Medical radioisotope supply options for Australia

Jim Green

National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia

January 2012

jim.green@foe.org.au

Does Australia need a new nuclear reactor to produce medical isotopes? The short answer is ‘no’. A better strategy would be to close the existing HIFAR reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney combined with:

1. Greater reliance on imported radioisotopes;

2. Ongoing use of the existing cyclotrons in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and others that are likely to be built in Australia;

3. Further research into advanced, non-reactor radioisotope sources such as cyclotrons, with the aim of sharply reducing demand for imported, reactor-produced radioisotopes (so other countries don’t have to deal with the adverse impacts of reactors such as intractable radioactive waste management problems); and

4. Greater use of alternative clinical modalities such as MRI, and Computerised Tomography.

None of these four strategies alone will suffice, but combined, they are more than adequate.

The above strategies are tried and tested. Over 250 cyclotrons are operating around the world. Many countries – including Australia – import isotopes. Alternative clinical modalities are well advanced – in fact they are used far more frequently than nuclear medicine! So there’s no risk involved in closing the existing reactor without replacement.

IMPORTATION

You might hear the argument that radioisotopes with short half-lives cannot be imported. True, but almost all of the short-lived radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine are produced in cyclotrons, not research reactors. With no research reactor in Australia, over 99% of nuclear medicine procedures would be unaffected, using either cyclotron-produced radioisotopes or imported radioisotopes. As for the small number of rarely-used radioisotopes that would not be available, alternative clinical technologies can easily fill this gap.

The Lucas Heights reactor was closed for three months from February-May 2000 and many doctors – including the President of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine – did not even know about the closure of the reactor! ANSTO staff members wrote to Sutherland Shire Council during the three-month reactor shutdown noting: “ANSTO’s radioisotope production has suffered no dislocation as a result of the shutdown, since bulk supplies of radioisotopes are purchased from the big international players in Canada and South Africa.”

Properly funded research into alternative radioisotope production technologies and alternative clinical technologies will enable reduced reliance on imported reactor-produced radioisotopes. To the extent that there is still a requirement for reactor-produced radioisotopes, the fewer reactors the better.

The major global radioisotope suppliers have the capacity to supply world demand several times over. More than three-quarters of all nuclear medicine procedures carried out around the world use imported radioisotopes. Countries largely reliant on imported radioisotopes include advanced industrial countries such as the United States, Britain, and Japan; in these countries nuclear medicine is widely practised and technically sophisticated despite the heavy reliance on imported radioisotopes.

CYCLOTRONS

Most nuclear medicine procedures are diagnostic (90-99% depending on the country): radioisotopes are administered to the patient (usually by injection) and as the radioisotopes ‘decay’ they emit radiation which is captured by a camera and used to generate an image. Only a small minority (1-10%) of nuclear medicine procedures are palliative (pain-relieving) or therapeutic.

About 75% of all nuclear medicine procedures use the radioisotope technetium-99m. There are several non-reactor methods of producing this, but none of these techniques is in routine use. ANSTO operates the National Medical Cyclotron but has not used it to pursue this important line of research.

Cyclotrons beyond to a class of machines called particle accelerators – electromagnetic devices that accelerate charged particles to enormous velocities. The particles can then be directed to hit a target and thus produce radioisotopes.

Because they are powered by electricity rather than the uranium fission reaction of a nuclear reactor, cyclotrons have important advantages:

– they generate only a tiny fraction of the waste of research reactors (typically less than 10%, and none of the spent fuel containing fission products and transuranics)

– they pose no risk in relation to nuclear weapons proliferation; and

– cyclotrons are much safer (for comparison, there have been five fatal research reactor accidents according to the International Atomic Energy Agency).

OTHER ALTERNATIVES

The alternative clinical technologies that compete with nuclear medicine include magnetic resonance imaging, X-radiology, computerised tomography and ultrasound. Moreover, the competition is not only between imaging techniques; there are also many chemical and biological alternatives to radioisotopes for in vitro studies and research.

In 2000, the President of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists told a Senate inquiry that the potential to reduce demand for reactor produced isotopes through greater reliance on cyclotron-produced isotopes is constrained by the current Commonwealth Government policy “specifically barring” the use of cyclotron-based Positron Emission Tomography (PET) as a substitute for conventional nuclear medicine.

Professor Hicks from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute said that PET had proved more accurate than any other diagnostic technology in diagnosing tumors, and that it had saved hundreds of lives and thousands of dollars and had the potential to revolutionise cancer treatment. (Sydney Morning Herald 12/3/01; The Age 28/1/01).

At the moment, there are only two hospitals in Australia with PET facilities. This compares starkly with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a new reactor at Lucas Heights.

QUOTABLE QUOTES

Former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott says: “The most publicly appealing rationale for a replacement reactor is the provision of medical radioisotopes. … But of all the programs associated with the replacement reactor this operation also carries the greatest risk, the greatest potential for massive contamination release and the most significant future weapons proliferation potential.”

Dr. Geoff Bower, then President of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine, was asked if it would be a life threatening situation if Australia did not produce medical isotopes locally on ABC radio in late 1998. ABC-JJJ radio. “Probably not life threatening. I think that’s over-dramatising it and that’s what people have done to win an argument. I resist that.”

Professor Barry Allen, former chief research scientist at ANSTO, says, “It’s reported that if we don’t have the reactor people will die because they won’t be getting their nuclear medicine radioisotopes. I think that’s rather unlikely. Most of the isotopes can be imported into Australia. Some are being generated on the cyclotron. But on the other hand a lot of people are dying of cancer and we’re trying to develop new cancer therapies which use radioisotopes which emit alpha particles which you cannot get from reactors. And if it comes down to cost-benefit, I think a lot more people will be saved if we can proceed with targeted alpha cancer therapy than being stuck with the reactor when we could in fact have imported those isotopes. … The question is really what the taxpayer of Australia wants. Do they want new therapies or do they want the reactor to be the centre of all research?”

MORE INFORMATION:


Australian Labor Party position

4/11/01 Joint Media Release by:
Martyn Evans (Shadow Minister for Science and Resources)
Jenny Macklin (Shadow Minister for Health)
Nick Bolkus (Shadow Minister for the Environment).

Howard Wrong on Medical Isotopes

Australia will have a secure supply of medical isotopes for cancer treatment, medical research and other applications under Labor’s policy of not building a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights.

John Howard is living in the past – the Lucas Heights reactor is not significant to Australia’s security and it is not the only source of medical isotopes.
The principle isotope from the Lucas Heights reactor used in medical treatment is Molybdenum. This is in turn used to produce Technetium on site at hospitals. Bulk supplies of Molybdenum can be readily imported and made up into ‘Technetium generators’ in Australia.

Other countries, including the United States and Japan do not produce their own medical Molybdenum. In fact, the great bulk of this material is currently produced in Canada and shipped around the world.

Australia already imports this material on a regular basis when the existing reactor is shut down for up to three months every year for maintenance.

The Senate Inquiry into Lucas Heights examined this issue in detail and was not convinced that logistical difficulties constitute a serious obstacle to the successful importation of radioisotopes.

In addition, other nuclear materials are already produced in Australia using the National Medical Cyclotron. The future direction of nuclear medicine lies with cyclotron produced products and accelerators.

Labor remains unconvinced of the arguments for the need for a new reactor and believes it is completely inappropriate for a reactor in suburban Sydney at Lucas Heights.

The Howard Government has committed more than $300 million for the new Argentinian designed reactor. This is not the best investment of that money. It is the wrong way forward for Australian nuclear science.

Labor supports the continuation of the other activities at Lucas Heights campus as a centre for medical, environmental, industrial and scientific applications on nuclear technologies under ANSTO.

A Non-Reactor Future for Lucas Heights

Jim Green
National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia
jim.green@foe.org.au
This paper was written in 2003.

1. Summary
* most of the work at ANSTO’s Lucas Heights facility does not depend on the operation of a reactor.
* a good case can be made for greater investment in non-reactor technologies/programs at Lucas Heights.
* pursuit of a non-reactor future for ANSTO offers several advantages, including a large reduction in the generation of radioactive waste.

2. Most of ANSTO’s activities do not depend on the reactor:
* Prof. Geoffrey Wilson analysed ANSTO’s program expenditure and found that in 1991-92, reactor-dependent research cost $8.35 million (31%), reactor-independent research cost $18.45 million (69%). (Research Reactor Review, 1993, Appendix 1, pp.31-32, 41-43.)
* Drawing on ANSTO’s 1992-93 Program of Research, former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott concluded that the HIFAR and MOATA reactors were used in 8 of 17 projects. In person-years this amounted to 45/215 or 21%. The figure fell to 14% when the adjacent CSIRO facilities were included. (Submission to 1993 Research Reactor Review.)

3. Advantages of a non-reactor future at Lucas Heights:

A good case could be made for further investment in non-reactor technologies if HIFAR is permanently shut down without replacement. These alternatives include particle accelerators (linear accelerators and cyclotrons), possibly spallation technology, safeguards projects using particle accelerators, etc etc. This would open up a win-win scenario:
* few if any job losses (possibly more jobs)
* broadly equivalent (perhaps greater) benefits for medicine and science
* advantages in relation to ‘national interest’ / non-proliferation objectives
* a large reduction in radioactive waste generation (and no more generation of spent nuclear reactor fuel)
* less contentious management of existing waste stockpiles in the context of a serious attempt to minimise waste production by the closure and non-replacement of HIFAR
* public support for ANSTO instead of division and hostility
* public and occupational health and safety advantages (e.g. there have been no fatal cyclotron accidents, but at least five fatal research reactor accidents).

4. Research reactors are yesterday’s technology:

“The future direction of nuclear medicine lies with cyclotron produced products and accelerators. … Labor remains unconvinced of the arguments for the need for a new reactor and believes it is completely inappropriate for a reactor in suburban Sydney at Lucas Heights. … The Howard Government has committed more than $300 million for the new Argentinian designed reactor. This is not the best investment of that money. It is the wrong way forward for Australian nuclear science.” (Joint media release by then Shadow Ministers Martyn Evans, Jenny Macklin, and Nick Bolkus, 4/11/01.)

Over half of all research reactors ever built have been closed and the number in operation continues to decline. For example, according to the IAEA, there were 297 in operation in December 1994 but only 265 in May 1998, i.e. 32 permanent shut-downs in 3.4 years or almost 10 annually. Conversely, the number of cyclotrons in operation continues to increase.

Some multipurpose research reactors are being replaced by reactors, but most are not being replaced or are being replaced by non-reactor technologies. To give a few examples:
* plans for a new research reactor in the USA were scrapped in favour of a spallation source.
* in the USA, plans to resume production of the important medical isotope molybdenum-99 were scrapped in favour of ongoing reliance on imported Mo-99.
* Belgium is planning to replace a research reactor with a spallation source.

5. Jobs at Lucas Heights:

Staff numbers at Lucas Heights peaked at 1354 in 1976. Staffing has fallen to the current level of about 750-800 despite the operation of the HIFAR reactor throughout this period. The new reactor will not ensure job security for ANSTO employees. History suggests that staff cuts and cuts to program funding will partially fund the $300 million new reactor. Staff cuts are all the more likely if/when cost blow-outs associated with the new reactor project begin to bite.

6. Alternatives to a domestic reactor for medical isotope supply:

Ongoing reliance on existing cyclotrons in Australia, plus a greater reliance on imports, is a perfectly viable alternative to a domestic reactor. This option is tried and tested whenever the HIFAR reactor is shut down for extended periods for maintenance.

The only problem with greater reliance on imported reactor-produced isotopes is that it leaves other countries to address the waste legacy. Therefore, a R&D program should be initiated to reduce reliance on imports in favour of non-reactor technologies, esp. particle accelerators including cyclotrons. Important in this regard is a paper by nuclear physicist Dr. Robert Budnitz, and energy and technology consultant Dr. Gregory Morris (the report is at: <www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/medicine5.html>). The report argues that “importation of radioisotopes and more extensive use of accelerators for isotope production represent a viable alternative to the building of a new reactor in Australia.” The report argues that this approach would have several benefits when compared with the plan for a new reactor, including reduced generation of radioactive waste, possible cost benefits, similar or better employment prospects, and better intellectual property opportunities (arising from the development of accelerator/cyclotron technology).

Specifically, the Budnitz/Morris report argues that Australia ought to pursue a R&D project into accelerator/cyclotron production of technetium-99m (the most commonly used medical isotope): “Development of accelerator based production of Tc-99m would probably require a one-to-two year effort involving several person-years of work, and a few million dollars of investment. The pay-off would be that Australia would develop and possess valuable expertise in a nearly radioactive waste and proliferation free route to the production of the world’s medically most important radioisotope.”

Serious pursuit of a R&D program along the lines suggested by Budnitz and Morris would probably require investment of a medium-sized research cyclotron, and a good case could be made for locating it at Lucas Heights given the concentration of Australia’s nuclear expertise there. The only other cyclotron of potential value for this R&D program is the National Medical Cyclotron in Sydney, but the NMC is already overstretched with its existing isotope-production role.

Closure and non-replacement of the HIFAR reactor might also free up resources – and generate political momentum – for the more rapid spread of small PET cyclotrons (costing a few million dollars each) for the production of short-lived isotopes for use in Positron Emission Tomography (the cutting-edge of nuclear medicine). Currently there are two PET cyclotrons in Melbourne and one is being built in Perth.

More information on medical isotope production and supply options:

* https://nuclear.foe.org.au/ansto/

* Medical Association for the Prevention of War, 2004, “A New Clear Direction: Securing Nuclear Medicine for the Next Generation”, www.mapw.org.au/download/new-clear-direction

* Papers at: http://web.archive.org/web/20071130183244rn_1/www.geocities.com/jimgreen3

7. Alternatives to a domestic reactor for scientific research:

HIFAR’s contribution to scientific research has been modest, at best. See the comments by Professor Barry Allen (former Chief Research Scientist at ANSTO), former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott, Professor Ian Lowe, the 1993 Research Reactor Review and others at <www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/science2.html>.

Even a more powerful, new reactor will be well down the global list (e.g. comparing neutron flux) and simply won’t be capable of ‘world class’ research despite the government’s claims to the contrary.

There is little scientific support for a new reactor beyond the small number of scientists with a direct interest in neutron beam research. There would be still less scientific support if not for the government’s highly-questionable insistence that science funding has not been reduced to pay for the reactor. As then Shadow Science Minister Martyn Evans said in 1997, “The money should have been competitively offered and judged against other needs for science.” (‘Search’ science magazine, 1997, Vol.28(10), p.296.)

There are several alternatives to a new reactor for scientific research, including particle accelerators, spallation sources, synchrotron radiation sources, and suitcase science (i.e. funding for Australian scientists to access overseas facilities). In all cases, the alternatives are preferable to a reactor in relation to radioactive waste and safety. Claims that synchrotron, accelerator and spallation facilities complement (but cannot replace) reactors understate the extent to which different facilities can be used for identical or similar applications. Alternatives to a new reactor were not properly evaluated prior to the September 1997 decision to fund a new reactor.

8. Alternatives to a domestic reactor for national interest / foreign policy objectives:

ANSTO is involved in useful environmental sampling safeguards work – but this uses ANSTO’s tandem accelerator, not the reactor. No doubt there is scope to increase ANSTO’s involvement in safeguards work using accelerators and other non-reactor technologies. And of course non-proliferation and disarmament objectives are fundamentally political/diplomatic in nature (e.g. expanded IAEA inspection rights), not technical.

The HIFAR reactor is of little or no direct value in pursuing non-proliferation objectives. It has been used for a video monitoring safeguards project, but of course that project could have easily been carried out elsewhere. Whatever advantages stem from training scientists on a domestic reactor i) are minimal, ii) can be compensated for by overseas training, and iii) are negated by a range of problems which also stem from the operation of a reactor in Australia.

The operation of a reactor compromises Australia’s capacity to pursue non-proliferation / disarmament objectives in several ways:
* For example, it creates a political imperative to downplay the proliferation risks associated with research reactors and associated technologies. Research reactors are used to produce plutonium for the nuclear arsenals of India and Israel, and research reactors have been used in support of covert weapons programs (some systematic, some preliminary) in 20+ countries – see <www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/rrweapons.html>. The government’s argument that building a new reactor will assist with non-proliferation objectives is circular, foolish and may be setting a dangerous new precedent.
* Ongoing generation of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) creates a political imperative to downplay the proliferation and safety risks associated with SNF reprocessing. This contradiction is most acute for SNF from HIFAR, which contains highly-enriched uranium (DFAT has said that reprocessing HEU-SNF is “contrary to sound non-proliferation principles”) but also applies to the new reactor.

There is no direct connection between the operation of a reactor and Australia’s place on the Board of Governors of the IAEA. In any case the IAEA position raises numerous problems, not least the active role played by the IAEA in the promotion of dual-use nuclear technologies. The 1993 Research Reactor Review said that there “was no evidence before the Review sustaining the view that permanent membership of the Board of the IAEA is crucial to advancement of Australia’s national interest” and that there might even be advantages in not being so closely identified with some of the IAEA’s stances (p.xix, pp.100-103).

Cancellation of the plan for a new reactor, and pursuit of non-reactor technologies for medicine, science and safeguards work opens up another potential benefit: Australian promotion of non-reactor technologies in the Asia Pacific region. The development and promotion of non-reactor technologies would represent a useful, if modest, non-proliferation initiative.

ANSTO’s Lucas Heights nuclear research reactor

ANSTO’s never-ending accidents, lies, misleading Parliament, cover-ups, bullying and intimidating staff, etc.

A Non-Reactor Future for Lucas Heights

Jean McSorley’s 1998 analysis of the foreign policy or ‘national interest’ agenda behind the new reactor at Lucas Heights. See also this article by Jean McSorley, an article by Jim Green, and a 1998 ABC radio documentary which discussed the ‘national interest’ agenda.

Lucas Heights and nuclear weapons

A new reactor for ‘world class’ scientific research?

Articles about Lucas Heights (Senate inquiries, Sutherland Shire Council call for a Royal Commission, etc.)

Articles about Lucas Heights – accidents, emergency planning, insurance etc

Friends of the Earth 2005 submission to ARPANSA re OPAL reactor operating licence application

ANSTO / ARPANSA whistleblower saga – 2007–ongoing

MEDICAL ISOTOPES

Medical radioisotope supply options for Australia

Reactor and Non-reactor Production of Molybdenum-99/Technetium-99m

Linking nuclear medicine to waste dump proposals: debunking ANSTO/government lies

Uranium Miners Turning Water Into Liquid Waste

Jim Green
Article published in The Advertiser (SA), July 25 2009

World Water Day on March 22 encouraged widespread reflection on worsening water depletion and pollution problems around the world. As the driest state in the driest continent, South Australia is the canary in the coal mine. But while many South Australians are pulling their weight by reducing water consumption and installing rainwater tanks, some industries are pulling in the opposite direction.

The uranium mining industry is perhaps the most egregious example. The daily extraction of about 35 million litres of Great Artesian Basin water for the Olympic Dam uranium/copper mine has adversely affected a number of precious Mound Springs – unique habitats which support rare and delicate micro flora and fauna, some species of which are unique to a particular Mound Spring.

BHP Billiton pays nothing for its massive water take for the Olympic Dam mine despite recording a $17.7 billion profit in 2007-08. That arrangement is enshrined in the Roxby Downs Indenture Act 1982 – as anachronistic a piece of legislation as you’re ever likely to see.

In February 2007, then Prime Minister John Howard wrote to state Premiers seeking their agreement “to establish proper entitlements, metering, pricing and reporting arrangements for water extracted from the Great Artesian Basin.” Asked whether his proposed new arrangements would apply to Olympic Dam, Mr Howard said: “Everybody’s got to make a contribution to solving this problem.” But within days, he voiced support for BHP Billiton’s “right” to free water from the Artesian Basin. In other words, everyone except BHP Billiton has to make a contribution to solving this problem.

As The Advertiser noted in a November 2005 Editorial, it is “essential … to safeguard the artesian basin water supplies”. To that end, most users are subject to the Great Artesian Basin Management Plan. But BHP Billiton is a law unto itself – its Olympic Dam mine is not subject to the Management Plan and also enjoys exemptions from the SA Natural Resources Act 2004 and the Environment Protection Act 1993.

Another problem at Olympic Dam concerns the liquid tailings dams which are constantly expanding as water is turned into liquid waste. In 2005 it was revealed that over 100 bird deaths were recorded in a four-day period – the birds had drunk liquid tailings waste from the mine. Ongoing seepage from tailings dams are a further concern. Last Monday (March 23), photos taken by an Olympic Dam mine worker were released clearly showing radioactive tailings liquid leaking from the so-called rock ‘armoury’ of a tailings dam. The leaks were ongoing for at least eight months and probably amounted to several million litres, but were not publicly reported at all. Serious questions must be raised as to BHP Billiton’s capacity to safely manage radioactive tailings if, as planned, tailings production increases seven-fold to 70 million tonnes annually and water consumption increases to over 150 million litres daily (over 100,000 litres every minute).

BHP Billiton proposes continuing with its water take from the Artesian Basin and also building a desalination plant in the Upper Spencer Gulf to provide an additional 120 million litres daily. The proposed desalination plant has raised concerns over its impacts on marine species and fishing industries – in particular from the discharge of brine. The Upper Spencer Gulf is a low flushing fragile marine environment unsuited to siting a desalination plant and BHP Billiton’s preferred site at Port Bonython is the breeding ground of the Charismatic Giant Australian Cuttle Fish.

In-situ leach (ISL) uranium mining is used at the Beverley uranium mine and is the mining method proposed for use at other SA mines including Oban, Beverley Four Mile and Honeymoon. ISL involves pumping acid into an aquifer, dissolving the uranium ore and other heavy metals and pumping the solution back to the surface. After separating the uranium, liquid radioactive waste – containing radioactive particles, heavy metals and acid – is simply dumped in groundwater. From being inert and immobile in the ore body, the radionuclides and heavy metals are now bioavailable and mobile in the aquifer.

Proponents of ISL mining claim that ‘attenuation’ will occur over time – that the groundwater will return to its pre-mining state. However there is considerable scientific uncertainty about the future of ISL-polluted groundwater and uncertainty about the timeframe for attenuation if it does occur. A 2003 Senate References and Legislation Committee report recommended banning the discharge of radioactive liquid mine waste to groundwater. The Rann Government responded by commissioning a study which had all the hallmarks of a whitewash yet still acknowledged that attenuation is “not proven” and could only cite a period of “several years to decades” for it to occur. Yet the companies proposing to use ISL mining at Beverley Four Mile want to absolve themselves of any future responsibility for the site just seven years after they have finished mining. The future of ISL mining is plain to see – short-lived mines leaving South Australians with a lasting legacy of polluted aquifers.

The Australian Nuclear Free Alliance – which brings together Aboriginal custodians with representatives from environmental, medical and public health groups – is calling on the Rann Government to initiate an independent public inquiry into the impacts of uranium mining on SA’s water resources. This inquiry ought to take place in the 12 months leading up to next year’s state election. It would provide political parties with an opportunity to demonstrate their resolve to properly regulate the state’s dwindling water resources and to address the contradiction between corporate water profligacy and the responsible attitude and actions of ordinary South Australians.

Dr Jim Green is Friends of the Earth’s national nuclear campaigner and a member of the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance’s national committee.

Water, uranium and nuclear power – longer paper

Feature: Water & The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor #770, 24 October 2013

http://www.wiseinternational.org/node/4031

Click here to download the full issue (PDF).

Articles (online):


Water, uranium and nuclear power

Jim Green jim.green@foe.org.au

National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia

  • 1. Introduction and summary
  • 2. Water and nuclear power plants
  • 3. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants
  • 4. Uranium
  • 4.1 Olympic Dam GAB Grab
  • 4.2 Olympic Dam desalination plant
  • 4.3 Beverley ISL uranium mine
  • 4.4 Ranger mine

1. INTRODUCTION & SUMMARY

A number of problems associated with the nuclear industry are much-discussed – the repeatedly demonstrated link between “peaceful” nuclear programs and weapons proliferation, the nuclear waste legacy, and the small risk of catastrophic accidents.

Less well understood are the various impacts of uranium mines and nuclear facilities on water resources.

Water & Nuclear Power Plants

* Nuclear power plants consume large amounts of water – 20-83% more than coal-fired plants. Water consumption for nuclear reactors is typically 13-24 billion litres per year, or 35-65 million litres per day. Conversely, the water consumption of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency/conservation measures is negligible or zero.

* Water outflows from nuclear plants expel relatively warm water which can have adverse local impacts in bays and gulfs, as can heavy metal and salt pollutants. The warming effect is particularly problematic if exacerbated by heat waves. For example, a number of European reactors had to be taken offline during a heat wave in 2006, and others had to operate at reduced power.

* Water problems in Australia would be exacerbated by nuclear power. Current examples include the problems in Queensland – pumping water to a (coal-fired) power plant because of dwindling local water supplies, the likelihood of increased prices for electricity, and an increased likelihood of blackouts, and increased competition for scarce water resources.

* Another set of problems will arise for coastal nuclear plants as sea levels rise.

Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plants

* The largest commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, in France and the UK, are major sources of radioactive marine pollution.

* Many European countries have for many years been calling for a sharp reduction in radioactive emissions from the reprocessing plants in France and the UK.

Roxby Downs: The GAB Grab

* The daily extraction of 35 million litres of Great Artesian Basin water for the Roxby Downs mine in South Australia has destroyed some of the precious Mound Springs and adversely impacted on others.

* Also controversial is the arrangement whereby BHP Billiton pays nothing for this massive water take.

Roxby Downs: Desalination

* There are concerns about the potential impacts on marine life and fishery operations of a proposed desalination plant in the Spencer Gulf region of South Australia. The plant would produce up to 120 million litres of water daily, most of it for the planned expansion of the Roxby Downs mine.

Beverley In-situ Leach Uranium Mine

* Debates over the the environmental impacts of mining typically revolve around the risk of environmental pollution. There is no such debate with the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia. Mining company Heathgate Resources pollutes the aquifer with heavy metals, acid and radionuclides as a routine aspect of its operations, and is under no obligation to rehabilitate the aquifer.

Ranger Uranium Mine

* An increasing series of spills, leaks, incidents and reporting failures since 2000 have undermined the credibility of both mining company Energy Resources of Australia and the current environmental protection framework and highlighted serious regulatory deficiencies.

* The incidents are part of a litany of operational errors and procedural failures at ERA’s Ranger operation. Whilst some of these are not of great individual impact, others are. Cumulatively they document a pattern of systemic under-performance and non-compliance and highlight the growing credibility gap that exists between ERA’s self promotion and the reality of its performance.

2. WATER & NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

Coal-fired electricity plants consume large amounts of water. Tim Flannery (2007) states that for cities such as Sydney, one fifth of the city’s water needs is consumed by electricity generation.

Unfortunately, nuclear power is even more water-intensive than coal.

Water for a nuclear power plant can be sourced from a river, lake, dam, or the ocean. The water has two uses:

  • it is converted to steam to drive a turbine; and
  • cooling water converts the steam back to water.

As Woods (2006) notes, the distinction between water usage and consumption is important. ‘Once through’ power stations use large quantities of water, but most of this water is returned to the source and can be used again. In ‘closed cycle’ systems, the steam is cooled in towers or ponds and the water that is not lost to evaporation is recycled through the plant again. Regardless of the system used, all power stations consume some of the water they use, mostly by evaporation. A closed cycle system uses about 2-3 % of the water volumes used by the once-through system, but the water consumption of the two systems is of a similar order of magnitude.

Woods (2006) concludes a parliamentary research paper by stating that: “Per megawatt existing nuclear power stations use and consume more water than power stations using other fuel sources. Depending on the cooling technology utilised, the water requirements for a nuclear power station can vary between 20 to 83 per cent more than for other power stations.” (See EPRI, 2002 for detailed figures).

Woods (2006) calculates that nuclear power plants consume 13-24 million litres per year per megawatt of electrical output. He bases his calculations on the lower end of the estimates of water consumption, so the true figures can be higher.

A typical nuclear reactor generates 1,000 megawatts, which equates to annual water consumption of 13-24 billion litres, or 35-65 million litres per day.

Water usage (as opposed to consumption) for once-through nuclear power systems can reach one trillion litres per year.

WATER CONSUMPTION OF DIFFERENT ENERGY SOURCES:

(litres per kilowatt-hour of electrical output)

Nuclear 2.3–2.8

Coal 1.9 #

Oil 1.6

Combined Cycle Gas 0.95

Solar PV 0.11

Wind 0.004

Above table compiled from various sources:

  • Paul Gipe, 1995, Wind Energy Comes Of Age, John Wiley & Sons.
  • American Wind Energy Association.
  • Meridian Corp., “Energy System Emissions and Materials Requirements”, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC. 1989, p. 23.
  • Rose (2006)

# A small number of air-cooled coal-fired electricity plants exist but they have a number of disadvantages – higher capital cost, lower efficiency resulting from the higher turbine back pressure, greater greenhouse gas emissions. (Rose, 2006.)

To give an example, operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 4.5 litres of water if coal is the energy source and 6 litres if nuclear power is the energy source. That calculation does not account for the water consumption associated with uranium mining.

Tim Flannery (2007) notes that wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power consume little or no water. Likewise, the vast array of energy efficiency/conservation measures which reduce demand for electricity in the first place are highly advantageous in relation to water consumption, a point emphasised by Flannery.

The extraction of water for a nuclear power plant can impact on the water source, through pollution with heavy metals and salts and because the water returned to the water source (in a once-through system) is warmer than the extracted water. These issues are summarised by the US Environmental Protection Agency <www.epa.gov/cleanrgy/nuc.htm>:

“Nuclear power plants use large quantities of water for steam production and for cooling. When nuclear power plants remove water from a lake or river for steam production and cooling, fish and other aquatic life can be affected.

“Water pollutants, such as heavy metals and salts, build up in the water used in the nuclear power plant systems. These water pollutants, as well as the higher temperature of the water discharged from the power plant, can negatively affect water quality and aquatic life.

“Although the nuclear reactor is radioactive, the water discharged from the power plant is not considered radioactive because it never comes in contact with radioactive materials. However, waste generated from uranium mining operations and rainwater runoff can contaminate groundwater and surface water resources with heavy metals and traces of radioactive uranium.”

The Christian Science Monitor reported on the impacts of the mid-2006 heat wave in western Europe on nuclear power plants (Sachs, 2006):

“The extended heat wave in July aggravated drought conditions across much of Europe, lowering water levels in the lakes and rivers that many nuclear plants depend on to cool their reactors. As a result, utility companies in France, Spain, and Germany were forced to take some plants offline and reduce operations at others. Across Western Europe, nuclear plants also had to secure exemptions from regulations in order to discharge overheated water into the environment. Even with an exemption to environmental rules this summer, the French electric company, Electricité de France (EDF), normally an energy exporter, had to buy electricity on European spot market, a way to meet electricity demand.

“Overall, about one-third of all water used in Europe is used for cooling electrical generators, including those powered by both nuclear and fossil fuels. Environmental officials in several European countries, including France and Germany, have warned that water levels in some reservoirs are at historic lows and have not returned to pre-2003 heat wave levels.”

Nuclear power would only exacerbate the problems being experienced in Queensland, as reported in The Australian newspaper:

* “Queenslanders are footing a $300 million bill so water can be pumped to a power generator for just four years before the plant is shut down. And they face hefty power bill increases because of the cost of supplying recycled water to the two main power stations servicing the drought-ravaged southeast of the state – Swanbank and Tarong. The revelations came as the Tarong station announced yesterday a 70 per cent cut in output in response to water restrictions. With anger already rising over the Beattie Government’s intention to pay for its $8 billion water infrastructure plans with water price increases of up to 150 per cent, the 2.5 million residents of southeast Queensland face the prospect of power blackouts and hikes in electricity bills.” (March 15, 2007, <www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21384755-2702,00.html>)

* “Southeast Queensland’s 2.5 million residents are facing power blackouts and level-five water restrictions as the region’s two main power stations are forced to cut production because of the worsening drought. As unions warned of possible job losses in the power sector, the Queensland Water Commission announced yesterday that water supplies for cooling the Tarong and Swanbank stations would be slashed from April 10 as part of the level-five restrictions.” (March 9, 2007, <www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21350071-2702,00.html>.)

Former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie was less than enthusiastic about nuclear power: “At a time when our farming communities are hurting badly, it is a folly for [Prime Minister John] Howard to be entertaining the thought of nuclear power stations in Queensland or anywhere else. Many towns and shires in our state are struggling to get enough drinking water, let alone enough to satisfy the amount a nuclear station would need to guzzle.” (28/10/06)

So we have the problems which have affected nuclear power in Europe:

  • lower water levels in lakes and rivers from which nuclear power plants draw water
  • water warming due to climate change
  • water warming due to a heat wave
  • local water warming from water outflows from nuclear power plants.

And the problems being experienced – or looming – in coal-powered Queensland, which would be exacerbated by nuclear power since it is more water intensive:

  • expensive water pumping to power plants because of dwindling local supplies
  • increased competition for scarce water resources
  • increased prices for water
  • reduced electricity output
  • increased power prices
  • increased probability of blackouts.

The consumption of large volumes of water is not nearly so much of a problem for coastal sites using sea-water – but other problems arise. A US report, ‘Licensed to Kill: How the Nuclear Power Industry Destroys Endangered Marine Wildlife and Ocean Habitat to Save Money’, details the nuclear industry’s destruction of delicate marine ecosystems and large numbers of animals, including endangered species. Most of the damage is done by water inflow pipes, while there are further adverse impacts from the expulsion of warm water. (See the report and video at: <www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/licensedtokill>.) Another documented problem is ‘cold stunning’ – fish acclimatise to warm water but die when the reactor is taken off-line and warm water is no longer expelled. In New Jersey, local fishermen estimated that 4,000 fish died from cold stunning when a reactor was shut down.

Another concern is the potential impact of rising sea levels on coastal nuclear power plants. Stéphane Lhomme from Sortir du Nucléaire argues: “Nuclear is not saving us from climate change. It’s in trouble because of climate change.” (Quoted in Sachs, 2006.)

References:

EPRI – Electric Power Research Institute, March 2002, Water & Sustainability (Volume 3):U.S. Water Consumption for Power Production—The Next Half Century, Topical Report EPRI, Concord. www.epriweb.com/public/000000000001006786.pdf

Tim Flannery, February 12, 2007, “Saving precious water at the flick of a switch”, www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/saving-precious-water-at-the-flick-of-a-switch/2007/02/11/1171128807960.html

Dr. Ian Rose, ROAM Consulting, paper commissioned by Queensland government, October 26, 2006, www.thepremier.qld.gov.au/library/office/NuclearPowerStation261006.doc

Susan Sachs, August 10, 2006, “Nuclear power’s green promise dulled by rising temps”, Christian Science Monitor, www.csmonitor.com/2006/0810/p04s01-woeu.html

Guy Woods (Department of Parliamentary Services), December 4, 2006, “Water requirements of nuclear power stations”, Research Note no. 12, 2006–07, ISSN 1449-8456. www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2006-07/07rn12.pdf

3. NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING PLANTS

Civil reprocessing plants – which process spent nuclear reactor fuel – release significant quantities of radioactive wastes into the sea and gaseous discharges into the air. Cogema’s reprocessing plant at La Hague in France, and BNFL’s plant at Sellafield in the UK, are the largest sources of radioactive pollution in the European environment (WISE-Paris, 2001). The radioactive contamination from these facilities can be traced through the Irish Sea, the North Sea, along the Norwegian coast into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, and gives rise to elevated contamination levels in biota. There are increases in the rates of childhood leukaemia and other radiation-linked diseases in the vicinity of both Sellafield and La Hague although the link between the reprocessing plants and these increases is contested.

The OSPAR Commission regulates marine pollution in the North-East Atlantic under the terms of the 1992 OSPAR Convention (<www.ospar.org>). Fifteen European countries are parties to the Convention, as is the European Union. Most of these countries have been calling for a sharp reduction in radioactive emissions from Sellafield and La Hague.

At the Ministerial-level OSPAR meeting in 1998, all parties agreed to progressive and substantial reductions in radioactive discharges to achieve, by the year 2020, close to zero concentrations in the marine environment above historic levels.

At the 2000 OSPAR meeting, a resolution was passed stating that: “The current authorisations for discharges or releases of radioactive substances from nuclear reprocessing facilities shall be reviewed as a matter of priority by their competent national authorities with a view to, inter alia, implementing the non-reprocessing option (for example, dry storage) for spent nuclear fuel management at appropriate facilities.” (OSPAR, 2000.)

The 2000 OSPAR resolution was supported by 12 countries – Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Norway, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Iceland, and Ireland – but not by France or the UK.

References:

OSPAR, 2000, “OSPAR Decision 2000/1 on Substantial Reductions and Elimination of Discharges, Emissions and Losses of Radioactive Substances, with Special Emphasis on Nuclear Reprocessing”, <www.ospar.org/v_ospar/strategy.asp?v0=5&lang=1>.

WISE-Paris, 2001, “Possible Toxic Effects from the Nuclear Reprocessing Plants at Sellafield and Cap de la Hague”, European Parliament Directorate General for Research, www.wise-paris.org/english/stoa_en.html

4.1 URANIUM – ROXBY DOWNS: THE GAB GRAB

The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) is a vast body of underground water that lies deep under the surface from central to north-eastern Australia.

The GAB supports many Mound Springs – natural up-wellings of water which deposit water-borne minerals that form into mounds. These unique arid land habitats support rare and delicate micro flora and fauna, some species of which are unique to a particular Spring.

South Australia’s Mound Springs have great ecological, scientific, anthropological and economic significance. They are listed as endangered ecological communities under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. That followed the 2001 recommendation from the Threatened Species Scientific Committee, which found that ongoing extraction of artesian water is likely to play a continued role in the decline of the Mound Springs and that an intensification of water extraction may cause the extinction of many more Springs.

BHP Billiton extracts 35 million litres of GAB water daily for the Roxby Downs (a.k.a. Olympic Dam) uranium/copper/gold/silver mine. The company is licensed to extract up to 42 million litres daily. The mine is the largest single-site industrial user of ground water in the Southern Hemisphere.

Since GAB water extraction for the Roxby Downs mine began in the 1980s, many Mound Springs have experienced reduced flows and some have ceased flowing altogether.

BHP Billiton (and previous mine owner WMC Resources) sometimes acknowledges the adverse impacts of its GAB grab on Mound Springs, albeit reluctantly. Sometimes BHP/WMC deny it. Sometimes the company obfuscates, claiming for example that no “major” springs are affected. In fact, there is no doubt that water extraction for the mine has ruined some Mound Springs and adversely affected others.

WMC Resources invested in borefield infrastructure on the false assumption that impermeable faults separated their borefields from the Mound Springs.

BHP Billiton does not pay one cent for the water it extracts from the GAB. In February 2007, BHP Billiton announced an $8 billion half-yearly profit – but the company still refuses to pay one cent for its massive GAB grab.

In 1996, the then Liberal SA government said it could not impose charges for WMC Resources’ water extraction because it would breach the Roxby Indenture Act. Whether or not that was true, the government could of course have moved to amend the Indenture Act.

In a disingenuous defence of the company’s failure to pay one cent for GAB water, BHP Billiton says it has funded the construction of infratructure such as pipelines and pumps. So what? That in no way justifies the extraction of water free of charge.

BHP Billiton states that the company saves more water through its pastoral bore-capping program than it uses for the Roxby Downs mine. But the draw-down effects from its water take are localised – and more to the point they are localised in areas which adversely impact on Mound Springs.

BHP/WMC claims that it has an incentive to minimise water usage since it has invested in water extraction and piping infrastructure. The claim is false and illogical. Having invested in the infrastructure, there is no incentive to minimise water extraction from the GAB.

The Prime Minister wrote to state premiers in early 2007 stating: “I seek your agreement … to establish proper entitlements, metering, pricing and reporting arrangements for water extracted from the Great Artesian Basin.” But the Prime Minister later defended BHP Billiton’s “right” to free GAB water.

The SA Government recognises that “the major threat to maintaining habitat diversity is a reduction in Great Artesian Basin pressure resulting in the extinction of Springs and loss of habitat diversity.” Yet the Roxby Downs mine enjoys indefensible legal favours, with the Roxby Indenture Act giving the mine a raft of exemptions from the Natural Resources Act 2004 (including the Water Resources Act 1997), the Environment Protection Act and the Aboriginal Heritage Act.

BHP Billiton was considering increasing its daily water take from the GAB by an additional 120 million litres as part of the proposed mine expansion, but currently its preferred plan is to source the additional water by building a deslination plant near the Spencer Gulf.

With the proposed mine expansion, BHP Billiton would be using 62 Olympic size swimming pools of water each day for its operations (155ML/2.5ML=62), sourced from some combination of GAB water, a desalination plant taking water from the Spencer Gulf, and possibly also Murray River water.

WMC Resources mounted an extensive campaign against the World Heritage nomination of the Lake Eyre Basin in the 1990s. WMC had (and BHP Billiton has) a vested interest in preventing World Heritage nomination because of its profligate use of water from the GAB. In February 1995, Liberal SA Premier Dean Brown wrote to Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating stating that a prerequisite for SA government support for a national nuclear waste dump in SA was that the federal government abandoned the pursuit of World Heritage nomination for the Lake Eyre Basin. (<www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/waste9.html>).

The Mound Springs are of profound cultural significance to the Aboriginal people of the region. The Arabunna people are the traditional custodians of the Lake Eyre South region, where affected Mound Springs are located. In the mid-1990s, WMC Resources used divide-and rule tactics against Indigenous communities in order to secure a water pipeline across Arabunna land to the Roxby Downs mine. This led to violence and one death. WMC Resources could not foresee the violence and the death but it could certainly foresee the divisions and tensions arising from its tactics. Some years later, WMC Resources no longer attempted to defend or justify this disgraceful behaviour. (More information: <www.geocities.com/olympicdam/articles.html>.)

In 1994, WMC admitted that some 5-6 billion litres of waste had leaked from the tailings dams at Roxby Downs and into the groundwater and soil below. The leak had occurred unchecked for at least two years. (More information: <www.sea-us.org.au/roxby/sa-inquiry.html>.)

On March 10, 2006, The Australian newspaper reported on documents obtained under Freedom of Information legislation. The documents, written by scientific consultants to BHP, state that the mine needs urgent improvements in radioactive waste management and monitoring.

 They call on government regulators to “encourage” changes to the tailings management, noting that radioactive slurry was deposited “partially off” a lined area of a storage pond thereby contributing to greater seepage and rising ground water levels.

Another problem with the tailings ponds is bird deaths. The ABC reported in January 2005 that over 100 bird deaths were recorded in one four-day period (<www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1279971.htm>).

Major recommendations:

BHP Billiton should be required to:

  • Close as soon as possible Borefield A, which is immediately within the Mound Spring arc as well as a wind-back rather than an expansion of Borefield B which directly threatens the Hermit Hill spring group.
  • Pay for its water – just as all other Australians are required to pay for water.
  • Relinquish the indefensible legal privileges provided by the Roxby Indenture Act

More information:

* Mudd, G M, 2000, Mound Springs of the Great Artesian Basin in South Australia: A Case Study From Olympic Dam. Environmental Geology, 39 (5), pp 463-476. (Not available online.)

* Mudd, G M, 1998, The Long Term Sustainability of Mound Springs In South Australia: Implications For Olympic Dam. Proc. “Uranium Mining & Hydrogeology II Conference”, Freiberg, Germany, September 15-17 1998, pp 575-584. <http://civil.eng.monash.edu.au/about/staff/muddpersonal/1998-UMH-2-ODam-v-MoundSprings.pdf>.

* More info from Dr Mudd:

http://users.monash.edu.au/~gmudd

http://web.archive.org/web/20091027070000/www.sea-us.org.au/roxby/springsdrying.html

* Daniel Keane, “The sustainability of use of groundwater from the Great Artesian Basin, with particular reference to the south-western edge of the basin and impact on the mound springs”, https://nuclear.foe.org.au/olympic-dam-uranium-copper-mine/

Pictures of the Mound Springs:

Sophie Cook: www.flickr.com/photos/cookielovescake (Radioactive Exposure Tour)

http://web.archive.org/web/20091027070000/www.sea-us.org.au/roxby/springsdrying.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20091027070000/www.sea-us.org.au/roxstop97/index.html

4. 2 – URANIUM – ROXBY DOWNS: DESALINATION

BHP Billiton provides the following information regarding its plans for a desalination plant:

* BHP Billiton and the SA government have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly study the desalination option.

* The Roxby Expansion EIS is investigating: locations for a desalination plant, the intake pipeline, and the discharge outlet; and the potential short and long term impact of brine discharge.

* BHP Billiton says the proposed desalination plant would draw about 320 million litres of seawater per day from the Upper Spencer Gulf via an intake pipeline and, after desalination, about 200 million litres of brine would be piped into the Gulf.

* The brine would have salinity levels of around 65 parts per thousand, compared with 37 parts per thousand for normal seawater.

* BHP Billiton is studying the potential effects of brine on marine species and communities such as cuttlefish, prawns and yellow-tail kingfish.

* The desalination plant would use approximately 30 megawatts of electricity. Options for the supply of this energy include electricity from the state grid and the supply of renewable energy such as solar and wind.

(Seawater Desalination Plant, Information Sheet #4, August 2006, www.olympicdameis.com/downloads/index.htm#guidelines)

A joint media release from the SA government and BHP Billiton on February 17, 2006 states:

* The proposed desalination plant has an estimated cost in excess of $300 million.

* BHP Billiton would establish a 330km pipeline to Roxby Downs.

* The plant would also supply water to the Upper Spencer Gulf and the Eyre Peninsula.

* BHP Billiton says it is likely to need an additional 70-120 million litres of water each day to meet its expansion targets. The proposed desalination plant would produce up to 150 million litres of water daily.

The prawn and sardine fishing industries have expressed concern over the potential impact of the desalination plant on nursery waters in the upper Spencer Gulf. The combined value of the two industries is estimated at $60 million a year, and the sardine industry supplies the blue fin tuna farming industry in Port Lincoln, valued at $220 million a year. The upper Spencer Gulf is a shallow body of water which receives very little rainwater inflow from the surrounding land. In 2006 the SA Environment Department proposed the upper Spencer Gulf attract the highest level of zoning protection as part of a new statewide marine protection system. (Jeremy Roberts, March 12, 2007, ” BHP warned over mine’s desal plant”, The Australian, <www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21364561-2702,00.html>.)

The Australian newspaper, drawing on documents obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, reported that the endangered southern giant petrel and the southern right whale may live in areas affected by the proposed desalination plant. The animals are included in BHP Billiton’s list of flora and fauna potentially affected by the expansion. Southern right whales were recently seen near Port Augusta in the upper Spencer Gulf, The Australian reported in July 2006. The BHP Billiton documents obtained by FoI refer to the Spencer Gulf as “a unique breeding ground” for the cuttlefish which may be affected by the desalination plant. (Michelle Wiese Bockmann, July 10, 2006, “Whale may threaten Olympic Dam”, <www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19735435-2702,00.html>.)

4.3. URANIUM – BEVERLEY IN-SITU LEACH URANIUM MINE

Since 2001 a fast tracked in-situ leach (ISL) mine, the Beverley uranium mine, has been operating in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The mine is owned by General Atomics, a US-based company, and managed by its subsidiary, Heathgate Resources.

ISL involves pumping acid into an aquifer. This dissolves the uranium ore and other heavy metals and the solution is then pumped back to the surface. The small amount of uranium is separated at the surface. The liquid radioactive waste – containing radioactive particles, heavy metals and acid – is simply dumped in groundwater. From being inert and immobile in the ore body, the radionuclides and heavy metals are now bioavailable and mobile in the aquifer.

There has never been a commercial acid leach mine in the USA given environmental approval. Experiences with its use in the Eastern Bloc and elsewhere have left aquifers heavily polluted.

Heathgate has no plans to clean up the aquifer as it says the pollution will ‘attenuate’ – that the aquifer will return to its pre-mining state over time. This claim has been queried by the scientific community as being highly speculative with little or no firm science behind it.

According to Dr. Gavin Mudd, a hydrogeologist based at Monash University: “The critical data which could answer scientific questions concerning contaminant mobility in groundwater has never been released by General Atomics. This is especially important since GA no longer maintain the mine is ‘isolated’ from surrounding groundwater, with desires to expand the mine raising legitimate concerns over the groundwater contamination legacy left at Beverley.”

Jillian Marsh, Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner, noted in her submission to 2002-03 Senate References and Legislation Committee that: “The government chose not to demand that the groundwater be rehabilitated, an unacceptable situation for the Australian public at large given our increasing reliance on groundwater and the increasing salinity of land surfaces and water systems.”

(<www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/2002-04/uranium/report/index.htm>)

The 2003 report of the Senate Committee noted “a pattern of under-performance and non-compliance” in Australia’s uranium mining industry, it identified “many gaps in knowledge and found an absence of reliable data on which to measure the extent of contamination or its impact on the environment”, and it concluded that changes were necessary “in order to protect the environment and its inhabitants from serious or irreversible damage”.

On ISL mining, the 2003 Senate report stated:

“The Committee is concerned that the ISL process, which is still in its experimental state and introduced in the face of considerable public opposition, was permitted prior to conclusive evidence being available on its safety and environmental impacts.

“The Committee recommends that, owing to the experimental nature and the level of public opposition, the ISL mining technique should not be permitted until more conclusive evidence can be presented on its safety and environmental impacts.

“Failing that, the Committee recommends that at the very least, mines utilising the ISL technique should be subject to strict regulation, including prohibition of discharge of radioactive liquid mine waste to groundwater, and ongoing, regular independent monitoring to ensure environmental impacts are minimised.”

A sham inquiry was subsequently convened by the SA government to justify ISL mining and to justify the government’s indefensible decision not to require rehabilitation of groundwater.

The 2003 Senate report also noted: “Another serious claim made by the ACF concerns the status and release of Heathgate Resources’ reports on the Beverley FLTs [Field Leach Trials], including the Groundwater Monitoring Summary. The ACF states that release of these reports under the Freedom of Information Act was delayed by company claims of commercial-in-confidence for more than two years. A successful ACF appeal to the South Australian Ombudsman finally secured the release of some of these reports, the Ombudsman finding that in no case was a commercial-in-confidence claim justified.”

Another feature of ISL mining is surface contamination from spills and leaks of radioactive solutions. There have been several dozen spills at Beverley, such as the spill of 62,000 litres of contaminated water in January 2002 after a pipe burst, and the spill of 15,000 litres of contaminated water in May 2002.

——————-

ISL Uranium Mining Method Far From ‘Benign’

By Dr. Gavin Mudd

Hydrogeologist / Environmental Engineer, Monash University

The mining technique of in situ leaching (ISL), often referred to as solution mining, is becoming an increasingly favoured method for the extraction of uranium across the world. This is primarily due to its low capital and operating costs compared to conventional mining. Little is known about the environmental impact of this method, and mining companies have been able to exploit this to promote the method as “environmentally benign”.

The ISL process involves drilling groundwater bores or wells into a uranium deposit, injecting corrosive chemicals to dissolve the uranium within the ore zone, then pumping back the uranium-laden solution.

The method should only be applied to uranium deposits located within a groundwater system or confined aquifer, commonly in palaeochannel deposits (old buried river beds).

Although ISL is presented in simplified diagrams by the nuclear industry, the reality is that geological systems are inherently complex and not easily predictable.

There are a range of options for the chemistry of the mining solutions. Either acidic or alkaline chemical agents can be used in conjunction with an oxidising agent to dissolve the uranium.

Typical oxidising agents include oxygen or hydrogen peroxide, while alkaline agents include ammonia or sodium-bicarbonate or carbon dioxide. The most common acidic chemical used is sulphuric acid, although nitric acid has been tried at select sites and in laboratory tests.

The chemicals can have serious environmental impacts and cause long-term and potentially irreversible changes to groundwater quality.

The use of acidic solutions mobilises high levels of heavy metals, such as cadmium, strontium, lead and chromium. Alkaline solutions tend to mobilise only a few heavy metals such as selenium and molybdenum. The ability to restore the groundwater to its pre-mining quality is, arguably, easier at sites that have used alkaline solution chemistry.

A review of the available literature on ISL mines across the world can easily counter the myths promulgated about ISL uranium mining. Whether one examines the USA, Germany, Russia and former annexed states, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Australia or new ISL projects across Asia, the truth remains the same – the ISL technique merely treats groundwater as a sacrifice zone and the problem remains “out of sight, out of mind”.

ISL uranium mining is not controllable, is inherently unsafe and is unlikely to meet “strict environmental controls”. It is not an environmentally benign method of uranium mining.

The use of sulphuric acid solutions at ISL mines across Eastern Europe, as well as a callous disregard for sensible environmental management, has led to many seriously contaminated sites.

Perhaps the most severe example is Straz pod Ralskem in the Czech Republic, where up to 200 billion litres of groundwater is contaminated. Restoration of the site is expected to take several decades or even centuries. For the USA, solution escapes outside of the ‘controlled mining zone’ and difficult restorations have been documented at ISL sites in Texas and Wyoming – including both acid and alkaline leach sites. Australia has encountered these same difficulties, especially at the controversial Honeymoon deposit in South Australia during pilot studies in the early 1980s and at Manyingee in Western Australia until 1985.

The Honeymoon pilot project used sulphuric acid in conjunction with ferric sulphate as the oxidising agent. The wells and aquifer experienced significant blockages due to the minerals jarosite and gypsum precipitating, lowering the efficiency of the leaching process and leading to increased excursions. The aquifers in the vicinity of Honeymoon are known to be connected to aquifers used by local pastoralists to water stock.

For Australia, water of any quality is precious – and particularly so when the only secure supply of water in a region is from groundwater. With the rise of water treatment technologies such as desalination, water of any quality is a valuable resource – environmentally as well as for possible community and industry use. An acid leach-type ISL project, especially as approved for Beverley and Honeymoon without remediation of polluted groundwater, therefore imposes a major environmental risk and pollution burden on future users of groundwater in these regions. ISL mining is therefore far from sustainable.
Journal articles, conferences papers etc. by Dr. Mudd: http://users.monash.edu.au/~gmudd

4.4 URANIUM – RANGER URANIUM MINE

The impacts of the Ranger uranium mine on the Kakadu wetlands in the Northern Territory are dealt with extensively in: Australian Conservation Foundation, 2005, Submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee, submission #48 at <www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/isr/uranium/subs.htm>.

The following excerpts are copied from the ACF submission:

An increasing series of spills, leaks, incidents and reporting failures since 2000 have undermined the credibility of both mining company Energy Resources of Australia and the current environmental protection framework and highlighted serious regulatory deficiencies.

In April 2000 ERA identified and repaired a leak in a tailings water return pipe located within the Ranger uranium mine Restricted Release Zone (RRZ). Contaminant materials in the RRZ are required to be maintained and managed in this designated area and not be released to the wider Ranger Project Area or the Kakadu environment. Between December 1999 and April 2000 an estimated two million litres of material containing high levels of manganese along with uranium, radium and a suite of other contaminants escaped from this broken pipe and the RRZ. This severe operational failure was compounded by the fact that more than twenty days elapsed before ERA notified the relevant Northern Territory (NT) and Commonwealth authorities of the leak despite the clear reporting requirement contained in section 16 of the Ranger Environmental Requirements …”

Further serious operational problems were exposed at the Ranger with the incorrect stockpile placement of a large volume of low grade uranium ore. 84,500 tonnes of material was placed in the wrong area between the period of January 14 to February 26, 2002. This error resulted in the movement of large volumes of rainfall seepage through the uncompacted stockpile with the subsequent mobilisation of high concentrations of uranium. Although the incorrect dumping of material commenced on January 14 ERA failed to report both this and the resultant increases in uranium contamination in water samples until February 27, 2002. Further, during this period ERA staff provided incorrect information on the stockpile status to an inspection team comprised of Commonwealth and NT supervising authorities.

The deficiencies in infrastructure and corporate culture seen with ERA’s tailings pipeline and stockpile issues were further highlighted with the high profile water contamination and vehicle clearance issues during 2004. Energy Resources of Australia’s Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu was recently found guilty and fined $A150,000 and costs over breaches of the NT Mining Management Act in relation to a contamination incident in March 2004 where around 150 people were exposed to drinking water containing uranium levels 400 times greater than the maximum Australian safety standard. Twenty-eight mineworkers suffered adverse health effects including vomiting and skin irritation as a result of the exposure.

The recent contamination event at Ranger is the latest in over 120 leaks, spills and license breaches since the mine opened in 1981. Aging infrastructure and a deficient safety/management culture at the Ranger mine has seen the frequency and severity of these incidents increase in recent years.

The incidents detailed above are part of a litany of operational errors and procedural failures at ERA’s Ranger operation. Whilst some of these are not of great individual impact, others are. Cumulatively they document a pattern of systemic under-performance and non-compliance and highlight the growing credibility gap that exists between ERA’s self promotion and the reality of its performance.

Water, uranium and nuclear power – short summary

Jim Green

National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia

jim.green@foe.org.au

2007

A number of problems associated with the nuclear industry are much-discussed – the repeatedly demonstrated link between “peaceful” nuclear programs and weapons proliferation, the nuclear waste legacy, and the small risk of catastrophic accidents.

Less well understood are the various impacts of uranium mines and nuclear facilities on water resources.

Water & Nuclear Power Plants

* Nuclear power plants consume large amounts of water – 20-83% more than coal-fired plants. Water consumption for nuclear reactors is typically 13-24 billion litres per year, or 35-65 million litres per day. Conversely, the water consumption of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency/conservation measures is negligible or zero.

* Water outflows from nuclear plants expel relatively warm water which can have adverse local impacts in bays and gulfs, as can heavy metal and salt pollutants. The warming effect is particularly problematic if exacerbated by heat waves. For example, a number of European reactors had to be taken offline during a heat wave in 2006, and others had to operate at reduced power.

* Water problems in Australia would be exacerbated by nuclear power. Current examples include the problems in Queensland – pumping water to a (coal-fired) power plant because of dwindling local water supplies, the likelihood of increased prices for electricity, and an increased likelihood of blackouts, and increased competition for scarce water resources.

* Another set of problems will arise for coastal nuclear plants as sea levels rise.

Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plants

* The largest commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, in France and the UK, are major sources of radioactive marine pollution.

* Many European countries have for many years been calling for a sharp reduction in radioactive emissions from the reprocessing plants in France and the UK.

Roxby Downs: The GAB Grab

* The daily extraction of 35 million litres of Great Artesian Basin water for the Roxby Downs mine in South Australia has destroyed some of the precious Mound Springs and adversely impacted on others.

* Also controversial is the arrangement whereby BHP Billiton pays nothing for this massive water take.

Roxby Downs: Desalination

* There are concerns about the potential impacts on marine life and fishery operations of a proposed desalination plant in the Spencer Gulf region of South Australia. The plant would produce up to 120 million litres of water daily, most of it for the planned expansion of the Roxby Downs mine.

Beverley In-situ Leach Uranium Mine

* Debates over the the environmental impacts of mining typically revolve around the risk of environmental pollution. There is no such debate with the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia. Mining company Heathgate Resources pollutes the aquifer with heavy metals, acid and radionuclides as a routine aspect of its operations, and is under no obligation to rehabilitate the aquifer.

Ranger Uranium Mine
* An increasing series of spills, leaks, incidents and reporting failures since 2000 have undermined the credibility of both mining company Energy Resources of Australia and the current environmental protection framework and highlighted serious regulatory deficiencies.

* The incidents are part of a litany of operational errors and procedural failures at ERA’s Ranger operation. Whilst some of these are not of great individual impact, others are. Cumulatively they document a pattern of systemic under-performance and non-compliance and highlight the growing credibility gap that exists between ERA’s self promotion and the reality of its performance.

Water consumption and pollution – uranium and nuclear power

Feature: Water & The Nuclear Fuel Cycle

WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor #770, 24 October 2013

http://www.wiseinternational.org/node/4031

Click here to download the full issue (PDF).

Articles (online):


Older Information

Impacts of Nuclear Power and Uranium Mining on Water Resources – short summary

Impacts of Nuclear Power and Uranium Mining on Water Resources – longer paper

Uranium Miners Turning Water Into Liquid Waste (article published in The Advertiser, July 25 2009)

Dr Ian Rose (Roam Consulting), 2006, Nuclear Power Station (PDF)

Guy Woods, Department of Parliamentary Services, 2006, ‘Water requirements of nuclear power stations’ (PDF)

Union of Concerned Scientists – 2007 briefing paper on nuclear power & water consumption (PDF)

Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool, January 2009, ‘Running On Empty: The Electricity-Water Nexus and the U.S. Electric Utility Sector’, Energy Law Journal, Vol.30:11, pp.11-51. (PDF)

Benjamin K. Sovacool and Kelly E. Sovacool, “Preventing National Electricity-Water Crisis Areas in the United States,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 34(2) (Summer, 2009), pp. 333-393. (PDF)

World Economic Forum, ‘Energy Vision Update 2009, Thirsty Energy: Water and Energy in the 21st Century’. (PDF)

US Nuclear Information & Resource Service, ‘Licensed to Kill: How the Nuclear Power Industry Destroys Endangered Marine Wildlife and Ocean Habitat to Save Money’

US NRC whistleblowers warn of nuclear accidents caused by dam failures and effort to suppress disclosure

Dawn Stover, ‘Treading Water’, 22 August 2012, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Human guinea-pigs in the British N-tests in Australia

‘An act of indefensible callousness’

Human guinea-pigs in the British N-tests in Australia

Jim Green, May 2001 jim.green@foe.org.au

The British government has finally admitted that military personnel were used in radiation experiments during the nuclear weapons tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s.

Confirming statements made repeatedly by veterans over the years, the British Ministry of Defence acknowledged on May 11 that it had used military personnel from Britain, Australia and New Zealand in radiation experiments. A statement released by the British government said that military personnel were “transported to or walked in various uniforms to an area of low-level fallout”.

The admission followed publicity surrounding documents found in the Australian National Archive in February by Sue Rabbitt Roff, a senior research fellow from Scotland’s Dundee University.

An October 12, 1956, document on an “Australian Military Forces – Central Command” letterhead refers to the ‘Buffalo’ series of four atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at Maralinga in September and October, 1956. The document names 70 Australian military personnel and one civilian, plus five New Zealand officers, all listed as exposed to radiation on September 28 or 29.

“As far as can be determined the individual dose for round one was received over a period of two to three hours while the various indoctrinee groups were touring the target response area. … Certain people were exposed to radiation on dates other than 28 and 29 Sep, during clothing trials or for a limited number during a tour of the contaminated area after round two”, the document said. The September 27 weapons test was 15 kilotonnes, about the same magnitude as the Hiroshima weapon.

The Central Command document reveals that at least 26 of the 76 people named as being exposed to radiation from tests in 1956 received a dose greater than the “maximum permissible exposure” of 0.3 roentgens in a week; the highest exposure was 0.66 roentgens in a few hours.

Some men were chosen for ‘clothing trials’ from an “indoctrinee force” of British, Australian and New Zealand military personnel. The men walked, crawled and were driven through a fallout zone three days after a nuclear test at Maralinga. Roff says 24 men were involved in the ‘clothing trials’, whereas Ric Johnstone, national president of the Australian Nuclear Veterans Association (ANVA), said in the May 19 Melbourne Age, “There were a whole lot more than 24 used as guinea pigs, there were men sent into the hot area with and without protective clothing.”

Roff dismisses the British government’s claim that it was testing clothing, not humans, and says that thousands of Commonwealth military personnel not directly involved in the nuclear tests at Maralinga were required to be outdoors to observe the detonations.

“The issue is that they (the British government) have always denied doing these experiments and they have never conducted any medical support or follow-up for the men who were involved in these experiments”, Roff told the BBC.

Roff said the Central Command document contradicts claims by the British government in the European Court of Human Rights in 1997 that no humans were used in experiments in nuclear-weapons trials; a claim which enabled the British government to successfully defeat compensation claims.

“I was in the court in 1997 when the government denied using humans [in] studies of the effects of radiation”, Roff said. “In fact the government said it would be ‘an act of indefensible callousness to have done so'”.

A New Zealand veteran, John (Blackie) Burns, told the May 15 New Zealand Herald that after one of the nuclear tests at Maralinga, “From time to time, trucks would speed past and raise dust to make sure we got a bit of the fallout over the top of us. Then we were taken back and hosed down and put through showers and monitored.”

Ric Johnstone from the ANVA said in a July 2000 statement: “Men were ordered to enter into ground zero (point of explosion) immediately following detonation of atomic bombs. Planes flew into and tracked mushroom clouds over Australia taking air samples and photos. Ships and ground crews washed down equipment and themselves with irradiated water. They drank contaminated water while eating food contaminated by dust from the red sand and soil in which they lived. The men worked and manoeuvred on Plutonium contaminated soil. They were provided with little or no protective clothing and seldom badged while some badges and dosimeters were falsified or not recorded because of high readings. In spite of this long lived dangerous level of radioactivity, the Australian Government expect us to believe that the test participants were exposed to only minimal non-hazardous levels of radiation.”

Retired Australian army major and Maralinga veteran Alan Batchelor said on ABC radio on May 11, “We had to go in and uncover equipment shelters that were located somewhere between 100 and 150 metres away from ground zero. We would do that commencing at about one hour afterwards, without protective clothing”.

Other British radiation experiments

The official British claim that it had never conducted human radiation experiments was undermined in 1996 when documents were released detailing experiments at Aldermaston, Harwell and Porton Down. The experiments involved radioactive substances being inhaled, injected, swallowed or eaten. Systematic efforts were made to keep information about the experiments from the public, and also from the trade unions at Britain’s nuclear laboratories. The government’s code of practice on human radiation experiments showed that people taking part in the experiments were told little about the experiment and its potential risks. Efforts were also made to prevent scientists who might query the need for human subjects from intervening. Government officials worked out an elaborate system for denying liability and damages to anyone harmed in the experiments. (WISE News Communique, #463, December 13, 1996, “British human radiation experiments”.)

Human guinea-pigs were also used in a series of tests near Christmas Island – five British hydrogen bomb tests in 1958 and 27 joint US-British nuclear tests in 1962 (Sue Rabbitt Roff, “The ghost of Christmas past”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 1997). Military personnel were lined up on a soccer pitch during tests in 1958 and 1962 to act as guinea-pigs.

During a 1996-97 European Commission of Human Rights hearing on the Christmas Island tests, the British government claimed that “indoctrinees” were required to witness the blasts as part of their “indoctrination”, so that they would not be unduly frightened of nuclear weapons in the event the bombs were ever used on the battlefield. However, this was difficult to reconcile with a 1953 memo issued by the British “Defense Research Policy Sub-Committee of the Chiefs of Staff Committee”. The memo, titled “Atomic Weapons Trials” and marked “Top Secret”, stated, “The army must discover the detailed effects of various types of explosions on equipment, stores and men with and without various types of protection.”

British governments have relied on dubious studies by the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) to claim that military personnel were not effected by the weapons tests. Both the US Advisory Committee of Human Radiation Experiments and the European Commission of Human Rights have criticised the NRPB for its research methodology and for drawing conclusions from data that they did not analyse. The European Commission of Human Rights wondered in a 1997 report why the British government “entrusted the investigation into its own liability to a government body when other bodies, whose impartiality could not be reasonably questioned, were available to do the work.”

The NRPB announced in 1996 that it was going to erase for ‘financial reasons’ a database containing the medical records of 40,000 veterans, half of whom are believed to have been participants in the nuclear tests. This plan was scrapped following vigorous protests by veterans.

Tony Blair’s New Labor government has followed in the footsteps of the Tories, refusing to settle compensation claims, denying veterans access to their medical records (citing ‘national security’ concerns, as the Tories did) and backing the NRPB ‘studies’. Ken McGinley, chair of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, said, “This is not a Conservative government cover-up, but a joint cover-up by the respective governments since the 1960s. There’s embarrassment that we have unintentionally rewritten the history of the British nuclear test program.”

Australian governments’ complicity

McGinley’s comments apply just as well to successive Australian governments. Buck-passing between British and Australian governments has been a familiar ploy. Another ploy has been to stall for time in the expectation that the political controversy will fade away as veterans die. A large majority of people involved in weapons tests in Australia have already died.

Bruce Scott, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, responded to the release of Roff’s research by saying that his office has contacted Roff in Scotland to ask her to forward the archival documents. But the documents are held in the national archive in Canberra, and Scott has access to further information which is still classified.

In 1999, the federal government announced it would compile a “nominal roll” of veterans, Aborigines and others who may have been exposed to radiation from the Maralinga tests. The roll is expected to be complete in June or July 2001. A cancer incidence study is promised following compilation of the roll.

A bureaucrat from the Veterans’ Affairs department said in a Senate hearing in May 2000 that the cancer incidence study would be complete by the end of 2000 – yet it has not even begun as at May 2001.

Ric Johnstone said in his July 2000 statement: “We are still waiting [for the nominal roll and cancer study] and more nuclear veterans have died, we believe and feel that minister Scott is aware that less than one quarter of the original 8000 are still living and compiling a national register at this late stage will be impossible, it is just another stalling tactic as the Government are now fully aware that time is on their side.”

Scott says that issues raised by Roff in recent weeks will only be pursued if “there is any new material in these documents that hasn’t been raised before in the context of the royal commission”. The Royal Commission into the British weapons tests in Australia did raise the issue of ‘clothing trials’ in its 1985 report, quite possibly basing its findings on the same document uncovered by Roff. The 1985 report said, “Some members of the indoctrinee force were required to undertake further work on day 3 after the detonation, where volunteers were marched through specified areas of levels of radiation to assess the degree of protection afforded by military clothing.”

However, the fact that the royal commission discussed the ‘clothing trials’ is no reason for the Coalition government to ignore the matter. Rather, it adds strength to the victims’ claims for the compensation they are being denied. Johnstone says this issue was “buried” following the royal commission. Scott seems keen to keep it that way.

Johnstone derided the government’s claim that victims are being adequately dealt with under the Military Compensation Scheme: “… the onus of proof is on the claimant and not on the Government as it is under the Veterans Entitlement Act. So go ahead and prove it if you can, knowing full well that since all of the tests were done under maximum secrecy (some aspects of the tests will never be revealed) and that all records are held by the Australian or the British governments it is going to be almost impossible for a claimant to prove the relationship between radiation exposure and illness, disease or death without their help which has been constantly refused.”

Johnstone also addressed the Coalition government’s refusal to provide funding for medical tests to assist in the determination of past radiation exposure on the basis of the specious and circular argument that victims of the nuclear weapons tests are not covered by the Veterans Entitlement Act: “Given the attitude of the Government you might think this would be a great opportunity for them to prove once and for all that nuclear veterans had never been exposed to harmful amounts of radiation, but no they are well aware of the truth and will not assist in supporting a test that will help the survivors prove their case.”


British Atomic Testing

ABC Radio National Science Show

June 2, 2001

Summary: A spate of documents unearthed from official Australian Archives has fuelled a rash of publicity on the effects of British nuclear tests on soliders. Now, a memo has been discovered which has international ramifications and could detonate a minor nuclear blast of its own.

Transcript: Peter Pockley:

Former servicemen from Australia, Britain and New Zealand have been searching over four decades for documents to verify any exposure to harmful radiation during Britain’s tests of 12 atomic bombs in the 1950s on the Monte Bello Islands of Western Australia and at Maralinga in South Australia.

They needed evidence for pursing claims for compensation against the Australian and British governments which have consistently denied that any tests for the effects of radiation were conducted with the troops. The official line has been that those near the blasts received nothing more than harmless doses.

Now the veterans seem to have a treasure trove of documents. As each set has emerged from archives or sheds, the authorities have been forced to acknowledge that there were tests involving hundreds of men. They were called ‘indoctrinees’ or ‘moles’ according to whether they stood in the open or were placed in trenches near the blasts.

They wore normal clothing or wrapped themselves in blankets and were ordered to run and roll through the radioactive dust where the bombs were let off. However, the British Ministry of Defence has asserted that they were only testing clothing and not the soldiers wearing them.

All the documents released recently have come from sources in the military and public service. But the latest one is the first to reveal the concerns of nuclear scientists about safety and that they were overruled.

I have here two pages of secret minutes of a top-level meeting held at the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) on the 15th July, 1958 to determine, quote: “radiological safety precautions at Christmas Island”. This 20 mile by 10 mile island in the Pacific was the place to establish Britain had its own hydrogen bomb, following proof of its plutonium bombs at Maralinga.

The meeting was only five weeks before “Operation Grapple Z” began with detonating two plutonium bombs and two hydrogen bombs above Christmas Island. Some hundreds of British troops were to be close to the blasts and the rest within 8 to 10 miles. Fijian and New Zealand personnel were also involved.

Australian support was refused by Prime Minister Bob Menzies. But, Christmas Island is highly relevant to the thousands of Australians who served at the Monte Bello and Maralinga tests as the operation was run by the same Britons.

The minutes record that senior scientists warned the military brass of the ‘medico-legal’ implications of not conducting blood tests on all participants before and after the tests. But the British were in a hurry to secure their independent deterrent before a moratorium was imposed and the officers decided on a short cut.

Air Vice-Marshal J. Grandy, the Commander of Operation Grapple Z said: “It was clearly impossible for over 4,500 service personnel on the island to be given blood counts”. Other officers, including the head of a Royal Air Force Hospital, labelled the proposal as “unsound” and not “of any use whatever”.

However, Dr J. Lynch of AWRE argued that blood counts were integral to medical examinations of all its personnel and that there was a statutory requirement under a new Factories Act for blood tests of all civilians exposed to radiation in the normal course of their duties. “AWRE were concerned about the political repercussions which might ensue of charges of negligence, however unfounded, could be proved. It would prejudice the case if no blood count was taken and a person became ill later”.

In the end, blood counts were recommended only for personnel “employed in the forward area where they might be subject to radiation hazards”. Forty three years on, nobody has been able to trace where the results have been kept.

The document was found by Sue Rabbitt Roff, a medical sociologist at the University of Dundee in Scotland, in the dossier of a veteran whose claim she has been supporting.

Guests on this program:

Dr Peter Pockley

Australian Correspondent, “Nature”


Nuclear guinea pigs lawyer doubts the official fallout

Sydney Morning Herald

May 23, 2001

The lawyer representing Australian troops seeking compensation for nuclear exposure at Maralinga has cast doubt over Government claims that atomic tests did not go ahead.

Documents show Britain planned to move up to 800 troops as close as possible to nuclear explosions in Australia during the 1950s to test the bombs’ impact.

The documents, obtained by a Scottish newspaper, show that the men – 560 of them Australian – were to occupy networks of trenches dug around the sites of four nuclear tests at Maralinga, in the South Australian desert.

The top-secret experiment, codenamed Operation Lighthouse, was called off only when the British, United States and Soviet governments agreed to a moratorium on all nuclear testing in October 1958.

Mr Morris May, the lawyer representing 30 Australian troops seeking compensation, said yesterday that he was sceptical of claims the tests did not go ahead.

“I find that somewhat surprising because everything that has been said has been done in order to test the survival of humans under the circumstances of atomic fallout … has been shown to be true,” he told ABC Radio. “I’m somewhat surprised that they could say that this particular experiment was abandoned.

“I’m somewhat sceptical about it. It may have gone ahead, yes.”

He said he would not be surprised if the government of the day knew what was occurring.

“The Australian government’s role in all the tests – and that has been consistently shown – has been that of suppliers of the troops and not asking any more questions that was absolutely necessary,” Mr May said.


Nuclear test inquiry ordered

By Mark Forbes

The Age

May 23, 2001

The Federal Government will investigate evidence of plans to expose hundreds of troops to the full force of atomic blasts at Maralinga in the 1950s, along with previous allegations of experiments on troops to test protective clothing.

About 50 classified documents detailing the plans, examined by The Age, reveal that Australia advocated placing troops close to the site of atomic blasts to be conducted with the UK at Maralinga, South Australia, in 1958.

The documents state the troops were to be the subject of biomedical experiments to test the impact of the blast on them and their clothing.

The British and Australian governments have previously denied they would propose using troops as guinea pigs.

The blasts were cancelled because of an international agreement placing a temporary halt on nuclear tests.

A spokesman said Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Scott was seeking an urgent briefing on the documents. They would be likely to be included in investigations already under way into the alleged use of human guinea pigs during the 1950s testing program.

Initial advice suggested the tests were not undertaken, the spokesman said.

The president of the Ex-Atomic Veterans’ Association, Ric Johnstone, called on Mr Scott to provide full medical care to the survivors while further investigations were undertaken so some could “die with dignity”. Both governments were continuing to cover up the facts of the tests, he said.

“They claim this operation never went ahead, but what about the smaller operations? In earlier blasts they were sending out groups of 10 and 20 for tests,” Mr Johnstone said.

The documents revealed extensive plans to use troops in Operation Lighthouse tests, advocated by Australia and with the support of the Defence Department. They said two groups would be used, the “indoctrinees” and the “moles” who would be stationed in trenches near ground zero – the site of the blasts.

“There is no UK objection to the Australian plans to have 564 indoctrinees of whom 385 will be in trenches,” one memo from the secretary of the Defence Department states.

Minutes of the working party running the tests state that biomedical tests were “reaffirmed for inclusion. The purpose is to study the effects of heat and blast on men at rest and wrapped in a blanket designed for use in the tropics”.

The documents were retained by a senior official involved in the program. They were stored in a garden shed until given to a researcher investigating the testing, Ann Munslow-Davies.

Ms Munslow-Davies said she was shocked by the size of the experiments and the “blatant disregard for people involved”. “The troops were to be put in as close to ground zero as possible for no other reason than to be nuked,” she said.


Secret documents detail plan to use servicemen in atomic tests

ABC TV ‘7.30 Report’ Transcript

May 21, 2001

KERRY O’BRIEN: And now to new evidence about an episode in Australian history which has already been under the scrutiny of another royal commission – the testing of Britain’s atomic bomb at Maralinga in South Australia.

Australian and British veterans of the tests have long claimed they were used as guinea pigs, and in the past fortnight, documents have emerged in Britain which give more substance to that claim.

Now, the 7:30 Report has received more secret documents.

They detail an official plan to subject nearly 2,000 servicemen to exposure to atomic blasts.

The object, among other things, was to assess the effectiveness of tropical blankets.

Code-named ‘Operation Lighthouse’, and scheduled for 1959, the plans were never implemented, largely perhaps because the British had by then acquired access to American testing grounds in Nevada. But the intent was chilling.

This report from Geoff Hutchison.

PETER WEBB, MARALINGA VETERAN: They said, “Count down 90 seconds, you’ll turn your back to the tower, “cover your eyes, shut your eyes, cover your hands,” and they count down 10, 9, 8…

Vivid flash and even with your eyes shut and you’re looking through your hands – you can see an x-ray of your hands – heat hit the back of your neck and, you know, blasts went through.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: Peter Webb spent just three months at the Maralinga test site between August and October 1956 witnessing detonations at One Tree Hill and Marcoo, in the frontline of British and Commonwealth experiments to develop a nuclear capability.

What instructions did you have?

What were you there for?

PETER WEBB: I don’t know and I still don’t know.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: And like thousands of Australia’s nuclear veterans, Peter Webb has spent the last 45 years fighting both illness and a conspiracy of secrecy.

What conclusions have you drawn about the experience?

PETER WEBB: I always thought we were put in there as guinea pigs.

SIR ERNEST TITTERTON, ATOMIC WEAPONS TESTS SAFETY COMMISSION, FOUR CORNERS, 1985: The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is that the investigations conducted by the Royal Commission have not produced a single verifiable case of injury to a person – far less a death to any person – in either the white or Aboriginal population of Australia.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: But the conspiracy of secrecy is fast falling apart, documents long hidden now re-emerging.

ANNE MUNSLOW-DAVIES, RESEARCHER NUCLEAR VETERANS ISSUES: They were concealed in a person’s back shed in Perth and for me to find these documents – it had on the title “‘Operation Lighthouse’ – pertaining to Maralinga” was like, “Oh, wow, what have I got here?”

GEOFF HUTCHISON: Anne Munslow-Davies, herself a daughter of a nuclear veteran, has found a staggering new plan for Maralinga which would intensify testing and use more people.

The plan – to expose the equivalent of a whole battalion to a series of atomic blasts.

OPERATION LIGHTHOUSE, SECRET GUARD: ‘Lighthouse’ is being planned on the basis of the first round being fired on the 30 September, 1959, and thereafter up to three more at eight day intervals.

It is not possible at this stage to indicate the yields of the rounds which will be fired.

The purpose is to study the effects of heat and blast on men at rest and wrapped in a blanket designed for use in the tropics.”

DR WAYNE REYNOLDS, HISTORIAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE: The interesting thing, Geoff, about the document is that it’s ‘Secret Guard’.

Guard documents were usually those documents you didn’t show the Americans.

They were very sensitive.

They were for the intimate use of British Commonwealth members and from my reading of these documents, this would lend legitimacy to this as a bona fide British Commonwealth operation.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: Far from being dictated to by their British masters, the Australians clearly wanted to be part of it.

OPERATION LIGHTHOUSE, SECRET GUARD: “The Australian Services are desirous that during the Lighthouse series, an indoctrination force of approximately 1,750 troops take part in an exercise involving construction of a trench system (upwind from ground zero) including command post, troop accommodation and weapon pits and that the system be occupied during the explosion. All participating troops to be blood counted before arrival on site.”

ANNE MUNSLOW-DAVIES: The theory at the time, I assume, was that if we lose a few good men in the process then far be it, if we save the country and they were dispensable.

And that’s what is indictable – the fact they ran these tests, made mistakes, people’s health were affected and they have never come clean with that.

DR WAYNE REYNOLDS: You must also remember that by 1956 Australia has a battalion deployed in Malaya as part of the strategic reserve – the British Commonwealth Strategic Reserve – and the documents show that one of the assumptions in the event of a limited war – or, indeed, a global war — would be that tactical nuclear weapons would be used in that theatre – in the jungle.

Now, what these documents are demonstrating is a concern about the effects of a tactical nuclear device on a battalion in a tropical setting.

So, to me, the timing is about right.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: Dr Wayne Reynolds is a senior lecturer in history at Newcastle University who has written extensively about Australia’s link with the atomic bomb.

DR WAYNE REYNOLDS: But the sorts of things you are seeing here, the Americans had been doing in the early 1950s.

GEOFF HUTCHISON: Is this an indication that a good number of men were going to be used as guinea pigs?

DR WAYNE REYNOLDS: I think that’s a very fair assessment.

They’ve already done that.

I think that needs to be stressed.

In 1956, they had already tested a nuclear device with personnel one mile from ground zero.

PETER WEBB: And when you think, they knew what was going to happen and they put troops in there that, in my opinion, should never have been there anyway. …

GEOFF HUTCHISON: ‘Operation Lighthouse’ and the exposure of a battalion to atomic blasts never happened.

The British, having patched up their prickly relations with the Americans, then took their testing program to the Nevada Desert.

But for those who did experience the Maralinga blasts and continue to fight a Department of Veterans Affairs which still refuses to call their service ‘hazardous’ and thus give them the medical benefits they demand, time is running out.

ANNE MUNSLOW-DAVIES: What I would really like to see in those documents is the records from the Maralinga hospital.

To date, they have never been found and no-one knows their whereabouts.

PETER WEBB: But every now and again, when something comes up like this, Peter Webb comes up and says, “Hey! I’m still here, I’m still alive, I’m still breathing’. What are you going to do about it?” I still get the same answer – “Nothing, bugger off and die,” and that’s the sad part.

KERRY O’BRIEN: We should point out that Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Scott has been out of the country and unavailable for interview.


Maralinga – how much more?

ABC Radio National – The World Today

May 22, 2001

ELEANOR HALL: Well let’s go now to an issue that’s sparked its own royal commission a couple of decades ago but is still causing lots of questions. Following discovery of yet another document exposing planned nuclear testing on Australian troops by the British Government in the 1950s, the question being asked today is how much more is yet to be revealed? The document, unearthed by an anti-nuclear activist, refers to Operation Lighthouse, a plan to place British and Australian troops as close as possible to ground zero. The British Government says the tests didn’t go ahead, but lawyers and veterans are asking can they believe that. The Federal Opposition wants confirmation the British gave information on Operation Lighthouse to an Australian Royal Commission in the 1980s, saying anything else would display contempt for Australia and its service personnel. Leigh Sales reports.

LEIGH SALES: Eight hundred men positioned in trenches as close as possible to a nuclear explosion, having their blood monitored to check the effects of radiation. It was a plan at one time sanctioned by the British Government. Britain says it called off the tests before they started when it, the United States and the Soviet Union, placed a moratorium on nuclear testing in 1958. The Australian Government held a royal commission into British nuclear testing in 1984-85, chaired by former Senator Jim McClelland. Shadow Veterans Affairs Minister, Chris Schacht, speaking from Singapore Airport, says if the Operation Lighthouse document was not in the material provided to the McClelland Royal Commission, it’s a matter of grave concern.

CHRIS SCHACHT: It would indicate that the British Government of the day did not come clean, or was not effective enough in providing that commission with all relevant documents. And if the document is authentic, it means the Australian Government now must demand of the British Government all documents to be made available. And this is a matter, within two weeks time when the Senate Estimates Committee take part with the Veterans and Defence Department, I will be pushing very hard. And if they can’t give satisfactory answers, the Government, that is, in Australia, what it’s doing to clarify this, well then we will certainly be asking for an independent inquiry.

LEIGH SALES: The veterans that I’ve spoken to this morning say that they believe there’s been a cover-up on the part of both the Australian and the British Governments. What would be your response to that?

CHRIS SCHACHT: We’d try to get to the bottom of it, but if it’s now coming out that a British government of the day did not provide the documents, well then I think that is a very, at the least, disappointing response that the British Government has treated Australia and its Service people with contempt.

LEIGH SALES: While Jim McClelland died last year, senior sources involved in the royal commission say they believe they got access to every document they wanted. But at the same time they admit the commission would not have known if there were other documents the British Government, quote, had hidden in a back drawer. Rick Johnstone, the head of the Australian Nuclear Veterans Association, is personally convinced the commission was hoodwinked.

RICK JOHNSTONE: There are documents and various evidence that were never ever put before the Royal Commission because they were first vetted by British public servants who decided they were too sensitive.

LEIGH SALES: So, was that royal commission effective then?

RICK JOHNSTONE: Well, Diamond Jim as he was called, is on record before he died as saying that he felt then that the Hawke Government used him to make it look as if they were doing something. They didn’t take any notice of his recommendations.

LEIGH SALES: Mr Johnstone is asking how much more is yet to come and says he doesn’t trust either the British or Australian Governments.

RICK JOHNSTONE: I don’t particularly believe either the British or the Australian Government on this matter at all because it’s obvious if you go back through past documents and past newspaper reports that both have lied.

LEIGH SALES: What do you think is going to be the extent of these sort of revelations?

RICK JOHNSTONE: I’ve got no idea. Both Governments keep ducking for cover and they control all the documentation and the evidence that people need, and they keep it pretty well covered up. We have living eyewitnesses still, and albeit some of the evidence is anecdotal, there’s enough anecdotal evidence there in eyewitnesses that any court in the world would give the benefit of the doubt to the claimants.

LEIGH SALES: How much longer are those eyewitnesses going to be around for though?

RICK JOHNSTONE: Not long, probably five or six years.

LEIGH SALES: And then what will happen?

RICK JOHNSTONE: And then it will all be swept under and there’ll be nobody worried about it.

ELEANOR HALL: Rick Johnstone is the head of the Australian Nuclear Veterans Association. Leigh Sales with our report.


More Maralinga revelations

ABC Radio National – ‘AM’

May 22, 2001

LINDA MOTTRAM: More secret documents have come to light underscoring Britain’s willingness to use Australian troops as guinea pigs at Maralinga in the 1950s. Unearthed by an anti-nuclear activist, the documents reveal that a series of planned nuclear tests would have placed nearly a battalion of Australian troops as close as possible to ground zero, according to the documents. The troops were spared when the tests were called off, after a temporary moratorium on nuclear testing in 1958. Matt Peacock reports.

MATT PEACOCK: The secret documents unearthed by an Australian anti-nuclear activist in a Perth garden shed reveal detailed planning by the British and Australian armed forces for the code named ‘Operation Lighthouse’. It proposed a series of four nuclear explosions at Maralinga beginning in October 1959 and, despite British denials since that it ever deliberately exposed servicemen to harmful levels of radiation, the documents make it clear that the indoctrinee force was to be placed as close as possible to so-called ground zero where the bombs were to be detonated. Sheila Grey of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans’ Association described the proposed tests as immoral and inhumane when I asked her reaction to the documents.

SHEILA GREY: Absolute disgust and dismay.

MATT PEACOCK: Why is that? I mean you knew that these tests were going on.

SHEILA GREY: Well yes, we knew the tests were going on but, I mean, although we didn’t believe it, the Government kept insisting that safety precautions were being taken; none of our men were put in any danger whatsoever. And we knew that was slightly untrue. But what they planned to do with this ‘Operation Lighthouse’ is just unbelievable. They were going to virtually put our men beneath the bomb blast, just out of scientific curiosity – no thought to what would happen to the men or future generations that they knew would be affected by radiation.

MATT PEACOCK: Sheila Grey says she’s ceased to believe the assurances from the British Ministry of Defence which, whilst it agrees ‘Operation Lighthouse’ was planned, says that it like other tests which did go ahead was not designed to test humans and that the troops would have only been exposed to low levels of radiation.

SHEILA GREY: Every time we turn the corner, we came across another – there’s no other word for it – a lie. They’re just trying to persuade us that everything was safe and we’ve got proof. I have about 500 death certificates in my house at the moment. Two of the same illness; three of the same illness … coincidence. But when you’re talking of 30, 40 even 100, there is no coincidence. The only thing they have in common are they all served at the British nuclear tests.

MATT PEACOCK: Both the Australian and British Governments have maintained there’s no evidence of greater incidence of disease amongst the nuclear test veterans. This is Matt Peacock in London for AM.


Australian Senate – Question without Notice, 22 May 2001

Questioner: Allison, Sen Lyn (Democrats, Victoria)

Responder: Minchin, Sen Nick (Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Liberal Party, South Aust)

Page: 23633

Veterans: Maralinga

Senator ALLISON – My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs. Minister, in the light of admissions by the British government in the last few weeks that Australian servicemen were deliberately exposed to ionising radiation at Maralinga in the 1950s, will your government now provide proper pensions and compensation for those veterans and their families?

Senator MINCHIN – I thank Senator Allison for her question. This matter has arisen because of the recent publicity obtained by Ms Rabbitt Roff in relation to certain documents that were released. As I am advised, those documents were available to the 1984-85 McClelland royal commission and were analysed carefully by the commission in its report, and the National Archives made those documents open to the public in March 1986 – in other words, there is nothing really new in all of this. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has checked its records and, according to the documents, the 25 Australians who received the dangerous dosage were all commissioned officers. Of the 25 the department can confirm, 14 are deceased and 11 are believed to be alive. Of the 17 for whom we have been able to locate any health records, only three have developed a cancer.

If any Australian veteran has suffered from an illness or injury related to service during this nuclear testing program, there are a number of avenues open for compensation under the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988. Such claims are now administered by the Military Compensation and Rehabilitation Service, under the Department of Veterans’ Affairs on behalf of the Department of Defence. There is also the special administrative scheme administered by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. That scheme provides compensation to test participants who have developed multiple myeloma or leukaemia other than chronic lymphatic leukaemia. Since 1995, compensation was only provided if the leukaemia had developed within 25 years since participation. There are, of course, common law claims through the courts. The recent revelations do not really change the facts. Our government and the previous government put in place appropriate arrangements to deal with any veterans affected by those tests.

Senator ALLISON – Madam President, I ask a supplementary question. I thank the minister for his answer, but I asked him about the admissions of the British government and not about the revelation of the documents, which I am aware were known at the time of the royal commission. I note the minister’s answer about compensation, but isn’t it the case that the royal commission in the 1980s recommended shifting the onus of proof with regard to compensation and proper compensation not just for veterans but for indigenous people and other civilians and workers in the area? Will you now undertake a study as a matter of urgency into the health effects of exposure on these people and their families at Maralinga, Monte Bello and Emu? Will you also conduct an investigation into the ongoing denial by Australian governments that Australians were not used as guinea pigs?

Senator MINCHIN – These issues are very old. There is nothing new in what has been revealed. These issues have been adequately dealt with over a very long period by both the previous government and ourselves. We believe the compensation arrangements that we have in place are appropriate. Of course, we have enormous sympathy for those affected by this. That is why these arrangements, which we believe are comprehensive and adequate, have been put in place.


Australian Senate – 22 May 2001

Speaker: Senator Lyn Allison (Democrats, Victoria)

Page: 23640

Veterans: Maralinga

Senator ALLISON (Victoria) – I move: That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources (Senator Minchin) to a question without notice asked by Senator Allison today, relating to veterans and other persons exposed to British nuclear tests in the 1950s.

I must say it was a predictable and shameful response. The minister says that it is all history, that there is no need for the government to consider this matter again, that it has all been dealt with, that there is compensation available for veterans who served in this area and that effectively the book is closed on this issue. There are a couple of points I want to make. Firstly, I understand the budget will announce some measures which will compensate prisoners of war who were in the Second World War. It seems, if there is compensation relating to the Second World War, which is even earlier than Maralinga, that compensation for this is appropriate in this day and age. A couple of weeks ago, we had the German government announce that it would be finalising its compensation package for the Jewish people who were treated so appallingly during the Second World War. So I cannot possibly accept that this is history and that it is a closed book.

The worst point in the minister’s response was that there was no acknowledgment that in the last few weeks the British government has actually admitted that Australian veterans were deliberately exposed to the fallout from these nuclear tests. Just a week or so ago, we had the shameful situation of governments suggesting that the exposure was just to the clothing and that it was not meant to look at the health effects on the men who were testing that protective clothing. We have been fed lies. The veterans have been put through not only terrible exposure but ongoing illnesses which affect their families as well as them. But this government keeps turning its back on that situation, as did the previous government.

I referred in my question to the royal commission. I will just read a couple of the recommendations of that commission. It said:

“16.0.3 Most of the people exposed to ionising radiation at Emu, Maralinga and Monte Bello Islands are thus covered by this Act”

– that is, the Compensation (Commonwealth Government Employees) Act 1971.

It continues:

“However, it is possible to identify other groups of people who are not so covered. These are people who worked at the test sites during and after the nuclear program and who may have been exposed to ionising radiation and who were not in the above categories of employment. This would include, for example, some day workers at the Kwinana construction company who remained at Maralinga after the explosion at One Tree and people employed in salvage operations. A further group of people includes some who were exposed to the Black Mist following the Totem 1 explosion, and the Milpuddie family.”

“16.0.4 The Royal Commission believes that access to the benefits of the Compensation (Commonwealth Government Employees) Act 1971, including the shifting of the onus of proof from the claimant to the Commonwealth imposed by sections 30 and 31, should be extended to include civilians not presently covered by the Act who were at the test sites at the relevant times, and to Aborigines and other civilians who were exposed to the Black Mist.”

Back in 1989, Senator McLean, a Democrats senator, raised this at the first official atomic test anniversary at Monte Bello. He pointed out:

(ii) that it is estimated that only 12 nuclear veterans of more than 15 000 people involved in the program will qualify for compensation under the Government’s recently announced provisions;

(iii) that Mr Doug Rickard, a civilian whose case was critical in triggering the McClelland Royal Commission, will not be compensated and that this illustrates the grossly discriminatory nature of the recent compensation provisions, and

(iv) that Mr Ric Johnstone, the first nuclear veteran to fight and win compensation, took 35 years to succeed and will retain, after legal costs and reimbursements, less than $200 000 of the $700 000 awarded to him …

The point the commission was making is that the onus of proof should not be placed on the veterans concerned. There is ample evidence to show that, if you were in this area at the time when those tests were conducted, there is a grave likelihood that you would be affected by them. We have the situation at present where the Department of Veterans’ Affairs is working to translate the information from the electronic version of the late 1980s, when the commission was held (Time expired)

Question resolved in the affirmative.


Over exposure

Sydney Morning Herald

May 27, 2001.

Atomic test survivors say the least they are entitled to is top medical treatment. Craig Skehan reports.

Ann Munslow-Davies this week got a call from a senior official of the National Archives seeking access to boxes of dusty documents which illuminate a dark chapter of Australia’s past.

“I told him I had posted copies on the Internet if he wanted to read them,” she told the Herald.

Munslow-Davies, 36, is a registered nurse and the daughter of a member of the Australian Army who died at the age of 48 following his participation in the British atomic bomb tests in Australia during the ’50s and ’60s. She believes the tests contributed to myriad health problems which drastically shortened her father’s life.

The now yellowing piles of official documents she holds, many of them typed carbon copies, were recovered some years ago from the garden shed in Perth of an atomic test veteran. Munslow-Davies had decided to release them because of a recent spurt of publicity about other documents showing Australian military personnel were used for radiation experiments during the atomic tests.

The documents recovered in Perth detail plans for a series of up to four British test explosions at Maralinga in South Australia during September 1959, in addition to tests conducted since the early ’50s.

However, in late 1958 the United States finally agreed to a longstanding British request to share atomic test data and as a result future testing shifted primarily to the Nevada desert.

An official Australian memo dated July 31, 1958, in reply to correspondence from the then Australian Department of Navy, stated that it had been decided to accept a British “offer to participate” in what was dubbed “Operation Lighthouse”.

It states that 14 Australian naval personnel were to be “above ground” during the first planned 1959 test explosion and of 500 army personnel, 350 would be in a “trench system” with the rest above ground.

Thirty-five members of the air force were to be in the trench system and 15 at ground level.

The briefing stipulated that all the troops were to be “blood tested” before being sent to the test site at Maralinga.

It was “desired” that the Australian personnel be as “close as possible to GZ”, the ground zero point of detonation.

Munslow-Davies, who lives in Maitland, said yesterday that the reference to blood testing of the Australian personnel planned to be used in the 1959 tests was extremely important. It showed that the British scientists in charge wanted to find out how the red and white blood cell counts were affected by varying levels of exposure to radiation.

“They wanted the blood reading for a baseline,” Munslow-Davies said.

“The documents we have refer to those who were going to be put into the trenches as ‘moles’. They were moles who were to be used as guinea pigs.”

Although the 1959 tests were aborted, Munslow-Davies says the modus operandi squared with earlier clothing trials during atomic blasts and cases of servicemen being sent into contaminated areas after first having their blood tested.

This included testimony from ex-servicemen at a 1984-85 royal commission into the 12 major atomic explosions in South Australia and Western Australia in the ’50s as well as some small trials in the ’60s. The servicemen told of being dressed in different types of military clothing and then sent into the test area following blasts at Maralinga.

British researcher Sue Rabbitt Roff, previously involved in studies purporting to show high incidence of cancer and death among test victims, earlier this month cited a National Archives document related to the clothing tests. Roff also referred to earlier accounts of test veterans who said they had been ordered to walk close to the “ground zero”.

The British Government last week finally admitted that Australian military personnel were transported to or walked in various uniforms to an area of “low-level fallout”.

Previously, the British had denied that troops were used as human guinea pigs.

The Federal Government was caught on the hop by the renewed media focus on Australia’s nuclear veterans. Despite cyclical interest over nearly five decades, including the royal commission, only a handful of the estimated 16,000 Australian military personnel and civilians involved have been compensated.

And many suffering serious illness still don’t get the type of health care entitlements extended to people who served in theatres of war.

A spokesman for the Veterans’ Affairs Minister, Bruce Scott, said that while the documents cited by Roff were not new, the associated claims being made by the researcher were being looked into. And he confirmed that an examination would be made of the material brought to light by Munslow-Davies.

“Many of these documents are known to us, but some are new,” he said.

The spokesman said that by the end of next month the Government hoped to have completed a register of the military personnel and civilians who participated in the atomic tests. Their health and mortality data would then be compared with national statistics to determine any variations from the norm.

“It will be a lengthy but accurate process,” he said.

Compilation of the national register began in mid-1999, and the national president of the Australian Ex-services Atomic Survivors Association, Max Kimber, said it had already dragged on for far too long.

He said that with the British Government having made admissions in relation to troops being deliberately exposed to radiation, action should be taken immediately to assist with the health problems of test veterans.

As a teenaged Australian Navy seaman, Kimber participated in atomic tests in the Montebello Islands off Western Australia in the ’50s.

“I was walking around Montebello with a group of scientists and when I came back I was completely radioactive,” he said yesterday.

“They hosed me down with salt water from where the explosion was. There is still a sign on the island stating that people should not stay there for more than one hour.”

He described the study being promoted by Scott as “a joke”.

“A health study 50 years after the event is only going to prove who is alive,” he said. “It is not going to show how people’s health was affected.”

Kimber said the Government should allow atomic test veterans to come under the hazardous service provisions of the Veterans’ Affairs Act, which would provide an entitlement to a health gold card. “It is not the compensation issue really, it is that they should not be denied medical treatment.”

Munslow-Davies said it was clear that more than half those who participated in the Australian atomic tests were already dead and the number increased every year.

“With the government study, if somebody in a car ploughed into a power pole and died, the cause of death would have been put down as ‘car accident’,” she said. “But they could have been riddled with cancer.”

The documents can be found at <http://members.optusnet.com.au/~seanmd/nuke/index.html>


Maralinga guinea pigs demand justice

By Brendan Nicholson

The Age

May 27, 2001

Camped out in the desert at Maralinga in 1957, Lance-Corporal Johnny Hutton* and his mates were a resourceful lot.

Within hours of British scientists exploding their atomic bombs, it was the 19-year-old NCO’s job to head out to near Ground Zero and dig up instruments buried there to monitor the blasts. For that, the army gave them shovels – and steaks for a good feed afterwards.

But it didn’t provide frying pans, so Corporal Hutton and his section just washed the dirt off these shovels and cooked up their steak and eggs on them over a fire.

Most of the time the men wore just shorts and boots, but they were given protective gear to wear when they drove out to the crater to collect the instruments. By the time they’d worn the gear for an hour or so the heat built up inside the suits and the masks fogged up so badly that they couldn’t see what they were doing. “We took them off and breathed in dust and pure radiation,” Mr Hutton said.

The six men in the tiny engineering unit were mostly British national servicemen. They started falling ill with nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, and when the mystery sickness hit Corporal Hutton he was rushed off to join his men in Maralinga Village Hospital. He spent 10 days there being fed through a tube thrust down his throat. Eventually the vomiting stopped without a cause being found and he was sent back to work. “You couldn’t see radiation, so you didn’t think it could hurt you,” Mr Hutton told The Sunday Age.

When the tests ended, he went on to serve in Malaya. He developed severe stomach pains and doctors eventually discovered massive ulceration in his stomach.

When he checked his army medical records there was no mention in them of his time in Maralinga Hospital. But when he applied to the Department of Veterans Affairs for compensation on the basis of his service in Malaya, he was told that the department believed his illness was caused by the conditions he was exposed to at Maralinga. Because that was not a war zone he was not entitled to veteran benefits.

To support its argument, the department sent him a copy of his clinical notes from Maralinga Village Hospital. “Clearly the records existed then,” Mr Hutton said.

As the campaign for compensation for bomb test veterans mounted in the 1980s, then Senator Gareth Evans, who handled defence matters for the government in the Senate, was asked to comment on test veterans’ claims that medical records had been falsified or lost.

Despite extensive searches, the records of Maralinga Hospital “have yet to be located”, he said.

Nurse Anne Munslow-Davies, a Maralinga test veteran’s daughter, has spent years trying to track down enough information to convince the government that the bomb test veterans should be given the same benefits as war veterans, and to support their claims for compensation in the courts.

She recently discovered, and posted on the Internet, extraordinary details of “Operation Lighthouse”, a British plan to expose nearly 2000 servicemen to the nuclear explosions. Some, referred to in the documents as “moles”, were to shelter in trenches only 3200 metres away from the explosion. This insane plan was abandoned when the test series ended prematurely.

Ms Munslow-Davies said the records from Maralinga Hospital could provide crucial evidence proving that servicemen suffered burns from the nuclear blasts and the symptoms of radiation sickness. Those records vanished years ago and were possibly taken to Britain at the end of the test series. “If that’s the case then you can bet the shredders have been working flat out,” she said.

The latest disclosures follow revelations that Australian troops were used in “clothing trials” to see how much protection various materials gave troops exposed to radiation.

The veterans are fighting an invisible enemy that is steadily killing them off, and officials reluctant to own up to anything that might help them win compensation cases.

*Mr Hutton was born John Woodley and enlisted under that name, but when the stepfather who raised him was dying, he adopted his surname as a gesture to him.


Radiation tests on Aborigines

By Mark Dunn

Herald-Sun (Herald and Weekly Times Limited)

10 July 2002

Radiation experiments were carried out on Aborigines in the 1960s, without proper consent, to test human survival in the desert.

 

Other radiation experiments on indigenous people included tests for cretinism and genetic flaws in Papua New Guinean tribespeople, according to a report by the Australian Radiation Laboratory.

Water laced with radiation was given to an unknown number of Aborigines north of Woomera in 1962 so metabolic studies could monitor their fluid retention in arid conditions.

Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency health director Peter Burns said the level of radioactive isotopes in the experimental drinking water did not pose excessive health risks to the subjects.

The issue was the participants’ lack of informed consent to the experiments, he said.

“It was a different world then,” Mr Burns said.

Australian scientists also used radiation tests on PNG highlanders, detecting a genetic imbalance of isotopes.

This led to the large-scale prevention of goitreism, a severe inflammation of the throat and related deafness and muteness.

The ARL report, written in 1994, refers to radioactive tests to research cretinism and metabolism which were carried out on Central Australian Aborigines and PNG Chimbu tribesmen. Radioisotope tests were conducted on PNG children as young as three months.

Adult Aborigines in an area north of the former Woomera rocket range were proposed as test samples for other experiments.

“It is reasonable to assume that (the Aborigines and PNG tribespeople’s) knowledge and understanding of the implications of the administration of radioisotopes to humans would have been limited,” the ARL report states.

“It has not been made clear … whether any effort was made to obtain some sort of informed consent from the two groups of native people.”

Atomic fallout and the corruption of science

Fallout: Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia
By Roger Cross
Wakefield Press, 2001
187pp, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Jim Green – written c2000

Fallout recounts the story of the cabal of British and Australian politicians, bureaucrats and scientists who conspired to prevent an informed public debate on the merits of nuclear weapons testing in Australia in the 1950s.

It is also the story of Hedley Marston – a celebrated biochemist working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – and his fight against those he described as “ruthless liars in high places”.

In 1955, British authorities sought the CSIRO’s assistance with biological experiments on the effects of radiation on animals during and after the weapons tests planned for the Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia, and at Maralinga, South Australia.

Enter Marston, using British monitoring equipment to obtain potentially scandalous data on radioactive fallout over vast tracts of Australia, including Adelaide. Worse still for the authorities, Marston was not clearly bound by secrecy provisions.

Marston is an unlikely hero – if a hero at all. He was a bull in a china shop, or, in the words of his friend Dick Thomas, a “Trojan Horse with the mind of a would-be Machiavelli”. He saw himself as a crusader against scientific corruption and for public safety: “I’m more worried than I can convey about the expensive, quasi-scientific pantomime that is being enacted at Maralinga under the cloak of security”, he wrote in a letter to Mark Oliphant in 1956, “and even more so about the evasive lying that is being indulged [by] public authorities about the hazard of fall-out … I nearly blow a gasket every time I think of it. … Apparently Whitehall and Canberra consider that the people in Northern Australia are expendable.”

However, Marston’s “public science and private life is a rewarding study of science in the service of self” according to Roger Cross, the author of Fallout and a senior lecturer in science and mathematics education at Melbourne University.

Cross writes, “the power and prestige of nuclear physicists enabled them to exert considerable influence – to strut the world’s stage – and … they were only matched for pride by biochemist Hedley Marston, who for his part … considered the physicists to be dangerous Johnny-come-latelies who were trespassing on his soil. There were plainly more bombs ready to explode than those slated for Monte Bello and Maralinga.”

Marston’s attempt to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the weapons tests was made somewhat easier by growing public, political and scientific consternation over the effects of weapons testing. In mid-1957, an appeal was signed by 2000 scientists urging an international agreement to stop testing. In Australia, concerns and/or outright opposition to the tests were expressed by trade unions with members working in the area, pastoralists, and the Labor Party among others. Even politicians from federal government’s own ranks began asking questions.

Safety Committee

To calm public fears, the federal government appointed the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee in 1955. British authorities vetted the membership of the Committee, and in the case of Ernest Titterton, there was a clear conflict of interest as he had been involved in the British effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Cross writes: “So a committee of nuclear physicists – men who, to whatever extent, had a vested interest in the continuation of atomic bomb testing in Australia – was appointed by the Australian government to make judgements concerning the biological risks to humans and other forms of life. Never mind that in matters of safety they were not competent to judge.”

The government repeatedly relied on the authority of the Safety Committee. For example, the September 29, 1956 Adelaide Advertiser was headlined, “No Risk From Atom Blast: Minister’s Assurance”, with the minister of supply saying his assurance was based on that of the head of the Safety Committee. And in September 1958, the minister of supply leaned heavily on the authority of the “eminent body of scientists” on the Safety Committee, noting that, “No test can take place in this country until the safety committee is assured that there will be no harm to human beings or stock from each experimental firing”.

The Safety Committee worked tirelessly to pacify legitimate public fears, if necessary with lies and obfuscation. The Committee colluded with politicians, bureaucrats and the establishment media to stage-manage publicity before and after the tests; this was, as Cross notes, “contrary to all acceptable scientific or journalistic practice”.

The Safety Committee knew – from measurements taken by Marston and others – that vast tracts of Australia (including Adelaide) were covered with radioactive fallout following the tests. Scientists were (and are) divided over the health effects of low-level radiation – a point acknowledged by the Safety Committee. Consequently, repeated assurances that the tests posed no risks were nothing more than propaganda.

Marston wrote in a report submitted to Sir Leslie Martin, chair of the Safety Committee, “In the light of our findings, press reports of public statements made by you and by other members of the Safety Committee from time to time during the recent weapons tests have been disturbing. Your ‘unequivocal assurance’ that the fallout is ‘completely innocuous’, that there is ‘no possible risk of danger or harm to any person’, ‘no risk whatsoever to people’, has been the opposite of reassuring. Australian citizens, generally, are suspicious of such statements, and Australian scientists, who ultimately share the effect of the public antagonism that is aroused, are resentful.”

In a letter to Oliphant just prior to the 1956 tests, Marston said the public statements of the Safety Committee were “wickedly misleading” and that the “high-handed bluff” was “sickening”.

No doubt public attitudes were further soured by scientific elitism. An Adelaide-based senior scientific officer with the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment said in 1956 that “the opinion of the man in the street [was] worth only a little more than that of his female counterpart.” Likewise, Philip Baxter, long-time chair of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission and a member of the Safety Committee, argued in the journal Search in 1975 that “In the end, the experts must be trusted”. The realpolitik of the Safety Committee suggests just the opposite.

In a 1957 letter to Oliphant, Marston made the prescient comment that, “Sooner or later the public will demand a commission of enquiry on the ‘Fall out’ in Australia. When this happens some of the boys will qualify for the hangman’s noose.” Surviving members of the Safety Committee, not least Sir Ernest Titterton, were indeed humiliated by the 1985 report of the Royal Commission into the weapons tests in Australia.

Tactics

Any number of tactics were used by the nuclear cabal to suppress information and to suppress dissent.

The government refused to allow the publication of weather conditions in north-western Australia following the June 19, 1956 test at Monte Bello Islands, which, at 3-4 times the power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, was the largest of the 12 nuclear tests carried out in Australia from 1952-57.

Martin claimed that thyroids tested after the September 7, 1956 test at Maralinga showed no evidence of any radioactive iodine or any other radioactive substance, yet Marston’s results indicated just the opposite; almost certainly, Martin was lying or his subordinates were lying to him.

The British authorities tried to get Marston to return his measuring equipment before he had completed his measurements of animal thyroids.

The Safety Committee (and others) went to great lengths to avoid acknowledgement of the contamination of Adelaide following the October 11, 1956 test; this included falsifying information in an article published in the Australian Journal of Science.

One of Marston’s assistants from the CSIRO was interrogated about research methodologies by the vice-chancellor of Adelaide University, A.P. Rowe, an Englishman involved in war-time radar research and former head of British guided missile team. Log books containing records of the experimental measurements were taken away, never to be returned. Cross asks whether Rowe was part of the British secret service, or acting for someone in authority in Australia. “Either seems a likely story.”

Anti-communist red-baiting was a recurring theme in discussions on the weapons tests, as when the minister of supply Howard Beale asserted that radioactive fallout from the tests was not an issue except for “the Communists and a few fellow travellers”.

Publish or perish

Marston’s major experiments involved testing for radioactive iodine in thyroids collected from sheep and cattle around the country. (Strangely, there is not even a passing mention of the use of human guinea-pigs at Maralinga in Fallout. Certainly Marston was not involved in the human experiments – but was he made aware of them, e.g. by CSIRO staff stationed at Maralinga?)

Marston was able to prove that vast tracts of Australia had been subjected to radioactive fallout, and controlled experiments also proved that most of the exposure came from contaminated feed (thus posing a long-term risk) rather than breathing contaminated air (a shorter-term risk).

Without the knowledge of the British or Australian authorities, Marston also measured the radioactive fallout over Adelaide following the test of October 11, 1956.

Marston’s evidence directly contradicted the public statements of the British authorities and Safety Committee that no contamination of populated areas had occurred.

The nuclear cabal were determined to prevent Marston from publishing his research, or failing that, to minimise the political fallout in other ways.

Cross uses the story of Marston’s manuscript to illustrate the politics of scientific publication, mechanisms for suppression of scientific debate and dissent, and the tactics used by the cabal to preserve their power and prestige when under threat.

Delaying tactics were deployed again and again – the tests of September and October 1957 came and went while the nuclear cabal was delaying the publication of Marston’s research.

The British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment had clear authority to vet Marston’s manuscript on the basis of secrecy provisions. Its director, Sir William Penney, demanded only two deletions, but he also said in a letter to the Australian ministry of supply that there might be “political grounds” in Australia to “justify a more restricted circulation”.

Other tactics used by the nuclear cabal in relation to Marston’s manuscript included:
– deliberate obfuscation in relation to scientific data and the interpretation thereof;
– selective use of available scientific data;
– specious and irrelevant comparisons between radioactive fallout from the tests and background radiation (specious because fallout from the tests could have been avoided, and because the comparisons ignored the issue of biological magnification due to the kind of radioisotopes producing the radiation and how they enter the body and concentrate at specific sites);
– pleading with Marston not to publish;
– the Safety Committee placed a number of conditions on publication of Marston’s manuscript despite having no authority to do so (given that Marston’s research was carried out on behalf of the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment);
– once publication was inevitable and could no longer be delayed, the Safety Committee schemed to publish an article critical of Marston’s research in the same issue of the same journal as Marston’s paper;
– the Safety Committee demanded a copy of Marston’s final manuscript prior to publication, a breach of scientific protocol; and,
– there is, according to Cross, “strong evidence” that Titterton lied to Marston’s superior at the CSIRO, falsely claiming that the British authorities demanded certain changes to the manuscript which they had not.

Eventually Marston’s manuscript was published, in the August 1958 Australian Journal of Biological Sciences. Twenty months (and three more weapons tests) had passed since Marston first completed his report.

Marston hoped and expected that publication of his research would fuel the political controversy over weapons testing. In a June 21, 1957 letter to Oliphant, he said that although the “fall-out from it” would “not injure innocent people”, “God help the guilty …”

However, only one publication picked up Marston’s research – a national weekly farmers’ newspaper, Stock and Land.

The research was undoubtedly newsworthy. For example, Marston’s research showed that, as he put it, a “very large amount of radioactivity … clearly indicated that the plume … passed directly over Adelaide”, which was in direct contrast to the pronouncements of the nuclear cabal. Cross notes that, “The people of Adelaide were not told that a radioactive cloud from the third atomic bomb explosion passed over the city, nor that some of the state’s northern communities received several dressings of radioactive debris form the tests. Indeed, they have never been told.”

The daily metropolitan papers must have known about Marston’s research, if only through Stock and Land. “Most likely they were leaned on by the government”, Cross argues.

Cross writes: “The power of allegiance to the mother country and the cold war rhetoric combined with a press close to government conspired against Hedley. How fortunate for the Safety Committee that Marston’s bombshell missed its mark and that publication of his paper caused only the merest ripple in the Australian media. And how intriguing.”

The corruption of science and scientists

Cross says he wrote this story of “jealousy, hate and power in the hope that we may come to a better understanding of the tensions that lurk behind the bland face of ‘science rhetoric’ here in Australia”. He achieves that aim, but also tends to undermine his own arguments by overstating the uniqueness of the events surrounding the weapons tests.

For example, Cross claims that the saga surrounding Marston’s manuscript, and in particular the delaying tactics, represented what was “arguably, the worst case of politically motivated interference in Australian science”. And he says that Titterton’s attempt to publish a parallel paper in the same edition of the Australian Journal of Biological Sciences as Marston’s paper was “an affront to scientific protocol … such a blatant attempt at control of a scientist’s manuscript is an almost unheard-of breach of confidentiality.”

However, the manipulation of science and scientists (‘jiggery-pokery’ as Marston called it) by corporate and political elites is commonplace (see for example the analysis by Sharon Beder in her book Global Spin). Almost every dirty trick used by the nuclear cabal in the 1950s has been deployed in more recent controversies in Australia over uranium mining, reactors and radioactive waste dumping.

The planned new reactor at Lucas Heights is a case in point:
– the Coalition government talks up the planned new reactor as the largest single investment in a science facility in Australia’s history, yet the government did not even consult its own science advisers before making the decision to build a new reactor. In the case of the CSIRO, this was most likely because of CSIRO’s view in 1993 that “more productive research could be funded for the cost of a reactor”.
– a number of scientists from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) noted in a March 2000 letter to a Sutherland Shire Councillor that “ANSTO management appears to be endeavoring to muzzle staff comments external to the organisation (through the use of) Acknowledgment Undertaking (forms).”
– opponents of the new reactor have been threatened with legal action (by a Coalition government MP).
– American cyclotron scientist Manuel Lagunas-Solar has been repeatedly misrepresented by ANSTO and the government.
– American scientist Dan Hirsch has been subjected to inaccurate, personal attacks by ANSTO and by the Sydney Morning Herald, with limited right of reply.
– a senior government bureaucrat said on ABC radio on March 29, 1998 that the government decided to “starve the opponents of oxygen” in relation to the planned new reactor, to “play the game and … just keep them in the dark completely”.
– an ANSTO scientist has, under direction from ANSTO management, written a paper arguing the case for a new reactor, yet the very same scientist disagrees with the conclusions of his own paper! This incident also illustrates what might be called scientific flexibility: the ANSTO scientist says that every statement made in the paper is true (which it is), but nevertheless, taken as a whole, the paper totally misrepresents his own views.

In relation to ANSTO (and it’s predecessor the Australian Atomic Energy Commission), it’s also worth noting that:
– ANSTO has used its (minor) role in the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ as a (minor) justification for its plan to build a new reactor;
– ANSTO has been involved in selecting the CEO of the current ‘independent’ nuclear regulator ARPANSA, and the AAEC’s Philip Baxter was a member of the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee from 1955-57; and,
– most of the concern over the public health hazards arising from weapons tests in the 1950s centred on the bone-seeking radioisotope strontium-90; whereas now, ANSTO frequently (but falsely) argues that a new reactor is required to produce samarium-153, an isotope used to alleviate the pain associated with bone cancer.

The role of the ‘Supervising Scientist’ in the Northern Territory also fits the pattern of science-in-the-service-of-power. As did the Coalition government’s efforts to change the composition of the World Heritage Committee, to limit its activities, and to bully the Committee to prevent a world-heritage-in-danger listing for Kakadu National Park. Moreover, Democrats’ Senator Lyn Allison claimed in 1998 that the government was collecting a “dirt file” on scientists involved in a fact-finding mission to Jabiluka (environment minister Robert Hill refused to confirm or deny the claim).

A review of Fallout in the April 2, 2001 Melbourne Age concludes that, “The country will continue to pay the price, perhaps for centuries, for those acts of official stupidity by the Menzies government, which were aided and abetted by scientists who should have known better.” But the scientists knew precisely what was going on … British and Australian authorities were at pains to involve only those scientists who would play the game (this being one reason for Oliphant’s exclusion). And with the exception of Marston, they chose wisely.

‘Independent’ nuclear regulators

In the preface to Fallout, Cross notes that in March 2000, industry minister Nick Minchin declared Maralinga ‘safe’ after $108 million had been spent on a ‘clean-up’. Cross invites readers to compare Hedley Marston with nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, who lost his job as a government adviser on the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ and has since become a vocal whistle-blower.

Both Marston and Parkinson have played key roles in exposing the scandals surrounding the weapons tests and the ‘clean-up’, respectively. But Parkinson has been far more influential than was Marston, if only because the media have been more receptive to Parkinson.

Many comparisons can be drawn with the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee and the current ‘independent’ nuclear regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA).

As with the Safety Committee, ARPANSA’s ‘independence’ is open to question. The head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) was formally involved in selecting the CEO of ARPANSA, and six ANSTO staff members work in the regulatory branch of ARPANSA.

Just as politicians were at pains to invoke the scientific authority of the Safety Committee in the 1950s, so too any mention of the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ (or the plans for a new reactor in Sydney or a radioactive waste dump in South Australia) is almost invariably accompanied with soothing remarks about the oversight of the ‘independent regulator’ ARPANSA.

As in the 1950s, there is a vast gap between the private and public faces of nuclear agencies. Privately, Geoff Williams, a senior ARPANSA officer, expressed his annoyance at a “host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups” associated with the ‘clean-up’. Publicly, however, ARPANSA CEO John Loy describes the ‘clean-up’ as “world’s best practice” even though more thorough clean-up options were considered but discarded in favour of burying contaminated materials under a few metres of soil. Parkinson wrote in the April 22, 2000 Canberra Times, “Is Dr Loy saying that a hole in the ground, without any treatment or lining is world best practice? That isn’t even world best practice for disposal of household garbage, let alone a long-lived hazardous substance such as plutonium.”

Just as the Safety Committee trivialised risks from the weapons tests, the current government and ARPANSA have made much of the consistency of the ‘clean-up’ with the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Code of Practice for the Near Surface Disposal of Radioactive Waste. However, the national code was designed for low-level, short-lived wastes only, not for situations like the plutonium contamination at Maralinga.

“The Government has always made clear that the Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992) does not formally apply to this clean-up”, Minchin said in an April 17, 2000 press release. That was a lie. For example, a March 1, 2000 press release from Minchin said the ‘clean-up’ was “consistent with guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council” without stating that the NHMRC code does not formally apply to this clean-up.

Likewise, a letter from John Loy to Minchin on February 29, 2000 said, “ARPANSA also certifies that the burial trenches at Taranaki, TM 100/101 and Wewak have been constructed consistent with the national Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste” without stating that the NHMRC code did not apply to Maralinga. An independent regulator would expose government lies, not parrot them.

And if the clean-up failed to meet the national code, so much the better that the code was not meant to cover such an operation – leaked minutes from a Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) meeting in 1999 quote a senior ARPANSA officer saying that it was not necessary to meet the letter of the code since it was not meant to apply to situations such as Maralinga. (ABC Radio National, Background Briefing, April 16, 2000.)

Another point of comparison is the treatment of the Maralinga Tjarutja people – as racist under the Howard government as it was in the 1950s. As Parkinson notes, “A very disturbing feature of the Maralinga [‘clean-up’] project is the lack of openness about what was done. Even those who might be the future custodians of the land have not been kept truthfully informed on the project.”

The Adelaide Advertiser announced in 1956 that “X-Rays More Harm Than A-Tests”. Likewise, Minchin said in a May 1, 2000 statement that predicted exposure from residual contamination at Maralinga compares “favourably” with medical exposure – no mention that medical exposures are generally voluntary and beneficial. (And in 1997 the government argued that a spent fuel reprocessing plant at Lucas Heights would generate less radioactive emissions than existing radiopharmaceutical processing operations.)

Minchin said the government “didn’t make a move without expert advice” in relation to the Maralinga ‘clean-up’, but the “experts” were dancing to sensitive, political tunes every bit as much as the politicians and bureaucrats. For example, in 1998 the chair of MARTAC asked a bureaucrat from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) if the department would “welcome” advice to terminate in-situ vitrification of contaminated materials at Maralinga and to simply bury the contaminated materials instead.

The ignorance of scientists and regulators in relation to radiological hazards in the 1950s was alarming, but to some extent understandable given the novelty of the science. No such excuse can be made now, yet according to Parkinson one of the senior DISR bureaucrats involved in both the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ and the proposed waste dump did not know the difference between alpha and gamma radiation – this is equivalent to a school-teacher not knowing the alphabet.

Just as the Safety Committee stalled the publication of Marston’s research, successive governments have used delaying tactics to deal with environmental, public health and compensation issues arising from the weapons tests. Test veteran Avon Hudson told ABC radio on October 13, 2000 that, “They [will] stall for time until we are all finally dead and that means the problem will go away for them.”

In relation to the planned new reactor at Lucas Heights, Parkinson wrote in a September 2000 submission to a senate inquiry into the planned reactor, “[DISR’s] record in project management and their lack of understanding of radiation and other technical subjects, as demonstrated publicly in recent months, leaves very much to be desired. … The newly formed ARPANSA also has not performed particularly well in its first major assignment – the Maralinga project. Unless their performance as regulators improves, then the new reactor project will be a trail of compromises as is the case on the Maralinga project.”

Summary – British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia

Jim Green

National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia

jim.green@foe.org.au

The general attitude of white settlers towards Australian Aborigines was profoundly racist; Aboriginal society was considered one of the lowest forms of civilisation and doomed to extinction. Their land was considered empty and available for exploitation – ‘terra nullius’.

The testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s by the British government in territory which sustained Indigenous culture had the effect of aiding the policy of ‘assimilation’. It did this by denying the safe use of land.

In “Fallout – Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia” (Wakefield Press, 2001, p.32), Dr. Roger Cross writes: “Little mention was made of course about the effects the bomb tests might have on the Indigenous Australian inhabitants of the Maralinga area, a community that had experienced little contact with white Australia. In 1985 the McClelland Royal Commission would report how Alan Butement, Chief Scientist for the Department of Supply wrote to the native patrol officer for the area, rebuking him for the concerns he had expressed about the situation and chastising him for “apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations”. When a member of staff at Hedley Marston’s division queried the British Scientist Scott Russell on the fate of the Aborigines at Maralinga, the response was that they were a dying race and therefore dispensable.”

The British nuclear testing program was carried out with the full support of the Australian government. Nine nuclear weapon tests were carried out at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia, and three tests were carried out on the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia.

Permission was not sought for the tests from affected Aboriginal groups such as the Pitjantjatjara, Tjarutja and Kokatha. The use of atomic weapons contaminated great tracts of traditional land, and transformed an independent and physically wide ranging people into a semi-static and dependent group – forced relocation was one of the traumas. The damage was radiological, psycho-social and cultural. This change was profoundly negative and to this day, much of the work of lifting the living conditions of Indigenous people result from the loss of traditional independence dating from the 1950s when the use of nuclear weapons forced Aboriginals into government- and mission-controlled enclaves. The size and nature of these substitute areas was such as to prevent the successful use of traditional living skills and de-culturalisation occurred.

Little or no attention was paid during the British nuclear testing program in Australia to the increased vulnerability of Aboriginal people to the radiological effects of the tests. That increased susceptibility was due to a range of factors including lack of clothing and footwear, a diet conducive to biological magnification of radioactivity, movement patterns, language barriers, and general health status. Conversely Aboriginal people generally lacked protections available to others such as reticulated water; hard permanent dwellings with dust proofing; remotely sourced food; food storage facilities which afforded some radiological protection; laundry/bathroom and drainage facilities.

The secrecy surrounding the nuclear testing program had the effect of ensuring the social isolation of groups, including affected Indigenous populations, compounded the suffering inflicted.

Studies of the health impacts of the weapons tests have excluded non-urban Aboriginal people (e.g. the study by Wise and Moroney, first presented to the Royal Commission, which states: “Two population groups are excluded from the calculations. They are the aboriginals living away from populations centres and personnel involved directly in nuclear test activities …” (Keith N. Wise and John R. Moroney, Australian Radiation Laboratory, May 1992, “Public Health Impact of Fallout from British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia, 1952 – 1957”, Dept. of Health, Housing and Community Services, ARL/TRI05 ISSN 0157-1400, p.2.)

List of British atomic weapons tests in Australia:

Operation Hurricane (Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia)
* 3 October, 1952 – 25 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Totem (Emu Field, South Australia)
* ‘Totem 1’ – 15 October, 1953 – 9.1 kilotons – plutonium
* ‘Totem 2’ – 27 October, 1953 – 7.1 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Mosaic (Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia)
‘G1’ – 16 May, 1956 – Trimouille Island – 15 kilotons – plutonium
‘G2’ – 19 June, 1956 – Alpha Island – 60 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Buffalo (Maralinga, South Australia)
‘One Tree’ – 27 September, 1956 – 12.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Marcoo’ – 4 October, 1956 – 1.4 kilotons – plutonium
‘Kite’ – 11 October, 1956 – 2.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Breakaway’ – 22 October, 1956 – 10.8 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Antler (Maralinga, South Australia)
‘Tadje’ – 14 September, 1957 – 0.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Biak’ – 25 September, 1957 – 5.7 kilotons – plutonium
‘Taranaki’ – 9 October, 1957 – 26.6 kilotons – plutonium

Monte Bello Islands

While the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia were uninhabited, the nuclear tests conducted there spread radioactivity across large portions of mainland Australia. The Royal Commission (p.261) concluded: “The presence of Aborigines on the mainland near Monte Bello Islands and their extra vulnerability to the effect of fallout was not recognised by either [Atomic Weapons Research Establishment – UK] or the Safety Committee. It was a major oversight that the question of acceptable dose levels for Aborigines was recognised as a problem at Maralinga but was ignored in setting the fallout criteria for the Mosaic tests.”

Emu Field

“The Government used the Country for the Bomb. Some of us were living at Twelve Mile, just out of Coober Pedy. The smoke was funny and everything looked hazy. Everybody got sick. Other people were at Mabel Creek and many people got sick. Some people were living at Wallatinna. Other people got moved away. Whitefellas and all got sick. When we were young, no woman got breast cancer or any other kind of cancer. Cancer was unheard of. And no asthma either, we were people without sickness.”
— Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, <www.iratiwant.org>

At the time of the two ‘Totem’ nuclear tests at Emu Field in South Australia, the area was used, as the Royal Commission reported, for: “… hunting and gathering, for temporary settlements, for caretakership and spiritual renewal.” (p.152) A major test named Totem 1 was detonated on October 15th, 1953. The blast sent a radioactive cloud – which came to be known as the Black Mist – over 250 kms northwest to Wallatinna and down to Coober Pedy. The Totem I test is held responsible for a sudden outbreak of sickness and death experienced by Aboriginal communities, including members of the Kupa Piti Kunga Tjuta and their extended families. The Royal Commission found that the Totem 1 test was fired under wind conditions which a study had shown would produce unacceptable levels of fallout, and that the firing criteria did not take into account the existence of people at Wallatinna and Melbourne Hill down wind of the test site (p.151). In relation to the two Totem tests, the Royal Commission found that there was a failure at the Totem trials to consider adequately the distinctive lifestyle of Aborigines and their special vulnerability to radioactive fallout, that inadequate resources were allocated to guaranteeing the safety of Aborigines during the Totem nuclear tests, and that the Native Patrol Officer had an impossible task of locating and warning Aborigines, some of whom lived in traditional lifestyles and were located over more than 100,00 square kilometres (p.173).

No special consideration was given to the Aboriginal lifestyle. In an exact replica of Operation ‘Hurricane’, the authorities conveniently forgot that these people were largely or wholly unclothed. They cooked and ate in unsheltered locations and had a diet liable to biological magnification of radioactive contamination, for example, lizards such as goannas and snakes.

Maralinga

A number of Aboriginal people were moved from Ooldea to Yalata prior to the 1956-57 series of tests at Maralinga, and this included moving people away from their traditional lands. Yet movements by the Aboriginal population still occurred throughout the region at the time of the tests. It was later realised that a traditional Aboriginal route crossed through the Maralinga testing range.

In relation to the Buffalo series of tests in 1956, the Royal Commission found that regard for Aboriginal safety was characterised by “ignorance, incompetence and cynicism”, and that the site was chosen on the false premise that it was no longer used by the Traditional Owners – Aboriginal people continued to inhabit the Prohibited Zone for six years after the tests. The reporting of sightings of Aborigines was “discouraged and ignored”, the Royal Commission found. (p.323)

At the time of the tests it was well publicised that Indigenous People of the Maralinga lands were moved to the safety of mission stations and reserves by “Native Patrol Officers” who patrolled thousands of square kilometres of land to try to ensure Indigenous people were removed. Signs were erected in some places – written in English, which few of the effected Aborigines could understand. For the Aboriginal people who still walked the Western Desert, many living traditionally, radiation exposure caused sickness and death. There are tragic accounts of families sleeping in the bomb craters.

The British Government paid A$13.5 million compensation to the Maralinga Tjarutja in 1995. Other Indigenous victims – including members of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – have not been compensated and received no apology.