Uranium mining - Faustian bargain or economic bonanza?

With both John Howard and Kim Beazley egging on a uranium debate, let’s have one. I mean a real information debate.

As a long-term campaigner against uranium mining and expansion of the nuclear fuel cycle, I am not about to dispute the financial arguments put forward. I will even add to them.

Put succinctly, for all its inherent risks, the world is simply not going to leave uranium resources in the ground. Our addiction to unsustainable, high-energy living, coupled with climate change, will guarantee that.

Howard and Beazley are opening up this can of worms on the pretext that uranium will be a bonanza for the national economy.

So, what’s really in it for Australia? Here’s how it goes, in a nutshell.

Until now, the world’s 440 nuclear reactors have been largely fuelled by using plutonium from dismantled cold war stockpiles. Mined uranium has just filled the gap. But that’s about to change, because the old nuke stockpiles are rapidly coming to an end.

This factor is what is injecting strong demand for new uranium mines. So too is a number of new nuclear power plants soon to be constructed, not least those in China. Then there is the gradual worldwide spread of carbon taxes intended to discourage and phase out the use of fossil fuels. The nuclear power industry is the main a beneficiary of carbon taxation and is rubbing its hands.

Like it or not, demand for fissile uranium is shooting up exponentially and with over one third of the world’s extractable uranium lying under Australian soil (1.1 million tonnes) it is not hard to see why we are being goaded into a hurried debate.

Significant uranium resources also exist in Canada, the US, Brazil, Niger, South Africa, Kazakhstan and Namibia, so it’s not as if there is no competition. Howard and Beazley obviously want Australia to be in the front running.

And Australia has a unique competitive edge over other potential suppliers - that is, if it wants to exercise that advantage. Our ancient geology enables Australia to offer uranium on an exchange basis, taking back high-level radioactive wastes, this being an unresolvable headache for nations having nuclear power plant. Agreeing to become a global waste dump goes hand in glove with the economic debate, a volatile issue that Beazley will not be able to shove under the carpet, try as he may.

Though heated public controversy will most likely prevent any state from agreeing to become a nuclear waste dump, the Federal Government has constitutional power to override the Northern Territory’s wishes. The territory, then, is destined to become the world’s major nuclear waste ground.

Now let’s add three more salient factors.

First, uranium has to be seen as a bedfellow with oil. Uranium politics will follow on the heels of oil politics, almost identically.

Just like oil, uranium is a non-renewable resource, except there is much less of it. With expected growth in the industry the world’s known uranium reserves are predicted to run out in about 40 years' time.

Like oil, uranium production will peak, then go into decline, well before it runs out - most likely in about 25 years time.  This is within the lifespan of new power plants being built and this is also when uranium prices will shoot through the roof. As with oil, this is when uranium politics will cause much international tension and potential conflict, even warfare.

Even well before that peak, will come another spike. Because there are not sufficient uranium mines open to fuel existing reactors (and it takes at least ten years to get things going), there will be a significant shortfall of nuclear fuel in about 15 years time. This too will push uranium prices through the roof. Again, the financial benefit to uranium producers is obvious.

If this whole scenario seems too good to be true for Australia, it can come unstuck in a flash as a result of a terrible nuclear accident, another Chernobyl or, in these troubled times, a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility or even an Hiroshima. There are high risks at stake, but if we look at uranium mining with rose-tinted, cash-register eyes, then the medium-term financial prognosis for Australia is good, I cannot deny.

But to those who can’t, or won’t, look further than the income side of the equation, I say, "Hold your horses". The nuclear fuel cycle throws up immense and intractable moral, social and environmental dilemmas of similar magnitude to that posed now by oil.

Australia may try to become the new Saudi Arabia, but if we brush aside, or try to rationalise away, the multitudinous moral and other dilemmas that spring from the nuclear fuel cycle, sure as eggs they will come back to haunt us as economic dilemmas - or as tumultuous national security risks.

Just as oil has brought us urban pollution, worldwide climate change, calamitous cyclones, drought disasters, threats to global biodiversity and oil warfare, so too nuclear power will bring on its own set of intractable headaches. The next generation will inherit these headaches, on top of those associated with climate change.

The lure of a financial bonanza may seem worth it now, but nuclear energy as a non-renewable resource will only serve to entrench our addiction to non-sustainable, high-energy consumption. What then?

This is the real nub of the problem and this is when the economic sums simply don’t add up any more.

In the words of Albert Einstein, “It is not possible to solve a problem with the same consciousness that made it.”

On the face of it, expansion of uranium mining appears to be a short-term winner for the Australian economy. That is why Howard and Beazley are both strategically bringing on policy change - mockingly fronted as “national debate”.

Both of them are keenly aware that the debate is clouded by a convenient time lag between fast money and the risks that inevitably follow, sometimes immediately, more often down the track. Just look at Maralinga.

The onus is on the Australian people to honestly weigh up the (hard core and subliminal) economic benefits and the (hard core and subliminal) risks to both this generation and the next - and the next. And the one after that. And take a stand.

Though Howard and Beazley may intend to ignore what the people think, public opinion still matters in Australia. Expressed strongly enough, it can still upset the apple cart.