Antinuclear

Senator Scott Ludlam in Parliament, on the sale of uranium to India

“……One of the most striking differences between the uranium market and those other commodity markets which Australians might be more familiar with and the one which the industry is most determined to deny is the link with weapons of mass destruction. In September this year this parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties handed down a unanimous report on the proposed nuclear cooperation agreement with India…..

The unanimous recommendations, in essence, say that there should not be uranium sales to India by Australia at this time under the terms of the current agreement. They made those recommendations on the advice of, among others, very senior former Australian officials from within the nonproliferation world who cautioned that the nuclear cooperation agreement:

… has a number of loopholes which mean that under the terms of the NCA India could use our uranium in the production of material that could end up in bombs……..

India is engaged in an active nuclear weapons arms race with its neighbour Pakistan, and just under one and half billion people live in these two countries.

Australia seems determined to circumvent and undermine the only disarmament and nonproliferation framework that the world has, just in order to open up another market for the desperate uranium sector…… Far away, on the other side of the world, in United Nations meetings in Geneva and New York, which our government assumes will never filter back to Australia, we are quietly sabotaging the first hopeful signs in a long while of global resolve in this area. The UN General Assembly’s First Committee recently voted overwhelmingly in favour of an Austrian sponsored resolution to fill the legal gap for the staged prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. This resolution was based on the careful study of the unthinkable humanitarian consequences of the use of these weapons. As a result, early in 2016, serious negotiations will get underway in Geneva to scope the elements of a global treaty banning these weapons. Why did Australia vote against this initiative? How many people in this country are even aware that that is what Australia’s diplomats were instructed to do by the Turnbull government?……

The third issue that the miners would probably prefer that we did not point out is that their industry, even at the primary end, at the mining end, is in very deep trouble not just because of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Japan’s Pacific coast on 3/11 but because peak nuclear was in the year 2002. Europe is on its way out. Japan is out. France is trying to work out how to drawn down and not have to replace the nuclear reactors it built in such a rush in the 1970s and 1980s. Germany is getting out. Italy has already got out. These are the things the uranium miners would probably prefer we did not talk about. The Beverley uranium mine is over. The Honeymoon mine in South Australia is over as well. The Roxby Downs expansion is cancelled. The Ranger 3 Deeps proposed expansion in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, which I had the good fortune to visit about this time last week, is cancelled. The Jabiluka deposit will never be mined. The Koongarra deposit has been reincorporated into Kakadu National Park. Colleagues, are you seeing a pattern here because I am? This is an industry that is on its last legs and it is just as well.

November 25, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics international