How a mass movement defeated uranium strategy
By Greg Adamson
By early 1979, the Australian anti-uranium movement had grown rapidly for more than two years. Millions of people were now convinced of the dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle. Hundreds of thousands had attended a protest demonstration or made some other active commitment to opposing the deadly export. Trade unionists had played a major part by supporting bans on the industry.
The federal government was not getting far with its nuclear agenda. It had also alienated many people with its bullying treatment of Aboriginal leaders in order to force partial acceptance of mining.
Then the spectacular and disastrous accident at the US nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island happened. On March 28 alarm bells started ringing at the reactor, which had been opened hurriedly at the end of 1978 for financial reasons. This was the real thing: the accident which anti-nuclear campaigners had predicted was taking place. The movement was right; "science" was wrong.
On April 6 and 7, at least 60,000 people attended protests in 20 cities and towns around Australia. The crowd of 20,000 in Sydney was the largest for any rally there since the Whitlam government was sacked in 1975. Much of the credit for the huge Sydney turnout belonged to Labor Against Uranium, a committee of Labor Party anti-uranium activists.
The union movement was not united on the issue. At a special meeting of 12 unions in Melbourne on March 9, 1979, two right-wing-led unions, the Australian Workers Union and the Federated Ironworkers Association (which have since amalgamated), indicated that they would continue to defy ACTU policy by allowing their members to work on site preparations for the Ranger mine.
At the same time, John O'Connor, the West Australian secretary of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), said his union would ban any goods coming to or from the Yeelirrie uranium mine site. On April 29, ACTU senior vice president and Electrical Trades Union (ETU) official Cliff Dolan announced that several key unions had resolved to ban all work by their members on the Nabarlek and Ranger projects.
The Amalgamated Metal Workers and Shipwrights Union (AMWSU), the Australian Railway Union, and the ETU would refuse to supply labour at the mine site, and would also try to stop the manufacture and transport of equipment for the mines. Dolan said the TWU had promised its support for this stand.
These were not futile gestures. The Ranger consortium had said it would need up to 500 tradespeople at peak construction time, most of them in trades covered by the unions which had imposed the bans.
The Malcolm Fraser government fostered the image that it was willing to ride out public opposition to its policies. In the case of uranium mining, this approach was of only limited value. If the government could win a quick victory, then the industry could go ahead, but if the fight to allow uranium mining became a long battle, the whole industry would become politicised, hindering the mining companies, which wanted to make money (regardless of consequences), not carry on an endless dispute with their workers and the public.
The desire of union and Labor Party members for action was shown on December 3 at a Sydney rally called by Labor Against Uranium. In an unprecedented show of support by Labor leaders, federal opposition leader Bill Hayden, NSW Premier Neville Wran and federal ALP minerals and energy spokesperson Paul Keating all expressed the Labor Party's opposition to uranium mining and export.
Further nuclear plans
The Liberal government in South Australia elected in late 1979 put forward plans to significantly expand the nuclear industry. Mining was proposed in SA at three places: the huge Roxby Downs reserves and the Beverley and Honeymoon sites near Lake Frome. An enrichment plant was suggested for either Port Pirie or Whyalla. This would represent a major new commitment to the nuclear fuel cycle, taking chemically concentrated uranium oxide and increasing the proportion of the radioactive isotope U-235 to the concentration required for particular power plants or military applications, producing gaseous, liquid and solid radioactive wastes.
The government pretended that these nuclear developments would generate large numbers of jobs. The SA United Trades and Labor Council challenged this fraud, leading a ban on work on the Roxby Downs site.
In other states, too, as if to prove that the loss of the Three Mile Island facility would not hinder the industry's forward march, a stream of nuclear plans appeared.
In January 1980 the West Australian State Electricity Commission announced that the most likely site for a planned nuclear reactor was Breton Bay, about 90 kilometres north of Perth. Premier Charles Court declared that the government would not be deterred from its plan to have a nuclear power station operational by the mid-1990s.
The Victorian State Electricity Commission was considering sites at Portland, French Island in Westernport Bay, Kirk south of Werribee and Giffard on the Gippsland coast. Two of these sites, Kirk and French Island, were close to the Melbourne metropolitan area.
Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen later proposed building a uranium enrichment plant at either Caboolture or Beaudesert, both near Brisbane.
Bans take hold
Meanwhile, real information about the nuclear threat was reaching more Australians. For example, metalworkers at Evans Deakin Industries in Brisbane held a stop-work meeting on February 20 to hear a Canadian-based researcher on the long-term health effects of low-level radiation exposure, Dr Rosalie Bertell, describe the dangers of the nuclear industry.
Workers at both EDI and the engineering plant Sergeants-ANI banned all work on steel fabrication for the Ranger mine site. A few weeks later the Electrical Trades Union announced that it was withdrawing services to any of its members working at the state's Mary Kathleen uranium mine, and called on them to leave the site.
Preparations for a major rally in April on the first anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident started at a January 9 Labor Against Uranium organising meeting of 120 in Sydney. There were divisions within the movement over whether the rally was worthwhile building. Both the Association for International Cooperation and Disarmament (AICD) and the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM) decided not to work to build the rally.
Within any movement, the timing of rallies is an issue to be decided by the participants, and should reflect the real possibility of organising a successful show of opinion. In this case, MAUM felt it didn't have the resources to help build the rally. In the case of the traditional peace organisation AICD, however, a more rigid view was put forward that the movement should limit itself to annual mobilisations on Hiroshima Day in August.
Attendance at the rally was 5000, with union and ALP branch banners prominent, and Dolan heading the speaking list. The rally played an important part in supporting workers who were involved or planning to ban uranium-related work.
By 1980, the cover-up over the British nuclear testing at Maralinga — two decades of suppression of discussion about them, justified by claims of national security — was beginning to unravel. This had been assisted by the work of a newly established Atomic Veterans Association.
As in the US, the British tests in Australia had included an examination of the ability of soldiers to operate in the vicinity of nuclear explosions. The total disregard of local Aboriginal residents during the testing was also revealed. The only measure taken to protect them had been the placement of English-language signs in the vicinity, which these residents would not have been able to read.
Hiroshima Day rallies in early August, focused on opposition to uranium mining, drew around 10,000 people to rallies in Sydney, Brisbane and several other cities. A few weeks later 5000 took to the streets in Melbourne.
Fraser fails
Before the October national elections, Fraser appeared to be concerned about nuclear weapons proliferation based on Australian exports. After winning the election, this was exposed as a pretence. By March 1981 "safeguards agreements" had been signed with seven countries, including the Philippines and South Korea, where corrupt and repressive regimes faced immense anti-government opposition, and France, which continued to test nuclear weapons in the Pacific.
Industry plans, however, were completely bogged down by early 1981, when, despite the predictions by government and pro-nuclear union leaders that bans on uranium mining would prove ineffectual, the bans by the Australian Railways Union, the Electrical Trades Union and the AMWSU (the largest union in the country) came into effect.
In early April, Queensland Mines appealed to the federal government to help it export yellowcake from the Nabarlek mine. Shipments through Darwin on barges had been halted by the decisions of the Northern Territory branches of the Waterside Workers Federation and the Seamen's Union not to allow the containers to be loaded or shipped.
Deputy Prime Minister Doug Anthony responded by having alternative options drawn up, including an airlift to Singapore. Despite these high profile airlifts, the uranium industry knew it was in trouble. Only a depoliticised industry could achieve their export targets. Fraser's confrontational strategy had failed to achieve this. But the industry found another ally, which would keep it in business for the next decade and a half, and anaesthetise public concern: the ALP.
[This is the fourth in a series on the history of the anti-nuclear movement. Greg Adamson has been active in the movement since the 1970s and is the author of We All Live on Three Mile Island: the case against nuclear power (Pathfinder Press, 1981). He is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]