Australia's nuclear U-turn

By Ben Sandilands
THE OBSERVER, CANBERRA
Monday, Jun 13, 2005, Page 9

ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

Nuclear power has come in from the cold in Australia almost overnight.

The very suggestion that Australia continue to mine and export uranium, or set up nuclear waste repositories, or even contemplate using it to generate electricity, has been a political taboo for almost 50 years.

Yet in the space of a few months, key environmentalists and political figures are talking up the need for a `nuclear debate.'

No political leader in Australia is greener than the New South Wales Premier Bob Carr.

But Carr, who has quadrupled the national parks of his state, and banned a range of mining and timber ventures on environmental grounds, says: "Nuclear power has to be on the table for new large power plants in New South Wales.

"Our massive coal reserves equal massive greenhouse gas contamination of the atmosphere if we keep building coal burning plants," he says.

"And apart from rising demand for power that has to be met somehow, we need lots of extra electrical energy if we pursue large scale desalination of sea water to help solve a looming crisis in the supply of fresh water," he says.

Carr has stopped short of saying he will build a nuclear power plant, but is pushing hard for the need to investigate the option, using the latest safeguards and technology for avoiding accidents like the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine in 1986, or the challenges of long-term storage of radioactive by-products.

Government support

On the opposite side of politics from Carr's Labor Party, conservative Prime Minister John Howard, has performed an even more complicated about turn.

Until recently, Howard had sided with US President George W Bush's view that global warming was a myth and the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas emissions "a nonsense."

Howard hasn't changed his mind about Kyoto, but this week he said: "I don't think global warming [from fossil fuel burning] is a myth. I have seen enough scientific evidence ... and while I think some of the extreme manifestations of global warming are mythical, I do think there is a very strong case for controlling greenhouse gas emissions."

His change of heart comes after a period in which his government's condemnation of the Kyoto Protocol as a deliberate handicapping of advanced industrial nations like Australia has been replaced by claims that it doesn't go far enough to address the issue.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer went further, saying: "Technology is the answer to global warming, not the Kyoto protocol, and nuclear energy is part of that answer in the context of global warming."

He also said: "The public seems more persuadable that nuclear power is a safe alternative, and there should be a debate -- a sophisticated debate not a rant -- from the Greens."

In response, the leader of The Greens (CORR) party in Australia, Senator Bob Brown, said it remained implacably opposed to the nuclear option because it was impossible to stop uranium and its deadlier form, plutonium, being diverted into weapons of mass destruction.

"We need to turn off more lights, and use more solar and wind energy," he says.

However even the green movement is divided over uranium. Peter Garrett, the famously anti-American and anti-nuclear industry lead singer of the rock band Midnight Oil and former leader of the Australian Conservation Foundation, says: "We have no option but to look again very carefully at nuclear technology."

Garrett said that soon after he took his seat as a Labor party member in Australia's Federal Parliament, rattling many of its supporters, for whom opposition to nuclear power and the enforced closure or curbing of existing Australian uranium mines had been an unchallenged policy position for decades.

Uranium source

While this was going on, the Australian government confirmed it had been in high level negotiations with China for several months over requests by Beijing for future access to the country's major uranium mines.

Australia has 41 percent of the world's proven reserves of uranium, of which 38 percent is inside the Olympic Dam copper mine in South Australia.

The talks with China are said to be progressing well, with most of the discussion now being related to the safeguards both nations would wish to put in place to prevent the diversion of uranium into the nuclear weapons programs of rogue states or even terrorist organizations.

However the coal industry isn't taking the Australian move toward a nuclear option lightly. It is lobbying politicians on the merits of expanding the export of uranium to boost the national economy, rather than actually using it in Australia in place of coal.

The strategy of the coal industry, supported by research funding from the Australian government, is to extend the economic life of coal far into the future by developing "clean" coal burning processes in which the carbon dioxide emissions are turned into a liquid that can be piped into deep and supposedly stable underground reservoirs instead of allowed to escape into the atmosphere.

But those who are leaning to the nuclear option in turn ask whether unproven clean coal technology will actually prove more costly, and perhaps even more dangerous to the environment, than uranium fired power stations.