The Guardian 14 June, 2006
Howard’s real nuclear agenda
Prime Minister John Howard says he is "yet to be convinced" of the economic and other arguments in favour of nuclear power generation in Australia. "All I am wanting is this country being open minded enough to look at the alternatives", he said again last week. However, while the PM may have doubts about the financial attractions of nuclear power in Australia, he is plainly as keen as mustard to see Australia’s nuclear industries expand into other areas such as enrichment and the storage of nuclear waste. Details have recently come to light about just how Australia could fit into US President George W Bush’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and how our island continent might become a one stop nuclear shop. And of course, what Dubbya wants, Johnny will bend over backwards to deliver.
For some time Howard has been saying that Australia’s current restricted role in the global energy cycle cannot be sustained. "Australia holds 40 per cent of the world’s known low-cost recoverable uranium reserves", he told the media again last week. The implication in what the PM says is that an energy-hungry world will not tolerate limitations like the three uranium mine policy indefinitely. And while he speculates that public opposition to nuclear power has weakened since the 1980s, he sounds absolutely convinced about the claim that "There is significant potential for Australia to increase and add value to our uranium extraction and exports."
The full implications of this value-added spiel were on display on the pages of The Australian Financial Review last Wednesday. As could be expected, Howard is not putting forward a brave concept of his own for public debate but pushing the agenda of his powerful friend, the US. The GNEP project was announced by the Bush Administration in 2004. The President describes it thus:
"As America and other nations build more nuclear power plants, we must work together to address two challenges. We must dispose of nuclear waste safely, and we must keep nuclear technology and material out of the hands of terrorist networks and states. To meet these challenges, my administration has announced a bold new proposal called the Global Network Energy Partnership…
"We will also ensure that developing nations have a reliable nuclear fuel supply. In exchange, these countries would agree to use nuclear power only for civilian purposes and forgo uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons."
Australia and Canada have been invited to join this "partnership" in which Australia’s role would be to mine and enrich uranium for export in the form of fuel rods for nuclear power generation to rapidly expanding economies like India and China. It would then accept the spent fuel rods back for storage. Australia would thus "lease" the nuclear fuel rods to customers.
Close accounting of material going in and out would, the theory goes, prevent nuclear proliferation among the other benefits. New nuclear energy using customers could be established while forbidding them the capacity to enrich uranium because, if you can enrich it to produce nuclear fuel, you could conceivably enrich it further to provide the raw material for nuclear weapons.
A side-benefit for the US and the UK is that the highly enriched material from redundant nuclear weapons could be stored down-under. A major consideration for the US is that the plan would allow its corporations to establish a dominant position in the nuclear fuel trade — a particularly attractive objective for the Bush Administration given the decline in US influence over the world’s remaining oil reserves
The Australian infrastructure for the scheme would see uranium mined, enriched and fabricated into fuel rods at Olympic Dams near Roxby Downs, transported along the Adelaide to Darwin rail link to the NT capital. The spent rods would travel back along the same rail link (owned, by the way, by UK nuclear waste management and transport specialists, Serco Asia) to Maralinga in SA. There the fuel will cool for 25-30 years before being encased in Synroc and stored, presumably forever.
While waste storage is currently hugely subsidised by governments wherever in the world it is practised, it is anticipated by industry optimists that it will also be a major earner for the corporate players involved in Bush’s grand plan.
Howard fancies that Australia’s servility to the US’s closed-loop nuclear plans will see him and his successors sit at the table with the big boys of global politics. "If we’re not a nuclear fuel supplier, then that shuts us out of certain gatherings", he told the media recently. This prospect could well be at the heart of Howard’s rediscovered fervour for the nuclear industry.
Last week, the Howard Government appointed the members of a taskforce to review uranium, processing and nuclear power in Australia [see story this issue]. It was originally intended to be an inquiry into nuclear power only but, as newly-appointed taskforce head Ziggy Switkowsky noted, "It is not necessary to be pro everything nuclear". In other words, it is not necessary to endorse nuclear power for Australia to fall in with George W Bush’s far-reaching pro-corporate nuclear scheme.
While it may well be that the Federal Government is not about to dust off its previously-secret Cabinet short-list of 14 sites for nuclear power stations drawn up nine years ago, that Foreign Minister Downer is not serious about a massive nuclear power plant and desalination plant for SA, there can be little doubt that Howard & Co are eager to please their US masters when it comes to the main issue of the nuclear fuel trade.
The fiercely contentious issue of a nuclear power plant in the back yard could well be a neatly engineered distraction from the damaging industrial relations debate currently raging in Australia but the threat posed to our security and independence posed by Bush’s GNEP should not be underestimated.