Antinuclear

Behind the plans for Australia to become a nuclear dumping ground and leverage synergies with the US military alliance and civilian nuclear

THE FIFTH ESTATE, MURRAY HOGARTH, 22 JULY 2024

The Nuclear Files: The pro-nuke lobby that surrounds the Liberal-National coalition wants Australia to become a fully-fledged nuclear nation – and a permanent dumping ground for the world’s high-level radioactive reactor waste.

“They want it all,” warns long-time anti-nuclear campaigner Dave Sweeney, from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), which is leading the environment movement’s counterattack on the coalition’s nuclear insurgency: “They want Australia to adopt the full nuclear cycle, from cradle to grave.”

The far-reaching ambitions of the pro-nuclear campaign were revealed at their Navigating Nuclear event in Sydney earlier this year, formally opened by the Opposition’s nuclear torchbearer Ted O’Brien MP, and attended by The Fifth Estate.

O’Brien’s enthusiasm for the “big brains” and “calibre of people” in the room at the event, the “big idea” of nuclear energy for Australia, and his job to “listen and learn” is all on show in the video of his opening address.

These nuclear influencers, who have helped to shape the Peter Dutton led coalition’s still-emerging nuclear policy over the past two years, are looking well beyond overturning Australia’s ban on nuclear energy, which would clear the path to build reactors.

Navigating Nuclear, which was promoted as being all about “the facts”, but rapidly descended into a propaganda exercise, heard from one an MIT professor, name about extraordinary ambitions for an all in nuclear Australia:

• Most controversially, becoming the world’s repository for high-level nuclear reactor waste, with America’s output alone worth $US1 billion a year
• Leveraging the AUKUS nuclear submarine military pact with the US and the UK to drive a civilian nuclear industry
• Challenging for the title of global number one uranium producer, which has long been an ambition for the powerful Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) and
• Even building reactors in our arid lands to make the deserts bloom with agriculture fed by nuclear-powered water desalination plants.

However unlikely, crazy or dangerous these plans to go beyond nuclear energy may sound, they are being openly proposed within the pro-nuke lobby.

As the ACF’s Sweeney makes clear, this is because pro-nuclear advocates, both here and internationally, want Australia to take a seat at the table with Big Nuke’. This means participating in multiple aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, from mining more and more uranium through to high level radioactive waste disposal as a global service.

The only thing off the table, at least for now, seems to be Australia joining ranks of nations that are nuclear weapons capable. But even that deep redline has been flirted with in recent months, with Jim Seth, a WA Liberal state executive extolling the benefits of nuclear weapons

His sentiments were echoed in a recent discussion paper from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suggesting that uncertainty with the AUKUS deal necessitates that “discrete thinking must start now to address these potentially program-killing issues. A Plan B that raises alternatives must be developed. These must include, if China is indeed perceived as a possibly existential threat, the option of Australian nuclear weapons”.

While Sweeney and other critics of Dutton’s domestic nuclear plan do not see nuclear weapons as the inevitable next step they do loudly warn of the voracious appetite of the ideological drivers of the nuclear push and the dangers of nuclear normalisation and mission creep.

“Australians would be wise to be very cautious”, says Sweeney. “Some of the current crop of nuclear promoters absolutely want an Atomic Australia. Their vision is one of unfettered uranium mining and enrichment, fuel processing, domestic nuclear power, national and international radioactive waste storage and Australia to have or host nuclear weapons and war fighting capacity. If they are successful, we will all be far poorer – forever”.

The sheer scale of nuclear ambition was made clear at the all-day Navigating Nuclear workshop, which as well as being opened by O’Brien, the shadow minister for climate change and energy, was attended by his senior adviser, James Fleay, and another outspokenly pro-nuclear coalition MP, the National Party’s David Gillespie.

This is in spite of the event originally promoted as “politicsfree”.

One of the keynote international speakers, Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston a top US outlined the economic opportunity for Australia to take the world’s radioactive waste.

Buongiorno estimated that American reactors alone produce $US1 billion worth of high level waste each year.

Currently this waste in the US has been stored for decade above ground at reactor sites, even after decommissioning, Buongiorno said.

This is the same methodology O’Brien is proposing for the seven preferred sites for reactors that it has identified in Australia, which he has said could have operating lives of 60, 80 or even 100 years.

High-level radioactive waste is a hot button issue for the public. Australia has decades of deeply contested history to find a site to accommodate permanent disposal of low and intermediate level radioactive waste from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s Lucas Heights facility and other sources such as medical.

Commercial reactor waste is hot dangerous and extremely long lived

Sweeney warns that: “Commercial reactor waste is a whole different ball game – hot, dangerous and extremely long lived, the current international best practice for its long term disposal requires very expensive confinement in purpose built facilities, located deep underground in highly geologically stable areas.”

Ultimately, the waste held indefinitely in so-called “dry casks” spread around America is meant to end up in such facilities, but so far, the Americans have never gotten around to actually doing it, in part at least because it costs a bomb!

It’s difficult to imagine a more controversial proposal for Australia’s future than becoming a nuclear dumping ground for the world’s reactor waste, at least part of which will remain dangerously radioactive for many tens of thousands of years.

Sweeney says: “Previous attempts to advance high level global radioactive waste disposal in WA in the 1990s and more recently in South Australia last decade foundered on the jagged rocks of hostile politics, community concern and deep First Nation opposition. But neither the nuclear industry’s waste, nor its need to be seen to have a pathway for disposing of this, has gone away.”

Overseas observers see Australia offers “a convenient postcode to store a permanent poison,” Sweeney says.

They have followers closer to home, including former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. In a June 2024 column in Adelaide’s The Advertiser, Downer argued that hospitals, schools and roads could all be paid for by a nuclear waste storage facility servicing Australia and other parts of the world, which could reap tens of billions of dollars in revenue, which he based on a state Labor-commissioned 2016 royal commission report.”

Even the World Nuclear Association, the industry’s own PR front, says:

The radioactivity of nuclear waste naturally decays and has a finite radiotoxic lifetime. Within a period of 1000 to10,000 years, the radioactivity of HLW (high-level waste) decays to that of the originally mined ore. Its hazard then depends on how concentrated it is … Most nuclear waste produced is hazardous, due to its radioactivity, for only a few tens of years and is routinely disposed of in near-surface disposal facilities. Only a small volume of nuclear waste (~3 per cent of the total) is long-lived and highly radioactive and requires isolation from the environment for many thousands of years.

Sweeney has been close to multiple community fights around plans to site global and national radioactive waste facilities throughout remote and regional Australia.

His experience over decades has seen many promises and scant progress. “Radioactive waste is a serious and unresolved management issue here and overseas. It needs to be isolated and secured from people and the wider environment for staggering periods of time – up to 100,000 years. It lasts longer than any politician’s promise and needs serious attention and management. It should always be approached through the lens of responsibility and human and environmental health, not shouted and touted as a revenue stream.”

O’Brien and his senior adviser Fleay were in the Navigating Nuclear audience when Buongiorno, outlined a series of major nuclear related options for Australia, including the world’s waste dump “opportunity”………………………………………………………………………………………..

What about the security risk and the synergy between military alliance and a civilian nuclear industry?…………………………………………………………..

Such security and proliferation concerns were not high on Buongiorno’s radar as he also cited leveraging AUKUS as another key opportunity for Australia, seeing clear synergies between the military alliance and a civilian nuclear industry.

This is despite then Prime Minister Scott Morrison being very clear of a distinction between AUKUS and any domestic nuclear industry when he stated, “Australia is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability.

Sweeney warns: “But that was then. Now the coalition has landed on nuclear as a key plank in the lead up to the next election, AUKUS is now being promoted as a driver and enabler and a convenient political wedge to attempt to blunt Labor’s sustained criticism.” …….
more https://thefifthestate.com.au/columns/columns-columns/the-nuclear-files/behind-the-plans-for-australia-to-become-a-nuclear-dumping-ground-and-leverage-synergies-with-the-us-military-alliance-and-civilian-nuclear/

July 22, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies, wastes