Critical Times

Peter Mac

Climate change has forced governments to seek alternatives to the generation of power from traditional coal-fired power stations, which produce large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2). In view of this, should a nuclear power industry be introduced into Australia?

The Prime Minister has made it crystal clear that he favours the introduction of nuclear fission or “clean coal” (CO2 capture and geosequestration), for Australia’s future electric power generation. Both these approaches are backed by extremely strong sectors of capital.

Nuclear power was widely considered to have no future after the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl. However, the nuclear industry has recently sought to exploit international concern about climate change, arguing that because nuclear reactions produce no CO2 emissions (ignoring those produced in the massive pre-reaction uranium mining and processing stage) they are the power generation answer.

On the other hand, numerous public opinion polls have shown that the majority of Australian citizens oppose the introduction of nuclear power or a nuclear waste storage site. Western Australian Premier Allan Carpenter recently declared that if the Howard Government took such an initiative his government would immediately hold a plebiscite and campaign against it.

For decades some nations have argued that because Australia exports uranium for other nations to use in their reactors, it should be prepared to accept the resultant nuclear waste.

The Howard government recently began investigating the possibility of overturning state legislation forbidding the construction of nuclear facilities, particularly nuclear waste storage complexes. This is an issue of enormous importance in countries with nuclear power or munitions industries, particularly the US. Even after sixty years of nuclear power development, no nation has found a safe and secure means of storing nuclear waste, which is appallingly, dangerous and long-lived.

Many of the sites which are considered suitable for nuclear waste storage are owned or occupied by Indigenous people. In a policy denounced by Aboriginal leaders as government blackmail, the Howard Government has consistently sought to manipulate aboriginal communities by offering special grants to relieve their grinding poverty, in exchange for abandoning their traditional land rights.

While some aboriginal communities have rejected these “with strings” offers, the aboriginal people of Muckaty Station, near Katherine in the Northern Territory recently agreed to their property being used as a potential nuclear waste disposal site, after the Howard Government made it clear that in exchange they would be offered grants for education and local development.

At the moment the relatively small amount of waste which has been produced at Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor is retained on site, apart from that which was previously dropped into the sea off the Sydney Heads, in a series of appallingly irresponsible acts in previous decades. If the Howard Government gets its way and establishes a nuclear industry in Australia, it would certainly establish a nuclear dump.

So would the ALP be a better bet? At first glance it would seem so. After all, the Party still declares its total opposition to establishment of a nuclear industry. Yet there are disturbing cracks in the ALP’s environmental policy. One is the recent decision to abandon restrictions on the number of Australian uranium mines.

Implementation of such a policy would facilitate an increase in uranium exports of uranium from Australia, which has forty percent of the world’s reserves, more than any other nation.

Apart from raising the already high risk of nuclear proliferation, (including possible access to fissionable material by terrorist organisations), the increased flow of uranium would also concentrate the world’s efforts on use of nuclear power, stunting the development of renewable power generation and magnifying the terrible problem of storing radioactive nuclear waste.

At the current rate of consumption, the world’s reserves of reactor grade uranium will only last another fifty years. This period will diminish in inverse proportion to an increase in the rate of use. In another twenty or thirty years time, when the world’s nations will inevitably be fighting a far more desperate battle against climate change than at present, they will also find themselves facing drastic power shortages if they put too many of their energy eggs in the nuclear basket.

The issues surrounding the use of uranium for power generation are very similar to those concerning the use of coal, in that both systems generate extremely dangerous pollutants. At this point in history nature is teaching us with brutal force that we will inevitably pay a terrible price for polluting our environment. The ALP should draw the lesson that it is stupid and counterproductive to attempt to rectify one source of pollution by increasing the use of another. They should leave that to the Liberals.