Uranium sales to China just too risky

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."