Conservatives want Oz to adopt the full nuclear cycle, from cradle to grave
Note: This article has been adapted from The Nuclear Files series first published in The Fifth Estate.
When Australia’s main conservative political parties began embracing nuclear power as their new answer to climate change in a blatant effort to distract from the current Labor government’s cleantech approach, they looked to North America for inspiration.
This included delegations of pro-nuclear politicians and lobbyists touring the U.S. and Canada in 2022 and 2023; reciprocal visits back to Australia; meet-ups at UN climate summits through a Net Zero Nuclear propaganda group; and this year an international event in Sydney, Australia, called Navigating Nuclear, featuring several keynote speakers from the U.S.
The result is a swathe of nuclear expansion recommendations for Australia, some extraordinary, including taking America’s and the world’s high-level radioactive nuclear waste. This in spite of civilian nuclear power having been banned in most places in Australia since 1998, and the country struggling for decades to even locate a repository for low and intermediate-level waste.
Where Australian nuclear advocates went on their 2023 study tour to North America.
Magical mystery tour
Top U.S. nuclear lobby figures engaged by the unofficial pro-nuclear delegations from Australia include Maria Korsnick, the CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute; Jeff Nevins, co-founder of Washington lobbying firm Boundary Stone Partners and also chief spokesperson for billionaire and gung ho nuclear proponent Bill Gates’ company TerraPower; and top Westinghouse Electric executive, Dr. Rita Baranwal, a former senior U.S. government nuclear official who was appointed by then President Donald Trump in 2019.
If the loudly pro-nuclear Australian conservatives – a coalition of the country’s Liberal and National parties – win back power in the next election, they are vowing to abandon the country’s renewable energy target and the nation’s UN Paris Agreement promises. Instead, they promise to delay planned coal plant retirements, dramatically expand polluting gas generation, restrict large-scale solar and wind, and introduce nuclear power at old coal sites, all the while claiming Australia can meet 100% net zero by 2050. In effect, it’s back to the pre-Paris Agreement days of polluting fossil fuels and the silver bullet promise of nuclear power in a country that would be starting from scratch.
“They want it all”
The pro-nuke lobby that surrounds Australia’s conservatives are hell bent on Australia becoming a full-fledged “nuclear nation.” Current Liberal Party head Peter Dutton wants to leverage the 2021 AUKUS submarine program, through which Australia, the U.K. and U.S. are collaborating on a nuclear-powered submarine fleet for the strategically-located South Pacific nation, one of America’s closest military allies.
In effect, it’s back to the pre-Paris Agreement days of polluting fossil fuels and the silver bullet promise of nuclear power in a country that would be starting from scratch.
“They want it all,” warns Dave Sweeney, one of Australia’s foremost nuclear policy experts, and long-time anti-nuclear campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), an organization that just had its Twitter account shut down by Elon Musk for nuclear energy posts. Sweeney is part of the Australian environment movement’s counterattack on the nuclear insurgency. “They want Australia to adopt the full nuclear cycle, from cradle to grave.”
Just days ago the Coalition’s nuclear torchbearer, Member of Parliament Ted O’Brien, spokesman on climate change and energy, upped the ante by calling for Australia to develop sovereign capability for uranium enrichment, which Sweeney said “shows the extent of the Coalition’s mission creep on its nuclear plans.”
“Uranium enrichment is a costly and contaminating industry that generates depleted uranium waste and has direct and proven nuclear proliferation risks. International bodies, national governments and industry recognize that these processing activities are proliferation sensitive, as can be clearly seen with the global concern over Iran’s uranium enrichment program.”
The big idea: Make Australia the world’s nuke dump
The far-reaching ambitions of the pro-nuclear campaign were revealed at a Navigating Nuclear event in Sydney earlier this year, formally opened by O’Brien, who aims to be Australia’s next Minister for Climate Change and Energy, and attended by this reporter. O’Brien’s enthusiasm for the “big brains” and “caliber of people” in the room was on show at the event, the “big idea” of nuclear power for Australia, and his job to “listen and learn” is all on show in the video of his opening address.
One of the Navigating Nuclear international keynotes, a top MIT nuclear expert, Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, even flagged an opportunity for Australia to become the permanent dumping ground for the world’s nuclear waste, highlighting that America’s high-radioactive reactor waste alone has been estimated to be worth $1 billion a year.
As well as the waste plan, and further leveraging AUKUS, Professor Buongiorno’s other ambitions for an all-in nuclear Australia included:
- Becoming the world’s number one uranium producer, which has long been an ambition for the powerful fossil-fuel-loving Minerals Council of Australia (MCA);
- Making the desserts bloom by building reactors to feed nuclear-powered water desalination plants.
Nothing is too crazy, or unlikely, or dangerous for the pro-nuke lobby, whose goal is for Australia to take a seat at the “Big Nuke” table.
“Australians would be wise to be very cautious”
“Some of the current crop of nuclear promoters absolutely want an Atomic Australia,” Sweeney said.” Their vision is one of unfettered uranium mining and enrichment, fuel processing, domestic nuclear power, national and international radioactive waste storage and Australia to have or host nuclear weapons and war fighting capacity. If they are successful, we will all be far poorer – forever.”
Dry cask nuclear storage. Source: Holtec International
If Australians are wondering what that would be like in their neighborhoods, then below is what above-ground, long-term temporary storage looks like, as shown in slides from Professor Buongiorno’s presentation.
Forget about wine vineyards. Build you own nuke vineyard to store atom waste in dry casks
High-level radioactive waste is a hot button issue for the public. Australia has a deeply contested history of decades of struggle to find a site to accommodate permanent disposal of low and intermediate level radioactive waste and against nuclear in general.
“Hot, dangerous and extremely long-lived,” Sweeney said of the current international best practice for long-term disposal. “It requires very expensive confinement in purpose-built facilities located deep underground in highly-geologically stable areas.”
Why make Australia a nuclear waste dump?
It’s difficult to imagine a more controversial proposal for Australia’s future than becoming a nuclear dumping ground for the world’s reactor waste, at least part of which will remain dangerously radioactive for many tens of thousands of years.
Previous attempts to advance high level global radioactive waste have foundered on hostile politics, community concern and deep First Nations opposition.
The region’s history as the location of American and French nuclear weapons testing saw the rising up of a strong anti-nuclear movement in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific island nations. Australia was one of the first nations to sign on to a Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the year after saw peace marches around the country demanding the world “Ban the Bomb. There was an attempt in the late 1960s to develop a 500MV nuclear power plant in Jervis Bay, south of Sydney, but local opposition grew quickly and the union of workers in the region announced it refused to build the reactor and in 1971 the plans were dropped.
In the wake of the Chernobyl accident, the Australian federal government passed laws to ban nuclear facilities and a number of states including New South Wales and Queensland passed their own nuclear bans. The current push by the Coalition government, which announced seven locations for its intended nuclear power sites without consultation, has yet to announce how it plans to overturn the complex legislated bans that stand in its way. Australian state premiers of the seven locations have unanimously rejected Dutton’s nuclear proposal and have said there is no known way to overturn legislated bans.
A sucker for radioactive waste
To many viewing all of this from overseas, Australia offers a convenient location to store a permanent poison. Its former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said that hospitals, schools and roads could all be paid billions of dollars for storing nuclear waste, reaping tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
Sign, sealed and delivered — for 10,000 years
But this would come at a price. “Radioactive waste needs to be isolated and secured from people and the wider environment for staggering periods of time – up to 100,000 years,” said Sweeney. “It lasts longer than any politician’s promise and needs serious attention and management. It should always be approached through the lens of responsibility and human and environmental health, not shouted and touted as a revenue stream.”
It’s difficult to imagine a more controversial proposal for Australia’s future than becoming a nuclear dumping ground for the world’s reactor waste.
The World Nuclear Association, the industry’s own PR front, tries to downplay stored waste, he said. Its experts argue that only a small volume of nuclear waste (~3% of the total) is long-lived and highly radioactive, and requires isolation from the environment for many thousands of years.
5,000 square kilometer of nuclear-powered farms
At the Navigating Nuclear conference nuclear proponent Buongiorno, outlined a series of major nuclear-related options for Australia, including nuclear powered water desalination plants for huge agricultural projects, covering more than 5,000 square kilometers.
He cited Israel as an inspiration for this concept, which is also likely to be highly controversial in an environmental – and political – context, given the sensitivity of arid zones and inland water aquifers, much less the whole idea of spreading nuclear reactors across the Australian landscape.
But all this, said Sweeney, would require Australia developing a far more extensive domestic nuclear sector including uranium enrichment and fuel fabrication. These capital-, energy- and risk-heavy activities also open the door to serious security and nuclear proliferation concerns and would likely raise alarm in our region and beyond.”
