Trust us

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.