Why we should say NO to
nuclear power

5. Because it would increase the risk of nuclear war

Arguably the most serious problem associated with nuclear power is the use of fissile material for weapons. This is an issue deeply embedded in the history of the nuclear industry, because it began with weapons and only later started adding production of useful energy.

Most of the know-how and infrastructure needed to produce nuclear power can also be used to develop weapons, which is why a decision by a country to embrace nuclear power inevitably arouses suspicion and anxiety in its neighbours. The most recent example is Iran. The anxiety is quite understandable. Iran has plenty of oil and gas as well as renewable resources like solar. Why would it go down the technically difficult and economically dubious path of nuclear power if it were not intending to develop weapons?

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT or just NPT), developed nearly 40 years ago, was intended to solve the problem. I think it has been a dismal failure, although there are pro-nuclear enthusiasts who still regard it as a success story.

In 2005, Ian Hore-Lacy, then head of the Uranium Information Centre (which is funded by the Australian mining industry to distribute pro-nuclear material) told a parliamentary committee that having only eight states known to possess nuclear weapons was “an extraordinarily good result”9 – suggesting that some had feared we might have 30 or 35 countries wielding nuclear bombs.

But the agreement is coming apart. As former Australian diplomat Professor Richard Broinowski puts it:

Under article VI, the weapons states are supposed to reduce and then do away with their arsenals [in return] for the non-nuclear weapons states saying “We will not possess, develop or acquire nuclear weapons”. In my view, we are probably going to see one or two extra nuclear states every year because they are absolutely sick and tired of having to follow their part of the bargain while the superpower and other nuclear weapons states have no intention of reducing their armaments.10

Broinowski continues that the United States is even developing new weapons, while China is also expanding its capacity to deliver nuclear bombs.

I was astonished to see that the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) responded with its own interpretation of the treaty, claiming that Article VI doesn’t require the weapons states actually to disarm, only to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”.11

Even if we accept that generous interpretation, there is still little evidence of “negotiations in good faith [to cease] the arms race at an early date.” Indeed, the 2005 United Nations conference of parties to the NPT broke up in complete disarray because the non-weapons states were so angry about the lack of progress.

Part of the problem is that the treaty was specifically intended to spread nuclear energy but restrain weapons proliferation. Prof. Broinowski argues that Iran’s recent actions are “perfectly legal under the NPT”, because the treaty actually encourages countries to develop the capacity to enrich uranium. “Yet that could lead immediately to weapons-grade plutonium or uranium being developed in Iran”, he says.

In short, the NPT sought to encourage peaceful use of nuclear technology while restraining its military Siamese twin.

World experts agree that there is a serious problem. One such is Dr Mohamed El Baradei, recently retired head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has a Janus-like task of seeking to promote peaceful uses of nuclear technology while restraining weapons development. In his words, “as long as some countries place strategic reliance on nuclear weapons as a deterrent, other countries will emulate them”. It is the height of delusion not to recognise that obvious truth.

El Baradei recently complained to the United Nations about the problems of trying to oversee approximately 900 nuclear facilities in 71 countries on “an annual budget of about $100 million…comparable to that of a local police department”! He noted that his agency had, in the past decade, recorded more than 650 attempts to smuggle nuclear materials.

He also reminded the United Nations that a country with a nuclear industry could formally withdraw from the treaty and quite legally develop its own weapons within months. In that sense, the safeguards regime can give only “an illusion of protection,” as journalist and author Robert Milliken concluded nearly 30 years ago.

The problem is not just “rogue” states but terrorist organisations. In 2007, a BBC correspondent, Gordon Corera, reported that Osama bin Laden, founder and leader of the international terrorist organisation al-Qaeda, had asked Pakistani nuclear scientists to help him get a nuclear bomb. Corera argued that the spread of nuclear technology to more countries was increasing the probability of an al-Qaeda bomb.12

Former Australian diplomat Trevor Findlay has been heavily involved in disarmament and nuclear verification, including being director of the Iraq independent verification team, VERTIC, set up by the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He says that the existing regulatory framework is already struggling to cope, so a major expansion of nuclear technology would pose huge challenges for monitoring and verification of safeguards.

The Oxford Research Group, which specialises in security issues, recently analysed whether nuclear power could make a major contribution to slowing climate change. It concluded that nuclear would have to be supplying at least a third of the world’s energy by 2075 to play a significant role. But this would involve building nuclear power stations at the wildly improbable rate of four a month, from now until then. Even if that could be achieved, the ORG concludes, it would probably have a disastrous impact on efforts to control weapons material.13 Such a rate of development of nuclear power would not be feasible based on the current style of reactors. It would quickly exhaust the limited reserves of high-grade uranium ores, forcing the use of poorer grades of ore. That would increase the fossil fuel energy needed to extract the fuel and eliminate the greenhouse benefits of the nuclear approach.

The only possible technology to enable such a dramatic expansion, the ORG concludes, is the so-called breeder reactor, which produces plutonium for the next generation of reactors as well as energy. This approach makes much more efficient use of the limited uranium but has a disastrous impact on proliferation.

The report calculates that expansion of nuclear power on that scale would require the processing each year of about 4000 tonnes of plutonium – in other words, an annual production equivalent to about 20 times the current global military stockpile. Put another way, for the world to generate enough nuclear power to have a serious impact on climate change, it would have to produce more plutonium than the entire present global military inventory every three weeks.

Such a scale of production would make it almost certain that some plutonium would finish up in the wrong hands. As the ORG concludes, “a world-wide nuclear renaissance is beyond the capacity of the nuclear industry to deliver and would stretch to breaking point the capacity of the IAEA to monitor and safeguard civilian nuclear power”. That seems clear, given El Baradei’s warning about the problem his agency is having now.

Dr Hans Blix was El Baradei’s predecessor as head of the IAEA. He recently chaired the independent Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. Its 2006 report explicitly rejects the suggestion that nuclear weapons are acceptable in some hands but a threat in others. That idea was implicit in the hysteria about President Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction which preceded the US attack on Iraq in 2003. It is echoed in today’s international concern that Iran’s uranium enrichment program is for nuclear weapons not nuclear power.

The suggestion is that nuclear weapons in such hands are an obvious threat to world peace but we should not worry about the arsenals of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. The commission concludes that the major nuclear threats – existing weapons, further proliferation and terrorism – “are interlinked politically and also practically: the larger the existing stocks, the greater the danger of leakage and misuse”.14

We should also recognise the possible impact on regional security if Australia were to “go nuclear”. I discussed earlier the problem of Iran. Its neighbours are suspicious because they see an energy-rich country, with no obvious need for the expensive and problematic development of nuclear power, going down that path with great determination. It is hardly surprising that Iran has frightened its neighbours, not just Israel but also adjoining Muslim countries.

Why is this relevant to Australia? Imagine you were an Indonesian or a Malaysian, looking south to Australia. You would see a country with reserves of coal and gas so large that it is bending over backwards to find ways to export them more rapidly.

At the same time, Australia is also a nation with enormous renewable energy resources; the amount of solar energy hitting Australia in an average summer day is about half the total global annual energy demand! The solar energy is many thousands of times greater than Australia’s energy use, as are the nation’s other renewable resources.

You would also see a country with few people relative to its land area – though for good biophysical reasons related to Australia’s old and extensively weathered soils.

Why then, you might ask yourself, would Australians waste money and other resources trying to develop an energy system that is more expensive, more problematic and more dangerous?

Like Iran’s neighbours, you would probably suspect that the secret motive might be to develop a nuclear weapons capacity. Any agitator wanting to spread that theory could quote past Australian nuclear technocrats to give the story credibility.

For example, in 1973 the former head of the then Australian Atomic Energy Commission, the late Sir Philip Baxter, publicly advocated that Australia develop nuclear weapons to defend itself against its more heavily-populated Asian neighbours.15 Just as India’s development of nuclear weapons prompted its neighbour Pakistan to do the same, any Australian decision to embrace nuclear technology would be likely to set off an arms race in its region, giving proliferation a dangerous fillip.

Former American Vice-President Al Gore remarked during a recent visit to Australia that every problem of weapons proliferation during his eight years in the White House arose directly from a civilian nuclear program.

The basic point is that increasing the amount of fissile material in the world is inevitably making our planet dirtier and more dangerous. This might be tolerable, if nuclear power were really the only feasible way of avoiding dangerous climate change. But it isn’t, so there is no case for taking the risk.

As a final codicil, the spread of nuclear power implicitly assumes that the future world will always be peaceful. In 20th-century conflicts, power stations and dams were seen as legitimate targets. Imagine the disastrous consequences of nuclear power stations being bombed in a serious conflict between states with nuclear reactors. An attack with even conventional weapons on a nuclear power station could spread radioactive debris over a large area. It is not clear how nuclear power stations could be defended or how any nation could cope with the consequences of a major dispersion of radioactive material.