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 Community Radio 855am

THE RADIO-ACTIVE SHOW

With Eric Miller and Linda Marks

Saturday at 10.00am

2nd January 1999

Good morning, this is the Radio Active Show brought to you by the Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service. I'm Eric Miller. The Radio Active Show is a weekly program bringing you news and information on Nuclear, Peace and Energy issues.

On today's show we look at Australia's nuclear research reactor in Sydney's South at Lucas Heights and the campaign to stop the new reactor being built. We hear from Jim Green from the University of NSW and Genevieve Rankin from the Sutherland Shire Council.

One of the first topics on the Nuclear Free Australia Forum last year on the 5th & 6th December was the Lucas Heights research reactor. The plans for a new reactor are well under way with comments from the public to the Environment Impact Statement now all in. We have now to hear the comments from ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, and the reply from the Government. The process could be finished by March. There has been a lot of activity against the reactor in Sydney and the Sutherland Shire where the old reactor is situated and the new one is to be built. But this campaign must go national if we are going to stop Australia from being nuclearised. Jim Green from the University of NSW spoke first.

Jim Green: Thanks very much to FOE in Melbourne for organising this conference and for the invitation.

We are told we need a new research reactor at Lucas Heights to produce medical isotopes. But the reality is that if you have $300 million and your aim was to improve the health of the Australian population then the very last thing you would do is build a new reactor in Sydney. We are told we need a new reactor to do scientific research. But the reality is that if you have $300 million and your aim was to improve Australia's science and technology capabilities then building a new reactor in Sydney or anywhere in Australia is the very last thing you would do. The same applies to industrial applications. ANSTO gets a net subsidy of $50 million every year so there is no commercial rationale whatsoever for operating ANSTO or a nuclear research reactor.

The real agenda has nothing whatsoever with medicine or science or industrial applications, what's really going on is that ANSTO and its reactor act as props for every other aspect of Australia's nuclear industry.

Historically ANSTO has been involved in a development of nuclear power. There was a push for nuclear weapons, there was a crazy idea to use peaceful nuclear explosives to develop an artificial harbour off the coast of Western Australia. It's also worth bearing in mind that ANSTO has been involved in every facet of the uranium industry from prospecting to mining, to marketing. So that's the history.

Currently ANSTO still supports the uranium industry. ANSTO's pushing hard for this waste dump at Billa Kalina in South Australia. ANSTO provides technical support for the visits of nuclear war ships. ANSTO provides support for the US nuclear alliance more generally. ANSTO also acts as a catalyst for the further expansion of Australia's nuclear industry. This year we've been fighting hard against the reactor, early next year there's going to be the next phase of the Billa Kalina campaign. A few years down the track it's more than likely we'll be fighting the plan for a spent fuel reprocessing plant. Ten to 20 years down the track there's a chance we'll be fighting concrete plans for nuclear power in Australia and ANSTO will be up to its neck in every one of these plans. So ANSTO's a prop for the nuclear industry and a catalyst for the further expansion for the industry.

Two points follow from this, this issue is more important than many people realise. It is a local health and safety issue but it is much more than that. Secondly, it's an issue with national ramifications and one that needs a national campaign.

So there are the arguments in a nutshell and to expand a little, I think it is worth revisiting ANSTO's history. Remember that ANSTO was set up in 1953 with a specific aim of developing nuclear power in Australia. The Hifar research reactor was designed specifically for research relating to nuclear power and that was the main purpose of the reactor until the Jervis Bay project was abandoned under the prime ministership of Billie McMahon in 1971. ANSTO was involved in the British weapons test in the 1950s and 60s. Philip Baxter, the chair of ANSTO was an extremely influential advocate of nuclear weapons in Australia. He put forward many proposals such as that we should build a nuclear power plant and divert the plutonium from that power plant and use that for weapons. Philip Baxter also set up a plough shares committee at ANSTO which was to use peaceful nuclear explosives for civil engineering projects. And as I mentioned, ANSTO has been involved in the prospecting of uranium, mining uranium, of marketing uranium, every facet of the uranium industry.

So, as you can see, ANSTO and its research reactor has been involved in the big ticket nuclear programs, supporting existing programs and pushing the frontiers of Australia's nuclear industry.

So, what is ANSTO up to now and why do they want a new research reactor? Nowadays ANSTO's support for the nuclear industry is a lot more insidious and complex. ANSTO's not actively involved in the uranium industry except in a marginal capacity. But all the same ANSTO still supports the Uranium industry. ANSTO is involved in monitoring Australia's uranium as it moved through the nuclear fuel cycle overseas. ANSTO provides technical advice to the Government on the technical capabilities of recipient countries, in particular, their military capabilities. ANSTO provides a degree of technical support to the uranium industry. And ANSTO boasts about the fact that it directly and indirectly drums up business for the Australian countries.

ANSTO's not currently pushing for nuclear weapons in Australia, but nevertheless, it is encouraging the proliferation of peaceful technologies around the world, in particular, the Asia-Pacific region. The problem here, as I'm sure everyone knows, is that peaceful nuclear technologies and military technologies are one and the same thing. Whether you are talking about uranium enrichment plants, power reactors, research reactors, reprocessing plants, or what have you, they can all be used for fair purposes or foul.

Australian Governments go to enormous lengths to involve Australia in the development of nuclear programs overseas through bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Government claims to be involved in these international bodies pushing for nuclear disarmament and improved safety standards, but the reality is that Australia continually undermines disarmament initiatives for the fear of upsetting the nuclear alliance with the US. The reality is that Australia continually undermines disarmament initiatives for fear of upsetting the uranium mining companies operating in Australia.

ANSTO is up to its neck in this international politicking. It provides advice to Government. ANSTO scientists are actively involved in regional programs in the Asia-Pacific and in broader international programs, and ANSTO staff often moved into diplomatic or bureaucratic postings overseas.

At the moment we are being told that Australia's place on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency depends on the replacement of the Lucas Heights reactor. It is doubtful that position does depend on the operation of a reactor in Australia and in any case, that position is not put to good use. As Jean McSorely writes, it would not be a bad thing if Australia were there pushing for stricter safeguards, the separation of promotion and watchdog activities and stringent safety laws. If Australia did that, it would more than likely lose its Board of Governor seat. So Australia has to be part of the promotional stakes to keep it in the upper echelons of the International Atomic Energy Agency. We have to play the game, we have to perpetuate this myth that you can have the proliferation of so called peaceful nuclear technologies without that spilling over into weapons programs.

So ANSTO supports the uranium industry, it is deeply involved in international nuclear politicking and proliferation. ANSTO is also deeply involved in the plan to build a radioactive waste dump in the Billa Kalina region of South Australia. When measured in terms of radioactivity most of the waste sent to that dump will be from ANSTO. The aim is to reduce political opposition to ANSTO's current status as Australia's defacto radioactive waste dump and thereby reduce the opposition to building another nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. In some, the Billa Kalina dump is a clearing exercise for ANSTO.

So they are the immediate issues surrounding ANSTO and the debate over the replacement reactor. In the future, a new reactor could very well turn out to be the thin edge of the nuclear wedge. For starters, the Billa Kalina dump is essentially a clearing exercise for ANSTO, but it could be the forerunner to a much larger dump, accepting waste from overseas. You will have heard media reports earlier this week arising from a promotional video from Pangea Resources, a company that thinks that it would be a good idea to dump international nuclear waste in the centre of Australia. There is also a very real chance that we will fighting a concrete plan for a spent fuel reprocessing plant at Lucas Heights, Billa Kalina or elsewhere in Australia. This could happen as soon as 2 or 3 years down the track. The current strategy is to send Australia's spent fuel overseas but no contracts have been signed. It's far from certain that it will be possible to do that and if that does fall through then the fight against the reprocessing plant in Australia will be on for young and old.

Ten to 20 years down the track? We could be fighting concrete plans to introduce nuclear power in Australia. People might have noticed that since the election of the Coalition Government the nuclear industry has been floating this idea, holding conferences, talking up this idea that nuclear power is the solution to the greenhouse problem. And we can expect that momentum to grow. Further down the track, 20 to 50 years, it's hard to say, it's possible that ANSTO could be involved in another push for nuclear weapons as it was 20 or 30 years ago. At the moment there is very little, if any, incentive for nuclear weapons in Australia because Australia is already a nuclear weapons state by proxy relying on the US war fighting machine. So they are the issues.

To sum up, we have been lucky in the past. The plans to develop nuclear power, nuclear weapons and a uranium enrichment plant all came to nothing. Plans to dump radioactive waste on remote communities have also been blocked so far. There is no guarantee however, that we'll be so lucky in the future. ANSTO and its reactor have been heavily involved in all these projects. If we can stop the new reactor being built, it pulls a prop from the uranium industry, it pulls a prop from the nuclear alliance with the US, it means that there is much less incentive to dump radioactive waste on Aboriginal land in South Australia or anywhere else. It means that nuclear power and weapons fade ever further into the distance. It is a fight with international ramifications and if we can stop this reactor is would be a huge victory for the entire anti-nuclear movement.

Eric Miller: That was Jim Green from the university of NSW speaking at the Nuclear Free Australia Forum last month.

Genevieve Rankin has been an activist against the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights for many years as well as a counsellor of the Sutherland Shire in South Sydney where the reactor is situated. She spoke next at the Nuclear Free Australia Forum, held on the 5th & 6th of December in Melbourne.

Genevieve Rankin: I'd like to first congratulate the organisers of this conference. I think that it is very, very timely that we are meeting here this morning in order to look at the nuclear industry's onslaught in Australia. When you pull all these things together, we can describe this as nothing more than an onslaught from the international nuclear industry on Australia at the moment. If you look at it from their point of view, there's probably never been a better time for them to move that right now in Australia. Now that the cold war has ended and all of us who were marching against the arms race in the 80s are no longer focussed on that issue. Plus we have massive uranium mines. And now we have a conservative government that has been elected again for 3 years. That government put all the mechanisms in place in their first term and can deliver on them in their second term.

I think it's very timely for us to be meeting here today with people from different states that are involved in the different issues and working out tomorrow what we are going to do to counter this. Because it's really up to us to move on it, people who are anti-nuclear in Australia.

There are, as other speakers have pointed out, the big 4 operations happening at the moment. There is a big push to expand Australia's uranium mining. There is the developing of a nuclear waste dump, and if it doesn't take international waste straight away they sure will want it to take it in the future. Also there is reprocessing of spent fuel. No longer is Scotland going to take our waste. With Scottish home rule and Scottish Environment Protection Agency and very strong communities there that are stopping the dumping of fuel rods at Dounereay, they have managed to close that part of the operation. So back here in Australia we have a push for reprocessing. We have just had legislation in the Federal Parliament, the APANZA bill that allows for reprocessing and reconditioning in this country. They are already experimenting on that at Lucas Heights. If they don't do the full processing at Lucas Heights they would prefer it to be where the reactor is, they will certainly plan to take it to the South Australia dump wherever that ends up.

At the same time we have a push for a new nuclear reactor in Australia. Now is the time. They can't get a licence for the old leaky one after 2003, in fact it shouldn't be licensed now. A study was done on it by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a proper risk assessment, in the last couple of years after much, much lobbying from local people. They spent $2million on it. Of the 7 safety criteria of whether you should have a nuclear reactor operating on that site in the middle of Sydney, they failed 4 out of the 7 criteria. And yet there is no process in train to stop their licence, stop the thing operating. It is an unsafe, dirty operation. It is one of the dirtiest reactors in the world, particularly research reactors. We have people who used to work there now working over in America and boasting. Helen Caldicott heard them when she was over there a couple of weeks ago. They were saying, hey you think that Brook Haven and these reactors you have in America are dirty, you ought to see the one I worked at in Lucas Heights. And the amount of iodine, the amount of tritium, the amount of argon, the amount of radon that we are allowed to pump out there with no laws in Australia to stop us. They are boasting overseas.

So you can see why it would be a good time for the nuclear industry to have a big onslaught in Australia. I think that all of these issues are intertwined and it is our challenge this weekend to work out how we can get a campaign going that does intertwine those issues and raise the level of awareness of the Australian communities to what is happening there.

In the local campaign in Sydney we have a very strong group of people. We have had a lot of successes in terms of getting publicity and keeping this issue alive on many different fronts. That's done by a very small group of people. If you look over the last 20 years or so we have half a dozen people who have been very active in this campaign, reading reports and trying to highlight the problems with the plant at Lucas Heights.

Now with the proposals for a new reactor, that group has swelled to almost 12, I think, and when you look at that small group of people who are very active and committed we have been able to achieve a lot of awareness, particularly in Sydney and the Sydney media. We have had a number of rallies and public meetings around the EIS.

It was interesting, during the EIS. There's an EIS on display at the moment. It is the biggest joke. We will have a competition at the end of today about which is the biggest joke EIS that we can find in Australia. I reckon it's Lucas Heights but some of you might have a different opinion. We have an EIS on display that doesn't tell us the design of the reactor. It doesn't even say how big it will be. We know it will be at least double the current one and let out more than 4 times as much waste, but that's not specified in the design. If you want to build a garage in our area you put your design plans into council and you show what you want to build. You want to build a new reactor, the biggest science project in the history of Australia, you don't even need to do a sketch diagram. We just say, yep, that's ok. The experts can't tell us how much radiation will be released because we don't have the design yet.

So we have a joke EIS on display. The period for responding to that has closed and we are now waiting on Environment Australia to, waiting for ANSTO first, to come back with a final draft report and then for the minister to have 6 weeks to rubber stamp it. It could all go through by March. The process is appalling.

We have had complaints. They have had 800 submissions to this, some of them are form letters from Nimbin and places like that. Even though it is a national process, there are complaints from ANSTO coming back that irrelevant people such as the people that might live on the north coast of NSW have a hide to put in a letter about this. Of course all the research done by Jim Green, by the consultants that the council have called in, by people who have put many, many hours of voluntary, timely research into this matter, all of their concerns are being denigrated by a smearing of the people involved. It is very interesting this process, Daniel Hirsh is one of the advisers that the council brought in from America. He is a person with a nuclear background. He has a curriculum vitae about that long and he sits on regulatory bodies in the States.

And suddenly we have all this scuttlebutt going around that he is a rabid anti-nuclear campaigner trying to shut down reactors all over the world. It would be nice if he was, but he isn't. But this sort of denigration is brought in to attack anybody that comes up with anything opposed to this industry expanding.

The reality is that there's no answer to the scientific questions. If they had an answer they wouldn't waste time attacking the scientists that are opposed to them. They would actually give us the answers to the questions that are being raised.

The local campaign is quite strong. The charter of the People Against The Nuclear Reactor states that we do not need a nuclear reactor in Australia. If they suddenly decide not to put it at Lucas Heights, we will be the first people supporting another community, for example, if they want to dump it in Kalgoorlie or any other part of Australia. We don't believe that Australia, moving into the next century, when we don't have a power industry, when we have lots of science that can't get funded in this country, we don't believe that we have a need a new nuclear reactor.

The campaign against the reactor at Lucas Heights at the moment is much too localised to Sydney, it's much to localised to the Sutherland Shire of Sydney. Because of the joke EIS process and this is a refusal, really, on the part of the Federal Government to environmentally assess this project at all. No assessment has been done. The Environmental Australia staff person, Steve Mercer, who is responsible for assessing the final submissions as they have come in, has said to residents that have rung in relation to the council submission, that it was alarmist nonsense. That was the phrase that came out of the public relations team at ANSTO before they had even read the council's submission. There has been no attempt whatsoever to do an environmental assessment of this project at all and there won't be unless there is a huge public outcry and legal challenge to what is going on at the moment.

The local campaign is strong, but because there has been no national assessment, the only real debate that I can see taking place on this issue at the moment is the Sutherland Shire Council. On the Sutherland Shire Council now we don't have a majority of anti-reactor people. We have a bunch of people who previously supported my motion at the start of their term. That was to have no reactor anywhere in Australia. It was a very good resolution that we got through the local government conference and we have support through local government in NSW and Australia on the issue. However, as soon as the Federal Government made its decision, the majority of the Liberal group on the council reversed that position and said they are now prepared to support it. They actually congratulated the minister on taking the hard decision to replace the leaky old reactor at Lucas Heights. So it was extremely disappointing and frustrating.

Last Monday night we had a huge debate which a few of us keep generating in that forum, but you can't help thinking, hey, is Sutherland Shire Council in Sydney the only place we are going to discuss a nuclear reactor for Australia. It is really, really important that it is not localised to there. It is very important that we have a combined campaign. This weekend we should take the opportunity to get our heads around the fact that we do have a nuclear onslaught in the country. If you start with mining, through to reactors, through to reprocessing through to waste dumps, we are here as a model case for the industry at the moment. They can get anything they want here from a compliant government and a community that's in a way gone to sleep on the nuclear issue. I think it's up to us to really see how we can pull those things together, mention them all in the same breath and really try to get some kind of national campaign going against this.

Eric Miller: Genevieve Rankin, counsellor for the Sutherland Shire, speaking at the Nuclear Free Australia Forum last month. And lots of campaign strategies were nutted out at the Forum but we will have to leave them for some time later.

That is all the time we have for the Radio Active Show this week so this is Eric saying goodbye as please listen in next week, bye for now.

Transcript produced by Linda Marks - with much thanks!!!
Page last updated January 8, 1999.
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