Uranium sales to China just too risky

An SBS-commissioned Newspoll of 1,200 Australians last September found that 53 per cent were opposed to uranium exports to China, with just 31 per cent in favour. Nevertheless, on January 17 the federal government began negotiating a bilateral uranium export agreement with a Chinese delegation and the negotiations will continue in the coming weeks and months.

The negotiations provoked a ferocious editorial in the January 21 Taipei Times:

One can almost hear the Australian government's saliva collecting in its mouth at the prospect of selling billions of dollars of uranium from its huge reserves to an eager customer for decades to come. Never mind that the customer is an unstable Third World despot with a big chip on its shoulder - and the owner of nuclear warheads and other munitions pointing in potentially inconvenient directions for Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Russia, India and Taiwan, not to mention US bases in the region.

The Taipei Times editorial continued:

We can expect to hear a lot of highfalutin language from Australia in the weeks to come about the need to modernize China and the role “clean” nuclear energy can play in a country desperate for fuel. Such “global citizen” shtick won't wash. All of this is happening as evidence emerges of tawdry connections between DFAT and the Australian Wheat Board, which is under investigation for feeding massive bribes to Iraqi officials while former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was still in power.

Yu Jie, a Beijing-based human rights advocate with the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, wrote in the February 10 Sydney Morning Herald:

But Australian authorities blithely plan to export uranium ore to this highly dangerous regime, one side willingly believing a series of agreements ... that this uranium ore will not be used for military purposes. But when have the Communist Party authorities genuinely respected international agreements? The European Union should not lift the weapons embargo against China, and Australia should not export uranium ore to China. This shortsighted behaviour can in the short term bring a definite economic benefit. But in the long term it will inevitably endanger world peace.

According to journalist Paul Davey's feature article in the February 1 Bulletin, concerns about the uranium export negotiations are also held in Washington, albeit more discretely, while Beijing hopes to use the negotiations not only to secure uranium but also to drive a wedge between Washington and Canberra.

The proposal to export uranium to China clearly raises some difficult questions. What are the implications of selling uranium to China given that the Communist Party regime maintains a nuclear weapons program, the media is tightly censored, state repression remains harsh and consequently civil society organisations are weak, human rights abuses are common and often severe, and little is known about the health and environmental aspects of its nuclear industry?

China's nuclear weapons program

Could we be sure, or even confident, that Australian uranium would not end up in Chinese nuclear weapons - and if it was, would we find out? China claims that it is not currently producing fissile material for its weapons program, but there is no independent verification of the claim. If the production of fissile material has indeed been suspended, there is of course no certainty that production will not be resumed.

It is generally believed that China has sufficient fissile material for a modest upgrade of its nuclear arsenal, but would need to produce more fissile material for a significant upgrade. By far the most likely driving force for a significant upgrade is China's concern about the United States' missile defence program. China has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and justifies that decision with reference to the US missile defence program.

By supporting the US missile defence program, Australia may be encouraging China to expand its nuclear arsenal while also providing the raw material through uranium exports.

China has limited domestic uranium resources. Madame Fu Ying, China's ambassador to Australia, told a Melbourne Mining Club luncheon in December that China has insufficient uranium for both its civil and military nuclear programs. As the Taipei Times editorialised: "Whether or not Aussie uranium goes directly into Chinese warheads - or whether it is used in power stations in lieu of uranium that goes into Chinese warheads - makes little difference. Canberra is about to do a deal with a regime with a record of flouting international conventions ..."

Washington certainly regards China's nuclear program with concern. The US Nuclear Posture Review, leaked in 2002, refers to China's "ongoing modernization of its nuclear and non nuclear forces" and envisages nuclear attacks on China in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan.

Last year, Zhu Chenghu, a general in the People's Liberation Army, said:

If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons. We, Chinese, will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course, the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.

The Chinese Communist regime also has a worrying record of military exports. In 2001, the CIA reported that China had provided missile-related items to North Korea and Libya as well as "extensive support" to Pakistan's nuclear program. In 2003, the US government imposed trade bans on five Chinese firms for selling weapons technology to Iran.

Human rights violations

What would happen to a whistleblower publicly raising concerns about diversion of Australian uranium from nuclear power to China's WMD program? Most likely the same fate as befell Sun Xiaodi, who was concerned about environmental contamination at a uranium mine in northwest China. The non-government group Human Rights in China reports that Sun Xiaodi was sacked and harassed. In April 2005, immediately after speaking to a foreign journalist, he was abducted by state authorities and has not been heard from since.

The persecution of Sun Xiaodi is par for the course. According to Amnesty International, the Chinese Communist regime is responsible for five out of every six executions carried out around the world. At least 2,468 executions were carried out in 2001 alone. On April 11, 2001, 89 people were executed in a single day to kick-start a “law and order” campaign and 1,781 people were executed in the following three months.

The statistics mask the human cost of the regime's mass persecution. Sun Xiaodi's daughter writes in an open appeal for her father's release: "As a daughter, I love my father very much; I miss him and think of him constantly. I urgently appeal to all concerned to unconditionally release my father, and I condemn these terrorist activities. Give me back my father, and give him back his freedom."

Madame Fu Ying said at the Melbourne Mining Club luncheon in December that Australia needed to prove it was a "reliable" uranium supplier and that unspecified "other factors" ought not interrupt supply. Perhaps she had the regime's human rights record in mind.

Beijing's record of media censorship is equally deplorable. According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 27 journalists were being held in prison at the start of last year, making China the world's largest prison for journalists. Of the 167 countries surveyed by Reporters Without Borders, China ranked 159th for press freedom.

Uranium sales to China would set a poor precedent. Will we now sell uranium to all repressive, secretive, military states, or just some, or just China?

Clearly we couldn't rely on whistleblowers or the Chinese media to inform us of any diversion of Australian uranium for nuclear weapons. We would be completely reliant on the inspection system of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the provisions of the bilateral safeguards agreement under negotiation.

IAEA safeguards

Last year, an International Atomic Energy Agency survey of 1,020 Australians found that 56 per cent of respondents considered the IAEA's ''safeguards'' inspection system to be ineffective.

As a nuclear weapons state, China is not subject to fullscope IAEA safeguards. Places using Australian uranium would be subject to inspections but this is no simple matter, since ''our'' uranium is indistinguishable from, and mixed with, uranium from elsewhere.

As journalist Dan Box noted in a page one article in The Australian on January 18, government officials have previously acknowledged that there is no guarantee uranium exports will never be used in nuclear weapons. One reason for this, as Box noted, is that countries with both nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs can mix Australian uranium with uranium from different sources. If Australian uranium was used for weapons, all that is required is that an equivalent amount of uranium should be set aside for non-military uses. Verifying that an equivalent amount has been set aside for non-military uses is of course easier said than done, especially since there has been little effort to separate the civil and military aspects of China's nuclear program.

The IAEA's inspection program is chronically under-resourced, so it is extremely doubtful whether inspections would be sufficiently numerous or rigorous to provide confidence, let alone certainty, that Australian uranium was not being diverted. IAEA Director-General Mohamed El Baradei described the inspection regime as "fairly limited" in a speech in February 2005.

Bilateral negotiations

As for the bilateral uranium export agreement being negotiated between Canberra and Beijing, the provisions in these agreements have been gradually and repeatedly weakened since the basic framework was established in 1977, as retired diplomat Professor Richard Broinowski details in his 2003 book Fact or Fission? The Truth About Australia's Nuclear Ambitions.

In 1982, Mike Rann, then a Labor researcher and now South Australian Premier, listed a number of examples of bilateral provisions being weakened and he identified the basic problem: ''Again and again, it has been demonstrated here and overseas that when problems over safeguards prove difficult, commercial considerations will come first."

When the government announces the successful conclusion to the bilateral negotiations, there will be a round of back-slapping and assurances that there is not the slightest risk of diversion of Australian uranium to WMD - though there obviously is such a risk.

We will be assured that Australia's usual uranium export conditions have been agreed to. But these provisions do not guarantee that diversion will not occur. They are weak and in some cases meaningless. For example, Australian consent will be required before reprocessing spent nuclear fuel produced using Australian uranium. But consent to reprocess has never once been withheld by any Australian government - even when it leads to the stockpiling of plutonium and the consequent regional tensions, as with Japan's plutonium stockpile.

Given that the bilateral agreement provisions have been repeatedly watered down, and some key remaining provisions have never once been invoked, it cannot truthfully be claimed that Australia's uranium export safeguards are better than any in the world. That claim is, however, made repeatedly.

It is not difficult to envisage a scenario whereby the IAEA inspection regime and the bilateral agreement would count for nothing - the most obvious being escalating tension over Taiwan. Beijing promises military action in the event that Taipei declares independence, and Washington promises a military reaction in which Australia could become embroiled. The bilateral agreement would not be worth the paper it's written on.

There are other serious concerns in addition to the potential use of Australian uranium in Chinese nuclear weapons. Wang Yi, a nuclear energy expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told the New York Times in January last year: "We don't have a very good plan for dealing with spent fuel, and we don't have very good emergency plans for dealing with catastrophe."