Antinuclear

Australia’s technocratic drive to nuclear ignorance

The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.

ARENA, Sybilla George, 11 Dec 2024

Australia is ‘going nuclear’. The addition of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia’s defence arsenal through the $368 billion AUKUS deal passes a threshold of nuclear legitimisation that Oceania’s anti-nuclear activists have been battling for decades. Nuclearisation used to be an eco-ethical debate, as with the anti- vs pro-uranium mining battles since the 70s that have seen wins and losses on both sides. The rapid increase of Australia’s nuclear involvement, however, signals the reframing of national nuclear rhetoric as techno-scientific rationality that precludes dialogue and authorises executive ruling.

While the AUKUS deal plays out in the limelight, at RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory the building of facilities to host six United States B-52H Stratofortress bombers on rotational deployment, alongside ‘up to 75’ US Armed Force permanent staff, is underway. The facility renovations are funded through the Force Postures Initiative, the most recent phase of the Force Postures Agreement which since 2014 has defined the United States’s military agenda in Australia, with the consent of successive Australian governments. The Enhanced Air Cooperation branch of the US Alliance was recently ratified when Australian Defence provided ‘air-to-air refuelling’ to B-2 Spirit bombers involved in the US’s October strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.

More than half of the United States’s stock of 76 active B-52 bombers is capable of carrying and deploying nuclear weapons; the remainder is conventionally armed. These jets have been flying over Australian airspace for half a century; however, stationing them at RAAF Tindal signals a significant escalation in nuclear involvement, as it will produce for the first time the conditions ‘to support potential nuclear combat missions from Australian soil’, according to a Nautilus Institute Special Report published in August.

 This would be illegal under the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), an agreement on which Australia under Labor has abstained since 2022 when it rescinded the Coalition government’s ‘No’ vote. Signing and ratifying the treaty features as a goal in Labor’s 2023 National Platform. Yet progress seems unlikely, given Australia’s third abstention on the TPNW on 1 November 2024 and the persistent silence from the government on the United States’s policy to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ the presence of nuclear arms aboard aircraft or ships. Under this policy, Australia will not be informed whether B-52 bombers on deployment at RAAF Tindal are carrying nuclear weapons.

The public interest in the disclosure of the presence of nuclear weapons includes matters of security, ethics and democratic transparency. Of great concern is the Albanese government’s passive concession to a foreign state’s policy that conflicts with its own commitment to ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ of foreign activities conducted in Australia. Restricted speech has been increasingly utilised as a tactic to expedite pro-nuclear policy in the rush towards technological rationality.

 Another example is Albanese’s Nuclear Power Safety Bill, which was rammed through the Senate without debate in October 2024. It stipulates two dumping ‘zones’ for highly irradiated ‘spent nuclear fuel’, to be located within dozens of kilometres of Perth and Adelaide—Western and South Australia being selected once again to play host to nuclear, as during the United Kingdom’s nuclear testing campaign. Indeed, Defence recently withdrew its environmental approval application for developments to prepare HMAS Stirling to host nuclear-powered submarines, and The Australian has reported that the government will resubmit the application with an additional request for the rights to store irradiated waste materials at the facility, which would thus be ‘subject to a single round of community feedback’.

Deferral to the United States’s ‘neither confirm nor deny’ nuclear weapons policy is an appeal to ignorance, and thus innocence, which in turn forecloses systems of accountability, since governments’ denial of information renders their constituents ignorant. The current government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft stationed at RAAF Tindal eerily resembles Robert Menzies’ ‘extreme’ commitment to the United Kingdom’s ‘need to know’ policy during the nuclear testing campaign from 1952 to 1963. As prime minister, Menzies exclusively assented without consulting Cabinet or scientific advisers to the use of the Montebello Islands as the site of Operation Hurricane, the nuclear bomb detonation that cemented the United Kingdom as the world’s third nuclear power. The program was not announced until 1952, prior to which Menzies deliberately misled the media about plans for nuclear testing on Australian soil, claiming he had ‘heard nothing’ about it.

The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.

. The UK nuclear testing campaign caused massive human and ecological suffering to Aboriginal communities in Western and South Australia. It was not until the publication of the 1985 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, more than two decades after the final tests, that the extent of Australian government collusion was revealed, typified by Menzies’ ‘complete’ acceptance that Australia be entirely excluded from technical information about the tests. This submission to an allied foreign state enacts the technocratic power of nuclear, which pitches influence disproportionally towards those with technical knowledge and renders those without it mute and nakedly vulnerable to, in the case of nuclear arms, annihilation………………………………

The Albanese government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons aboard B-52s at RAAF Tindal regurgitates the United States’s policy so as to allow it to skirt its democratic responsibility to inform the public of potential nuclear escalation. Extensive control of messaging and media across the decade-long nuclear testing campaign by Menzies on behalf of the United Kingdom, particularly regarding its true health risks, denied Australians the opportunity to establish informed opinions on the tests. The drive to ignorance common to both Menzies’s and Albanese’s nuclear policy strategies has been achieved via the interiorisation of allied foreign states’ intelligence protocols. This techno-scientific rationale dangerously licences executives to accelerate nuclear proliferation beyond the forum of public debate to which it belongs, and into reality.  https://arena.org.au/australias-technocratic-drive-to-nuclear-ignorance/

February 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, spinbuster | Leave a comment

How anger at Australia’s rollout of renewables is being hijacked by a new pro-nuclear network

Facebook groups opposing renewables projects are now increasingly full of pro-nuclear content, and groups such as Nuclear for Australia have set up dedicated social media accounts targeting specific sections of the community – such as an Instagram account titled “Mums for Nuclear” – as they gear up for the election campaign.

Facebook groups opposing renewables projects are now increasingly full of pro-nuclear content, and groups such as Nuclear for Australia have set up dedicated social media accounts targeting specific sections of the community – such as an Instagram account titled “Mums for Nuclear” – as they gear up for the election campaign.

An alliance of political groups is harnessing real fears about the local impact of wind and solar farms – and using them to spruik nuclear power.

By Ariel Bogle and Graham Readfearn

The entrance is marked by an AI-generated image of a dead whale, floating among wind turbines. On the first floor of the East Maitland bowling club, dire warnings are being shared about how offshore wind may impact the Hunter region – alongside a feeling of not being consulted, of being steamrolled.

“Environment and energy forums” like this one in late November have been held up and down the east of Australia, aiming to build a resistance to the country’s renewable energy transition.

Today’s event is being cohosted by No Offshore Turbines Port Stephens (NOTPS) and the National Rational Energy Network (NREN), a group with informal National party links that was behind February’s Reckless Renewables rally in Canberra. The advocacy group Nuclear for Australia is also here.

“We’re not a political group,” the NOTPS secretary and a Port Stephens resident, Leonie Hamilton, tells Guardian Australia.

“We’re not there to push [politicians] into parliament, but we are going to listen to what they have to say.”

Hamilton says she’s undecided on the issue of nuclear power.

The coastline of the Hunter was declared a potential area for offshore wind in mid-2023 after “extensive community consultation”, according to the federal government. But some, such as NOTPS’ Ben Abbott, are still angry about a perceived lack of detail about the project.

Today’s forum is about raising awareness across the Hunter, Hamilton says. “We think it’s important it happens before the election, so that people understand what the costs are.

“[The coast] belongs to everyone and they should have the opportunity to understand what’s going on.”

There are local groups like NOTPS around Australia that want their broad concerns about the rollout of renewable energy to be heard but say they do not want to be used for a political agenda and do not advocate for particular energy sources.

But working alongside those groups is an increasingly coordinated alliance of conservative thinktanks, political lobby groups and politicians who are flatly opposed to the clean energy transition.

Fears about the environmental and social impact of renewables projects are finding purchase in an information gap critics say has been ceded by the government, the industry and environmental groups – and there are plenty of interested parties willing to step in.

An earlier NREN event in Sydney was sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Sandra Bourke, a cohost of the Maitland event, is an NREN member but also a spokesperson for the conservative lobby group Advance – which was a key player in the defeat of the Indigenous voice to parliament and is now fundraising on a “lies of renewables” campaign.

A Facebook account under Bourke’s name is present in almost 20 community Facebook groups and pages opposing renewable projects, from Kilkivan, Queensland, to Bunbury, Western Australia, regularly sharing Advance clips and links to Sky News.

The upcoming election is a “crossroads”, she tells the crowd, while declining an interview with Guardian Australia. There’s an Advance sign-up form on every seat.

Up the back of the room are “Where’s Meryl?” posters, referring to the Labor incumbent MP Meryl Swanson, who holds the local electorate of Paterson.

The Liberal candidate Laurence Antcliff is here, along with three men in T-shirts bearing his name. He tells the room he is opposed to the offshore wind project in Port Stephens and will “fight every single day” to ensure it does not go ahead.

Swanson, who has said “many, many meetings” were held with local groups about the proposal, was not invited.

The nuclear energy wedge

In June the Coalition announced it would lift the bans on nuclear energy if it won next year’s election, then build nine publicly owned reactors at sites around the country.

The announcement gave extra fodder to advocacy groups and conservative thinktanks that have long opposed the shift to renewables.

Last week the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, appeared in Port Stephens alongside Antcliff. “It’s in this community’s best interest that [the windfarm] project does not proceed,” he said, as he spruiked the alternative of nuclear power.

Facebook groups opposing renewables projects are now increasingly full of pro-nuclear content, and groups such as Nuclear for Australia have set up dedicated social media accounts targeting specific sections of the community – such as an Instagram account titled “Mums for Nuclear” – as they gear up for the election campaign.

A new report looking at the pro-nuclear information ecosystem, funded by the progressive campaign group GetUp, found a “likely-coordinated and sophisticated ecosystem” of thinktanks, not-for-profits and political operatives engaged in pro-nuclear messaging.

For these interests, the focus on nuclear energy is a chance to “present a solutions-based response to climate change, and divert attention from their pro-coal and gas positions”, the report concluded.

“Nuclear energy provides a wedge for the environmental movement, climate independents, the Labor party and Greens, because it stokes division and can bog them down in technical explanations of why nuclear is neither desirable nor viable in Australia.”

Ed Coper, who is the chief executive of the communications agency Populares and has worked on teal campaigns, says the volume of noisy opposition to renewables is disproportionate to community attitudes. Nevertheless, he predicts nuclear will be an effective election campaign wedge.

For parties opposed to the clean energy transition, this is an opportunity to “peel off” environmental support from renewables support. The message to this cohort is broadly that “renewable energy generation is ruining pristine farming land and is not a good use of land and destroys the habitats of protected species and pristine views”, he says.

“That gives [the Coalition] a whole new constituency. If Labor goes into the election assuming everyone is against nuclear energy, they’ll be in for a shock.

“Energy transition requires an enormous amount of social licence.”

Solar plans discovered by chance

About 200km north-east of Melbourne, John Conroy and his family have been producing beef in Bobinawarrah since the 1960s. In a neighbouring paddock are plans for the large Meadow Creek solar farm and battery – plans he discovered by chance in September 2022 after a visit from the electricity distribution company AusNet.

“We alerted the community,” he says. “The project had been in the process for 12 months before we even knew about it

He says the main concerns of the community surround fire risk – both from the project but also the liability of landholders if fires on their properties spread to the solar farm.

In April the Victorian government removed the rights of landholders to appeal against planning decisions made on renewables projects.

“That is a real slap in the face,” Conroy says. “We’re a community of working-class people, producing food, doing our best to keep footy clubs going, and then the government takes away your rights to have a say.”

The independent federal MP for Indi, Helen Haines, says questions about insurance liability “should have been answered long ago”.

“We should be having these conversations long before a project is up for a planning permit.”

Families like the Conroys in her electorate are spending hundreds of hours getting across technical details of projects and government rules. “It shouldn’t be that way,” she says.

Haines says communities are operating in a “vacuum” and she wants to see information hubs in regional centres where people can go for trusted information and support.

The MP, with Senator David Pocock, last year successfully pushed for a government review into the way communities were being asked to host major renewables projects.

More than 700 people attended 75 meetings, with the review making nine recommendations the government said it would implement in collaboration with the states.

Governments needed to allow only reputable developers to build projects, the review said, and zones should be identified to avoid projects targeting inappropriate land areas.

“There is pushback – this is real and the concerns that communities have are existential,” Haines says. “We have to stop trying to generate social licence after a decision has been made.”

Instead, she says, the transformation should be about regional development and making sure communities have genuine long-term benefits from any projects.

“I want to look back and see better roads, better healthcare and internet, better childcare services, and see that the renewable energy transformation helped us get there. But communities are just not seeing that.”

Locals want ‘some control and influence’

“The fundamental issue here is there’s an assumption that there is no time to properly talk to people and give them not just a tokenistic say, but give them some control and influence in managing their local environment,” says Georgina Woods, who has 25 years of climate change activism and advocacy behind her.

Woods is head of research and investigations at the campaign group Lock the Gate, an organisation that emerged from the unrest among farmers and landholders at the coal seam gas boom in Queensland in the 2000s.

Governments have failed to clearly articulate why the transformation is needed and the urgency of climate action, she says. “We are getting further away from a broad consensus on why these projects are being done in the first place.”

“Until we put people and landscapes and nature at the centre, we’re at risk of repeating the same mistakes with renewable energy that we made with mining.”

West of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales are the gently rolling hills of Oberon. Outside town are plans for a 250-turbine windfarm on pine plantations owned by the state government.

Chris Muldoon, a committee member of Oberon Against Wind Towers, says that would mean local landholders would miss out on any financial benefits of hosting turbines while the town would have to live with the sight of turbines almost 300 metres tall in an area known for its postcard aesthetic.

“They’re chasing the wind and the towers, but there’s no consideration of the economic or social impact,” says Muldoon, who manages Mayfield Garden in Oberon, a tourist attraction owned by the wealthy Sydney-based businessman Garrick Hawkins.

Hawkins has contributed to the campaign to block the windfarm, says Muldoon, as have many locals.

In September the group put up nine candidates for the Oberon council elections, with two elected. Their pitch was uncompromising. “Oberon First are the only candidates who have committed to slamming the door in the face of greedy, arrogant wind tower developers,” the group said.

Oberon has a lot of hobby farmers and second homes for people in Sydney, says Muldoon, which means they have “city skills” that have mobilised against the development, something other communities do not have.

The group is not against windfarms or renewable energy, insists Muldoon, but “you just need to make less invasive decisions about the rollout”.

He points to people living in renewable energy zones, where surveys have shown broad support among farmers for renewables projects.

Outside those areas, he says, projects often come as a surprise to communities that are ill-prepared to navigate the technicalities of dealing with planning regulations, or wading through environmental impact statements “that can be 1,000 pages long”.

“Outside the renewable energy zones, the framework isn’t working,” he says. “It’s the wild west.”

Oberon is in the federal electorate of Calare, where the independent Kate Hook is trying to unseat Andrew Gee, who quit the Nationals to sit on the crossbench in 2022 over the party’s opposition to an Indigenous voice to parliament.

Hook left her job in September working for a not-for-profit to help communities negotiate with governments and renewable energy companies to get the most benefit from projects.

She says the “missing piece” causing communities to push back is a lack of understanding of why the transition away from fossil fuels is needed and how it could benefit them.

“People shouldn’t have to rely on Google, but this is why people are anxious,” she says. “There’s a tsunami of misinformation.”

“People might not like the look of windfarms, but do they want farmers to be able to stay on their land? Because these projects can help them do that.

“What we need is discussion, not division.”

A spokesperson for the climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the government was “working with local communities to secure regional jobs and provide energy security”.

“Unfortunately, the former Coalition government spent 10 years failing to make the necessary reforms to improve community engagement in a rapidly changing energy market,” she said.

The government was implementing the community engagement review “to enhance community support and ensure that electricity transmission and renewable energy developments deliver for communities, landholders and traditional owners”.

December 11, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, spinbuster | Leave a comment