NuScale Power the canary in the small modular nuclear reactor market
SMRs are being marketed as a solution to the climate crisis, but they’re already far more expensive and take much longer to build than renewable and storage resources – that we already have.
Utility Dive, David Schlissel, 21 Mar 23, Davis Schlissel is the Institute for Energy Economics anf Financial Analysis director of resource planning analysis.
NuScale is hoping to be among the first of about a dozen companies trying to take advantage of the much-hyped market for small modular nuclear reactors or SMR. So far, however, the Oregon-based company is looking like the first canary in the coal-mine.
Considered a leader in the new technology, NuScale is marketing its SMR project by claiming that the reactor design project will save time and money – persistent problems for traditional large nuclear plants.
But NuScale and the Utah Municipal Power Systems, its partner in an SMR project planned for Idaho, announced early in January, that the target price for the power from their proposed modular reactor had risen by 53% from $58/MWh to $89/MWh……..
The announcement has serious implications for all would-be SMR manufacturers………………
the new $89/MWh target price already means that power from the NuScale SMR will be much more expensive than renewable and storage resources even with an estimated $4.2 billion in tax-payer subsidies.
……………………………….. The gap is only going to get larger as the costs of building SMRs rise and costs of renewables and storage continue to decline.
………….. Using SMRs as backups for renewables will not be financially feasible
………………………………….evryone – utilities, ratepayers, legislators, federal officials and the general public, should be very sceptical about theindustry’s current claim that the new SMRs will cost less and be built faster than previous designs. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-power-small-modular-reactor-smr-ieefa-uamps/645554/
European Tiny Modular Reactor Deal Starts With Absurdly Expensive Electricity
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks.
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
By Michael Barnard, 25 Mar 23, https://cleantechnica.com/2023/03/23/european-tiny-modular-reactor-deal-starts-with-absurdly-expensive-electricity/
Supposedly a European energy deal has been reached in which a US firm sells a bunch of tiny nuclear reactors to European countries at an enormous price per GW. It’s hard to think that anybody would ink the deal as described.
It was a Bloomberg piece, and Bloomberg normally gets the facts right, although Bloomberg New Energy Finance gets the framing right far more often. And a bit of evaluation seems to confirm the basics. So let’s tear it apart.
Let’s start with small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). The premise is that they will be a lot cheaper than big nuclear reactors because, you know, modularity. Anything you can manufacture in large numbers drops in price, typically by 20% to 27% for every doubling of units. That’s a truism known as Wright’s Law after the first management consultant who observed it, the experience curve per Boston Consulting Group which happily stole and rebranded it or just the learning curve.
There are a bunch of problems with this premise when it comes to nuclear electricity generation. I’ve written about them, had my content peer-reviewed and included in text books, and debated them with nuclear industry proponents for audiences of a couple of hundred institutional investors likely representing funds worth close to a trillion, so I’m just going to quote myself:
Small modular reactors won’t achieve economies of manufacturing scale, won’t be faster to construct, forego efficiency of vertical scaling, won’t be cheaper, aren’t suitable for remote or brownfield coal sites, still face very large security costs, will still be costly and slow to decommission, and still require liability insurance caps. They don’t solve any of the problems that they purport to while intentionally choosing to be less efficient than they could be. They’ve existed since the 1950s and they aren’t any better now than they were then.
As I discussed with Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, megaprojects expert and author of How Big Things Get Done recently, small modular reactor firms are trying to hunt for an optimized point on the continuum between the efficiencies of big thermal generation and modularity, and I don’t think they are going to find it.
And that’s really true for Last Energy if this reporting is remotely accurate. So what’s the story? Well, apparently they’ve signed a $19 billion deal to supply 34 nuclear reactors that are 20 MW each. Apparently they are going to at least Poland and the UK, although regulatory approval stands in their way.
The first thing that caught my eye was the MW capacity. 34 reactors of 20 MW each only adds up to 680 MW of nameplate capacity. That’s smaller than a billion dollar offshore wind farm that takes ten months to build.
Side note: Nuclear nameplate capacities are usually reported with units of MWe, or megawatts of electricity. That’s because their thermal energy output is perhaps three times the size, but meaningless, as all we care about is the electricity. I just stick with MW usually because the best comparison is to wind and solar which don’t create and waste a lot of heat. However, at 20 MWe, the tininess of the reactor and related thermal generation suggests that the efficiency of turning heat into electricity is probably much worse. That’s the point about thermal generation liking to scale and why everyone building nuclear went bigger in the 1970s and 1980s so that it wouldn’t be as expensive.
So, 20 MW. Is that accurate? I went to their public website, and sure enough, that’s the size. It’s their only claimed product, although they have built and delivered none of them anywhere.
The second thing that caught my attention was the eye-watering price tag, $19 billion. That seems really high even for nuclear, and especially high for only 680 MW.
Maybe this would be reasonable if nuclear normally had capacity factors of 20%, and this tech was operating at 90%, but nuclear globally runs about 90% of the time. It has high uptime, which proponents overstate as an advantage, but is the reality. You can’t actually operate nuclear less than 90% of the time and have it be reasonably priced due to the cost of building the stuff.
How does this compare? Let’s pick the British Hinkley Point C nuclear expansion, one of the most expensive and slowest in the developed world. It is so expensive that the developers demanded and got about $150 per MWh wholesale guaranteed for 35 years with inflation bumps. This when offshore wind energy is running around $50 per MWh wholesale and onshore wind and solar are running around $30 per MWh wholesale. Yeah, Hinkley is absurdly expensive electricity.
Let’s take a walk through memory lane. Hinkley was supposed to deliver electricity for about $24 per MWh when it was originally proposed in 2008, and be in operation by now. Five times the cost per MWh accounting for inflation, so a clear miss. And the current plan is pretending that in 2027 it’s going to be grid-connected, but that’s undoubtedly 2028 at earliest, 20 years after it was originally set in motion, and 11 years after start of construction. So far, so nuclear.
Hinkley’s current cost projection — five years from grid connection, so incredibly likely to rise by billions — is about $40 billion. That’s a lot of amortization per MWh, hence the remarkably high wholesale price. As a reminder, Iceland, which runs 100% on renewables, is delivering consumer retail prices lower than this wholesale price. All of Canada is providing consumer rates below this wholesale cost, although recent news makes it clear that nuclear heavy Ontario are subsidizing consumer rates by US$4.4 billion annually to prevent revolt. Hmmm, is this a trend?
Surely Hinkley must be turning out to be more expensive than this SMR deal? Well, no. Hinkley is building two big, complex, next-generation EPR reactors with 1,630 MW capacity each. That’s 3,260 MW total capacity. That’s almost five times the capacity of the Last Energy SMRs. For only two times the cost.
The ratio is pretty clear. These SMRs will be about 2.4 times the cost per MWh of the very expensive Hinkley facility. All else being equal — and the only reason we have to think this won’t be equal is that nuclear costs always rise, so the $19 billion is likely to be closer to $40 billion — this is already about $360 per MWh wholesale prices for electricity.
What’s the consumer retail price of electricity in the UK? About $340. What about coal heavy Poland? $181.
Yes, the very first announcement of a nuclear deal, probably well over a decade before anything might be connected to the grid, has wholesale rates well over consumer retail rates today.
On original – image of project categories which meet time, budget, and benefits expectations vs ones that don’t, from How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner -(nuclear is the worst!)
This is the first version of new material from Flyvbjerg and his team. They have assembled over 16,000 megaprojects’ worth of data on budget, schedule, and asserted benefits vs actuals over 25 categories of projects. This is a view by likelihood of cost overruns. The top of the chart has the least likely categories to go over budget once the shovel hits the ground. The bottom has the categories most likely to go over budget, often by multiples of the original projections. You’ll note where nuclear lies.
SMRs are attempting to fix that by making a bunch of smaller, repeatable reactors instead of big ones. As I pointed out earlier, they are foregoing the efficiencies of being big enough to receive the benefits of physics for thermal generation in order to hunt for a point where modularity optimizes costs and risks sufficiently to make it economically viable.
However, at 2.4 times the cost per MWh of one of the most expensive nuclear generation projects on the planet, clearly they are nowhere near the field, never mind anywhere near the goal. As Flyvbjerg points out several times, first of a kind projects have massive long-talked risks, and Last Energy’s announcement has first of a kind in big neon screaming signage over every part of the deal.
Already 2.4 times as expensive as very, very expensive Hinkley. First of a kind, so very likely to double or more in price. Very unlikely to be built before 2040 due to long-tailed risks. Who exactly signed a deal like this, and why?
UPDATE:
Comments from Lyle Morton, Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Last Energy: Reaching out to clarify an important detail regarding the Last Energy announcement. The $19bn is not a cost figure but the total value of the electricity under contract over the duration of the 4 contracts — which range from 20-24 years.
My take: That’s still a ridiculous $160-$170 per MWh wholesale by the initial terms of the deals before all of the inevitable problems with first of a kind deployments. Even at $160-$170, I’ll believe this only when I see it in operation, at the price point specified, and delivering benefits as promised. I won’t be holding my breath.
Burning down the house — Climate options are available now. Nuclear power isn’t one of them
Our climate needs a fire hose. Our government is bringing buckets
Burning down the house — Beyond Nuclear International
Climate options are available now. Nuclear power isn’t one of them
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In 2019 at the Davos World Economic Forum, youth climate leader, Greta Thunberg, then only 16, warned the audience in a quiet and measured voice that addressing the climate crisis involved a solution “so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases.”
In closing, she said: “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.”
On March 12, 2023, the Biden administration announced that it had approved oil and gas drilling in Arctic Alaska, retaining the United States’s vaunted position, alongside China and India, as one of the world’s leading arsonists.
As the UK daily, The Guardian reported of that decision: “The ConocoPhillips Willow project will be one of the largest of its kind on US soil, involving drilling for oil and gas at three sites for multiple decades on the 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve which is owned by the federal government and is the largest tract of undisturbed public land in the US.”
The US government’s lame excuse for approving the drilling project was that it had few legal options, given Conoco-Phillips holds lease rites to the land dating back decades.
So sue. The house is on fire. Tying the project up in the law courts would have bought us time. Green-lighting new oil and gas drilling is tone deafness to a crisis that has gone beyond the tipping point.
This was confirmed, yet again, days later, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023, the final part of its mammoth Sixth Assessment Report. It came replete with even more dire warnings than in previous AR6 reports, which should already have been panic-inducing enough for the world to wake up and understand that we cannot drill for a single more drop of oil. Ever. Period.
This time, the scientists who co-authored the AR6 Synthesis Report called it their “final warning.” However, in their press release announcing the report, the authors tried to take the high road, insisting that “There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now”.
None of those options includes nuclear power, according to the IPCC scientists, which never mentions ‘nuclear’ once in the report narrative. It appears only in a single graph (below on original)) to illustrate its lack of applicability to addressing the climate crisis…………………………………………..
IPCC Chair, Hoesung Lee, said: “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”
If we act now. Like we didn’t after Thunberg’s words of warning in 2019. Like the Biden administration didn’t last week. What’s left is the largely empty rhetoric of hope, but no signs of panic.
This lack of urgency is compounded by a failure in the media to put the climate emergency on the front page with regularity. The given reason is that it’s not what their readers are interested in, a complete abdication of responsibility to inform, educate, and in the case of the climate crisis, to inflame passion and a demand for action. And there is also, in the US at least, and as we wrote last week, a lamentable adherence to an outdated formula that relegates the voices of right and reason to the back of the quote queue.
This was no better (or should that be worse) exemplified than by the two days of coverage about the Alaskan Willow project in The Washington Post, which never once in either story quoted anyone from the Indigenous Alaskan population bitterly opposed to the drilling.
…………………………………………………… we still aren’t seeing the outrage where it really matters. We are still confronting deniers. And our governments are not taking the climate crisis nearly seriously enough. Instead of rushing for the fire hoses, they are bringing buckets.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/03/26/burning-down-the-house/
Where the $1.3 Trillion Per Year U.S. Military Budget Goes
The Duran, by Eric Zuesse, March 24, 2023
Nobody can give a precise dollar-number to U.S. ‘Defense’ spending because the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department has never been able to pass an audit, and is by far the most corrupt of all federal Departments (and is the ONLY Department that has never passed an audit), and also because much of America’s military spending is being paid out from other federal Departments in order to keep down the published annual U.S. Government ‘Defense’ expenditure numbers (which come from ONLY the “U.S. ‘Defense’ Department).
Those are expenditures for America’s privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)
According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.
Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.
Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.” ………………………………
If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results………………………………………………………………………………………………
The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest………………………………………………….. more https://theduran.com/where-the-1-3-trillion-per-year-u-s-military-budget-goes/
Australia has just lost its best energy minister, lets hope Labor doesn’t trash his legacy — RenewEconomy
Updated: The NSW Coalition loss means Australia’s best performing energy minister is no longer running the show. What does that mean for the state’s transition from coal? The post Australia has just lost its best energy minister, lets hope Labor doesn’t trash his legacy appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Australia has just lost its best energy minister, lets hope Labor doesn’t trash his legacy — RenewEconomy
Declassified Video Shows How B-52 Crews Would Conduct Nuclear Strikes During Cold War
The Aviationist March 26, 2023 STEFANO D’URSO
A 1960 Strategic Air Command training video familiarized B-52 crews with the devastating effects of nuclear weapons and how to navigate through a nuclear battlefield.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently declassified some very interesting training films and film reports that the Strategic Air Command prepared in the 1960s to prepare bomber pilots and crews for a potential nuclear war. Among these there is the United States Air Force Training Film 5363, “Nuclear Effects During SAC Delivery Missions,” made in 1960 and which kept its secret classification until now.
The purpose of Training Film 5363 was to familiarize SAC pilots and crew members with the devastating effects of nuclear weapons detonations and the detailed plans that were developed so the crews could evade the dangers of a nuclear battlefield and return home after completing their mission. These plans were among the contents of the “Combat Mission Folders,” which included guidance needed to reach targets and return to base safely and were assigned to each nuclear-armed bomber on alert duty.
…………………… The film begins with a B-52 flying a sortie of the Emergency War Order, launched under Positive Control and on its way to the “go/no-go” position, but without the crew knowing if this is a real mission or an exercise until they get there. Before eventually going in, however, the narrator explains that, while they know that the mission can be successfully accomplished as it was carefully planned and reviewed by highly qualified combat planners and they flew countless profile missions, they need to know the nuclear effects of a detonation.
The narrator then takes the viewers trough the basics of a nuclear detonation’s thermal, blast and radiation effects and the efforts that the U.S. Air Force had taken to prepare the crews for situations where they might experience them. In fact, the central part of the film covers the effects of nuclear explosions of both aircraft and crew and the measures taken to minimize crew exposure, like carefully planned routes that created a safe distance between the bomber and the detonation of their weapon and the detonations caused by other SAC bombers operating in the same area.
The film then returns to the B-52 approaching the turnaround point, when then a radio message from SAC comes in: “Sky King. Sky King. This is Migrate. This is Migrate. Do not answer. Break. Break. Alpha Sierra Foxtrot Juliet Oscar Papa Mike Tango. Break. Go-Code.” The crew scrambles to verify the code and discover that this is the go code for a real mission: “Pilot to crew. We checked the go code and verified it. This is it. We’re going in”.
After a very brief moment of disbelief, the crew members get down to business and prepare the aircraft for the nuclear strike mission as they are about to cross the H-Hour Control Line on the way to their assigned target in the Soviet Union. As they navigate towards the target, the crew experience the shockwave from another nuclear bomb dropped in the vicinity of their route, before a low-altitude flight over lakes, mountains, forests and fields to avoid Soviet air defense missiles…………………………………………………. more https://theaviationist.com/2023/03/26/declassified-video-shows-how-b-52-crews-would-conduct-cold-war-nuclear-strikes/
March 26 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “We Won’t Act On Climate Change Until Our Comfortable Lives Are Threatened – And That Day Is Coming” • The IPCC’s latest climate report stopped some of us in our tracks because there are many warnings about our heating planet and escalating climate breakdown, and each new one is a reminder that we’re […]
March 26 Energy News — geoharvey
AUKUS, the Australian Labor Party, and Growing Dissent
the Royal Australian Navy would be far better off acquiring between 40 to 50 of the Collins Class submarines to police the coastline rather than having nuclear powered submarines lying in wait off the Chinese shoreline.
March 25, 2023, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark https://theaimn.com/aukus-the-australian-labor-party-and-growing-dissent/
It was a sight to behold and took the wind out of the bellicose sails of the AUKUS cheer squad. Here, at the National Press Club in the Australian capital, was a Labor luminary, former Prime Minister of Australia and statesman, keen to weigh in with characteristic sharpness and dripping venom. Paul Keating’s target: the militaristic lunacy that has characterised Australia’s participation in the US-led security pact that promises hellish returns and pangs of insecurity.
In his March 15 address to a Canberra press gallery bewitched by the magic of nuclear-propelled submarines and the China bogeyman, Keating was unsparing about those “seriously unwise ministers in government” – notably Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles, unimpressed by their foolish, uncritical embrace of the US war machine. “The Albanese Government’s complicity in joining with Britain and the United States in a tripartite build of a nuclear submarine for Australia under the AUKUS arrangements represents the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War One.”
In terms of history, this was chilling to Keating. The AUKUS security pact represented a longing gaze back at the Mother Country, Britain, “shunning security in Asia for security in and within the Anglosphere.” It also meant a locking alliance with the United States for the next half-century as a subordinate in a containment strategy of Beijing. This was a bi-partisan approach to foreign policy that saw the US dominating East Asia as “the primary strategic power” rather than a balancing one.
For Keating, the impetus for such madness came from a defence establishment that dazzled the previous Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. That effort, he argues, was spearheaded by the likes of the US-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Andrew Shearer of the Office of National Intelligence. They even, he argues, managed to convince PM Albanese, Marles and Wong to abandon the 20-month review period on the scope of what they were seeking.
The steamrolling Keating was also unsparing in attacking a number of journalists for their ditzy, adolescent belligerence. The sword, once produced, was never sheathed. Peter Hartcher, most notably, received a generous pasting as a war infatuated lunatic whose anti-China campaign at the Fairfax presses had been allowed for years.
In terms of the submarines themselves, Keating also expressed the view that the Royal Australian Navy would be far better off acquiring between 40 to 50 of the Collins Class submarines to police the coastline rather than having nuclear powered submarines lying in wait off the Chinese shoreline.
As we all should know, submarine policy is where imagination goes to expire, often in frightful, costly ways. For all Keating’s admiration for the Collins Class, it was a nightmarish project marred by fiascos, poor planning and organisational dysfunction within the defence establishment. At stages, two-thirds of the Australian fleet of six submarines was unable to operate at full capacity. The lesson here is that submarines and the Australian naval complex simply do not mix.
The reaction from the Establishment was one of predictable dismissal, denial and distortion, typical of what Gore Vidal would have called deranged machismo. Instead of being critical of the powers that are, they have turned their guns and wallets on spectres, ghosts and devilish images. The tragedy looms, and it will be, like many tragedies, the result of colossal, unforgivable stupidity.
At the very least, the intervention by Keating, notably in the Labor Party, has not gone unnoticed. Within the Labor caucus, tremors of dissatisfaction are being recorded, breaches growing. West Australian Labor backbencher Josh Wilson defied his own party’s dictates by telling colleagues in the House of Representatives how he was “not yet convinced that we can adequately deal with the non-proliferation risks involved in what is a novel arrangement, by which a non-nuclear weapons state under the NPT (Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty) comes to acquire weapons-grade material.”
Wilson’s views are not outlandish to the man. He is keen to challenge the notion of unaccountable executive war powers, a problem that looms large in the Westminster system. “To assume that such decision-making is already perfect, immutable, and beyond scrutiny,” he wrote in December last year, “puts Australia at risk of making the most dangerous judgments without the best institutional framework for doing so.”
A gaggle of former senior Labor ministers have also emerged, even if they initially proved sluggish. Peter Garrett, former environment minister and front man of Midnight Oil, while proving a bit squeamish about Keating’s invective, found himself in general agreement. “The deal stinks with massive cost, loss of independence, weaking nuke safeguards & more.”
Kim Carr, who had previously held ministerial positions in industry and defence materiel, revealed that the matter of AUKUS had never been formally approved in the Federal Labor caucus, merely noted. Various “key” Labor figures – again Marles and Wong – agreed to endorse the proposition put forth to them on September 15, 2021 by the then Coalition government.
He also expressed deep concern “about a revival of a forward defence policy, given our performance in Vietnam.” For Carr, the shadow cast by the Iraq War was long. “Given it’s 20 years since Iraq, you can hardly say our security agencies should not be questioned when they provide their assessments.”
For former foreign minister, Gareth Evans, there were three questions: whether the submarines are actually fit for purpose; whether Australia retained genuine sovereignty over them in their use; and, were that not the case, “whether that loss of agency is a price worth paying for the US security insurance we think we might be buying.”
Will these voices make a difference? They just might – but if so, Australia will have to thank that political pugilist and Labor veteran who, for all his faults, spoke in terms that will be considered, in a matter of years, treasonous by the Empire and its sycophants.
“Collaborative” bases, and the ideology of AUKUS
What we need now under either the optimist or the more realistic pessimistic view is a massive campaign, a campaign that starts today against the background of this terrible shock, this awful sense of betrayal.
Pearls and Irritations, By Richard Tanter, Mar 24, 2023“……………………………………………. The Minister for Defence in the Albanese government made a ministerial statement last month, in which he talked about the joint facilities. But he also introduced a new category of bases under the US-Australia Force Posture Initiative that the previous Rudd-Gillard-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison alliance supporting government had not thought of – collaborative bases.
Collaborative – an interesting word in its double meaning, isn’t it.
At the moment we don’t know how many Agreed Locations and Facilities there are on this list of collaborative bases identified in a secret part of the Force Posture Agreement – the bases given over by Australia to the US to be under varying degrees of US operational control. The most recent example is RAAF Tindal thanks to Scott Morrison, and we are going to see a lot more of that.
And the last part of nuclear permissiveness is the atmosphere that fills the room in Canberra when you listen to certain senior officials, compliant academics, and insider journalists talk about nuclear weapons for Australia.
In the past few years we have already had three former deputy secretaries of defence – the people who do the planning – saying in public it’s time for us to reconsider the decisions taken by the Fraser and Whitlam governments half a century ago to stop our development of nuclear weapons.
It’s time, they say, to think again about Australian nuclear weapons.
No, they say, we’re not advocating nuclear weapons for Australia, we just need to think about it.
But in the context of half a century of nuclear restraint, of full knowledge of what the possession of nuclear weapons will mean in our region, or what the actual effects of nuclear weapons use will mean in human and environmental terms, ‘just considering’ nuclear weapons acquisition means clearly much more than that.
The ideology of AUKUS
Ideology’s a funny word. Usually it’s used about other people. Like bad breath, ideology is something that afflicts the other guy, not us. Well, that’s nonsense. We all suffer from ideological thinking at certain times.
Ideology is that category of thinking that actually stops thought, which by its emotional logic takes means you don’t have to think about what’s actually being said.
In the ideological nonsense in The Age’s ‘Red Alert’ we saw a kind of triple equation, born of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and American plans to take the opportunity to reshape its alliances.
Russia = China – we don’t need to think about that, do we – they’re autocracies, and we’re not.
Putin = Xi. I’m happy to see that President Putin is to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of his invasion of Ukraine. President Xi is not a particularly nice man, but a long way from Putin’s desperate criminality.
Ukraine = Taiwan. Putin invaded Ukraine, so Xi must be about to invade Taiwan – without any serious evidence, and in contrast to the behaviour of China since 1949.
This is the kind of talk that disables critical thinking. None of that makes any sense of the biggest historical defence spend we’ve ever seen, and nothing to say what will happen over the next forty years.
I think that China has some problems. If I lived in Tibet or Xinjiang I would be extremely concerned about what is happening to most of the people in those provinces of China in a deeply repressive kind of way.
If I lived in Vietnam I would know from a thousand years of history there’s a lot of pushing and shoving between China and its neighbours.
But the Vietnamese are still there – they have survived on their own resources.
I would be very concerned about some of the ways China treats its own citizens.
I would not like the concrete islands that China has made – and militarised – in the South China Sea.
True, China now has its first overseas base, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa – a little one across the bay from giant American and French bases of longstanding.
There may be, may be, some kind of PLA naval access to a port in the Solomon Islands, largely, if it eventuates, because of the arrogance with which Australia has treated the Pacific Islands for decades – ‘family’ when we wanted; shoved into the outhouse of history when we don’t care.
I don’t know. That might happen. That would mean, oh dear, they will have two overseas bases – just 798 or so to go before they equal the Americans.
We need a country-agnostic policy of opposing all foreign bases in our neighbourhood – all.
I think Australia needs to be a little more careful and self-reflective about the way in which it talks about some of these undoubted sins of China.
We know something about islands that have been taken over for military purposes.
The forced removal of the people of the Chagos Islands so the US could build Diego Garcia – a British crime even recognised in the World Court.
Guam, an unvarnished American military colony since the end of the Second World War.
We know that China has bullied countries whose policies it doesn’t like with economic coercion – including Australia. We might, though, remember the seven decades of crushing US sanctions against Cuba – for the crime of defeating American plans. And now, again, the people of Afghanistan facing punishing sanctions for the crime of winning a war against the US.
We just need to be a little more honest and self-critical about this.
What China is doing in Xinjiang and Tibet is pretty recognisable as settler-colonialism with an overlay of ghastly pre-emptive counter-terrorism.
We know a bit about that sort of thing here.
And it doesn’t matter how we weigh the balances of these sins, whether we think any of these are equal or not.
But the important thing is that this must not stand.
I heard Lenore Taylor, the excellent editor of The Guardian Australia talking in a podcast the other day in an interesting way about a small sense of optimism buried in the Albanese proposal.
Taylor pointed out, and other people have noted the same thing, that in terms of the finances, the only thing that has been agreed to by the Albanese government concerns the forward estimates, the four year commitment from the budget in May.
The forward estimates, Taylor reminded us, amount to about $9 bn over those four years – probably mostly as an industrial subsidy to expand the US submarine-building yards.
Now, to you and me, $9 bn is a lot of money, but to the Defence Department, I suspect they waste something like that every month with costs overruns, white elephants, and renegotiating contracts when they change their minds.
This optimistic view suggests that the Albanese government, wedged by Morrison’s brilliant stroke of madness, has done the only thing it could do – gone along verbally, and got itself as much wiggle room as possible by pushing the serious spending out for years.
Events, they may be hoping, will save them from going through with the whole plan.
And on that they may not be wrong. The AUKUS scheme is so poorly conceived, so grandiosely conceived, so incalculably expensive, and so contingent on so many highly risky contingencies that it is very likely to go badly wrong.
So, they have, on this view, left themselves a back door out of the trap.
May be. Maybe not.
But the US has a long history of keeping recalcitrant junior partners in line, and Australian political, academic and media life does not lack for alliance supporters and enforcers who will keep a foot on that back door to keep it shut.
But it doesn’t matter, whichever view is right.
What we need now under either the optimist or the more realistic pessimistic view is a massive campaign, a campaign that starts today against the background of this terrible shock, this awful sense of betrayal.
A campaign which is made up diverse community-based groups, which has branches in suburbs and branches in country towns, broadly based with all sorts of elements and streams of opinion about peace.
Making the argument very clearly, based on experience, that the only times we have known Labor governments to stand up to the will of the United States have been on the back of huge long-running popular campaigns.
The first, now a long way back, was in the days of the Vietnam War, when Gough Whitlam became prime minister in 1972, and immediately responded to that high public pressure by ending our war in Vietnam, and of course, conscription of 19 year-olds for that purpose.
That only happened because of the pressure.
And the second was in the early 1980s when the Reagan administration, the most extreme rightwing administration since the early 1950s was pressuring Australia to take a greater role in the war against the then current demon, the Soviet Union.
It was again public pressure that forced the Hawke government to back down – in this city the role of the coalition of groups around People for Nuclear Disarmament and similar groups across the country – and then the electoral success of Nuclear Disarmament Party in the 1984 federal election.
We need that pressure – whether there is in fact a back door way out of this or not, there has to be huge public pressure on the Albanese Labor government.
Every time a Labor member of parliament or senator puts foot outside their office to appear in public, turns up at a public meeting, we need to ask them why have you betrayed us. Why have you allowed this to happen? What are you going to do?
We have to make it personal and objectionable and we have to make a whole lot of noise.
This must not stand.
Thank you. https://johnmenadue.com/these-are-the-horrors-of-aukus/
Lethal underwater nuclear submarines -their power to devastate the climate
Insanity: governments betray what climate science demands, Pearls and Irritations, By Andrew Glikson, Mar 25, 2023
Nowadays the last thing governments and major parties are following is what climate science requires, the single most critical factor society has ever faced…………………………………………………………………….
………………………………….another factor triggering major climate change: With the proliferation of nuclear weapons world-wide a combination of greenhouse and nuclear-induced climate changes have become increasingly likely. Armed with up to 40 nuclear Tomahawk Cruise missiles equipped with multiple warheads the Virginia class submarines constitute a lethal nuclear war platform whereby the arsenal of a single submarine can potentially annihilate major industrial centres and large population concentrations of an adversary. The firing of these missiles and retaliation from the surviving nuclear forces of the opponent virtually guarantee a global nuclear conflagration, including clouding of the atmosphere and obliteration of agriculture on a time scale of up to decades.
There were times when prophets promised the people peace on Earth, now the powers-to-be and their media mouthpieces are promising the world a nuclear holocaust between the rival empires in three years to come. Previous wars often erupted from territorial, economic, political, religious or ideological disputes, now the US vs China + Russia conflict is taking place between essentially private enterprise systems, repeating “sapiens’” insane obsession with war for the sake of war.
A nuclear war would terminate such insanity. Is it too late to hold pre-emptive Nuremberg trial for those who poison the planetary atmosphere and promote nuclear war? https://johnmenadue.com/the-faustian-bargain-how-governments-betray-what-climate-science-demands/
Macron’s nuclear power plan hits trouble
In a POLITICO interview, Luxembourg’s leader Xavier Bettel slams French push to include nuclear energy in EU’s green tech plan.
BY SUZANNE LYNCH AND JAKOB HANKE VELA, MARCH 22, 2023
French President Emmanuel Macron is facing an uphill battle to persuade EU leaders to designate nuclear energy as a key green technology of the future, after one of his allies blasted his plan on the eve of a summit in Brussels.
Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel told POLITICO in an interview that while it is up to individual countries to choose their own energy mix, nuclear power must not benefit from an official “European label” that would give the vital French industry a boost.
Bettel’s criticism risks reinforcing divisions between Macron and his fellow leaders as they meet in Brussels to discuss the green tech plans at the European Council summit starting Thursday.
“Nuclear is neither sustainable, nor safe, nor fast,” Bettel said in an interview. “Some people think they are selling nuclear power as the answer to everything,” he continued, but pointed out that it can take at least 10 years for a plant to be operational.
“Secondly, we have had incidents at the international level which are worrying and which have had catastrophic repercussions for many other countries. And thirdly, we still have a problem with nuclear waste. We still don’t know how to deal with it, so we can’t say that it is safe and sustainable.”
France’s energy diet is dominated by nuclear power and Macron’s government has been lobbying Brussels to include nuclear energy in the EU’s Net Zero Industry Act — a package of plans unveiled last week by the European Commission.
The proposals in the act would allow “strategic net-zero” projects to qualify for a fast-track permitting process and smoother access to funding, part of the effort by Brussels to jump-start the transition away from fossil fuels to greener forms of energy.
Bettel said it’s up to each national government to decide its own energy mix, but argued that nuclear power should not be seen as good for the environment. “Everyone can do what they want,” he said. “But for me, the European label on nuclear energy — it would be in fact wrong to call it a green energy, or safe, or renewable.”
As POLITICO previously reported, in recent days France has not only lobbied to include nuclear energy in the EU’s Net Zero Industry Act, but it is also making a renewed push to give nuclear-based hydrogen a bigger role in meeting EU renewable energy goal,
Several diplomats said they expect the issue of nuclear to be discussed by leaders during Thursday and Friday’s summit. In particular, France — as well as countries like the Czech Republic — have been pushing for the phrase “technological neutrality” to be included in the language of the summit conclusions, which will be signed off on by leaders in Brussels. That would represent an oblique acknowledgment that all forms of energy, including nuclear, could form part of the EU’s green tech plan.
NATO sending depleted uranium shells to Ukrainian military in major escalation
LeoHohmann.com 24 Mar 23
Scottish Baroness Annabel Goldie, a conservative deputy minister of defense in the government of the United Kingdom, has confirmed that the U.K. will be sending depleted uranium shells to the Ukrainian military for use against Russian forces.
In response to a parliamentary crossbench question from Lord Hylton on March 20, Goldie stated:
“Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armor-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles.”
Depleted uranium is highly toxic to humans, leading to cancers, birth defects and other horrific outcomes. According to the journal Scientific American:
“Used as ammunition, it penetrates the thick steel encasing enemy tanks; used as armor, it protects troops against attack. And when it was used in the Gulf War and later during the Allied bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo, depleted uranium (DU) was hailed as the new silver bullet that would solve most of the military’s problems. After the end of Operation Allied Force, however, several Italian soldiers were diagnosed with leukemia. Politicians and the media soon forged a link between the disease and depleted uranium use. They further drew a parallel with Gulf War Syndrome, and in no time, depleted uranium became the Agent Orange of the Balkan conflict.”
This decision to send depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine did not go unnoticed by the Russians……………………
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova chimed in with the following statement:
“We consider the plans officially confirmed by the UK Department of Defense for the transfer of depleted uranium shells to Ukraine as a step fraught with a further escalation of the conflict. The British supply of weapons to Kiev, especially such sensitive species, leads to further destabilization of the situation and pushes the prospect of finding mutually acceptable interruptions. They are contrary to international law. The radioactivity, high toxicity and carcinogenicity of such weapons are well known. Among the consequences of using depleted uranium – the growth of oncological diseases among the population and the enormous environmental damage for the Ukrainian territory where it will be applied.
“The civilians of Serbia and Iraq, who still feel the impact of such actions, can tell about all of this. It is unlikely that the leadership of the UK itself, which was directly involved in these conflicts, forgot about it.”
Biden administration spokesman John Kirby dismissed the Russian concerns about depleted uranium as “a straw man” and, like the U.S. government has always done, he denied there are any negative health effects of depleted uranium. To do otherwise would be to admit that the U.S. poisoned thousands of its own troops in Iraq, as well as the Iraqi people.
A 2019 study documented the devastating impacts of depleted uranium on Iraqi children born with birth defects………………………………………………………………………………………. https://leohohmann.com/2023/03/22/nato-sending-depleted-uranium-shells-to-ukrainian-military-in-major-escalation/
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) flexes its muscles – forces the ABC to back down on a Media Watch show that dared to criticise ASPI
Despite ASPI telling Media Watch it only has four defence industry sponsors, page 143 of its latest annual report clearly lists five. Since its establishment, ASPI has enjoyed the financial largesse of a dozen weapons makers, which collectively picked up $51 billion in Defence contracts between 2011 and 2021.
ASPI conveniently classifies sponsors who make billions of dollars supplying mainly high-tech services to the military as “private sector” companies.
ASPI takes exception to media scrutiny, By Ainslie Barton, https://johnmenadue.com/aspi-takes-exception-to-media-scrutiny/ 25 Mar 23,
ABC’s Media Watch backs down, following complaint from Australian Strategic Policy Institute, after it aired a segment of Channel Nine political reporter Chris O’Keefe berating both ASPI and Nine Newspaper over the Red Alert series.
Two weeks ago, ABC’s Media Watch carried the banner “Hysterical reporting stokes fears of war with China” aimed at Nine Newspapers’ three-part Red Alert series in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Host, Paul Barry took them to task for gathering a one-sided China hawk panel upon which to base its report. The program included comments from a host of experts who strongly disagree with the proposition that China is poised for war.
It also quoted from mainstream media, including a clip from Nine’s Today Show in which political correspondent Chris O’Keefe had this to say, “The reporting this morning is hysterical, now if you’ve got the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI] who are saying ‘Oh well, we are the ones who could be going off to war in three years’, well they’re funded by the Australian Defence Force, Lockheed Martin, Thales and Boeing.”
Barry later brought up one of Nine’s China experts, former ASPI boss Peter Jennings, making it clear he was no longer the think tank’s executive director.
This week, Media Watch again picked up the China threat and nuclear submarine debate, following former prime minister Paul Keating’s National Press Club appearance. In summary, Barry argued instead of mainstream journalists just launching into Keating for opposing AUKUS, they should have been doing their actual jobs. That job is not being cheerleaders for our massively hawkish foreign and defence policies, it’s asking questions about the government’s rationale to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to nuclear submarines.
However, at the end of the episode, it was Barry himself coming up with explanations, saying this, “And finally, a clarification about last week’s show. When discussing Nine’s Red Alert series on China we played a short clip of Chris O’Keefe linking Peter Jennings to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. ASPI says Jennings no longer plays an active role with the institute and it was not involved in the framing of The Age and Herald’s report. ASPI also says it receives funding from only four defence manufacturers and it’s two percent of its budget.”
Even though the hot war may not have yet started the fog created by ASPI abounds.
Jennings is synonymous with ASPI, outside of Canberra he was a little-known Liberal ministerial adviser and a Defence Department policy wonk. It wasn’t until he took up the role at ASPI that he became the go to China hawk for mainstream media.
He might have vacated the executive director’s office but the views he expressed in the Nine Newspapers series are entirely consistent with his views at ASPI, and indeed the views of his successor Justin Bassi.
Despite ASPI’s constant claim of independence, Bassi walked right out of the office of Liberal Cabinet Minister Marise Payne into ASPI’s office, just a few blocks from Parliament House. He was a ‘captain’s pick’ with it widely reported then Defence Minister Peter Dutton intervened to veto the ASPI board’s preferred candidate, instead installing China hawk Bassi. The appointment of the ASPI executive director has to be ratified by the Cabinet, indeed a very broad interpretation of the term “independent”.
What constitutes no active role?
Jennings might have vacated his corner office but, the simple fact is, immediately upon the completion of his tenure, he assumed the position of “ASPI Senior Fellow”. His profile is on the ASPI website, his phone number is included, and that number is the ASPI direct line.
As ASPI complained, it might not have framed the Nine Newspapers report, but it absolutely framed the narrative. No single group has done more to portray China as a military threat than ASPI. There is an argument, had ASPI not spent years laying the China threat groundwork, this Nine Newspapers series would not have hit the front pages.
While Bassi had nothing to do with the Red Alert series, one could hardly argue he didn’t support it, after all he Tweeted a link to the SMH story the day of publication.
Far more egregious than this and the nature of Jennings’ ongoing connections with ASPI are those of Nine Newspapers’ gang of five experts. One in particular is Lavina Lee, who Nine described as a “geopolitics guru” and “senior lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University”.
What both Nine in its publications, and presumably ASPI in its demands to Media Watch, did not disclose is Lee’s position as a member of the ASPI Council. This is not an honorary role, as the ASPI Annual Report reveals, it is a paid position.
The issue with Lee is not so much the freedom to express her opinions outside of her role at ASPI. It’s the fact she was peddling a narrative indistinguishable from ASPI’s, under the guise of being an independent academic, and did so without disclosing her formal paid role with the think tank.
Breaching the defences
Despite ASPI telling Media Watch it only has four defence industry sponsors, page 143 of its latest annual report clearly lists five. Since its establishment, ASPI has enjoyed the financial largesse of a dozen weapons makers, which collectively picked up $51 billion in Defence contracts between 2011 and 2021.
ASPI conveniently classifies sponsors who make billions of dollars supplying mainly high-tech services to the military as “private sector” companies.
One of its, non-defence industry, backers is the multi-billion dollar US engineering and systems integration company Leidos which has a substantial defence division. According to figures published on the Department of Finance website, since July 2021, it has been awarded more than 140 contracts, with the Department of Defence and security agencies, worth over $1 billion. The classification of Leidos as a run of the mill private sector player seems to be a loose definition.
Other, non-defence, supporters include engineering company Jacobs (107 Defence contracts worth $154 million); cybersecurity company Quintessence Labs, which has been awarded one small Defence contract; Palo Alto Networks which supplies multi-billion dollar network security systems for the military; Splunk Technologies, yet another military supplier; Senatas, a maker of military encryption systems; and software company Oracle, one of the biggest ICT service suppliers to the US military.
That adds up to 12 current sponsors who either make weapons or provide services supporting military infrastructure. The lesson is you can’t take anything ASPI says at face value.
Greens attack Albanese government’s ‘deeply unsettling’ secrecy on submarine nuclear waste plans.
Radiation Health and Safety Advisory Council also warned against cloak of national security to ‘mask inadequate radiation safety protection’.
Guardian. Daniel Hurst, 24 Mar 23
Labor and the Coalition have been accused of taking a “deeply unsettling approach” to transparency around Aukus after the major parties blocked the publication of documents about nuclear safety and waste issues.
The government cited national security concerns when it rejected a Senate order to produce documents, including those about options to manage operational waste from the nuclear-powered submarine program.
The move comes just months after the Radiation Health and Safety Advisory Council warned against allowing a cloak of national security to “mask inadequate radiation safety protection of the Australian public, weaken regulatory authority, or inhibit transparency on matters of Australian public safety”.
David Shoebridge, a Greens senator and defence spokesperson, said the council was “the very agency entrusted to protect Australians from radiation and ensure nuclear safety and security, yet the government is already ignoring its advice”.
“The hiding of information at this early stage signals a deeply unsettling approach to future regulation, transparency and oversight of these nuclear submarines,” Shoebridge said.
His motion had sought a range of documents reviewed by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) working group, including the safeguards required for a nuclear-powered submarine program.
It also sought information about the “characterisation, classification and acceptance of risks in a nuclear environment” and any minutes of meetings held with the nuclear-powered submarine taskforce on these topics………….
The Coalition joined with Labor to defeat the motion in the Senate this week.
The former independent senator and submariner Rex Patrick said the blocking of the motion “shows the shallowness of thinking behind both major parties as to the need for complete transparency around this important issue”.
“This Aukus program has been orchestrated in total secrecy such that the government and Defence could get to a point of announcing a fait accompli without any debate or resistance,” Patrick said.
“There are some things that should properly be kept secret around a submarine – but these things should not include nuclear stewardship, nuclear regulation, nuclear safety or how to deal with operational waste and spent fuel.”
Patrick has, however, used freedom of information laws to obtain some other documents from Ansto and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa).
These include minutes of an Ansto board meeting on 9 February showing the agency will seek government funding of $34.5m over the next four years because it faces increased workload “as a direct result of a nuclear-powered submarine program”…………………………………………………..
In the latest sign of misgivings within Labor, a party branch in the electorate of the prime minster, Anthony Albanese, passed a motion calling on his government to “withdraw from the Aukus alliance and cease any program in pursuit of the acquisition of nuclear submarines”.
Party members at the Enmore branch meeting this week agreed that Labor should prioritise spending that contributes to the “social good of our society rather than wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on a dangerous and unnecessary weapons program”.
According to a copy that has been widely circulated within NSW Labor, including to a large number of branch secretaries, the motion argued Aukus was “not in the interests of the Australian people” and “could take us into an unnecessary and devastating war”.
The motion reflects concerns within elements of the party’s rank-and-file membership, but does not yet indicate a groundswell that could stop the deal.
……………. The Petersham branch – also within Albanese’s electorate – passed an anti-Aukus motion in late February, before the San Diego announcement.
Labor members are also mobilising against the possibility of Port Kembla being selected as a future base for nuclear-powered submarines.
Some members are understood to have been emboldened to register their concerns, after several prominent Labor figures including the former prime minister Paul Keating spoke out against Aukus. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/24/greens-attack-albanese-governments-deeply-unsettling-secrecy-on-submarine-nuclear-waste-plans
AUKUS – “These are the horrors”
Instead of humiliatingly accepting the smirking American ‘we neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons visiting your country’, the Albanese government could reassert a little of our lost sovereignty by stating up front, no nuclear weapons never.
The AUKUS submarines will not be here to defend Australia, but only to attack China in a subordinate role with the American forces.
Pearls and Irritations, By Richard Tanter, Mar 24, 2023
AUKUS. This is a horror for which I now fear for the lives of my children and their children. Every time a Labor member of parliament or senator puts foot outside their office to appear in public, turns up at a public meeting, we need to ask them: why have you betrayed us? Why have you allowed this to happen? What are you going to do?
Transcript of a speech at the Anti-AUKUS Rally, Naarm, State Library of Victoria lawn, 18 March 2023.
These are horrors.
This is a horror for which I now fear for the lives of my children and their children.
This is now changing the direction of Australia for the next forty or fifty years.
We have never seen anything like this in peacetime Australia. At any stage.
This must not stand.
But it’s with the suite of profound horrors that we must start with.
The horrors of AUKUS
Firstly, the automatic involvement in war.
We have already been tied to the United States by the bases – by Pine Gap, by North West Cape, by the Space Surveillance Telescope that take us into space warfare, by the many other Australian bases to which the US has access.
We are already tied in, hard-wired in many cases, to the American war machine.
And the ADF is barely an autonomous force today.
But AUKUS takes us very much further down that road.
We already know what the submarines are there for.
In a rational world I actually think submarines are very important for the defence of Australia – but not in the form of this politically-driven, call-from-Washington-inspired scheme for long-range, long-endurance nuclear-powered submarines whose only rational use is to attack China.
Not on their own – Keating’s right about that calling them toothpicks thrown at a mountain – but in concert with American submarines and carrier task forces.
Maybe not immediately nuclear-armed, but almost certainly capable of nuclear-attack as well.
The AUKUS submarines will not be here to defend Australia, but only to attack China in a subordinate role with the American forces.
The horror of that fiscal black hole.
What does that $368 billion actually amount to? As if we have any idea of what the value of a dollar will be in forty years time – the lifetime cost of AUKUS will be an order of magnitude higher, certainly two or even four trillion dollars.
But what that means in terms of the sacrifice from what’s needed from government for decent health and survival for the Australian people is itself horrific.
This moves us towards what I think is an almost irrevocable position of enmity as far as the Chinese are concerned.
Principally because the only rational strategic role for those submarines is to contribute, potentially, to an American existential threat to China.
Even if we stop tomorrow, is China going to forget that?
Why should they?
We’ve revealed our hand.
We have a Minister for Defence who is effectively the minister for Washington, and this is where we have come to.
The horror of the sacrifice zone that the high-level nuclear waste storage site that is to be somewhere built in Australia.
I have to say that of all things that have shocked me about this scheme, this is one that has shocked me most.
Not just because I made the mistake of thinking that Albanese might be halfway reasonable because in my role as a former president of ICAN I had relations with those people, and he pledged he would support a nuclear ban treaty.
Well, that’s not happening now unless we make it happen.
But the announcement of a nuclear waste dump for high-level toxic nuclear waste, radioactive for thousands of years, is another world all together.
I had foolishly thought that they would follow their own mantra for the past year of saying that ‘this will be a sealed reactor full of highly enriched uranium, and to prevent diversion to nuclear weapons, the US will deliver it sealed, and when the fuel is exhausted it will return to the United States sealed for disposal, somewhere safe, where no-one else can get at it …’
More fool me. More fool me.
They betrayed us again, and that nuclear sacrifice zone of high level waste is going to be a huge problem – and struggle – for decades and decades.
What really troubles me as someone who works on strategic issues and thinks that defence issues are real and important, is that this the largest defence expenditure – if we can use the word ‘defence’ with a straight face in this context – this massive defence expenditure actually disables our genuinely necessary defence capabilities.
There will be very little money left over for anything else in defence.
Worst of all, it disables the possibility of what we have come here today to call for – an independent defence and foreign policy – because there will be nothing left.
I heard one of those defence experts quoted in that authoritative source, Nine Entertainment’s Red Alert on the front pages of The Age – the same report that said yes, we have allies, we have Diego Garcia – all 27 square kilometres of it grabbed by the Brits and rented by the Americans, and we have Guam – the tiny American colony almost wholly taken up by US military bases – it would be funny if it wasn’t so awful and so telling about the government’s grasp of the actual facts – I saw that one of those experts said ‘we have to accept that if there is a war with China ‘that means Pine Gap goes’.
Actually I think that’s quite true, under certain circumstances. But the blitheness, the casualness with which that is said tells us a lot about how these people think.
Because if ‘Pine Gap goes’ in a nuclear missile attack, then Alice Springs and most of its 25,000 citizens ‘go’ too. No need to think about that, is there?
Just the casualness with which this is proposed and debated, apart from the ignorance, is stunning and revealing.
And the last part of the horror for me is the nuclear permissiveness which is now beginning to swell in discussions in Canberra security circles.
The momentum that is going to be built out of this first step of nuclear-powered submarine will mean we’re already going to have naval training for this; we’re going to have expanded nuclear engineering programs at places like the ANU.
We’re going to have military and naval careers built around this.
We’re going to have an industry here which has a deep interest in going the next step from naval nuclear propulsion to a civilian nuclear power industry.
We also know, because this is preceded by the US B-52 bombers at RAAF Tindal near Katherine in the Northern Territory – not nuclear-armed bombers at present, but quite definitely possibly nuclear-armed in the future at the stroke of a presidential pen –that those bombers will be used as part of an attack on China.
And what’s really important to understand now is that the South pacific Nuclear Weapon Free Zone, which Australia signed and says it’s proud of, has a loophole in it sponsored by the Australians to meet US needs, which says there are to be no nuclear weapons in the territories of the member states, like Australia, except in the case of ‘transits’ or ‘visits’.
Transits and visit in these days of American rotational deployments can cover an awful lot of interpretations.
The Albanese government could do one very simple thing to address this fear: it could declare that under no circumstances will any nuclear weapons from any country be allowed into Australia.
Not for a visit, not of layover in transit, just never.
No nuclear-armed aircraft, warships or submarines will ever be allowed to enter Australia.
The USS Asheville nuclear-powered attack submarine in Perth at the moment at Stirling Naval Base, and its successors, will never be allowed to return without a verifiable declaration that they come without nuclear weapons.
Instead of humiliatingly accepting the smirking American ‘we neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons visiting your country’, the Albanese government could reassert a little of our lost sovereignty by stating up front, no nuclear weapons never.
The strategy of AUKUS
The strategic part of what’s happening at the American bases in Australia (aka ‘joint facilities’) is part of all this.
You know what is happening at Pine Gap, the giant American-built and American-paid for joint surveillance station outside Alice Springs.
You know about the wonderfully-named Harold E. Holt Naval Communications Station on the tip of North West Cape in Western Australia – a critical submarine communications base for American nuclear submarines and in the future for these AUKUS submarines. It’s immensely important, and probably another priority target, most likely nuclear under certain circumstances.
But just down the road the US has built a giant and highly advanced space telescope.
That doesn’t sound very much, does it.
But what it’s there for is our contribution to American plans for space warfare, to ensure what the US calls ‘space dominance’. And you understand perfectly well how critical space is for all militaries – and indeed our whole society – today.
We are deeply and increasingly plugged into that activity.
All governments have talked for the last thirty years about ‘the joint facilities’ – we don’t have any American bases, of which Australia has full knowledge and concurrence of any activities conducted at these bases.
When you peel that back, and when you talk to ministers – I can tell you I am continually shocked by their ignorance, as well as their deceptions………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://johnmenadue.com/these-are-the-horrors-of-aukus/
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 