Chapter Nine
Australia’s Nuclear Trade

AUSTRALIANS RESPONDED IN two ways to the 11 March triple disaster in Tōhoku. First, with immediate sympathy and support for the victims, aid from the federal government in Canberra and non-government agencies, and a prime ministerial visit. Second, with concern on the part of the mining community, particularly uranium miners, that their lucrative export markets in Japan might contract or disappear.

Let us examine the humanitarian response first.

Temora is a wheat-growing town in the Riverina district of New South Wales. It has an aviation museum, a restored wartime airfield, and a wonderful mixed squadron of operational vintage military aircraft including a Tiger Moth, a Wirraway, a Boomerang, two Spitfires, a Mustang, a Hudson, a Meteor, a Sabre, a Vampire, and a Canberra. The whole project was begun by David Lowy, a past Australian aerobatic champion, and son of the shopping centre magnate Frank Lowy. On flying days, the airfield draws tourists and locals like iron filings to a magnet. Temora is also one of five Australian towns that have sister-city relationships with towns in Fukushima prefecture. The others are Rockdale, Bathurst, and Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, and Townsville in Queensland.

Temora’s relationship is with Izumizaki, a small rural community in Fukushima prefecture, 70 kilometres south-west of the nuclear plant, the home town of Terry Colbert’s wife, Satomi (see Chapter Two). When Temora suffered a crippling drought in 2007, Izumizaki citizens raised the equivalent of $27,000. The council was a bit embarrassed by the size of the gift, but arranged for nearby Charles Sturt University to use it to establish an agricultural scholarship for Temora students. After the 11 March disaster, Temora was keen to reciprocate the gift. By June 2011 the community had raised $15,000, some of which came from a sushi stall they set up on flying days at the airfield, and they were planning on raising more. Other Australian sister cities did what they could to help.

This was a tiny part of Australian aid to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims. Many Australian NGOs and churches sent money and relief supplies. The federal government sent a Royal Australian Air Force C-17 transport aircraft with 76 aid and rescue personnel and 20 tonnes of rescue equipment, backed up by a goodwill visit a month later by Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Initially, the Japanese authorities were hesitant about agreeing to the visit, unsure whether they had the resources to host it at such a crowded and distracted time. Indeed, when French president Nicolas Sarkozy came earlier without invitation, he and his frustrated party were restricted to a four-hour visit to Tokyo. However, after some persuasive diplomatic footwork by the Australian ambassador, Murray McLean, the foreign ministry agreed to the Gillard visit. After calling on the emperor and ministers in Tokyo, the prime minister and her party got to Minamisanriku (200 kilometres north of Fukushima city) by road, bad weather having closed local airports. There, she hosted a dinner for 600 locals in an effort to lift battered morale. Australian efforts were acknowledged by the then Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, whose thanks were published in The Australian on 5 May 2011:

Australia, our closest friend, has provided swift support in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, including in the dispatch of an urban search and rescue team to Minamisanriku town in Miyagi Prefecture, the deployment of Royal Australian Air Force C-17 aircraft to assist relief operations, and the donation of $10 million to the Australian Red Cross-Japan and the Pacific Disaster Appeal.

Support came not only from the government but also from NGOs, students, and countless individuals through various activities such as charity and fund-raising events.

During her official visit to Japan between April 20 to April 23, Prime Minister Gillard expressed Australia’s sorrow and grief over Japan’s great losses. She reiterated Australia’s strong solidarity and friendship with Japan and its people, and her readiness to continue to support its early recovery. She visited Minamisanriku, a town devastated by the earthquake and tsunami, and where the Australian team had search and rescue operations, and gave her warm-hearted encouragement to people at the evacuation centre.

The visit, having conveyed an unfaltering message to Japan at this difficult time, was greatly appreciated by all the people in Japan. I wish to express our sincere gratitude for all the sympathy and assistance that the Australian people have kindly extended to us.

Let us now consider the response of the uranium-mining industry.

Uranium plays a relatively small part in the extraordinary growth of Australia’s mineral exports to Japan. As of November 2010, total annual Australian uranium exports worldwide, of which Japan takes around 25 per cent, were less than $1 billion, compared with coal exports from Queensland alone of $40 billion.

Many Australians know about the postwar expansion of trade, but fewer are aware that Japan enjoyed a significant trading relationship with Australia much earlier. Before Federation in 1901, thousands of Japanese fishers and pearlers lived in northern Queensland, and hundreds more in Western Australia. To look after their interests, Japan established a consulate in Townsville in 1896. The Japanese community would have grown, but further immigration was prevented by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which allowed few men to bring their wives to Australia, and demanded a dictation test (usually in English, but it was allowed to be in whatever language immigration officials chose) that Japanese immigrants could not possibly pass.

Despite the sharp reduction in Japanese immigrants, bilateral trade kept expanding. By the mid-1930s, Japan was Australia’s second-largest export market for wool and wheat after the United Kingdom, and Tokyo was the second capital city to host an Australian diplomatic legation after Washington in the late 1930s. Conservative Australian prime minister Robert Menzies earned the sobriquet ‘Pig Iron Bob’ for selling scrap metal to feed Japan’s growing armaments industry. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, the legation was closed and most Japanese settlers in Australia were interned. Deep suspicion and hostility clouded Australian attitudes towards the Japanese until well after the end of the war in 1945. Australians particularly resented the way the Japanese army had mistreated Australian POWs.

Formal bilateral relations were re-established at the end of the Allied occupation of Japan in 1952, when a senior foreign-ministry official, Haruhiko Nishi, became Japan’s first postwar Japanese ambassador to Canberra. Bilateral trade negotiations were initiated by Australia in 1956. Menzies visited Tokyo in April 1957 to finalise a trade agreement, and his trade minister, John McEwen, signed it on Australia’s behalf in Tokyo in July. Nobusuke Kishi’s visit to Australia in December 1957 was the first by a Japanese prime minister.

And so, with a degree of courage on both sides, the political ice was broken. The trade agreement was the framework for a breathtaking postwar expansion in bilateral trade that began in the 1960s — comprising Australian minerals and energy to feed Japan’s rapidly growing steel industry, and Japanese manufactured goods, initially textiles, then motor vehicles and electronics, to growing markets in Australia. Unlike Australia’s trade with the United Kingdom, trade with Japan had few political or cultural underpinnings, but the Commonwealth government quickly took steps to add them. First came regular ministerial-level talks with the Japanese. Second were moves to counter a tendency by Japanese companies and ministries to play one Australian company or state off against another in securing long-term mining contracts. Drawing on recommendations drafted by Kenneth Myer, of the Melbourne retailing family, the government established machinery to coordinate the interests of Australian states, the Commonwealth, and the private sector in their various commercial dealings with Japanese trading houses.

A remarkably comprehensive set of bilateral agreements was also negotiated following the initial trade agreement — on air services in 1956, the exchange of international money orders in 1961, the avoidance of double taxation in 1969, cooperation in the peaceful uses of atomic energy in 1972, cultural cooperation in 1974, cooperation on a geostationary meteorological-satellite system in 1977, fisheries in 1979, and science and technology in 1980. Guiding principles for the relationship were contained in a basic treaty of friendship and cooperation signed in 1976. Agreements on cooperation in science, working holidays, the protection of migratory birds, and defence followed.

By 2005, the relationship had become comfortable and mutually advantageous. About the only substantial irritant was Japan’s insistence on hunting whales in the Southern Ocean, particularly in areas in or near the Australian Antarctic Territory, and in what were claimed to be exclusive fishing zones (which the Japanese did not recognise). The irritant was exacerbated by a threat in 2010 by Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd (which was never carried out) to take Japan to the International Criminal Court over the matter.

Not least important in the robustness of the relationship has been the growth of the number of Japanese residents in Australia. In 2009, the Japanese foreign-affairs ministry announced that, after the United States and China, Australia was home to the largest number of its nationals outside Japan. Between 2005 and 2008, Japanese residents in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, and Perth increased by 25 per cent, mainly as the result of marriage by ‘working holiday brides’. If China had by then eclipsed Japan as the main driver of Australia’s export trade, with the prospects of India following, no one with a stake in the Australian–Japanese relationship was particularly worried. Two-way trade continued to be substantial and expanding. Japan remained Australia’s second-largest market after China for minerals and energy, particularly steaming and coking coal, iron ore, and non-ferrous metals, and was second to China as its most important source of machinery and manufactured goods.

Australian coal and iron ore exports to Japan began almost immediately after the end of the Pacific War, although establishing a market for uranium took longer. In the 1950s, Japan began to assess competing foreign nuclear technologies. After the unsuccessful trial of a British gas-cooled reactor, the Japanese concentrated on American light-water technology, buying a pressurised-water reactor under licence from Westinghouse, and a boiling-water reactor from General Electric.

Spurred on by the vision of nuclear-energy autonomy, Japan’s future nuclear barons wanted to expand the industry rapidly, but knew they had a problem: Japan had no commercial quantities of uranium, and would be dependent on imports. With its nascent uranium industry, geographical proximity, and a political system suitable for long-term contractual commitments, Australia looked like a promising supplier. But when a trade delegation came to Canberra in 1959, the Australian government was cautious: memories of Pearl Harbour, the bombing of Darwin, and Australian POWs’ slave labour on the Thailand–Burma railway were still fresh. Visions of a nuclear-armed Japan haunted some officials. The minister for national development, senator William Spooner, recommended that any uranium sales to Japan should be limited, and covered by written assurances that the material would not be re-exported or used for military purposes. These rules were semi-formalised in an exchange of notes between the Australian and Japanese governments in 1962. Several one-off shipments to Japanese power companies followed.

Initial Australian reserve soon gave way to the realisation that demand for Australian uranium would grow as the number of Japan’s nuclear plants increased. Mining companies, with dollar signs flashing in their eyes, were particularly keen to expand the trade, and so was the Commonwealth trade bureaucracy. But Washington was beginning to lean on Canberra to proceed carefully. Through its Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s, the United States had been the single most enthusiastic and influential international promoter of nuclear technology; but during the 1960s, Washington had begun to worry about the connection between peaceful and military uses of nuclear fission, and the possibility of unbridled nuclear-weapons proliferation.

An Irish-sponsored UN resolution in 1961 became the genesis of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was championed by the United States throughout the decade, and which entered into force in 1970. The treaty had two seemingly contradictory aims: to encourage the international development of nuclear energy, while prohibiting proliferation of its military applications beyond the five states which already had nuclear weapons — Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. With nuclear-weapons ambitions of its own, especially under conservative prime minister John Gorton, Australia was initially reluctant to sign the treaty. It did so when Gorton was persuaded that ‘signing’ was not ‘ratifying’, and that he might still have room to pursue his ambitions to build a nuclear reactor before he had to ratify the treaty. He abandoned his plan only when advised that it would irritate Washington and even place Australia’s bilateral relations with the United States in jeopardy. Any residual nuclear ambitions were swept away when Gorton’s conservative successor, William McMahon, decided in 1972 that plans to build a nuclear reactor at Jervis Bay on federal territory — ostensibly to generate power for the NSW grid, but in reality to provide plutonium for nuclear weapons — would not be tolerated by a sceptical electorate.

The Labor Party won the December 1972 federal election and broke the 23-year conservative domination of Australian politics. Gough Whitlam was the country’s first genuinely internationalist prime minister, and he took a more active approach towards nuclear non-proliferation than any of his predecessors. He opposed atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing by France in the South Pacific and by China in its western desert region of Lop Nor. He joined New Zealand in mounting an action against the French at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and sent an Australian logistic vessel, HMAS Supply, to support the New Zealand frigate HMNZS Otago in patrolling the French test area. Although he stopped short of fully endorsing a New Zealand move to declare a nuclear-free zone in the South Pacific, or a Malaysian initiative to declare South-East Asia a zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality, he endorsed international efforts to keep the Indian Ocean free from nuclear rivalry.

Whitlam mainly left development of uranium exports to his minister for minerals and energy, Reginald Francis Xavier Connor, a short-back-and-sides, belt-and-braces party infighter who was inordinately suspicious of bureaucrats and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of his portfolio. Connor thought that Australian mining companies were disorganised, and that otiose Liberal-Country Party federal governments had complacently watched them compete with each other for Japanese contracts as the Japanese coordinated their efforts to drive down prices. Connor was a great nationalist and a big thinker, intellectually persuaded by the Club of Rome mentality that the world would run short of natural resources. He wanted to leave minerals, including uranium, in the ground until scarcity drove up prices. In January 1973, he secured cabinet approval to place all minerals under export controls. At this time, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission estimated reasonably assured resources of Australian uranium at 188,000 tonnes, or 12 per cent of the world’s estimated resources of 1.6 million tonnes. With these assets, and with what still remained to be discovered, Australia could become a world uranium price-setter. Connor watched the price rise from US$6 per kilogram in 1973 to US$30 in 1975. Not one to tolerate the continuation of a policy of exporting raw materials without adding value through refinement, he promised a joint feasibility study with the Japanese for an enrichment plant in Australia, and planned to construct three uranium-milling plants in the Northern Territory to produce uranium oxide, or ‘yellowcake’, feedstock.

Before Whitlam would allow these to proceed, however, he commissioned an inquiry on the effects of mining and exporting uranium from the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory. Called the Fox Inquiry after the ACT Supreme Court judge who chaired it, its findings were ambivalent and cautionary: the international nuclear-power industry was unintentionally contributing to an increased risk of nuclear war, but Australia could nevertheless develop and export uranium if the fullest and most effective safeguards were imposed. Under no circumstances should sales be made to countries not parties to the NPT.

These findings were published only after the dramatic dismissal of Whitlam by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, in November 1975, and his replacement by a new conservative leader, Malcolm Fraser. Like Whitlam, Fraser had a dilemma about exporting uranium. He was under pressure from uranium miners to allow exports, but he had to do so responsibly to appease the United States, as well as Australian voters who were volatile about all things nuclear. In May 1975, he announced in Parliament his conditions under which uranium could be exported. The most important ones were that it could only be sold to countries that were signatories to the NPT, and then only if they were of ‘good non-proliferation character’. Fully effective backup agreements applying to the recipient country’s entire nuclear industry had to be signed before the negotiation of commercial agreements. Nuclear-weapons states and non-weapons states alike had to give assurances that they would not use Australian uranium in any nuclear-weapons programs. It had to be in a form to attract full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards at the time it left Australian ownership. It could not be transferred, enriched beyond 20 per cent uranium-235, or reprocessed without the specific prior consent of Australian authorities.

With a moralistic flourish, Fraser declared that safeguards should not be balanced or traded off against commercial considerations. He might have believed his rhetoric at the time, but events quickly showed that his and the government’s motives were basically mercenary. An exploratory mission from Canberra found that potential buyers of Australian uranium were scornful of the safeguard provisions. None of the European countries or Japan was prepared to renounce the option of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel — and none, especially Japan, would agree to the obligation that they had to obtain permission from Australian officials every time they wanted to transfer, reprocess, or enrich Australian uranium.

The mining lobby grudgingly accepted the conditions because they had no choice. At the other end of the opinion scale, popular resistance to uranium exports under any conditions was vehement. Throughout 1977, thousands of people marched in protest against uranium mining. That year, at its national conference in Perth, the Australian Labor Party decided to ban mining and export until problems to do with proliferation and the disposal of nuclear waste had been resolved; any export contracts negotiated by the Fraser government would be repudiated until this was done. The deputy prime minister and minister for trade, John Douglas Anthony, gave a speech in response that managed both to genuflect to the Australian mining lobby and America’s nuclear non-proliferation policies. He castigated what he termed the ‘wild men of the left’ who were calling for a ban on mining. He declared darkly (and incorrectly) that a total refusal to export uranium would place Australia in clear breach of the NPT. Australia had already lost six years in the development of uranium, he thundered. There could be no doubt that Australia could best contribute to the reduction in nuclear-weapons proliferation by developing and exporting its vast uranium resources as soon as possible.

Leaving Anthony’s moral spin aside, commercial pressure gradually eroded Fraser’s safeguard conditions. First to go was the condition that uranium had to be in a form to attract full IAEA safeguards by the time it left Australian ownership. As IAEA safeguards only attached to uranium once converted into uranium hexafluoride (a gas ready for enrichment into the isotope uranium-235), and as Australia had no facilities to do the converting, it could only export uranium oxide. Fraser’s cabinet quietly dropped the requirement, and uranium oxide passed out of Australian ownership to overseas customers without IAEA safeguards attaching to it.

Other safeguards were expediently cancelled or modified to suit buyers. Under Japanese pressure, cabinet exempted future supplies from the new safeguards under contracts negotiated with Japanese power companies in the 1960s, notably the Chubu Electric Power Company and Shikoku Electric Power Company. Under pressure from the French, who had not signed or ratified the NPT, and would not do so until the early 1990s, cabinet then decided to drop the provision that uranium could not be sold to countries that were not signatories to the treaty. Next to go was Fraser’s stipulation that customer countries had to be of good non-proliferation character. Given the Shah’s ambitions to develop nuclear power and (many observers strongly suspected) nuclear weapons, Iran seemed a dodgy prospective customer. Yet the Australian minister for foreign affairs, Andrew Peacock, declared that Iran ‘was a fervent signatory of the NPT’. The Philippines and South Korea were similarly suspect — the one for corrupt practices in the construction of its first power reactor on the Bataan Peninsula near Manila, and the other for having run a clandestine nuclear-weapons research program since the late 1960s.

Under Japanese pressure, a ‘programmed’ approach was then adopted to modify the stipulation that Australian approval had to be obtained in each case before its uranium could be enriched, reprocessed, or transferred. Now it could be handled on an automatic or ‘toll’ basis without tiresome permission procedures, a condition that became a standard part of bilateral agreements with Japan and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).

The Australian Labor Party defeated the Liberal-Country Party Coalition at the March 1983 federal election, and Bob Hawke, a charismatic union leader, became Australia’s new prime minister. He was painfully aware of the deep loathing of the left wing of the party towards uranium mining and export, and of the opposing views of right-wing members who wanted it to proceed. The division had forced a compromise policy at the 1982 ALP conference and led to a ‘three-mine policy’ which limited uranium mining to established mines at Ranger and Nabarlek in the Northern Territory, and Olympic Dam in South Australia. As Labor came to power, public opposition to uranium exports was at an all-time high, with 80 per cent of the electorate opposed. Hawke’s foreign minister, Bill Hayden, feared that, in their zealotry, the growing number of anti-nuclear activists would put pressure on Hawke to make radical changes that could undermine US–Australia relations, such as prohibiting US nuclear-armed naval ships from visiting Australian ports, or closing US bases in Australia. Hayden devised an anti-nuclear policy that would appease the public while uranium exports continued. He proposed appointing a career diplomat, Richard Butler, as ambassador for disarmament, supporting an effective comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, supporting outlawing chemical and biological warfare, contributing to the disarmament activities of the United Nations, condemning further French nuclear-weapons testing in the Pacific, and negotiating a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the South Pacific. He proposed establishing a peace research institute at the Australian National University in Canberra, and increasing Australia’s contribution to the 1984 International Year of Peace. Hawke agreed to everything.

On uranium exports, Hawke then commissioned yet another uranium-related study, this time to investigate Australia’s role in the nuclear-fuel cycle. Headed by Ralph Slatyer, professor of biology at the ANU, the report’s conclusions reflected the two opposing faces of NPT objectives while endorsing Australia’s uranium exports. First, Australia should do everything it could to promote the dissemination of peaceful nuclear technology while discouraging weapons proliferation. Second, while continuing to export uranium, it should ‘add value’ by involving itself in stages of the nuclear-fuel cycle beyond merely mining and milling uranium.

One of Richard Butler’s first overseas forays was to Japan in July 1984, to assess Tokyo’s thinking on nuclear matters. At this stage, Japan had 24 nuclear power plants, and was the world’s third-largest civil nuclear power after the United States and France. It was buying increasing amounts of uranium oxide from Australia, mixing it with oxide from other sources, and having it enriched in the United States. In pursuit of its policy of developing full autonomy in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it was constructing an independent enrichment and reprocessing facility at Rokkashō in Aomori prefecture, in northern Honshu. Japanese authorities told Butler that they regarded uranium mining in Australia as an integral part of Australia’s NPT obligations, and as increasingly important to their own nuclear ambitions.

To address the problem of keeping tabs on Australian uranium in an increasingly complex international nuclear industry, Hawke added two further modifications to Fraser’s bilateral safeguard conditions. The first was to develop a doctrine of ‘equivalence’, which in theory kept an accountant’s eye on an equivalent amount of uranium to that originally sold to a customer, wherever the original Australian material may have been diverted to, or in what form. The second was to introduce ‘flag swaps’ or ‘book transfers’, which removed the link between origin and material in an even more fundamental way than equivalence. This was prompted in 1982, when Euratom sought Australian agreement to substitute 71.5 tonnes of French uranium held as uranium hexafluoride (UF6) in the United States for the same quantity of Australian UF6 held in France, thus avoiding expensive shipping costs.

And so the highly vaunted bilateral safeguard conditions originally attached by prime minister Fraser to Australian uranium exports were diluted and attenuated by a succession of governments, starting with his own. A further relaxation occurred in 2007 during the conservative government of John Howard, when the three-mine policy of the Hawke Labor government was abolished, allowing open slather on uranium mining. In response, in 2008, Western Australia lifted its ban on uranium exploration and mining. The Canadian and Japanese mining giants Cameco and Mitsubishi promptly bought Rio Tinto’s vast Kintyre uranium deposit in the Pilbara region of the state for $500 million. In South Australia, three more uranium mines at Honeymoon, Four Mile, and Crocker Well were set to join the state’s two operating mines at Olympic Dam and Beverley (which had succeeded Nabarlek). Meanwhile, good prospects for new uranium-supply contracts beckoned from India, Russia, Japan, Iran, and Canada, where a total of nine new reactors were scheduled to be commissioned in 2009. According to the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, many more reactors were in the pipeline, especially in China. The OECD’s forecast was for a 6 per cent world growth in demand in 2009, leading to a massive increase of 66 per cent by 2030.

With such expectations of expanding international demand for uranium, particularly in Japan, on the grounds that nuclear-power reactors lower greenhouse-gas emissions, it is little wonder that Australian uranium-mining companies and their pro-nuclear supporters were highly agitated as a result of the nuclear catastrophe that occurred at TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant following the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Pro-miners downplayed the catastrophe by asserting that it was a minor accident due to the age of the reactors, that more modern reactors were immune from such damage, that no one would suffer permanent radiation sickness, and that nuclear power continued to be both the safest and the only way to replace fossil-fuel power plants and thus save the planet from global warming.

During the media blizzard in Australia that followed the Fukushima disaster, some of the most prominent ‘expert’ commentators were pro-nuclear advocates with scientific qualifications: Professor Aidan Byrne, a nuclear physicist at the Australian National University; Dr Ziggy Switkowski, former head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation at Lucas Heights in Sydney and high-profile CEO of Telstra; and Professor Barry Brook of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Adelaide University.

Byrne was cautious about the disaster and its effects. In several interviews, he emphasised that all the facts of the accident were not then available, but he doubted that it would turn out to be as bad as Chernobyl. He was particularly sceptical that radiation leaking from the plant would prove as dangerous or widespread as at Chernobyl.

Switkowski put a more pro-nuclear bias on events. He had recommended in a report commissioned by prime minister Howard in June 2006 that Australia should construct 25 nuclear-power reactors by 2050, a figure which in 2010 he increased to 50 reactors. In an article in The Australian on 17 June 2011, Switkowski admitted that Fukushima would set back the expansion of nuclear power in Japan and around the world (including in Australia), but believed that the industry would recover from the setback. He claimed that almost 200,000 people in Fukushima prefecture had been routinely checked for radiation exposure, without any evidence of adverse health effects; this number included more than 1000 children monitored for elevated radioactive iodine in their thyroid glands, without any cancers detected. He asserted that nuclear power was clean, the only possible technology that could feasibly replace fossil fuels as a reliable base-load source of electricity; if adopted by enough countries, it would save the planet from global warming. He continued to advocate the construction of nuclear reactors in Australia.

Brook gave a more assertive rebuttal of public-health dangers attaching to the disaster. The accident was under control, he claimed, and there was very little reason for concern, either in the Tōhoku region, or anywhere else in Japan. In one of his early commentaries, he categorically stated that:

The risk of meltdown is extremely small, and the death toll from any such accident, even if it occurred, will be zero. There will be no breach of containment and no release of radioactivity beyond, at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure. Those spreading FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces.

I am happy to be quoted forever after on the above if I am wrong ... but I won’t be.

... The only reactor that has a small probability of being ‘finished’ is FD unit 1. And I doubt that, but it may be offline for a year or more.

His message hardly changed, even as the containments of three reactors exploded, even as attempts to cool the exposed and melting fuel rods inside them failed, even as 200,000 people were evacuated, and even as alarming jumps in radioactivity were recorded in the vicinity of the reactors and as far away as Tokyo.

Pro-nuclear Australian journalists, many associated with the Murdoch press, echoed the positive views of the academics. Andrew Bolt, of the Melbourne newspaper The Herald Sun, urged his readers to read the ‘marvellously sane and cool explanation’ from ‘our friend Professor Barry Brook’. Like Brook, he claimed, against all the evidence, that no more than 50 people had died as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and that Fukushima was likely to be far less dangerous. In an article in The Weekend Australian of 23–24 July 2011, the foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, inveighed against what he saw as the ‘completely kooky phobia about anything to do with nuclear power’ that exists in Australia. He asserted:

The perfect test for seriousness about combating greenhouse gas emissions is our attitude to nuclear energy. Unless you are a Greens/Taliban fundamentalist seeking to de-industrialise the West, you are not serious about climate change if you oppose nuclear energy. It is the only non-greenhouse gas-emitting alternative baseload energy supply available. Most of the climate change spruikers in Australia are not really serious about the subject. It’s mostly gesture, moral grandstanding and party politics. We have not even the scent of a serious discussion of nuclear power in Australia.

Peter Van Onselen, contributing editor to The Australian, wrote on 27 April that it was hardly the time for a debate on nuclear power to gain momentum in Australia. But, he wrote:

We shouldn’t forget that for all the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, radiation exposure has been contained. Compare that to the many deaths each year from coalmining ... If they [the Greens] got their wish and nuclear power was wound back globally, emissions in countries such as China, the US, France and Italy would skyrocket.

Australian uranium-mining companies joined the chorus. Rio Tinto is one of the world’s biggest uranium producers, with a controlling stake in Energy Resources of Australia as well as an interest in Namibia’s massive Rossing mine. At the company’s annual meeting in Perth on 5 May 2011, chairman Jan du Plessis said it would be ‘lovely’ to be able to live solely off solar power, but that wasn’t going to happen. He said, ‘Our firm view is that for the sake of energy security ... the world is going to have to include ... a certain contribution [from] nuclear energy.’ Two weeks later, the company’s CEO, Tom Albanese, told a public meeting that there was no doubt that the Fukushima disaster would slow the growth of uranium mining over the next ten years, but the long term remained strong. China, he claimed, had 27 reactors under construction, and more than 100 on the drawing board. Japan and the United States had little choice but to retain their plans for nuclear expansion.

Meanwhile a prominent Sydney-based think tank, the Lowy Institute for International Policy, maintained a consistently pro-nuclear bias in its public meetings on the subject. The institute’s deputy director, Martine Letts, asserted that Australia had to respond to the accident at Fukushima with an ‘objective’ and ‘unemotional’ public debate on the issue. Her implication was that nuclear sceptics are emotional and irrational, whereas pro-nukes are clear-headed and rational. She hosted two Lowy luncheons to ‘ventilate the issues’. At the first, on 20 April 2011, her guests were John Carlson, former director-general of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office in Canberra; Michael Angwin, CEO of the Australian Uranium Association; John Borshoff, CEO of the Paladin Energy uranium-mining company; and Selena Ng, regional director of the French nuclear construction company Areva.

Letts could not have chosen a more pro-nuclear panel. After paying tribute to Clarence Hardy, a recently deceased pro-nuclear advocate and secretary of the Australian Nuclear Association, she introduced Carlson, who observed that on most subjects of technical complexity, ‘experts’ are usually engaged, whereas on nuclear issues, ‘anyone with an opinion can pass as a nuclear expert’. He followed this patronising observation with a string of assertions about nuclear safety: the Fukushima reactors were an old design without the additional safety features of modern reactors; they had caused no significant radiation exposure to any member of the public; nuclear waste was more a political than a technical problem; the public’s exaggerated fear of radiation impacted more seriously on their ‘mental health’ than radiation did on their physical wellbeing.

The Australian Uranium Association’s Michael Angwin said that, notwithstanding Fukushima, the drivers of demand for nuclear power — the aspirations for wealth, energy security, and technology to combat climate change — had not changed. The risk associated with nuclear power was as low as it had been before Fukushima, and the media had focused on the sensational and the immediate.

In an aggressive speech, seemingly pitched at instilling confidence in his uranium-mining shareholders, John Borshoff asserted that the Fukushima reactors would ‘slowly stabilise’, that no deaths had occurred, and that it was doubtful that there would be harm in the long term. In a sulphurous aside, he charged the media with being like ‘jackals’, full of hyperbole, focusing on the breakdown at Fukushima while ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Nuclear technology, he asserted, was the safest industry in the world. Nuclear power was a ‘must’, carbon-free and safe. Demand would not change. There was a shortage in supply of uranium, and prices would go up. By 2030, he claimed, 250 new reactors would be built.

Selena Ng from Areva gave a more nuanced presentation. The company had provided technical advice to the Japanese at Fukushima, and it believed that nuclear safety was non-negotiable, and that the industry must be transparent. To say that people were stupid or ignorant if they distrusted nuclear technology was arrogant and wrong. Current international emergency procedures to contain nuclear accidents had not been changed since Chernobyl, and urgently needed updating. Fukushima was a wake-up call. Meanwhile, Areva would continue to promote ‘safe’ nuclear power in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

A second Lowy discussion of nuclear issues was held on 9 June 2011. Against a backdrop of noisy anti-nuclear demonstrators in the street outside, Letts observed that Australian public opinion seemed to be against nuclear power in Australia, but in favour of expanding uranium exports to other countries. Opinion, as she put it, tended either to be for or emotionally against nuclear power, and Lowy’s job was to introduce ‘new voices’ into the public debate. The voices may have been new to Lowy, but they were well known as pro-nuclear among informed Australians.

Andy Lloyd of Rio Tinto acknowledged the damage at Fukushima, but asserted that generation III and IV reactors would be a lot safer. Nuclear power was an option that would come into its own throughout the world as the international community struggled with combating global warming from carbon emissions.

The second speaker was the former national president of the Labor Party, Warren Mundine, a champion of native-title rights. He confessed to having been an anti-nuke, but was now pro. He had begun his ‘journey’ seven years ago when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and had then been cured with radiation therapy. The Labor Party policy of restricting uranium exports, he asserted, was illogical:

Our uranium can’t just stay in the ground ... we need to dispel a lot of local emotional nonsense ... hundreds of thousands of workers need jobs in the industry ... Fukushima has slowed down the process of acceptance, but it will speed up again ... I am confident it is one of the safest of industries ... We must avoid slogans and cute one-line debates ... we need to have a nuclear waste repository. We can’t just say no.

Several emotional drivers appeared to be underlying the ‘rational’ pro-nuclear arguments of all these speakers: impatience that Australia was so slow to exploit the largest repository of uranium in the world, anger that successive Australian governments had prevented greater international sales and higher profits, hope that a surge in construction of nuclear power plants around the world in response to global warming would overwhelm the sceptics, frustration that both major parties had failed to debate the pros and cons (particularly the pros) of establishing a domestic nuclear-power industry, and desire to advance individual vested interests.

The iron law about the need to use caution in any political discussion about nuclear issues had been reimposed during the 2007 federal election campaign. John Howard wanted an ‘open debate’ on the need for nuclear reactors in Australia, aimed at persuading the public to vote for them. But several candidates from his own party said they would not have reactors in their own electorates, which may have been a factor in him losing his own seat in a Labor landslide. Since then, with a few notable exceptions, both sides of politics have been reluctant to debate the issue in federal parliament.

One who probably would is Martin Ferguson, Minister for Resources and Energy, who told a nuclear forum in Sydney at the end of June 2011 that debate on the option of introducing nuclear power in Australia remained alive, despite the best efforts of the Greens and non-government organisations to demonise discussions. Furthermore, he did not think it wise for other countries to wind down nuclear programs, as they would only turn to more carbon-intensive forms of power generation. He took a swipe at Germany’s decision to shrink its nuclear program in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, saying it was an expedient political decision and that the country would now have to import power from nuclear plants in other countries such as France. During 2011, the deputy leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, also called for Australia to embrace a nuclear future, but had little or no popular support.

On the related issue of uranium exports from Australia, Australia’s two largest uranium exporters, BHP Billiton (from the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia) and Rio Tinto’s Energy Resources Australia (Ranger in Kakadu, the Northern Territory), were asked by shareholders at public meetings whether, as major uranium suppliers to Japan, they felt they should accept any responsibility for the Fukushima disaster. Neither would, admitting that while both companies exported uranium to Japan, commercial-in-confidence strictures prevented them from saying whether any had fuelled the Fukushima reactors. This response was echoed by both political parties.

Despite Fukushima, both sides of Parliament continue to advocate opening new mines and exporting more uranium to what they characterise as an energy-hungry world. Before its 2007 election victory, the Labor Party had scrapped its ‘no new mines’ policy, potentially opening up 40 per cent of the world’s economically recoverable uranium resources. Martin Ferguson called on Victoria and NSW to rethink their long-term bans on exploration and mining because they limited knowledge of potential deposits. A brief press flurry arose in early August 2011 when Barry O’Farrell, the new Liberal premier of NSW, was reported to be considering repealing the state’s Uranium Mining and Nuclear Facilities (Prohibitions) Act 1986. Following an initial public outcry from anti-nuclear activists, he quickly and publicly backed down, but then went ahead and introduced legislation to change the act to allow uranium exploration. The amendments passed through Parliament on 28 March 2012. As this book goes to press, South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia allow exploration and mining, Queensland (with a new Liberal government) is likely to follow quite soon, and New South Wales allows exploration, but not yet mining. Victoria and Tasmania allow neither exploration nor mining.

Meanwhile, there are four operational uranium mines in Australia. They are Rio Tinto’s Ranger mine in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory; BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia; General Atomics’ Beverley mine in South Australia, close to the NSW border; and Honeymoon, also in South Australia. The Ranger mine is leaking and ageing, but expanding. Olympic Dam, an underground mine, is soon to expand into a large open-cut to exploit the largest known deposit of uranium in the world. At both Beverley and Honeymoon, uranium is extracted though an environmentally questionable process known as in situ leaching, whereby an acid or alkaline solution is injected into the ore body to dissolve the uranium, which is pumped to the surface as a ‘pregnant liquor’ and beneficiated into solid uranium oxide. The mine owners, which include the American company General Atomics in the case of Beverley, and Mitsui in the case of Honeymoon, are not responsible for any environmental damage their mining methods may cause to underlying aquifers.

Some Australians responded to the Fukushima disaster with hope that it would reawaken the world to the dangers of nuclear power. Others hoped that the world would take Fukushima as an opportunity to develop better safety procedures in more efficient nuclear installations to ensure a nuclear-powered future. So far, neither of these hopes has been realised. As the horrendous consequences of the disaster slowly emerge, Australians will have to wait to know the outcome, which they will be unable to influence either way. Meanwhile, the minister for sports in the former conservative Howard government, Andrew Thomson, suggested that a way to break a ‘deadlock’ in Japan that is jeopardising recovery efforts at Fukushima would be for Australia to take radioactive soil and debris removed from the clean-up area outside the 20-kilometre exclusion zone, and bury it permanently in Australia. As reported in The Australian on 15 March 2012 by Tokyo correspondent Rick Wallace, Thomson said:

This stuff is only mildly radioactive, it’s not going to harm anyone, but the last place you want to store it is Japan — it’s just too crowded. Western Australia has benefited greatly from Japanese demand for iron ore and base metals and South Australia is launching a major uranium export industry. It’s only fair and reasonable if we propose to sell more uranium to Japan in future that we should offer such help now when Japan really needs it.

According to an anti-nuclear activist, Nat Wasley, Thomson’s suggestion is a thinly veiled business proposal: in return for taking the waste, Australia should receive more funding from Japan to ensure the construction of the troubled Oakajee port and rail project in Western Australia, thereby unlocking the mid-west iron ore region. But in making the proposal, Thomson overlooked a provision in legislation passed through federal parliament in March 2012 that makes importation of nuclear waste illegal. In any event, the proposal would probably be rejected out of hand by an electorate keen to export uranium while profits can be made, but opposed to taking back any end-product such as irradiated waste or spent fuel rods.