Australia’s nuclear future

But this is a vacuous plan because only 10 per cent of the plutonium is converted to fission products while 90 per cent remains. This deadly radioactive mixture then must be cooled, transported, stored and isolated from the environment virtually for ever at enormous expense.

Presently only China, France, Japan and Russia are included in the US GNEP plan, but clearly Australia is involved because Howard is about to repeal federal legislation banning uranium enrichment, nuclear power and the reprocessing of spent fuel in Australia.

This suspicion is confirmed by the following facts. According to journalist Julie Macken, Dr John White, chairman of Howard’s Uranium Industry Framework UIF, head of the Australian waste company Global Renewables, and his colleagues have spent $45 million of their own money creating the Australian Nuclear Fuel Leasing company (ANFL) which is to facilitate and manage uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, leasing, transport and storage in Australia of 15 to 20 per cent of the world’s radioactive nuclear waste.

This foreign nuclear waste will, according to White, be shipped to Darwin and then sent on the Halliburton-Serco railway line to be cooled for decades and then stored in the Australian outback for ever more.

The question which begs an answer is this. GNEP is to be handled only by politically stable countries, but given the radiological life and proliferation properties of plutonium how long can political stability be guaranteed?