Uranium mining - Faustian bargain or economic bonanza?

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.