Antinuclear

Defeated plan to import foreign high-level nuclear waste to South Australia

HOW SOUTH AUSTRALIANS DUMPED A NUCLEAR DUMP

Jim Green, RenewEconomy, 15 June 2017, http://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australians-dumped-nuclear-dump-70197/

Last November, two-thirds of the 350 members of a South Australian-government initiated Citizens’ Jury rejected “under any circumstances” the plan to import vast amounts of high-level nuclear waste from around the world as a money-making venture.

The following week, South Australian (SA) Liberal Party Opposition leader Steven Marshall said that “[Premier] Jay Weatherill’s dream of turning South Australia into a nuclear waste dump is now dead.” Business SA chief Nigel McBride said: “Between the Liberals and the citizens’ jury, the thing is dead.”

And after months of uncertainty, Premier Weatherill has said in the past fortnight that the plan is “dead”, there is “no foreseeable opportunity for this”, and it is “not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government”.

So is the dump dead? The Premier left himself some wriggle room, but the plan is as dead as it possibly can be. If there was some life in the plan, it would be loudly proclaimed by SA’s Murdoch tabloid, The Advertiser. But The Advertiser responded to the Premier’s recent comments ‒ to the death of the dump ‒ with a deafening, deathly silence.

Royal Commission

It has been quite a ride to get to this point. The debate began in February 2015, when the Premier announced that a Royal Commission would be established to investigate commercial options across the nuclear fuel cycle. He appointed a nuclear advocate, former Navy man Kevin Scarce, as Royal Commissioner. Scarce said he would run a “balanced” Royal Commission and appointed four nuclear advocates to his advisory panel, balanced by one critic. Scarce appointed a small army of nuclear advocates to his staff, balanced by no critics.

The final report of the Royal Commission, released in May 2016, was surprisingly downbeat given the multiple levels of pro-nuclear bias. It rejected ‒ on economic grounds ‒ almost all of the proposals it considered: uranium conversion and enrichment, nuclear fuel fabrication, conventional and Generation IV nuclear power reactors, and spent fuel reprocessing.

The only thing left standing (apart from the small and shrinking uranium mining industry) was the plan to import nuclear waste as a commercial venture. Based on commissioned research, the Royal Commission proposed importing 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel from power reactors) and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste.

The SA Labor government then established a ‘Know Nuclear’ statewide promotional campaign under the guise of ‘consultation’. The government also initiated the Citizens’ Jury.

The first sign that things weren’t going to plan for the government was on 15 October 2016, when 3,000 people participated in a protest against the nuclear dump at Parliament House in Adelaide.

A few weeks later, on November 6, the Citizens’ Jury rejected the nuclear dump plan. Journalist Daniel Wills wrote: “Brutally, jurors cited a lack of trust even in what they had been asked to do and their concerns that consent was being manufactured. Others skewered the Government’s basic competency to get things done, doubting that it could pursue the industry safely and deliver the dump on-budget.”………………………………………

Economic claims exposed

Implausible claims about the potential economic benefits of importing nuclear waste had been discredited by this stage. The claims presented in the Royal Commission’s report were scrutinised by experts from the US-based Nuclear Economics Consulting Group (NECG), commissioned by a Joint Select Committee of the SA Parliament.

The NECG report said the waste import project could be profitable under certain assumptions ‒ but the report then raised serious questions about most of those assumptions. The report noted that the Royal Commission’s economic analysis failed to consider important issues which “have significant serious potential to adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes”; that assumptions about price were “overly optimistic” in which case “project profitability is seriously at risk”; that the 25% cost contingency for delays and blowouts was likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had “little support or justification”

The farcical and dishonest engineering of a positive economic case to proceed with the nuclear waste plan was ridiculed by ABC journalist Stephen Long on 8 November 2016: “Would you believe me if I told you the report that the commission has solely relied on was co-authored by the president and vice president of an advocacy group for the development of international nuclear waste facilities?”

The economics report was an inside job, with no second opinion and no peer review ‒ no wonder the Citizens’ Jury was unconvinced and unimpressed.

Prof. Barbara Pocock, an economist at the University of South Australia, said: “All the economists who have replied to the analysis in that report have been critical of the fact that it is a ‘one quote’ situation. We haven’t got a critical analysis, we haven’t got a peer review of the analysis”.

Another South Australian economist, Prof. Richard Blandy from Adelaide University, said: “The forecast profitability of the proposed nuclear dump rests on highly optimistic assumptions. Such a dump could easily lose money instead of being a bonanza.”

The dump is finally dumped

To make its economic case, the Royal Commission assumed that tens of thousands of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste would be imported before work had even begun building a deep underground repository. The state government hosed down concerns about potential economic losses by raising the prospect of customer countries paying for the construction of waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA.

But late last year, nuclear and energy utilities in Taiwan ‒ seen as one of the most promising potential customer countries ‒ made it clear that they would not pay one cent towards the establishment of storage and disposal infrastructure in SA and they would not consider sending nuclear waste overseas unless and until a repository was built and operational.

By the end of 2016, the nuclear dump plan was very nearly dead, and the Premier’s recent statement that it is “not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government” was the final nail in the coffin. The dump has been dumped.

“Today’s news has come as a relief and is very much welcomed,” said Yankunytjatjara Native Title Aboriginal Corporation Chair and No Dump Alliance spokesperson Karina Lester. “We are glad that Jay has opened his ears and listened to the community of South Australia who have worked hard to be heard on this matter. We know nuclear is not the answer for our lands and people – we have always said NO.”

Narungga man and human rights activist Tauto Sansbury said: “We absolutely welcome Jay Weatherill’s courageous decision for looking after South Australia. It’s a great outcome for all involved.”

Reflections

The idea of Citizens’ Juries would seem, superficially, attractive. But bias is inevitable if the government establishing and funding the Jury process is strongly promoting (or opposing) the issue under question. In the case of the Jury investigating the nuclear waste plan, it backfired quite spectacularly on the government. Citizen Juries will be few and far between for the foreseeable future in Australia. A key lesson for political and corporate elites is that they shouldn’t let any semblance of democracy intrude on their plans.

The role of the Murdoch press needs comment, particularly in regions where the only mass-circulation newspaper is a Murdoch tabloid. No-one would dispute that the NT News has a dumbing-down effect on political and intellectual life in the Northern Territory. Few would doubt that the Courier Mail does the same in Queensland. South Australians need to grapple with the sad truth that its Murdoch tabloids ‒ The Advertiser and the Sunday Mail ‒ are a blight on the state. Their grossly imbalanced and wildly inaccurate coverage of the nuclear dump debate was ‒ with some honourable exceptions ‒ disgraceful. And that disgraceful history goes back decades; for example, a significant plume of radiation dusted Adelaide after one of the British bombs tests in the 1950s but The Advertiser chose not to report it.

The main lesson from the dump debate is a positive one: people power can upset the dopey, dangerous ideas driven by political and corporate elites and the Murdoch press. Sometimes. It was particularly heartening that the voices of Aboriginal Traditional Owners were loud and clear and were given great respect by the Citizens’ Jury and by many other South Australians. The Jury’s report said: “There is a lack of Aboriginal consent. We believe that the government should accept that the Elders have said NO and stop ignoring their opinions.”

Conversely, the most sickening aspect of the debate was the willingness of the Murdoch press and pro-nuclear lobbyists to ignore or trash Aboriginal people opposed to the dump.

Another dump debate

Traditional Owners, environmentalists, church groups, trade unionists and everyone else who contributed to dumping the dump can rest up and celebrate for a moment. But only for a moment. Another dump proposal is very much alive: the federal government’s plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump in SA, either in the Flinders Ranges or on farming land near Kimba, west of Port Augusta.

In May 2016, Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Regina McKenzie, who lives near the Flinders Ranges site, wrote:

“Last year I was awarded the SA Premier’s Natural Resource Management Award in the category of ‘Aboriginal Leadership − Female’ for working to protect land that is now being threatened with a nuclear waste dump. But Premier Jay Weatherill has been silent since the announcement of six short-listed dump sites last year, three of them in SA.

 “Now the Flinders Ranges has been chosen as the preferred site and Mr Weatherill must speak up. The Premier can either support us ‒ just as the SA government supported the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta when their land was targeted for a national nuclear waste dump from 1998-2004 ‒ or he can support the federal government’s attack on us by maintaining his silence.”

Perhaps the Premier will find his voice on the federal government’s contentious proposal for a national nuclear waste dump in SA, now that his position on that debate is no longer complicated by the parallel debate about establishing a dump for foreign high-level nuclear waste. He might argue, for example, that affected Traditional Owners should have a right of veto over the establishment of a national nuclear waste dump ‒ precisely the position he adopted in relation to the international high-level waste dump.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter.

J

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Military mansplaining dispels any nonsensical ideas about “the sanctity of space”

Australian Independent Media, 31 Dec 24,  https://theaimn.net/military-mansplaining-dispels-any-nonsensical-ideas-about-the-sanctity-of-space/

Doncha love mansplaining? It simplifies everything, takes away your worries, and you can now complacently forget about any silly way-out anxieties that you might have had about technological progress.

As our military defenders develop advanced and artificial intelligence weaponry for war in space , USA Air Force secretary, and former military contractor, Frank Kendall mansplained all this perfectly for us:

Mr. Kendall said when he first came into office, there was an understandable aversion to weaponizing space, but that now the debate about “the sanctity or purity of space” is effectively over.

“Space is a vacuum that surrounds Earth,” Mr. Kendall said. “It’s a place that can be used for military advantage and it is being used for that. We can’t just ignore that on some obscure, esoteric principle that says we shouldn’t put weapons in space and maintain it.

The threat is there. It’s a domain we have to be competitive in.”

One might ponder on where this threat comes from. It seems pretty clear to me that macho military men of one nation, for example the USA, devise killing machines, and then macho men of another nation, for example China, react by devising killer machines. Then the USA men have to go one better and so on. The cleverness of macho men is the original threat.

Of course many men do not have this blinkered macho attitude to exploiting land, sea, and now space, for weaponry that damages no only humans, but other species, and indeed, the whole ecosphere. Unfortunately these many other men are also not so good at confidently mansplaining the ideas that they might have – about caring for the ecosphere, about negotiation as an alternative to war. That takes a lot of hard work, to present those ideas, and they tend to do it in a careful way, rather than talking down to the rest of us..

It is really a lot easier and simpler to decide that becoming the top killer is the way to solve differences: much harder to really think about solving the problems.

The “sanctity and purity of space”. Where did Kendall get that from?

Well, the phrase contains both a religious and environmental significance. Originally from a very spiritual poem – it has caught the imagination of many – as a theme to respect the beauty of the sky, the environment, and our role as custodians of our ecosphere.

This kind of spiritual waffle is anathema to the mansplaining military macho men.

For one thing, it involves some complicated ideas that they probably can’t understand, with their one-track adversarial thinking. To give just one example: light pollution from spacecraft disrupts the lives of not only many tiny species like moths, but also of birds and sea turtles.

Then there are ethical questions – about space vehicles, weapons, debris crashing in various locations, including neutral, uninvolved countries. And, most concerning of all is the newest technology, artificial-intelligence-enhanced fighter jets and space-based warfare. Missile-carrying robot drones with A.I.-enhanced software will be able to independently decide on flying routes, and on identifying and attacking enemy targets. Robots will be able to make decisions on whom to kill.

The phrase that Mr Kendall wanted to discredit comes from a famous poem – High Flight – A Pilot’s Prayer by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. The author was a religious man, who died at 19, in World War 2. The poem was first read out in a church, right opposite the White House. Written in a romantic style, this poem has inspired many to pond on the writer’s thought:

“with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space”

I have often thought that art of all kinds does point the way for positive human development, and just phrases like that one from John Gillespie Magee, Jr. can have a powerful influence, No wonder that war-obsessed men are keen to discredit such poems.

If people think of space as a place of beauty, mystery and wonder, they are not likely to be in favour of unrestrained weapons development, and the $215 billion budget overseen by Mr Kendall for ever-advancing weaponry. Whereas if we accept the idea that space is just “a vacuum – a place that can be used for military advantage” , well, the arms race is all OK, and we could be on the way to omnicide.

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

New Zealand is under siege by the Atlas Network

We have a handful of years to achieve a monumental shift from fossil fuel towards renewable energy: Atlas partners aim to ensure this does not take place.

March 3, 2024, by: Lucy Hamilton,  https://theaimn.com/new-zealand-is-under-siege-by-the-atlas-network/—

Just as the Atlas Network-connected Advance body intervened in the Voice referendum in Australia and, in recent weeks, a by-election, similar organisations spawned from the American model are distorting New Zealand’s politics from within as well as from without.

One of the key researchers into the Atlas Network, Lee Fang, observed that it has “reshaped political power in country after country.” In America, every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has begun office with a Roadmap provided by the Heritage Foundation, primary Atlas Network partner. The “Mandate” for 2025 puts America on a hard path to fascism should a Republican win in November. Britain’s economy and standing have been savaged by Atlas partners’ impacts on the Tories. In New Zealand, the recently-elected rightwing coalition government is aping the new “Atlas president” of Argentina, aiming to privatise national assets, but is increasingly also imitating Atlas strategies recently seen in Australia, inflaming racial tensions and harming the wellbeing of Māori people.

Dr Jeremy Walker called Australia’s attention to the local Atlas partner organisations’ impact on the Voice to Parliament referendum and is now helping draw together the focus on the New Zealand partners’ very similar distortion of their national debate. There is a deep racism at the heart of this ultra-free market ideology that has licensed the international right to exploit resources and people around the globe untrammelled, largely in American corporate interest, but more broadly for any corporation or allied sector big enough to be a contender. (They do not, by contrast, fight for the renewable energy sector’s interests, as a competitor to their dominant fossil fuel donors; this shapes their climate crisis denial and delay, and colours their loathing of First People’s capacity to interfere with their profits by environment-driven protest. A sense of Western Civilisation as the apex of human existence and deep disdain for non-Western cultures also pervade the network.)

The Atlas model is to connect and foster talent in the neoliberal sphere. Young men (mostly) are funded or trained to replicate the talking points that Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) and lobbyists have built into a global network of over 500 bodies in 100 nations. The fact that neoliberal orthodoxies are more religious ideology that fact-based theories explains why their impact has been so utterly disastrous everywhere they have reshaped societies. The goal is to spawn replicating bodies with benign-sounding names that promote the UHNWI and corporate talking points – but with a veil hiding the self-interest that is obvious when those groups speak for themselves. Some of the bodies feign being thinktanks, which George Monbiot recently renamed junktanks to clarify their disingenuousness. Others are “astroturf” organisations that pretend to be grass roots bodies representing popular opinion. Another model is the beach-head in universities, an independent organisation within those institutions intended to dignify the neoliberal religion and the chosen strategies, including climate denial. All these produce material to fill civic debate and train more acolytes to enter politics, strategy companies and junktanks. Mainstream media elevates their standing by hosting their operatives as experts without explaining that the benign-sounding organisation to which they belong is a foreign-influence operation’s local outlet.

These groups damage local conditions to favour international corporations. They lobby for the removal of the “regulations” that are actually protections for the public – as workers, as consumers, as residents. They push for the privatisation of national treasures so that (often foreign) corporations can exploit the profits at the expense of the public. The greater the damage to the local democracy, the easier it is for them to act unimpeded. The stronger their infiltration of the media, the harder it is for the local electorate to understand the stakes. The politicians and strategists that emerge from the sphere (or are its allies) know that none of this wins votes, so they fill the space with culture war division to distract the voter from paying attention. Race and sexuality are their most obvious targets, as reactionary nostalgia for a mythical past of white picket fences pervades their ideology: a valorisation of “Christianity” and “family” and the “sacredness of marriage” (preached by adulterous politicians) is equally apparent in their propaganda.

The coalition that took power in NZ late in 2023, after a campaign centred on attacking the country’s founding Waitangi Treaty, has considerable Atlas infiltration. There is concern about Atlas fossil fuel and associated tobacco interests perverting policy in parliament, as well as senior ministerial aides who might be compromised. The government has promised to repeal Jacinda Ardern’s ban on offshore gas and fuel exploration, plans to sell water to private interests, not to mention planning to enable the selling off of “sensitive” NZ land and assets to foreign corporations, just as Argentinian Milei is intending.’

One of the government members, the Act Party, began its existence as an Atlas partner thinktank and continues that close connection. It was founded by former parliamentarian Denis Quigley with two members of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the Atlas Network’s inner sanctum. One, Roger Douglas, was responsible for Rogernomics in NZ which has been described as a “right wing coup” that worked to “dismantle the welfare state.” The other, Alan Gibbs, who has been characterised as the godfather of the party, and a major funder, argued Act ought to campaign for government to privatise “all the schools, all the hospitals and all the roads.” This may not be surprising since he made much of his fortune out of the privatisation of NZ’s telecommunications.

The Act Party is currently led by David Seymour who functions as a co-deputy prime minister in the government. He has worked almost his entire adult life within Atlas partner bodies in Canada and boasts a (micro) MBA dispensed by the Network.

In Seymour’s 2021 Waitangi Day speech, he acknowledged his “old friends at the Atlas Network.” In light of that, his recent disdainful and absolute dismissal of the party’s connection to Atlas in an interview was telling: he clearly felt the association was damaging enough to lie outright.

Seymour is also deeply antagonistic to policies dedicated to repairing the disadvantage suffered by Māori people, disingenuously describing provisions that work cooperatively with Māori people as the “dismantling of democracy.” He appears antagonistic to Māori culture.

Another Atlas partner that has been key to distorting debate in NZ is the Taxpayer Union (TPU) which is emblematic of the production of metastasising bodies central to the Atlas strategy. Its co-founder and executive director is another graduate of the Atlas (micro) MBA program. Jordan Williams (currently “capo di tutti capi” of the Atlas global alliance of anti-tax junktanks) laughably depicts Atlas as a benign “club of like-minded think tanks.” He created, however, a body called the Campaign Company which helped radicalise the established farmer power base in NZ politics, planting sponsored material in the media. Williams claimed to grant the farmers “world-class campaign tools and digital strategies.” He also co-founded the Free Speech Union (FSU), which is unsurprisingly fighting regulation of the damaging impact of internet disinformation as well as fostering culture war battles.

A further spin-off of the bodies illustrates the increasing ugliness of the populist strategies. A former Act Party MP has founded the New Zealand Centre for Political Research which is fomenting civic division against Māori interests, including placing hate-mongering advertisements in the media.

The Act Party (alongside the populist New Zealand First party) is at the heart of the coalition government’s intention to destroy NZ’s admirable efforts to promote Māori interests for the betterment of the commonwealth, including the co-governance innovation. Efforts to undo disadvantage and programs that have promoted the distinctive NZ democratic experiment are set to be dismantled. A “massive unravelling” of Māori rights is at stake.

It is not only Māori people who will suffer. The NZ coalition government is also attempting a kind of “shock therapy” that did so much to tip first Chile and then other “developing” nations into brutal pain in pursuit of market “freedom.” The MPS was at the heart of Pinochet’s neoliberal brutality, resulting from Nixon’s injunction to make the Chilean economy scream.[1] New Zealand now faces cuts to a range of services, welfare and disability payments, even while the new PM, one of NZ’s wealthiest ever holders of the role, charged the taxpayer NZD 52,000 to live in his own property. It’s important to remember that this kind of entitlement is the sort that the neoliberals like, alongside subsidies to industry and corporations.

Lord Hannan (one of Boris Johnson’s elevations to the peerage, and a junktank creature) recently spoke in NZ, welcoming “all the coalition partners around this table” to hear his oration. There he celebrated the small percentage of GDP that NZ’s government spends on its people, cheering on the TPU’s power. He also disdained the “tribalism” that has dictated recognition of First Peoples’ suffering. There is grand (but unsurprising) irony in a graduate of three of Britain’s preeminent educational institutions dictating that humanity’s essential equality is all that can be considered when devising policy, particularly in settler-colonial nations.

Amusingly the weightier debunking of the Atlas connections has come from: Chris Trotter, formerly centre left, now a council member of Williams’ FSU; Eric Crampton, chief economist of the New Zealand Initiative, NZ’s leading Atlas partner and Sean Plunkett whose “anti-woke” vanity media platform, Platform, is plutocrat funded and regularly platforms the NZI talking heads.

While Atlas’s system largely functions to connect and train operatives, as well as acting as an extension of American foreign policy, this modest-seeming program must not be ignored. We have a handful of years to achieve a monumental shift from fossil fuel towards renewable energy: Atlas partners aim to ensure this does not take place.

And Atlas partners will push us at each other’s throats while we procrastinate.

[1] That MPS intervention resulted in massive unemployment, extraordinary inequality, and fire-sale prices of national assets to cronies. Much of Chile’s later success is as likely to be attributable to the trade requirements of (statist) China whose demand for copper has done so much to enrich Chile.

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear power no silver bullet for net zero target

 https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/nuclear-power-no-silver-bullet-for-net-zero-target-20231229-p5eu7z.html DECEMBER 31, 2023

Thanks to Nick O’Malley and Mike Foley for their comprehensive review of the nuclear power “option” (“Net zero hero or big waste of time that we don’t have on our side?”, December 24). As they explain, nuclear power is too slow and too costly to help Australia meet its 2050 net zero target. As former chief scientist Alan Finkel said in June, “So when put together it’s not realistic, even if we wanted to, to have nuclear in Australia before about 2040, by which time I am quite confident we won’t need it.” The opposition is not strong on science but is better at art – the art of distraction. Ray Peck, Hawthorn

January 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment