Antinuclear

Dr Jim Green – The SA Royal Commission and uranium enrichment

Nuclear non-starter: Oversupplied, losing money and without a constituency, Climate Spectator, JIM GREEN 16 Feb 15 “… South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced a Royal Commission on February 8 to investigate options to expand the state’s involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle beyond uranium mining. There is some hope that a value-adding enrichment industry could compensate for the weakened uranium mining industry.

But the 2006 Switkowski report found that there was no realistic prospect of an enrichment industry in Australia, due to overcapacity at enrichment plants around the world. The SA Royal Commission will reach the same conclusion. Former World Nuclear Association executive Steve Kidd noted in Nuclear Engineering International in July 2014 that “the world enrichment market is heavily over-supplied”.

There are other reasons to be concerned about uranium enrichment … though it hardly matters given that it is an economic non-starter. Australia’s involvement in enrichment R&D began in 1965 with the ‘Whistle Project‘ in the basement of Building 21 at Lucas Heights, then run by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. Those in the know were supposed to whistle as they walked past Building 21 and say nothing about the enrichment R&D. Why the secrecy? Because enrichment provides a direct path to nuclear weapons.

Forty years later, John Howard was likening uranium enrichment to value-adding to the wool industry. Perhaps Lucas Heights also had a secret program to knit woollen garments? Or perhaps not.

The enrichment R&D was publicly revealed in the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1967-68 Annual Report and plodded along until it was terminated in the mid-1980s. Nuclear power was growing steadily from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, yet Australia didn’t come close to establishing an enrichment industry. It’s hardly likely to happen when nuclear power capacity is stagnant, when the enrichment market is heavily over-supplied, when there is growing international momentum to curb the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies (enrichment and reprocessing), and when the atomic bomb lobby is far smaller and weaker than it was in the mid-1960s.

Clutching at straws, enrichment lobbyists argue that an Australian enrichment industry could supply nuclear power reactors in Southeast Asia. That argument would carry more weight if there were any power reactors in Southeast Asia.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Australia. http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2015/2/16/energy-markets/nuclear-non-starter-oversupplied-losing-money-and-without

February 16, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics, uranium