Antinuclear

Australia’s year of selling uranium to to dictatorships, crooks, murderers and proliferators

A Year Of Nuclear Bungles, New Matilda, By Jim Green, 19 Dec 12, “……Australia fuels proliferation tensions in North Asia by allowing Japan open ended permission to separate and stockpile weapons-useable plutonium produced from Australian uranium. The issue has resurfaced in recent months thanks to Japan’s nuclear hawks. Former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba put it bluntly: “Having nuclear plants shows to other nations that Japan can make nuclear weapons.”

Last year, US President Obama told a nuclear security summit: “We simply can’t go on accumulating huge amounts of the very material, like separated plutonium, that we are trying to keep away from terrorists.” Yet Australia gives open ended permission to Japan to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and to stockpile it.

India’s comptroller and auditor-general, Vinod Rai, has found that the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board is ineffective and negligent. He found that 60 per cent of regulatory inspections for operating nuclear power reactors were either delayed or not undertaken at all. Smaller radiation facilities operate with no oversight at all. Existing legislation gives the board almost no punitive power.

Meanwhile, the Indian government continues to attack and murder citizens opposing nuclear power plants; to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal and its missile capabilities; and to thumb its nose at the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Nuclear security remains very poor and corruption is widespread.s…….

The first consignment of uranium from Australia has arrived in Russia following the 2010 ratification of a uranium supply agreement. Unfortunately, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards inspections of Australian uranium (and its by-products) will be rare if indeed any inspections take place at all. In 2008, Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties concluded that: “It is essential that actual physical inspection by the IAEA occurs at any Russian sites that may handle [Australian Obligated Nuclear Materials]. Further, the supply of uranium to Russia should be contingent upon such inspections being carried out.” The Gillard Government ignored the recommendation and ratified the agreement. ….

Selling WMD feedstock (in the form of uranium) to dictatorships, crooks, murderers and proliferators is a mug’s game. Just ask BHP Billiton — the world’s largest mining company has disbanded its Uranium Division, cancelled the Olympic Dam mine expansion (citing the depressed uranium price), and sold the Yeelirrie uranium deposit in WA for less than 7 per cent of the nominal value of the uranium resource…….. http://newmatilda.com/2012/12/19/year-nuclear-bungle

December 20, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News