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Trust us

By Tilman Ruff - posted Friday, 17 November 2006


The Howard Government has spoken repeatedly of the strength of international safeguards when it comes to exporting Australian uranium to other nations. The government has insisted that these safeguards are strong enough to ensure Australian uranium is not used in nuclear weapons, even by those trading partners that have existing nuclear weapons programs. But is this true? Can Australian uranium be safely secured from nuclear weapons production? Or is there a more sinister reality?

On Sunday, November 2, a major new Australian report was released entitled Illusion of Protection: the unavoidable limitations of safeguards on nuclear materials and the export of uranium to China.

This report, prepared for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia) (MAPW), addresses the flaws and limitations of the international nuclear safeguards system with particular reference to the proposed sale of Australian uranium to China, a declared nuclear weapons state. The report highlights the limitations of the global nuclear safeguards regime, an issue of particular importance in the context of current moves to dramatically expand the Australian uranium industry.

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The report finds there is a serious and unavoidable risk that Australian uranium exports to China will directly or indirectly support Chinese nuclear weapons manufacture, and potentially nuclear weapons proliferation in other countries.

There is much that could and needs to be done to improve the international safeguards system, however its fundamental flaws and the pervasive interconnections between the civil and military applications of nuclear technologies and materials mean that the most prudent and responsible position is to phase out the mining and export of uranium.

Supporters of Australia's uranium export industry claim that the safeguards applied to Australia's uranium exports are the equal of, or better than, safeguards applied by other uranium exporting nations. This claim ignores the problem that all uranium-exporting nations are reliant on the inadequate and under-resourced safeguards system of the IAEA, and it cannot be credibly advanced to justify Australian uranium exports.

Australia’s Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) has no substantive verification capacity to add to limited IAEA safeguards. The government’s Regulation Impact Statement for the nuclear agreement with China foreshadows annual visits to reconcile nuclear material transfer reports. This is essentially an arms-length book-keeping exercise that relies on the importing state’s adherence to materials accountancy standards. Little is known or verifiable about the veracity of China’s nuclear materials accountancy, but available information is concerning.

Claims that Australia would have no leverage in relation to international nuclear safeguards in the absence of a uranium export industry are false. Australia’s moral and political authority to actively pursue a strengthened non-proliferation and safeguards regime would be enhanced by such an approach. Furthermore, non-nuclear and non-uranium exporting states can and do influence international safeguards through the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and by engagement with a range of other international fora and mechanisms.

Although the Illusion of Protection report makes a case specifically against sales of Australian uranium to China, the lessons and problems outlined are applicable generally, and particularly to any plans to sell uranium to India or any other state with nuclear weapons programs or ambitions.

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The unique physical and medical realities of nuclear materials and technology have powerful implications. The assurances of safety and safeguards needed are way higher than for any other materials. At issue are materials which can be used to make nuclear weapons. Just 100 - 0.4 per cent - of the 27,000 nuclear weapons in the world, if targeted on major cities, could end human civilisation and drastically compromise the earth’s ability to support life in the space of a few hours.

Uranium, nuclear fuel, and extracted plutonium will still be toxic and usable for nuclear weapons in hundreds of thousands of years, much longer than any human institution has survived.

The timeframes of political leaders, governments and political systems represent just the blink of an eye in these geological timeframes. Policies, governments and political systems can change rapidly. Only three decades ago, former foreign minister Andrew Peacock was advocating sale of Australian uranium to Iran. The half-life of plutonium is 24,400 years, after which its radioactivity will have declined by half. The half-life of uranium-235, the isotope enriched for reactors and weapons, is 713 million years.

To put this in perspective about 30,000 years ago, neanderthals still roamed parts of Europe and Asia. As little as 12,000 years ago, no society practiced widespread agriculture. Writing was developed about 5,000 years ago.

Fissile materials will still be hazardous and weapons-usable when the world has changed beyond our wildest dreams. People for thousands of generations to come will have no choice but to still be dealing with the nuclear legacy of the present generation.

Nuclear weapons constitute the greatest immediate threat to global survival and health. In the event of a nuclear war, don’t bother to call your doctor. No meaningful response will be possible for most victims if even one nuclear weapon is detonated in a city.

Anything which increases the number of nuclear weapons; the number of places they are kept; the number of groups who build, steal or buy them; the number of people who have access to them; anything which increases the range of ways and the number of situations they might be used, or reduces the threshold for their use, is bad for your health.

Like other nuclear powers, rather than disarming as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires, China is currently expanding and modernising its nuclear arsenal. This is largely driven by the US missile defence program, to which Australia contributes, and US plans to militarily dominate space.

The standards of safety and caution need to be extraordinarily high when dealing with nuclear materials, and the first rule of the healing professions applies to decision-makers as well: First, do no harm.

IAEA safeguards are intended to have a 90-95 per cent probability of detecting a significant diversion in time before weapons could be made. The significant quantities of fissile materials defined by the IAEA as sufficient to build a nuclear weapon are several times too high. The conversion times within which diversion is supposed to be able to be detected, are also too high. And add to that the lack of universal implementation of safeguards. As of last month, the Additional Protocol which was developed 10 years ago in response to Iraq’s advanced weapons program was in force in only 78 of the more than 180 countries signed up to the NPT.

States can withdraw from the NPT, as North Korea has done, with three months' notice. Application of safeguards in a nuclear weapons state is voluntary. In China only about 10 of 44 proliferation-sensitive nuclear facilities are eligible for safeguards (and therefore might process Australian uranium). In China for the past few years, IAEA safeguards have been implemented at only three facilities. And only one of these has a detailed facility-specific Subsidiary Arrangement in place with the IAEA.

The IAEA does not in any way specifically safeguard uranium from any particular source. If you were dealing with these kinds of gross deficiencies in being investigated for a serious illness, you would be right to find this completely unacceptable and look for another doctor.

The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties of the Federal Parliament has been holding public hearings on the nuclear co-operation and safeguards agreements the government has signed with China in the hope these will pave the way to large and growing exports of Australian uranium to China. The committee is expected to report in the coming month.

However, there seems to be a disturbing systematic pattern of error, misinformation and complacency which is alarming, and which undermines the long-term interests of Australians. The Federal Government and the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) are increasingly part of the problem of proliferation risk, rather than part of the urgently needed solution.

The Federal Government claims that for years it was ignorant of, and cannot be held accountable for, the world’s largest case of illegal and corrupt sanctions breaches, involving the Australian Wheat Board (AWB). For years it ignored, played down and didn’t want to hear questions and what should have been alarm signals from the UN, US and Canada. And that was about wheat. Yet in relation to uranium the government is asking us to trust flawed safeguards regarding the most dangerous of materials, where the weight of leverage lies with China.

The processing of Australian uranium in China prior to enrichment is not subject to safeguards, which only begin to apply at the enrichment stage. And the one organisation - the China National Nuclear Corporation - manages nuclear materials and facilities for both power and weapons purposes. Australians have little reason to be confident in such arrangements.

It is almost 30 years after the Fox Inquiry established by a previous coalition government characterised nuclear safeguards as providing “an illusion of protection”, and since then the frailty of this illusion has been repeatedly demonstrated - in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea. Since then Australian safeguards have also progressively been watered down, for example in allowing blanket advance, or “programmatic”, approval for reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium.

This is the most proliferation-sensitive of nuclear processes, which is technically impossible to effectively safeguard. China is an authoritarian state with an appalling record of proliferation of sensitive nuclear and missile materials, technology and know-how to other countries. The nuclear weapons designs sold by the international nuclear black market headed by Pakistani scientist AQ Khan were Chinese. Yet the government asks us to trust their assurances on safeguards on Australian uranium and that these will apply to every future government of Australia and China and their instrumentalities and all the companies involved, and whatever succeeds them, essentially forever. Now that is utopian.

Australian uranium used in nuclear reactors can end up as either radioactive waste, or fissile material for weapons. The safeguards applied to Australian uranium, reflected in the agreement signed with China, do in truth provide only an illusion of protection.

At best, Australian uranium would indirectly contribute to weapons by expanding the pool of uranium China says it needs for both power and weapons. At worst, Australian uranium could be directly used in Chinese nuclear weapons, or in nuclear weapons elsewhere. Under current and proposed safeguards, Australians could sleep easy only because if this happened, there would be no way they would ever know.

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Both the executive summary and the full report are available online from the ACF and MAPW websites.



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About the Author

Tilman Ruff is Associate Professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne and Australian chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

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