Jim Green
Recently, the prime minister has become fond of likening a domestic industry for enriching uranium to building factories to knit garments from Aussie wool. It's a cosy argument for value-adding, but it masks the security and environmental threats of a domestic uranium enrichment industry.
Unlike enrichment plants, garment factories don't generate large volumes of radioactive waste in the form of depleted uranium, and they don't have the potential to destabilise the region.
We can safely assume that the Lucas Heights nuclear plant in Sydney never operated a secret program to knit woollen garments. But in 1965, Lucas Heights, then known as the Atomic Energy Commission, did begin a secret uranium enrichment program. It was known as the "Whistle Project", so named because workers would whistle as they walked past Building 64, where the basement housed the secret enrichment program.
There can be no doubt that the Whistle Project had a military agenda. Indeed, in the archives of the University of New South Wales, you can find hand-written notes by the then chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, Sir Philip Baxter, in which he calculates how many nuclear weapons could be produced if the enrichment work proceeded as he hoped it would.
As it happens, the enrichment work was publicly revealed in the 1967-68 Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the project proceeded in fits and starts until the Hawke Labor government put an end to it in 1984.
Other countries proceeded with their "peaceful" uranium enrichment programs. More precisely, they proceeded to build nuclear weapons using highly enriched uranium from their "peaceful" enrichment programs. This is how Pakistan and South Africa developed their arsenals of nuclear weapons.
The Iraqi regime was pursuing uranium enrichment until its nuclear weapons program was terminated during and after the 1991 Gulf War. North Korea claims to have an arsenal of nuclear weapons which use enriched uranium as their fissile material. There is enormous controversy over the current uranium enrichment program in Iran.
The simple fact is that "peaceful" enrichment plants can produce low-enriched uranium for power reactors, and they can produce highly-enriched uranium for weapons of mass destruction.
Further, the depleted uranium tailings waste produced in large volumes at enrichment plants can be used in munitions, such as those used by the US and NATO in Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan.
Australia could not credibly oppose uranium enrichment programs in North Korea or Iran if it had the same capacity to produce fissile weapons material. Nor could it credibly oppose Indonesia's current plans to build facilities for the production of plutonium — oops, I mean peaceful power reactors.
In the June 6 Bulletin, Max Walsh discusses the "elephant in the room" in the current nuclear debate — the possibility that it is being driven by a military agenda. Could it be that PM John Howard is interested in uranium enrichment precisely because of its military potential?
Does Howard subscribe to the "fortress Australia" views that led former Liberal prime minister, John Gorton, to approve the construction of a facility for plutonium production, or reactor, at Jervis Bay in the late 1960s?
The PM is undoubtedly aware of widespread concern that the international non-proliferation regime could collapse because of the recalcitrance of the major nuclear weapons states and the ambitions of would-be weapons states. As the UN Secretary-General's 2004 report "High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change" noted: "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation".
The PM has argued that in the emerging nuclear world order, countries supplying nuclear fuel might also take responsibility for spent nuclear fuel disposal. If Australia is to supply not just raw yellowcake but enriched uranium or fuel rods, the pressure to host an international high-level nuclear waste dump will continue to build.
As Professor John Veevers from Macquarie University wrote in the Australian Geologist in August 1999, when Pangea Resources was attempting to foist a nuclear dump on Australia, such a dump would pose serious public health and environmental risks. "[T]onnes of enormously dangerous radioactive waste in the northern hemisphere, 20,000 kms from its destined dump in Australia where it must remain intact for at least 10,000 years. These magnitudes — of tonnage, lethality, distance of transport, and time — entail great inherent risk."
Instead of pursuing his nuclear dreaming, the PM should focus on adding value to benign and clean energy resources. Australia was once a leader in solar power, an industry that his government has left to wither on the vine as capital and brains take flight overseas.
In May, a confidential CSIRO report was released which argued that solar thermal technology "is poised to play a significant role in baseload generation for Australia" and will be cost-competitive with coal within seven years.
But this potential won't be realised unless the federal government can be persuaded to shift its nuclear ambitions from enrichment plants and power reactors to the nuclear fusion power supplied by the sun at a safe distance of 150 million kilometres.
An expanded renewable energy target, like those recently announced in Victoria and South Australia, would provide jobs and energy security while cutting greenhouse emissions. And it won't upset the neighbours.
[Dr Jim Green is an anti-nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth.]