congress to ratify it. "Congress has got to understand that it's in our economic interests that India has a civilian nuclear power industry to help take the pressure off the global demand for energy,” he said.

While Bush worried about US Congress, the ruling Indian Congress Party now has its own problems. Its Communist coalition partners have warned of "serious consequences" if New Delhi goes ahead with the landmark deal with the US. Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) General Secretary Prakash Karat told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh not to take the next step in the deal. That step is the approval from the 45-nation Nuclear Supply Group and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) global watchdog. "The government should not take the next step with regards to negotiating on the safeguards agreement with the IAEA, said Karat”. “It is for the Congress leadership to decide on the matter which will have serious consequences for the government and the country.”

India has never been a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT). The NNPT is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. The Treaty’s three pillars are non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful use. It established a safeguards system under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Opened for signature in 1968, the Treaty entered into force in 1970. 187 countries have joined the Treaty, including the five nuclear-weapon States. North Korea ratified the NNPT but later pulled out. Among the other handful of countries that are holding out against the treaty are known nuclear powers India and Pakistan and a likely one – Israel. Under the US deal, India has agreed to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities, placing the civilian facilities under IAEA safeguards. But its nuclear weapons facilities are not included in the agreement.

The Indian nuclear power programme began in 1964. It was the first in the third world and still the most comprehensive. In 1972 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi authorised Indian scientists to manufacture a nuclear device they had designed and prepare it for a test. The device was ironically dubbed the "Peaceful Nuclear Explosive" or PNE, but commonly called Smiling Buddha. However obsessive secrecy meant that very few records of any kind were kept either on the development process or the decision making involved in its development and testing. This has resulted in the events being documented almost entirely by oral reports many years later. The Smiling Buddha was detonated at the remote Pokhran nuclear test site in the north-western Thar Desert.

India did not carry out any further nuclear tests until Operation Shakti in 1998. Inspired by a new Nationalist government, India had telegraphed its intentions through the 1990s to test another device. While news of the tests was greeted with unanimous disapproval internationally, it was a source of great pride in India. PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India to be a Nuclear Weapon State and also imposed a self-declared moratorium on further nuclear fission by India.

Talisman Sabre Rattling at Shoalwater Bay

A public meeting in Brisbane was told today about the largest military exercise in Australia this year: Operation Talisman-Sabre 2007 (TS07) at north Queensland’s Shoalwater Bay. Kim Stewart from Peace Convergence told the meeting TS07 will involve nearly 14,000 US troops and over 12,000 Australian personnel, according to a Public Environment Report released last year.

The exercise is designed to improve combat readiness and interoperability. The field training portion of TS07 will be conducted from 19 June to 2 July, with force preparation and deployment of forces during the week of 12 to 18 June. Current planning shows Australian forces likely to participate are 20 ships and 25 aircraft while US forces likely to take part are 10 ships (including a carrier Battle Group) and 100 aircraft. Shoalwater is the major location with some events taking place at Townsville and Bradshaw (NT) bases.

This is the second major war games exercise in two years at Shoalwater. The purpose of Talisman Sabre 2005 (TS05) was to train American and Australian military in “crisis action planning for execution of contingency operations. TS05 brought together 11,000 US and 6,000 Australian under the command of Vice Admiral Jonathan W Greenert, Commander of the US Seventh Fleet. They practiced joint operations, test interoperability and also what was called “refined procedures and doctrines”.

Local residents are worried by the scale of these exercises and have complained about ongoing abuse of the Shoalwater Bay marine environment by military personnel. Local fishermen claim Army engineers used heavy explosives to blast a hole in the dunes on Freshwater Beach, lowered the local water table by 3 metres and drained a swamp into the sea. They also complain of heavy artillery firing in the water catchment, decimation of mangroves, deaths of dugongs due to bombings, and blasting of the Great Barrier Reef.

A local action group the Shoalwater Wilderness Awareness Group (SWAG) prepared a response (pdf) to the Department of Defence’s Public Environment Report for TS07. SWAG has five major concerns with the exercise. It claimed there was little public consultation, has serious omissions related to environmental impact, water catchment damage and lack of clean-up, identified risks in the document related to road damage and accidents, pointed out the dangers of nuclear weapons and depleted uranium to be used in the exercise, and lastly the failure to produce an Environmental Impact statement.

Shoalwater Bay is a wetlands of international importance. Vast mangrove forests, mudflats, sandflats and seagrass beds have formed on the sheltered western side of Shoalwater Bay. Half the wetland types found in Queensland exist in the Shoalwater and Corio Bays area. Threatened species which live in or visit these waters include dugong, saltwater crocodiles and various types of turtles including green, loggerhead, hawksbill and flatback. Almost half of Australia's recorded mangrove species are found in this area. They provide a nursery for fish and sheltered roosts for birds.

Australia is a signatory of The Ramsar convention on wetlands (signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971). The convention is an intergovernmental treaty which provides the framework for national and international action for the use of wetlands. Shoalwater Bay is one of 64 Australian sites (pdf)registered with Ramsar and the fourth largest protected wetland after Coongie Lakes (South Australia), the Coral Sea islands territory and Kakadu.

Situated between Mackay and Rockhampton, the Shoalwater Bay area is a relatively undisturbed habitat area with significant flora and fauna. The mangrove, tidal mudflats and saltflats are internationally important habitats for resident and migratory waterbirds. The site regularly hosts over 20,000 birds. The entire 240,000 hectare area is within the Mackay-Capricorn Marine Park. The Shoalwater Bay Training Area has been listed on the Register of the National Estate since 1980 but is managed by the Department of Defence.

Dr Zohl dé Ishtar addressed the public meeting on the wider context of the Shoalwater Bay military exercise. dé Ishtar is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland. She has wide-ranging experience in dealing with cross-cultural research and project collaboration with Indigenous Pacific and Australian women/communities. dé Ishtar recently returned from Guam where she observed first hand the US military influence on the island.

dé Ishtar explained how the US military now sees the North West Pacific region as its highest risk area with the ongoing tensions between China and Taiwan and to a lesser extent between the Koreas. The US intent to increase their military presence in the North Pacific but preferably in US controlled territory not in allied territory. The favoured locations are Alaska, Hawaii and Guam. As the commander of Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base said Guam is “big lily pad for leap frogging people, supplies, aircraft -- anything we need to sustain a conflict -- into the [Southwest Asia] region."

Not everyone in Guam is happy about the US presence. Guam is the southernmost of the Mariana Island and is four hours flight north of Cairns. It is a small island and an “unincorporated territory” of the US which means Guam residents don't vote for the US President and have no voting representation in the US Congress. Guahan (Guam) was settled by the Chamorros people at least 4,000 years ago and colonised by Spain in the 17th century. The US took control of the island after the Spanish-American war of 1898. It was captured by Japan for three years in World War II. Since that war, Guam has been vital in securing American military and economic interests throughout the Pacific and Asia.

The US Department of Defence occupies 30% of the island with the potential to expand. It is rapidly increasing the offensive capability of both the Air Force and Navy on the island. There are plans to establish a Global Strike Force on Guam, involving rotating 48 F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, six B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, adding another three nuclear submarines to the three Guam already houses and plans to become the home port of 60 per cent of the Navy's Pacific Fleet in the region. It will become the "largest, most forward US military installation in the Pacific theatre," which will inevitably make Guam a first-strike target in any Pacific war.

Ishtar pointed how Guam is becoming known as the tip of the spear of US Pacific forces. Guam's new priority is a result of the "unknowns" in East Asia - code language for Pentagon concerns about the rise of China - with its claims on Taiwan and rivalry with Japan - and a region with friction over oil rights, North Korea. Logistically it is far easier to support Guam from Australia than the US.

In 2005, the Australian Government entered agreements (under the auspices of Ausmin) with the US to provide long-term access and joint use of Shoalwater Bay Training Area. This agreement ties Australia to the rapid military build up in Guam. Talisman Sabre 2007 is a result. dé Ishtar pointed out how if Guam is the tip of the spear, then Australia prepares the hand that holds the spear.

Five Minutes to Midnight

The Doomsday Clock was moved forward two minutes earlier this week. According to the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the time is now 11.55pm – barely five minutes to nuclear annihilation. The Bulletin cited North Korean nuclear tests, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the US’s recent use of "bunker buster" nuclear bombs as the reasons for the change. They also cited human related climate change as a growing danger. "We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age," the group said in a statement read in New York and London. It was the first adjustment since 2002.

The Doomsday Clock is a peculiar hangover from the Cold War. The Clock evoked both an image of doom (midnight) and a nuclear launch (countdown to zero). Created in 1947, it was initially set to seven minutes to midnight. This week marks the 18th adjustment of the clock in the last 60 years. It has been as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953 when the US and USSR tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of one another, and as far away as seventeen minutes in 1991 after the same two countries signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (SALT).

The custodians of the clock are the board of directors of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”. Founded in 1945, the Bulletin is a magazine that covers global security and public policy issues, especially related to the dangers of nuclear weapons. The original founder and editor was biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, a professor of botany and biophysics at the University of Illinois near Chicago. It has an impressive list of contributors over the years that include Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Carl Sagan, Wernher von Braun, Al Gore, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.


Bunker buster bombs are the newest threat identified by the Bulletin. These are bombs designed to penetrate hardened targets or those buried deep underground. Barnes Wallis designed the first bunker buster bombs for the British in World War II. The US military updated Barnes Wallis’s original designs for use in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The American looked at plans to develop nuclear variants in order to access the so-called Al-Qaeda underground complexes in Tora Bora as well as Iranian nuclear industry which is also mainly underground. In 2005, the Bush administration requested Congress approval for $4 million dollars to research the technology. Congress refused and the idea was abandoned after criticism of potential nuclear fall-out. The military analysts Jane’s suspect however that the research may still be continuing under a different name.

The bulletin believes we are now at the cusp of a Second Nuclear Age. Many felt that the nuclear threat was eradicated by the fall of the Soviet Union as a world superpower in 1991. But many new dangers emerged to fill the void. The ex-Soviet states suffered a partial breakdown of command and control systems leading to the “disappearance” of former Soviet nuclear weapons. Israel nuclear ambitions are matched by many of its Arab enemies. The 50 year old feud between India and Pakistan is now a nuclear standoff. And Pakistan’s chief nuclear technician A Q Khan has sold secrets of nuclear technology to many smaller countries in Asia and Africa worried about American hegemony. Meanwhile the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) could disintegrate due to the lack of good will among its members.

The climate change rationale is also adding new relevance to the Cold War institution. The statement released this week claimed global warming poses a dire threat to human civilisation second only to nuclear weapons. It cited flooding, desertification and threats to habitats and agricultural resources which are likely to contribute to mass migrations and wars over land, water, and other natural resources. Stephen Hawking told the London gathering “as scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."

Father of the Islamic nuclear bomb in hospital

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear programme, is stable in hospital after his health deteriorated last week. Pakistani army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said. "Dr. Khan is in good health and there is nothing dangerous." Khan was detained in hospital after he complained about pain in the femoral vein. The 66 year old scientist underwent a successful prostate cancer operation at a private hospital in Karachi last month. It was the first time he was allowed out since his house arrest on 31 January 2004 imposed by President Pervez Musharraf after allegations of his involvement in the transfer of nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

A.Q. Khan was born in 1935 in Bhopal in what was then British India. The Muslim Pathan family migrated to newly independent Pakistan. Khan graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Karachi. He studied further in West Germany and the Netherlands before gaining a Ph D from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1972. His first job was with the Amsterdam based Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO). FDO was a subsidiary of Urenco a British-German-Dutch consortium that provides enriched uranium for European nuclear power stations. Urenco used a Zippe-type centrifuge to collect Uranium-235. Nazi scientist Gustav Zippe invented the Zippe-Type centrifuge during World War II and it is now the easiest way to make fuel for reactors as well as nuclear weapons. Zippe was captured by the Russians after the war and they forced him to reveal his method. After he was released, the Americans also ordered him to provide help for their nuclear program. Khan worked at the Urenco Dutch facility where the Zippe-type centrifuge was operational.

18 May 1974 was the festival of Buddha’s birthday in India. On that day India launched the “Smiling Buddha”, its first ever nuclear explosion. Pakistan was furious. In 1975, Khan went on holiday to Pakistan. He was asked by the then-prime minister Ali Bhutto to secretly take charge of Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment program. The Dutch were quickly aware they had a spy in their midst. Ruud Lubbers, who would later go on to become Prime Minister, was the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs at the time. He later admitted he discussed the Khan case with US CIA officials. But the Americans advised against arrest and told him to merely block Khan's access to Urenco. The following year, Dr. Khan escaped from the Netherlands with two secret blueprints for uranium centrifuge. The Dutch convicted him in 1983 in absentia for stealing the designs but his conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

Back in Pakistan, Khan initially worked for Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). He created a new research lab which was later renamed Khan Research Lab (KRL) in his honour by new military president Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. Khan was charged with a five year task to enrich uranium to build the world's first Islamic nuclear bomb. As well as Khan’s brilliance, western intelligence inertia and weak export controls helped Pakistan made rapid progress in developing U-235 production capability. He convinced two Dutch firms to sell them over 6,200 unfinished steel rotor tubes. By 1987, a British newspaper reported that Dr. Khan had openly confirmed Pakistan had nuclear weapon capability. The US turned a blind eye as they needed Pakistan’s support against the Russians in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Khan’s DIY nuclear techniques caught the attention of other countries. First up was Islamic Iran as early as 1988. They began buying his drawings and parts and ended up with 500 centrifuges of its own. Meanwhile at home, his plans for the Islamic bomb were nearing fruition. In May 1998, Pakistan exploded a subterranean atomic bomb in the Chagai Hills in the desert of south-western Baluchistan province, barely 50 km from the border with Iran. Coming barely days after a similar bomb test from India, both countries in the sub-continent were now nuclear powers.

Over the years Pakistan had switched from an illegal importer of nuclear technology to an illegal exporter. Khan set up his supply headquarters in Dubai. He used a South African factory, imported centrifuge parts from Malaysia, electronics from Turkey, technology from Europe and a bomb design from China. This sophisticated and privatised black market became known as the Khan network and it was ready to do business with any customer. Ironically Saddam Hussein turned him down because he though Khan was an American front. Instead his most lucrative client became North Korea. In the late 1990s, Khan supplied uranium enrichment equipment and perhaps even warhead designs to North Korea.

The North Korean connection started to seriously alarm US security organisations. The CIA had cracked the network and was recommending its break-up. But after 9/11 the rules changed again. Once again the US turned to Pakistan as an ally and turned a blind eye to its nuclear programme. As a token gesture, Washington imposed sanctions in 2003 on Khan’s firm for the alleged transfer of missile technology from North Korea. Khan ignored the warnings and went on to do business with Libya. He showed them how to turn enriched yellowcake uranium into nuclear fuel and also provided Chinese 1980s nuclear bomb design. The US raided a ship bound for Libya and they caught the consignment red-handed. The US and Pakistan took the decision to turn Khan into a scapegoat. He was forced to publicly apologise by Musharraf and he announced on TV he was acting alone. Bush hailed Khan’s apology as a victory. Musharref made sure Khan could not tell his side of the story. He granted him a pardon but has since held him under loose house arrest allowing no questions from pesky outsiders.

Pakistan continues to deny culpability in the Khan network.

public meeting in Brisbane: Nuclear matters

On Tuesday 11 July, an anti-nuclear alliance group held a public meeting in the Abel Smith lecture theatre at the UQ campus, St Lucia. The meeting was entitled “Nuclear Matters: Mining, Energy & War”. The meeting was hosted by the QNFA (Qld Nuclear Free Alliance) in conjunction with another group called SOS (Students of Sustainability). Together they have formed an umbrella Brisbane group called Just Peace.

The four invited speakers were Professor Ian Lowe (President of the Australian Conservation Foundation), Senator Kerry Nettle (NSW Greens Senator), Speedy McGuinness (Kungurakun-Gurindji elder from NT) and Dr Ibtissam Abdul Jabbar (UQ research scientist). Senator Nettle was a late apology due to her visit to Papua New Guinea and she was replaced by Senator Christine Milne (Green, Tasmania). The meeting was attended by approximately 200 to 300 people.

Annette Brownlie opened the meeting by describing Just Peace as a Brisbane organisation that were seeking alternatives to war and to Australian reliance on the US military. Its aims are justice and peace. It plans to do this by exchanging information, conducting dialogue and offering support and fellowship. She asked that attendees take time to stop and remember the Aboriginal forebears and traditional owners of this land. She then introduced Professor Ian Lowe.

Professor Lowe also gave thanks to the traditional landowners. He started by exposing a great myth. That myth was that nuclear power is greenhouse friendly. Dr James Lovelock had raised the alarm with his “Revenge of Gaia” in which he said that climate change damage was irreversible and we should “think the unthinkable” and embrace nuclear power. Professor Lowe said he has thought it and believes it is still unthinkable. He has also thought about uranium exporters who have shown no interest in climate change. That lack of concern also exists at government levels and there is no support for practical measures either in the coal industry, for renewable resources, or more energy efficient solutions. Nor does nuclear power address emissions from transportation. In short the argument for nuclear power is as transparent as before. Lowe then talked about the 1975 Fox Report. The Fox Report supported limited regulated uranium mining endorsing sales to countries that are signatories to the NNPT (Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty).

The report was the start of the 3-mines policy at Nabarlek, Ranger and Olympic Dam. It gave then PM Malcolm Fraser the chance to sell uranium to an ‘energy starved world’. It was a grubby moral imperative. Nuclear accounts for barely 10% of the world’s electricity and 3% of the world’s energy. It was a dishonest policy 30 years ago and is dishonest today. As an energy source it is quite expensive and subsidised by governments. And it would be 15 years before any new nuclear power stations would fire up in anger. We cannot wait 15 years for a solution. The rush to build nuclear power stations in the world is itself a cause of the energy crisis.

Professor Lowe then turned to the matter of water. Nuclear power needs lots of water. The Roxby Downs plant (site of the Olympic Dam) eyed off the Murray river only to find out that the Murray doesn’t contain much water these days. They then turned their attention to the Great Artesian Basin but that was stymied by a letters campaign to the SA government. Now, BHP Billiton are building a desalination plant. We are now exporting uranium to China, how does that contribute to world peace? By 2020, the industry may grow to be one third the size of our cheese industry. But unlike cheese, when we export uranium we not only give it to current governments but we also give it to future successor regimes whose actions we have no control over.

While the world dirties its collective nappy over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, we forget that the Americans gave the original technology to the previous regime of the Shah. We cannot guarantee that future administrations will turn uranium into fissile material for bombs. Prof Lowe concluded that “if nuclear is the answer, it must have been a very silly question”.

Dr Jabbar spoke next. She was born in Baghdad and has an M Sc in immunology and a PhD from UQ. She works at the Centre for Immunology & Cancer Research, University of Queensland. She spoke using a set of Powerpoint slides and had three issues to discuss. The issues were ignorance, health effects and moral consequences. She started by describing the phobia and fear around the topic. She visited Iraq in 2003 for the first time in 23 years where she saw for herself the damage done by nuclear weapons on people. She then showed a brief video from CNN which displayed people’s ignorance of where Iran was on a world map.

There has been limited success with nuclear weapons in the 1963 Partial Ban Treaty which prohibits the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in space. However there are still 50 nuclear weapons tested every year. 55% of these are US, 30% are Russian and the remaining 15% is spread across China, UK, France, India and Pakistan. Radioactive Weapons, called Depleted Uranium (DU) were first used in Gulf War I (GW1) in 1991. Many more were used in GW2. These weapons have “somatic toxicity”. Dr Ernest Sternglass author of “Secret Fallout” believes 400,000 infants in Iraq may be affected by DU. Freeman Dyson, the British-American physicist and mathematician has corroborated Sternglass’s figures. Dr Jabbar also believes the risks are greater at lower radiation levels. Dr Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine at Washington’s Georgetown university admitted the US Veteran’s Association made him lie about the impacts of DU.

Dr Jabbar then cited a 1997 experiment where 30% of GW1 vets had suffered from Gulf War syndrome. “When we went, we were healthy” they said. There are only 256 entries in Pub Med (a US National Library of Medicine service) on the topic and only 2 papers on Iraq. 1kg of uranium provides 5kg of DU. DU is “organotropic” (related to the attraction of certain chemical compounds or micro-organisms to specific tissues or organs of the body). It gets into the skeletal tissue and has been traced in urine 16 years after the event. It accumulates in bones, the kidney and even the Central Nervous System. It alters DNA, causes carcinogens, cell death and mutation. It can also alter chromosomes. The Iraqi population has now been hit twice in 12 years with DU.

Al Eskan disease is closely related. Discovered in 1992 the disease is a condition triggered by the exceptionally fine sand dust of the Central and Eastern Saudi Arabian peninsula. The inhalation of this sand has caused fatigue and worse. The morality aspect is important too. We have legitimised a side effect which says it is ok to use civilians as a target. It is a moral disaster. Science needs to take the road of the darkness. The truth is regulated by the authority in the shape of tanks and bombs but also by computers, TV and the Internet. Dr Jabbar finished with a quote from Albert Einstein “from the basic power of the universe, there is no protection”.

Speedy McGuinness spoke next. His speech was a plea for a wake-up call. He spoke first in his native Kungurakun-Gurindji dialect. He paid homage to a powerful black woman at the back of the auditorium who was a tribal elder from the Gulf of Carpentaria. He then apologised for not being a speaker in the same league as Professor Lowe and Dr Jabbar. He promised not to swear too much and then said “fucking war, eh?” He talked about the peace pilgrimage he took with others from Brisbane to Nagasaki, a journey of 4,500kms over 8 months. He discussed the impact of the atomic bombings with monks in Japan. They described bodies of women and children floating in the river. It was a war, just like there is a war between black and white in Australia. This was not political “crapotology”. The war is still going on. And they are still dropping uranium bombs in Australia at Bradshaw camp and Delemere Range in NT. McGuinness said he was proud of his 30 year campaign to save Australia from uranium mining.

He discussed the Rum Jungle uranium mine 65km south of Darwin. The place got its name when the wheels fell off a bullock wagon containing rum bottles destined for the miners. The bullockies drank the rum there and then. The nearby East Finnis River is still contaminated from the old Rum Jungle uranium mine. For nearly 30 years, contaminated mine water collected in the dry season, only to wash into the river in the wet. The Rum Jungle is closed now but the government want to re-open it as a nuclear waste dump. And they can do this because federal law overrides the NT government. The government are getting rid of the cycads in the area near McGuinness’s property in preparation. And after all, what good are trees only pumping oxygen into the air?! The cycads were cut down by contractors and sent to labs in Alabama. Now McGuinness needs to plant another 500 of them. It’s his job.

McGuinness apologised again for the rambling nature of his speech but said “you’ll get the full story, somehow”. They gave the land back to the Aboriginal owners back in 1993. McGuinness discussed Japan again. In a country the size of Victoria, there are 54 nuclear reactors. No-one feels safe. They are bombing with uranium in Iraq and it is the children who suffer most. McGuinness is a translator for his people in courts and hospitals and said the things he sees there ‘spin me out.’ He was invited by the SOS to this meeting in Brisbane but was not keen to come to a meeting where people come along and listen and feel good before going home and forgetting all about it. But it was the magic word that convinced him to attend: Students. SOS is "Students of Sustainability". Students are ‘feral’ but they are also talkative. Next week they might be talking about me (McGuinness) but they will also be talking about the Rum Jungle and the contamination of the East Finnis River. You won’t read about that in public schools. We need to encourage the smaller ones. It’s as scary as all hell. McGuinness ended by saying to the students “I’m putting my faith in you”.

The final speaker was Senator Christine Milne. She started by acknowledging that she was on Aboriginal land. She recently led a Green delegation to the Mt Everard Aboriginal settlement in WA. This is one of the proposed sites for a nuclear waste dump. It is only 4km from a defence site and is the likely choice for the dump when the government finally decide. The Greens do not support the federal government overturning NT state rulings or using traditional land for waste dumps. She is ashamed that Bob Hawke proposed Australia to be the nuclear waste dump of the world. According to Hawke there are plenty of ‘empty’ places we can store it. He said “nobody lives there and any nearby Aboriginals can be moved and compensated”. We have learnt nothing from the past. And now the Government assures us that nuclear power is safe. At a global meeting on conservation in Switzerland, Senator Milne was approached by a Russian delegate Alexey Yablokov who demanded to know of her “what on Earth are you Australians doing?” He was talking about nuclear waste. He mentioned that the sarcophagus built around the Chernobyl site is now leaking and is likely to break open in a few years time.

But the problem is also here and now. Senator Milne stated that on June 14 this year, the US air force did a nuclear test on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. They tested Minuteman missiles that can travel 4,800 kms in 30 minutes. This fact was not mentioned in any Australian news media. Then on June 30, the Russians launched a ballistic missile in the Bering Strait which landed on its target 5,500kms away on the Kamchatska Peninsula. Again there was no media coverage in Australia. India too launched a missile test as recently as last weekend. Why was there no Australian reaction about any of these events compared to our grandstanding over the recent North Korean tests? While we continue to export uranium, Australia has no moral authority to exercise power globally. Australia should be an honest broker not a deputy sheriff. The uranium should stay in the ground. The NNPT (Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty) should be applied equally and fairly. We should be campaigning for the total elimination of the nuclear arsenal worldwide. But at the moment, we are trying to pick winners and losers.

Senator Milne then recommended a book by international lawyer Philippe Sand called “Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules”. The US has systematically undermined international law: the refugee convention, the Geneva convention, the NNPT. But these are the only frameworks we’ve got. Now we are in this mess. As Professor Lowe said it is nonsense to think that selling uranium to China will somehow prevent climate change. China’s ambassador to Australia has stated that the reason China imports uranium is that it does not have enough for civilian and military uses. So either directly or indirectly, Australia is facilitating Chinese nuclear weapons. Alexander Downer would like to assure us that safeguards will apply. But the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) has confirmed that they do not have oversight of Chinese facilities. To say that Australian uranium can be ‘tracked’ safely is nonsense.

The current situation in Australia is driven by the need to create new export markets for uranium. First China and next India. The problem with selling uranium to India is that it is not a signatory to the NNPT. Australia cannot sell uranium to India without infringing the treaty. America also wants to work with the lucrative Indian nuclear market so Bush and Howard are keen to establish new ‘arrangements’ outside the treaty. The US has yet to sign off on a deal with India and the Australian government has refused to answer questions on its stance. Within the NNPT Sweden and Switzerland will block any moves to engage with India. So Bush has created a “Global Nuclear Energy Plan” which will encourage multi-lateral nuclear agreements outside the control of the NNPT. A nuclear supply centre will lease enriched uranium to countries and the suppliers will take back the nuclear waste. This apparently demonstrates stewardship. Senator Milne called to watch out for the use of the word “stewardship” in all official nuclear industry documentation. The Labor lobbyist for the industry, Martin Ferguson uses the term “stewardship” continually. This needs to be contested at every opportunity. It is a travesty of the real meaning of the word.

The Age journalist Richard Baker put in an FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the government to release details of his nuclear talks with American officials. But the request was denied out of hand because of the documents’ “sensitive nature”. The plan involves expanding exports to China, supporting the India as part of Bush’s global plan, mine for uranium at Olympic Dam and transport it to Adelaide on a Halliburton owned railway line for export. The plan concludes with a scheme to take back all the high level waste. This will all be drawn up under the PM’s hand-picked Task Force on the Australian Uranium Industry Framework. The group is led by John White who has a major conflict of interest. He is also the head of uranium exporters “Global Renewables” and helped draft Bush’s “Global Nuclear Energy Plan”. The government business case for uranium will revolve around the “safe” return of the waste so that it cannot be enriched for weapons use. The argument has already started. They will wedge Labor on their three-mine policy and their refusal to take back the high-level waste

The US is now talking to Russia about leasing enriched uranium to Iran and taking back the high-level waste. The US now supports this idea and is putting its faith in Putin. Putin will approve a dump facility which has potential profits of $20 billion. This is because the US cannot store its own nuclear waste and a Russian dump will do as well as an Australian one. The Asian situation is extremely volatile. Every day Howard meddles in situations for which he cannot control the long-term consequences. China has signed major oil and nuclear contracts with Iran. So has Russia. Russia itself has retreated substantially from democracy under ex-KGB member Putin. The Asian arms race gathers pace. Indonesia won’t stand idly by. If any of these regimes are overthrown there is no knowing what the successor regimes might do with nuclear fuel. Selling uranium to these regimes is irresponsible. Australia has a moral obligation with 40% of the world’s uranium. We should leave it in the ground. Senator Milne concluded by saying “it is part of the sustainability that will bring about peace”.

Annette Brownlie ended the forum by thanking the speakers for their excellent contributions and opened the session to the floor for a question and answer session.