En Passant

This article, by Andrew Cheeseman, first appeared in Socialist Alternative online on 09 March 2010

Once more, the Rudd government is talking up a nuclear future. There are plans for a new nuclear waste dump and it’s quite likely that this month’s meeting between US President Barack Obama and the Australian parliament will see further discussions of so-called “uranium leasing”.

Uranium leasing sees uranium exported from Australia to be used in reactors in countries like America, with the toxic waste then returned to Australia where it is dumped.

The last decade has seen a large increase in uranium production in Australia – from 5,800 tonnes of uranium oxide in 1998 to around 10,000 tonnes in each of the last four years.

In the 1980s, such an expansion of the nuclear industry would have been unthinkable. Mass movements against uranium mining forced the ALP, despite its conservatism and links to the mining industry, to put significant limitations on uranium mining in the form of the three-mine policy, essentially preventing any new uranium mines in Australia.

But since then, the PR teams of the nuclear industry have been hard at work trying to make the idea of a nuclear future more palatable. The same sorts of spin doctors that once sang the praises of asbestos and denied any link between smoking and cancer are now out to tell us that nuclear power is the solution to global warming, that it no longer has any links to nuclear weapons, and given a chance, they’ll probably also tell you that it will cure cancer, end poverty and do your laundry.

So why should the nuclear industry be opposed today?

Firstly, it is critical to recognise that uranium mining in Australia takes place on stolen Aboriginal land. Mining of uranium desecrates sacred sites, destroys pristine wilderness areas and forces the relocation of entire communities that live near mine sites. Much of it even takes place in the Kakadu National Park!

For this reason, Aboriginal communities have been in the forefront of many anti-nuclear campaigns, including the inspiring protest movement that led to the mothballing of the Jabiluka uranium mine in the late 1990s. Socialist Alternative was proud to support the struggle of the Mirrar people against that mine – both at the mine itself and on the streets of the major cities.

Even where Aboriginal communities have given consent to uranium mining, it’s been because of coercion – communities have been required to allow uranium mines in order to fund basic services such as sanitation and hospitals.

Secondly, it’s important to cut through all of the myths that now surround the industry. The main lies told by defenders of the nuclear industry are that it is a “green” energy source, that nuclear waste can be safely disposed of, that nuclear power is safe, and that nuclear power makes economic sense. These are all lies. There is nothing green or safe about the nuclear industry.

 Industry Lie #1: Nuclear energy is a “green” power source

With more and more people caring about the environment, what better way to try to present a dirty, dangerous industry than as a carbon-free, clean alternative to coal? The reality, however, is very different.

The ecological devastation caused by uranium mining is incredible. Several of the world’s largest uranium mines use the in-situ leech (ISL) mining method, which is described by one pro-nuclear industry website as follows:

“Uranium ISL uses the native groundwater in the orebody which is fortified with a complexing agent and in most cases an oxidant. It is then pumped through the underground orebody to recover the minerals in it by leaching… In Australian ISL mines (Beverley and the soon to be opened Honeymoon Mine) the oxidant used is hydrogen peroxide and the complexing agent sulfuric acid.”

In other words, take one of the strongest acids known to humanity, mix in some of the chemical used to bleach hair, dump it in natural water sources and pump the resultant sludge into the ground. If you tipped that mixture down the sink, you’d earn yourself a well-deserved fine and probably wreck your entire house’s sewerage system. But if you pump it into national parks, and then are reckless with the waste, you get to claim to be an environmentalist.

Even once the uranium is out of the ground, there’s nothing green about nuclear power. The uranium needs to be enriched – a process that typically requires enormous amounts of power produced by burning fossil fuels. Scientists Jan-Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith argued in Nuclear Power, The Energy Balance that nuclear power only produces less carbon dioxide than coal when the purest uranium deposits are used, and that these deposits are extremely limited.

 Industry Lie #2: Nuclear energy is safe

The early years of the nuclear industry saw the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl, which exposed nearly a million Ukrainians to radioactive material (up to five million more may have been exposed to small amounts) and is expected to have caused a total of 4000 deaths. An area about the size of the city of Adelaide around the site is known as the Zone of Alienation, and is still unfit for human habitation a generation after the accident.

And whilst safety has improved since Chernobyl, even the most technologically advanced countries aren’t free from nuclear leaks. A CBS news story in February revealed that just over one quarter of US nuclear plants are leaking tritium – a hydrogen isotope that can become a colourless, odourless yet radioactive pollutant in water. It remains carcinogenic for decades.

In 1999 a nuclear fission plant in Tokaimura, Japan had a serious accident and leak. More recently in March 2004, a pipe containing uranium-contaminated water was connected to a drinking fountain at Ranger Uranium Mine. And most of that happened before the economic crisis made companies even keener to save money any way they can.

Tritium leaks, metropolis-sized exclusion zones and radioactive gas leaks do not make for a safe power source at all, and that’s not even thinking about nuclear weapons yet.

Industry Lie #3: Nuclear waste won’t be a problem for future generations

Nuclear fission reactions create an enormous spectrum of waste chemicals, mostly radioactive heavy metals. Significant amounts of this waste will remain radioactive for centuries, and some of it will still be deadly in twenty thousand years. However, there’s no way known to store it until it is no longer a threat.

 Industry Lie #4: Civilian nuclear power has no military links

Civilian nuclear reactors can be rapidly modified to produce nuclear weapons. A typical 1000-megawatt reactor processes Uranium-238 to produce about 200kg per year of Plutonium-239 (or alternately similar amounts of Uranium-235). Purified, this can be used to produce forty nuclear weapons. Each would be capable of annihilating an entire city.

When it comes down to it, this is the key reason that governments really want to invest in nuclear – they potentially get both energy and weaponry.

Even small-scale plants that are intended for scientific research rather than large-scale power generation (such as the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney) are a concern. Whilst they may not produce enough material to make a bomb, they lay some of the groundwork needed for a larger program, as the technical skills and infrastructure needed to build a reactor capable of churning out weapons-grade plutonium aren’t markedly different from those needed for reactors like Lucas Heights.

Industry Lie #5: Nuclear power is economically viable

Under capitalism, whenever there’s no ulterior motive involved, governments and corporations go with the cheapest option, to minimize costs and maximize profits. However, nuclear power has always required enormous subsidies to be “competitive” in the market.

Estimates of US government subsidies to the nuclear industry typically agree that about $US250 billion of public money has been spent on research, constructing plants and bailing out the nuclear industry in America alone. That’s over 30% of the total sale price of the power produced by those plants.

By comparison, the entire wealth produced by the state of Victoria in the 2007-08 financial year was $AU268 billion – just a trifle less than the total handouts to the US nuclear industry. The capitalist class isn’t prepared to spend that sort of money developing renewable energy. They are only prepared to waste that level of money on nuclear power because of its military uses. In reality, it is $US250 billion of military funding masquerading as energy spending.

 No to nuclear

Nuclear technology is far too dangerous to trust bodies like the Australian or American governments with. It is costly, unsafe, extremely polluting and requires the desecration of Aboriginal land to mine uranium. Further, it was responsible for the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the production of over twenty thousand similar weapons since.

For these reasons and more, the anti-nuclear campaigners of the second half of last century were absolutely right to oppose the nuclear industry. Today we need to follow in their footsteps.