Uranium: keep it in the ground!
Opposition to the uranium mine in Kakadu National Park — Energy Resources Australia's Jabiluka deposit — and the Coalition's decision to build a new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, between Sydney and Wollongong, is growing. In the next period, the anti-nuclear movement is likely to have to mobilise against a range of attempts, locally and internationally, to revive the nuclear industry.
The Howard government wants to develop as many of Australia's 37 potential uranium mines as possible. The international nuclear energy industry is also taking advantage of the debate over greenhouse gas emissions to argue, opportunistically, that nuclear power offers greenhouse gas-free energy. It is time, argues Green Left Weekly's NORM DIXON, to again make the case forcefully against uranium mining and the nuclear fuel cycle.
1. Uranium mining is polluting and wasteful
No matter how uranium is mined, the environment becomes contaminated with radioactivity. Uranium tailings are the greatest long-term threat, while leaks, spills and ground water problems are short-term concerns.
Uranium tailings contain 80% of the radioactivity of the original ore because they contain uranium decay products such as thorium and radium. They are easily dispersed and require containment for hundreds of thousands of years.
Tailings containment systems at most uranium mines have a life span of 200-500 years. Tailings dams from past mines have been left to collapse and pollute areas near Rum Jungle and Moline in the NT.
From each tonne of ore mined at the Ranger mine, only three kilos of yellowcake are recovered. For 3600 tonnes of uranium oxide, almost a million tonnes of tailings are produced.
These tailings are pumped into a dam after being treated with lime to reduce the solubility of the heavy metals present. Regulated releases of about 2 million cubic metres of contaminated water from Ranger each wet season carry radioactive radium and toxic pollutants — including selenium, copper, lead, cadmium and arsenic — down nearby Magela Creek and into the flood plain, contaminating the precious Kakadu ecosystem.
After each wet season, radioactive wastes become increasingly concentrated in plants, water and animals. The new mine at Jabiluka will add to this.
Uranium mining and milling release large quantities of radioactive radon gas, as well as ammonia, nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide and sulphuric acid mist, which kill plants and corrode rock faces.
2. Uranium is a health hazard
It's been known since 1920 that uranium miners suffer high mortality from lung cancer, caused by exposure to radon gas. Radon, which decays from radium 226, is an inert gas, heavier than air, with a half-life of about one week. When inhaled, radon and its decay products lodge easily in the lung, emitting energetic alpha particles, which affect the vulnerable cells lining the fine tubes in the lung.
In 1980, the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found "a clear indication that cumulative exposure to radon and its decay products is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer". It added that there is "no margin of safety" and called for the permissible exposure limits for all uranium and nuclear workers to be reduced to 10% of the then current level.
Rich ore bodies, such as the one at Jabiluka, emit more radon gas, and underground mining poses a greater threat to workers because the gas is concentrated.
A study of the Register of Deaths shows that 40% of those who worked underground at the Radium Hill mine in South Australia have died of lung cancer.
A study of Navajo Indians in the western US — whose lands are pocked by more than 350 abandoned uranium mines — found an unusually high number of birth defects among more than 500 babies born between 1967 and 1974. Surveys have found serious increases in cancer among children living in areas of former mining activity.
3. Nuclear power is not safe
Nuclear power station accidents can be catastrophic, as the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine demonstrated.
Friends of the Earth (Ukraine) estimates the immediate radiation effects of the accident have already claimed more than 32,000 lives. In 1993, the World Health Organisation reported a 24-fold increase in thyroid cancers in children.
More than 250,000 hectares of contaminated farmland have had to be abandoned. Radiation from Chernobyl spread across Europe and beyond Britain.
In 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island complex near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, came within 30 to 60 minutes of a meltdown, which would have released massive amounts of radiation.
Australian paediatrician and anti-nuclear activist Dr Helen Caldicott told a Washington anti-nuclear rally a month afterwards: "Three thousand people would have died immediately. Ten to a hundred thousand would be ... getting ulcers on their skin, severe vomiting and diarrhoea, and, as their blood cells died, they would be dying of massive haemorrhage or infection ...
"Thousands of babies would be born with small heads, because radiation affects the developing brain. Thousands more babies would be born mentally retarded for life. There would be an epidemic of leukaemia five years later, and hundreds of thousands of cases of cancer would appear 15 to 50 years later. [A meltdown] would have killed approximately half a million people."
The Indonesian government plans to build 12 nuclear reactors in central Java — an earthquake zone. Australian uranium will almost certainly fuel them. An accident would harm millions in Indonesia and affect northern Australia.
In the last three years, there have been significant reactor accidents, spills and mishaps in Japan, France and the Ukraine. They are only the ones we hear about. Many never hit the headlines.
On December 8, 1995, Japan's first power-generating fast breeder reactor, at Monju, leaked sodium from its cooling system. Had the cooling system failed, a catastrophic meltdown could have taken place. The government-owned Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) attempted to cover up the seriousness of the leak.
On April 17, the PNC admitted that there had been 11 unreported radiation leaks from its plants since late 1994.
More recently, leaks occurred after a fire broke out on November 20 at a PNC nuclear factory 115 km from Tokyo.
4. Radioactive waste cannot be disposed of safely
Nuclear waste remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no safe way to store waste for such long periods.
US environmental researcher Peter Montague has revealed that deadly plutonium inventories are being held in at least 35 locations in the US, in more than 64,000 containers including plastic bags, glass bottles and metal canisters, some of which were unlabelled and unmarked and many ruptured or broken. Plutonium had contaminated floors, walls, piping and doors at several facilities.
Montague concludes, "Even the wealthiest, most technically advanced nation in the world evidently does not have what it takes to manage these materials safely. Plutonium is among the most toxic materials every discovered ..."
5. Nuclear weapons
Under Labor, Australian uranium became important to the international nuclear club, including, in at least a few cases, French weapons production. Under the Coalition, it is more likely that Australian uranium will find its way into nuclear weapons.
There is no realistic way to prevent uranium supplied as fuel turning up in nuclear weapons. Nuclear reactors produce plutonium, suitable for weapons production, during normal operations. India tested an atomic bomb in 1974; it used plutonium developed in a "civilian" research reactor.
It has been argued that the Australian government's refusal to supply uranium to countries which have not signed the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) prevents its misuse. Yet the French, Chinese and US — all NPT signatories — are still maintaining and modernising their nuclear arsenals.
The near-impossibility of preventing Australian uranium finding its way into military programs or unsafe reactors is underlined by the practice of "flag swapping". In February 1988, a dismissed employee from Nukem, a West German uranium brokerage firm, leaked confidential company documents to the magazine Der Spiegel. Exposed were deals in which uranium supplies were given false origins in order to appear to comply with safeguards.
One documented deal resulted in Australian uranium being enriched to weapons grade for use in France, in violation of Australian government "safeguards".