Consultation, full disclosure, and an environmental audit: Nuclear Free Local Authorities’ triple demand of Australian government over nuke sub waste dump down under
the NFLAs have raised our fundamental objections to any siting of nuclear powered, and possibly nuclear armed, submarines at Garden Island as a violation of Australia’s legal commitments as a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a South Pacific nuclear free zone. The proposal will increase military tensions with China and make Rockingham a target for a counterstrike should war break out.
a White House paper states that Australia ‘has committed to managing all radioactive waste generated through its nuclear-powered submarine program, including spent nuclear fuel, in Australia’.
NFLA 22nd Nov 2024
With an international outlook and solidarity in mind, in response to a consultation by the Australian Federal Government, the UK / Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities have posted their objections to plans to station nuclear-powered subs and establish a waste dump in Western Australia.
As part of the AUKUS military pact established between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, Australia intends to acquire a fleet of nuclear powered submarines, powered by reactors built by Rolls-Royce in Derby, as well as permitting Royal Navy and United States Navy nuclear submarines to operate from Australian naval bases.
In March 2023,the AUKUS Nuclear-Powered Submarine Pathway was announced by the three partners centred on the HMAS Stirling Naval Base on Garden Island in Western Australia’s Cockburn Sound. The Australian Government has allocated AUS $8 billion for base improvements.
Under the AUKUS ‘Force Posture Agreement’, from 2027, US Virginia Class submarines are to be stationed here, with British Astute submarines joining them on rotation in the 2030’s. Around this time, the base will also become the home port of Australia’s first nuclear powered submarines, with three and up to five Virginia Class submarines being purchased from the US (subject to Congressional approval).
The Federal Government has passed new legislation to allow for the domestic storage of nuclear waste from all these submarines, and in July after a limited consultation the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) issued a licence to the Australian Submarine Agency to prepare a nuclear waste storage site at the base. Without it, visiting United States and British nuclear-powered submarines could not undertake maintenance in Australia, so the nuclear dump is seen as essential to the pact.
The extent and nature of the waste to be stored, and for how long it would be stored, remains unclear. The Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA) complained to the regulatory authorities that: ‘The consultation documents provided no details about the volume of waste or how long it would be stored at the island. They also made confused and misleading claims about the types of low-level waste that would be accepted’.
Whilst regulators insist that it would be low-level waste, this claim has been refuted by critic Australian Green Senator David Shoebridge who said the Federal legislators were told in a Senate Estimates Hearing by the Australian Submarine Agency that it would include intermediate waste. It is also contradicted by a White House paper which states that Australia ‘has committed to managing all radioactive waste generated through its nuclear-powered submarine program, including spent nuclear fuel, in Australia’.
This waste would include US Virginia-class submarine reactors, which each weigh over 100 tonnes and contain over 200 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Ian Lowe, an expert on radiation health and safety, told The Conversation in March 2023 that when the first three AUKUS submarines are at the end of their lives — 30 years from when they are commissioned — Australia will have 600 kilograms of ‘spent fuel’ and ‘potentially tonnes of irradiated material from the reactors and their protective walls’. The fuel being weapons-grade will require ‘military-scale security’.
Australian campaigners have also complained bitterly that the submarine base and the storage site are located in the wrong place.
Mia Pepper, Campaign Director at the CCWA, said that ‘Garden Island in one of the most pristine and diverse environments in the Perth region’ and that ‘This plan for both nuclear submarines and nuclear waste storage will inevitably impact access to parts of Cockburn Sound and Garden Island’.
And when responding to ARPANSA, the CCWA stated that the facility is ‘within an area of dense population’ and in the vicinity of ‘important and diverse heavy industrial facilities, including a major shipping port’. The CCWA also raised the ‘unaddressed community concerns regarding an accident’ on the site and complained about the ‘lack of transparency and rigour’ throughout the regulatory process.
Nor is there any long-term solution to storage. Garden Island would be seen as a temporary store, but it is unclear for how long. A Federal Government proposal to establish a nuclear waste dump at Kimba was resisted by local Indigenous people who launched a successful legal challenge to defeat the plan.
In its response to the consultation being conducted by the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the NFLAs have raised our fundamental objections to any siting of nuclear powered, and possibly nuclear armed, submarines at Garden Island as a violation of Australia’s legal commitments as a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a South Pacific nuclear free zone. The proposal will increase military tensions with China and make Rockingham a target for a counterstrike should war break out.
We also called on the Federal Government to conduct a proper consultation and make a full disclosure of the facts, and requested that officials conduct a full environmental audit of the likely impact of the waste storage site…………………………………………. https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/consultation-full-disclosure-and-an-environmental-audit-nflas-triple-demand-of-australian-government-over-nuke-sub-waste-dump-down-under/
Trump, AUKUS and Australia’s Dim Servitors
November 22, 2024, Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/trump-aukus-and-australias-dim-servitors/
There is something enormously satisfying about seeing those in the war racket worry that their assumptions on conflict have been upended. There they were, happily funding, planning and preparing to battle against threats imagined or otherwise, and there comes Donald Trump, malice and petulance combined, to pull the rug from under them again.
What is fascinating about the return of Trump to the White House is that critics think his next round of potentially rowdy occupancy is going to encourage, rather than discourage war. Conflict may be the inadvertent consequence of any number of unilateral policies Trump might pursue, but they do not tally with his anti-war platform. Whatever can be said about his adolescent demagogic tendencies, a love of war is curiously absent from the complement. A tendency to predictable unpredictability, however, is.
The whole assessment also utterly misunderstands the premise that the foolishly menacing trilateral alliance of AUKUS is, by its nature, a pact for the making of war. This agreement between Australia, the UK and the US can hardly be dignified as some peaceful, unprovocative enterprise fashioned to preserve security. To that end, President Joe Biden should shoulder a considerable amount of the blame for destabilising the region. But instead, we are getting some rather streaky commentary from the security wonks in Australia. Trump spells, in the pessimistic words of Nick Bisley from La Trobe University, “uncertainty about just what direction the US will go.” His policies might, for instance, “badly destabilise Asia” and imperil the AUKUS, specifically on the provision of nuclear–powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. On the last point, we can only hope.
The Australians, being willing and unquestioning satellites of US power, have tried to pretend that a change of the guard in the White House will not doom the pact. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressed a “great deal of confidence” that things would not change under the new administration, seeing as AUKUS enjoyed bipartisan support.
Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, is also of the view that AUKUS will survive into the Trump administration as it “strengthens all three countries’ ability to deter threats, and it grows the defence industrial base and creates jobs in all three countries.”
Another former ambassador to Washington, Arthur Sinodinos, who also occupies the role of AUKUS forum co-chair, has pitched the viability of the trilateral pact in such a way as to make it more appealing to Trump. Without any trace of humour, he suggests that tech oligarch Elon Musk oversee matters if needed. “If Musk can deliver AUKUS, we should put Musk in charge of AUKUS, and I’m not joking, if new thinking is needed to get this done,” advises the deluded Sinodinos.
The reasoning offered on this is, to put it mildly, peculiar. As co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Musk, it is hoped, will apply “business principles” and “new thinking”. If the Pentagon can “reform supply chains, logistics, procurement rules, in a way that means there’s speed to market, we get minimum viable capability sooner, rather than later.”
These doltish assessments from Sinodinos are blatantly ignorant of the fact the defence industry is never efficient. Nor do they detract from the key premise of the arrangements. Certainly, if an anti-China focus is what you are focusing on – and AUKUS, centrally and evidently, is an anti-China agreement pure and simple – there would be little reason for Trump to tinker with its central tenets. For one, he is hankering for an even deeper trade war with Beijing. Why not also harry the Chinese with a provocative instrument, daft as it is, that entails militarising Australia and garrisoning it for any future conflict that might arise?
Whatever the case, AUKUS has always been contingent on the interests of one power. Congress has long signalled that US defence interests come first, including whether Australia should receive any Virginian class submarines to begin with.Trump would hardly disagree here. “Trump’s decisions at each phase of AUKUS cooperation will be shaped by zero-sum balance sheets of US interest,” suggests Alice Nason of the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre rather tritely.
If Trump be so transactional, he has an excellent example of a country utterly willing to give everything to US security, thereby improving the deal from the side of Washington’s military-industrial complex. If there was one lingering, pathological complaint he had about Washington’s NATO allies, it was always that they were not doing enough to ease the burdens of US defence. They stalled on defence budgets; they quibbled on various targets on recruitment.
This can hardly be said of Canberra. Australia’s government has abandoned all pretence of resistance, measure or judgment, outrageously willing to underwrite the US imperium in any of its needs in countering China, raiding the treasury of taxpayer funds to the tune of a figure that will, eventually, exceed A$368 billion. Rudd openly acknowledges that Australian money is directly “investing into the US submarine industrial base to expand the capacity of their shipyards.” It would be silly to prevent this continuing windfall. It may well be that aspect that ends up convincing Trump that AUKUS is worth keeping. Why get rid of willing servitors of such dim tendency when they are so willing to please you with cash and compliments?
1 This month
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