Category: Uncategorised

Links

Information sources on Australian nuclear issues

Please advise of dead links, omissions etc.

INDEX TO THIS WEBPAGE

A FEW SOURCES & RESOURCES

  • 3CR weekly Radioactive Show available for download as podcast!

www.3cr.org.au/radioactive

https://www.facebook.com/radioactiveshow

  • Links: (i.e. webpages with lots of links to sites on Australian nuclear issues)

Nick’s pro- and anti-nuclear links – prof. assocs, government, industry, information, prof. services, research institutions www.calytrix.biz/radlinks/Australia/Australia.htm

Heaps of mainly pro-nuclear links – ARPANSA www.arpansa.gov.au/RadiationProtection/links.cfm

ENVIRONMENTAL / ANTI-NUCLEAR GROUPS

Please contact jim.green@archive2.foe.org.au to advise of corrections, other groups etc. Last updated Jan 2016.

NATIONAL

Australian Nuclear Free Alliance (Aboriginal/environmental alliance)
www.anfa.org.au

Friends of the Earth
www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear
Jim Green, national nuclear campaigner (Melbourne)
jim.green@archive2.foe.org.au 0417 318 368
PO Box 222, Fitzroy, Victoria, 3065

Beyond Nuclear Initiative
www.beyondnuclearinitiative.com
Natalie Wasley, Project convenor (Sydney)
natwasley@alec.org.au, 0429 900 774

Australian Conservation Foundation
http://www.acfonline.org.au/be-informed/northern-australia-nuclear-free
Dave Sweeney, Nuclear Free campaigner (Melbourne)
d.sweeney@acfonline.org.au, 0408 317 812
First Floor, 60 Leicester Street, Carlton, Victoria, 3053

Australian Student Environment Network
http://asen.org.au/getactive/campaigns/no-nukes/
info@asen.org.au

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
www.icanw.org
Tim Wright, Australian Campaign Coordinator
tim@icanw.org ph 03 9347 4795, 0400 967 233
G3/60 Leicester St, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW)
www.mapw.org.au

MAPW contact details: http://www.mapw.org.au/about-mapw/contact

Wilderness Society (Queensland uranium)
http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/queensland/uranium_mining

Greens’ Senator Scott Ludlam
http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/portfolios/nuclear

Greenpeace Australia
www.greenpeace.org/australia/en/news/Nuclear
www.greenpeace.org/australia/en/what-we-do/nuclear

NEW SOUTH WALES

Sydney – Uranium Free NSW

website: uraniumfreensw.org.au

facebook: facebook.com/UraniumFreeNSW

twitter: https://twitter.com/UraniumFreeNSW

Sydney – Nature Conservation Council

www.nature.org.au/campaigns/uranium/

Sydney – 311 Campaign for Nuclear Free (Japanese)
www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_221456754534946
Yukiko Hirano yukikosal@yahoo.co.jp 0414758 295

Blue Mountains Nuclear Free Group

www.nuclearfree.blogspot.com

bmnuclearfreegroup@gmail.com

Uranium Free Dubbo

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uranium-free-Dubbo/351844294982388

NORTHERN TERRITORY

Arid Lands Environment Centre (Alice Springs)

www.alec.org.au

Jimmy Cocking director@alec.org.au 08 8952 2497

PO Box 2796, Alice Springs, NT 0871

Environment Centre Northern Territory (Darwin)
www.ecnt.org
Lauren Mellor, Nuclear Free NT campaigner
lauren.a.mellor@gmail.com, ph 08 8981 1984, 0434 257 359
Office: 3/98 Woods St, Darwin 0801
Postal: GPO Box 2120 Darwin Northern Territory 0801

QUEENSLAND

Queensland Nuclear Free Alliance

http://qnfa.org

https://www.facebook.com/KeepQldNuclearFree

Friends of the Earth Brisbane BUMP Action Group

Websites: www.nuclearfreequeensland.org and www.brisbane.archive2.foe.org.au
Email:nuclearfreequeensland@yahoo.com.au
Phone: 0411 118 737

Friends of the Earth PACE – Peace Anti-Nuclear and Clean Energy Collective

https://www.facebook.com/pages/PACE-Collective-Peace-Anti-Nuclear-Clean-Energy/120356581467953

Food Irradiation Watch
www.foodirradiationwatch.org
foodirradiationwatch@yahoo.com.au
0411 118 737

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Friends of the Earth Adelaide
www.adelaide.archive2.foe.org.au
Clean Futures Collective
Level 1, 157 Franklin Street, Adelaide SA 5000

adelaide.office@archive2.foe.org.au
www.facebook.com/pages/Clean-Futures-Collective/134979696573151

Nuclear Operations Watch Port Adelaide (NOWPA)

http://nowpa.org/

www.facebook.com/nowportadelaide

NOWPA is an alliance of Port Adelaide community members and people along uranium transport routes.

South Australian Action Group

www.facebook.com/SaagSouthAustralianActionGroup

ENUFF South Australia

https://www.facebook.com/pages/ENUFF-South-Australia/1421696554801885

VICTORIA

Friends of the Earth, Melbourne

Anti-nuclear and Clean Energy (ACE) campaign

www.melbourne.archive2.foe.org.au/?q=an/home
www.acecollective.org
ace@archive2.foe.org.au

https://www.facebook.com/acekollective

Meets fortnightly at the FoE office: 312 Smith St, Collingwood.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Conservation Council of Western Australia
http://uraniumfree.wordpress.com
http://conservationwa.asn.au/content/view/201/260
Mia Pepper, Nuclear Free campaigner
mia.pepper@conservationwa.asn.au ph 08 9420 7266, 0415 380 808
City West Lotteries House, 2 Delhi St, West Perth, WA 6005

ANAWA (Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia)
www.anawa.org.au
http://nouranium.wordpress.com
admin@anawa.org.au
5 King William St, Bayswater WA 6053
Telephone & Fax 9271 8786
Marcus Atkinson, BUMP campaigner 0400 505 765

Footprints for Peace
www.footprintsforpeace.net
marcus@footprintsforpeace.org

Friends of the Earth Southwest WA
Joan Jenkins joanpod4@tpg.com.au

Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance (WANFA)
Della Rae Morrison, Chairperson
dellaraemorrison@gmail.com 0438 678 471

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URANIUM MINING

Uranium mining – various

Map of Australian uranium sites australianmap.net

Friends of the Earth uranium webpages: www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u

Australian Nuclear Free Alliance www.anfa.org.au

Yellowcake Country: Australia’s Uranium Industry (short articles on numerous issues) www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u

Dr. Gavin Mudd – technical papers on ISL mining, impacts of Olympic Dam on Mound Springs, etc http://users.monash.edu.au/~gmudd

Jim Falk et al., 2006, “Australia, uranium and nuclear power”, International Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol 63(6), December, pp.845-857. (Available from jim.green@archive2.foe.org.au)

Sustainable Energy & Anti-Uranium Service archive (dated but still has useful info on uranium mining)

World Information Service on Energy:

  • Uranium Mining (global): www.wise-uranium.org/indexu.html
  • Issues at Operating Uranium Mines and Mills – Australia: www.wise-uranium.org/umopaus.html
  • Uranium Mining and Exploration Companies: www.wise-uranium.org/ucomp.html
  • Uranium Decommissioning Data – Australia: www.wise-uranium.org/uddaus.html
  • Uranium Mine Ownership – Australia: www.wise-uranium.org/uoaus.html
  • Uranium Decommissioning Projects – Australia: www.wise-uranium.org/udaus.html
  • New Uranium Mining Projects – Australia: www.wise-uranium.org/upaus.html

Parliamentary inquiries etc.

Senate References and Legislation Committee, October 2003, “Regulating the Ranger, Jabiluka, Beverley and Honeymoon uranium mines”, www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Completed%20inquiries/2002-04/uranium/index

House of Representatives – Federal Standing Committee on Industry and Resources, Australia’s uranium: Greenhouse friendly fuel for an energy hungry world, December 2006 www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=isr/uranium/report.htm

Senate Select Committee on Uranium Mining and Milling, 1997, Uranium Mining and Milling in Australia www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate_Committees?url=uranium_ctte/report/contents.htm

Australian Government’s ‘Uranium Industry Framework’ http://web.archive.org/web/20110223192531/http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/mining/australian_mineral_commodities/uranium/Pages/uranium_industry_framework.aspx

Uranium Council (formerly Uranium Industry Framework):

http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/mining/australian_mineral_commodities/uranium/council/Pages/council.aspx

Uranium customer countries – China, Russia, India etc.

Friends of the Earth www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/cc

Uranium sales to Russia

Uranium Sales to Russia (PDF file) – FoE Submission to Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, June 2008

Treaties Committee rejects Russia uranium agreement, Online Opinion, 22 September 2008 www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7929&page=0

Joint Standing Committee on Treaties rejects uranium sales to Russia – Report #94 – http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jsct/14may2008/index.htm or direct download http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jsct/14may2008/report1/fullreport.pdf

Uranium sales to India

US-India ageement (PDF) – Joint Australian NGO statement

Trashing nuclear promises (US – India nuclear deal), Tilman Ruff, Online Opinion, 21 August 2008 www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7796

Proposed uranium sales to India – detailed 2010 EnergyScience Coalition briefing paper (PDF)

Uranium sales to China

Article by David Noonan

Joint Standing Committee on Treaties approval for uranium exports to China http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jsct/8august2006/index.htm

Uranium and nuclear weapons proliferation / safeguards

Friends of the Earth: www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/safeguards

Medical Association for Prevention of War www.mapw.org.au/nuclear-chain/safeguards

Medical Association for the Prevention of War and Australian Conservation Foundation, 2006, “An Illusion of Protection: The Unavoidable Limitations of Safeguards”, www.mapw.org.au/download/illusion-protection-acf-mapw-2006

Who’s watching the nuclear watchdog?, Richard Broinowski and Tilman Ruff, Online Opinion, 10 September 2007 www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6339

Henry Sokolski (ed.), Feb 2008, “Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom”, www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=841

Alan J. Kuperman, David Sokolow, and Edwin S. Lyman, March 18, 2014, ‘Can the IAEA Safeguard Fuel-Cycle Facilities?’, Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (www.NPPP.org), http://blogs.utexas.edu/nppp/files/2014/03/NPPP-working-paper-2-2014-Mar-18.pdf

Looking beyond Iran and North Korea for Safeguarding the Foundations of Nuclear Nonproliferation, former IAEA Safeguards Director Pierre Goldschmidt, Nov 15, 2011, www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1115&tid=4

Building Support for the Agencys Safeguards Mission, Henry Sokolski, Nov 03, 2010, Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre, www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=50&rtid=6

Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre www.npolicy.org and see in particular the section on the non-proliferation regime www.npolicy.org/topics.php?page=0&tid=4

Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding Dialogue, June 2007, https://www.keystone.org/policy-initiatives-center-for-science-a-public-policy/energy/nuclear-power-joint-fact-finding.html

Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (Australia), 2008, inquiry into proposed uranium sales to Russia: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=/jsct/14may2008/report1/fullreport.pdf

Dr. Brian Lloyd, NT Parliamentary Library Service, Feb 6, 2007, Nuclear Proliferation: Fifth in the series on the Debate on Nuclear Policy in Australia, 2006-2007 www.parlibrary.nt.gov.au/parliamentary_research_papers

Professor Richard Broinowski, Our role in limiting nuclear proliferation?, August 8, 2005 www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/our-role-in-limiting-nuclear-proliferation/2005/08/07/1123353210626.html

Professor Richard Broinowski, Australian Uranium & Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, Submission to Federal Standing Committee on Industry and Resources http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=isr/uranium/subs.htm or direct download: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=isr/uranium/subs/sub72.pdf

Professor Richard Broinowski, “Fact or Fission? The Truth About Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions”, Melbourne: Scribe, 2003.

Trust us, Tilman Ruff, Online Opinion, 17 November 2006 www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5156

Value-subtracting: Form vs. substance in Australian uranium safeguard policy, Richard Leaver, Austral Special Report 09-08S, 11 December 2009, Nautilus Institute, http://nautilus.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/leaver-safeguards.pdf

Nuclear Safeguards: some Canadian questions about Australian policy, Richard Leaver, Austral Policy Forum 09-5A, 23 February 2009, http://nautilus.org/apsnet/nuclear-safeguards-some-canadian-questions-about-australian-policy/

Depleted uranium (DU)

International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons: www.bandepleteduranium.org

Uranium mining companies

Australian Uranium Association www.aua.org.au

BHP Billiton (Olympic Dam) www.bhpbilliton.com/home/aboutus/regulatory/Pages/default.aspx#050_Uranium

SXR Uranium One (Honeymoon): www.uranium1.com

Heathgate Resources (Beverley): www.heathgate.com.au

Energy Resources of Australia (Ranger) www.energyres.com.au

Beverley and Honeymoon in-situ leach mines

Adnyamathanha Elders: http://yurabila.wordpress.com

SXR Uranium One (Honeymoon mine) www.uranium1.com

Senate References and Legislation Committee, October 2003, “Regulating the Ranger, Jabiluka, Beverly and Honeymoon uranium mines” www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate_Committees?url=ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/2002-04/uranium

Roxby Downs / Olympic Dam uranium mine

FoE www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/roxby

Lizards Revenge http://lizardsrevenge.net/

Mark Parnell MLC / SA Greens www.markparnell.org.au/campaign.php?campaignn=29

Save the Basin (Great Artesian Basin): www.savethebasin.com

Cuttlefish Country (impacts of proposed desal plant on the Spencer Gulf and the Giant Cuttlefish) cuttlefishcountry.com

BHP Billiton Watch: http://bhpbillitonwatch.net

FoE Adelaide www.adelaide.archive2.foe.org.au

SA Nuclear Information Centre www.ccsa.asn.au/nic/index.html

List of spills and accidents at SA uranium mines:

www.pir.sa.gov.au/minerals/sa_mines/approved_mines

Ranger and Jabiluka and other Top End uranium issues

Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corporation www.mirarr.net

Environment Centre of the Northern Territory www.ecnt.org

Australian Conservation Foundation www.acfonline.org.au/default.asp?section_id=106

Senate References and Legislation Committee, October 2003, “Regulating the Ranger, Jabiluka, Beverly and Honeymoon uranium mines” www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate_Committees?url=ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/2002-04/uranium

Senate Select Committee on Uranium Mining and Milling, 1997, Uranium Mining and Milling in Australia http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate_Committees?url=uranium_ctte/report/contents.htm

Angela Pamela (near Alice Springs)

www.stopangelapamela.org.au

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NUCLEAR RACISM

Australia:

Australian Nuclear Free Alliance www.anfa.org.au

Radioactive Racism in Australia www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/racism

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, Irati Wanti campaign http://web.archive.org/web/20080718193150/www.iratiwanti.org/home.php3 or this link should take you to the same archived Irati Wanti website: http://tinyurl.com/y8jbuh8

Violence in Marree – WMC Interference http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/roxby/1990s

Mirarr/Gundjehmi submission #44 at http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=isr/uranium/subs.htm or direct download (10MB PDF) http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=isr/uranium/subs/sub44.pdf

International:

Indigenous World Uranium Summit www.nuclear-free.com and www.sric.org/uraniumsummit.

Intercontinental Cry nuclear articles: https://intercontinentalcry.org/?s=nuclear

Richard Salvador, Pacific Islands Association of NGOs (PIANO), NGO presentation to UN NPT Review Conference, 2002,

http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/npt/prepcom02/NGOpres2002/4.pdf

USA:

* Beyond Nuclear http://www.beyondnuclear.org/native-america/

* International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers www.GrandmothersCouncil.org

* Honor the Earth www.HonorEarth.org

* Indigenous Action: http://www.indigenousaction.org/

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NUCLEAR POWER

Nuclear power in Australia

Friends of the Earth webpages: www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/nfc

Andrew Macintosh (The Australia Institute), 2007, “Siting Nuclear Power Plants in Australia Where would they go?”, Web Paper No. 40

http://www.tai.org.au/documents/downloads/WP96.pdf

Richard Baker, June 29, 2006, ‘Secrecy on Howard’s nuclear trip’, The Age

www.theage.com.au/news/national/secrecy-on-howards-nuclear-trip/2006/06/28/1151174268792.html

Impacts of Nuclear Power & Uranium Mining on Water Resources www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/water-nuclear

Nuclear power in Australia – Switkowski report + critiques

 

Nuclear power – global

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003 and 2009 update, “The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study”, web.mit.edu/nuclearpower.

UK: www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/index.php

Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/

Economics of nuclear power

Ben McNeil, June 2007, The Costs of Introducing Nuclear Power to Australia, Journal of Australian Political Economy #59,

http://media.wix.com/ugd/b629ee_14530a4a91394ff385d90813cf0fcd97.pdf

World Information Service on Energy, 2005, ‘Unfair Aid’: The subsidies keeping nuclear energy afloat

www.wiseinternational.org/node/3163

Stephen Thomas et al. (commissioned by Greenpeace International), 2007, “The Economics of Nuclear Power”, www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/the-economics-of-nuclear-power.

Citigroup, November 2009, ‘New Nuclear – the Economics Say No: UK Green Lights New Nuclear – Or Does It?’, https://www.citigroupgeo.com/pdf/SEU27102.pdf

EnergyScience Coalition fact sheet on economics www.energyscience.org.au

This ANSTO-commissioned report argues that nuclear power would be economic in Australia … but only if it is subsidised! John H. Gittus, “Introducing nuclear power to Australia: an economic comparison”:

Keystone Center, 2007, Nuclear Power Joint fact-Finding, https://www.keystone.org/policy-initiatives-center-for-science-a-public-policy/energy/nuclear-power-joint-fact-finding.html

Harding, J, 2007, Economics of nuclear power and proliferation risk in a carbon-constrained world, Electricity Journal 30(20):1–12, November.

Lovins, AB & Sheikh, I, 2008, The nuclear illusion, Ambio, November 2008 preprint, www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid257.php.

Severance CA, 2009, Business risks and costs of new nuclear power.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants.

Nuclear power and climate change

Friends of the Earth et al., 2005, Nuclear Power: No Solution To Climate Change’ www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/nfc/power

Ian Lowe, 2005, Is nuclear power part of Australia’s global warming solutions?, Address to the National Press Club, http://bernardrooney.blogspot.com.au/2005/10/professor-ian-lowe-is-nuclear-power.html

Ian Lowe, Quarterly Essay, Issue 27, September 2007, Reaction Time: Climate Change and the Nuclear Option, www.quarterlyessay.com

Pete Roche, April 2005, Is Nuclear Power a Solution to Climate Change www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/index.php or direct download: www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/Nuclear_Power_April_05v2.pdf

Brice Smith, 2006, Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change www.ieer.org/reports/insurmountablerisks

Charles D. Ferguson, 2007, Nuclear Energy: Balancing Benefits and Risks, US Council on Foreign Relations, www.cfr.org/publication/13104/nuclear_energy.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fby_type%2Fspecial_report

Amory Lovins, Imran Sheikh, and Alex Markevich, 2008, Forget Nuclear, www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php.

Amory Lovins, 2005, Nuclear power: economics and climate protection potential, Rocky Mountains Institute www.rmi.org.

Mycle Schneider (WISE Paris), April 2000, “Climate Change and Nuclear Power”, published by World Wide Fund for Nature www.panda.org/downloads/climate_ change/fullnuclearreprotwwf.pdf

Greenpeace, “Nuclear Energy: No Solution to Climate Change” www.greenpeace.org/usa/Global/usa/report/2007/7/nuclear-energy-no-solution-to.pdf

Mark Diesendorf, June 16, 2006, “Nuclear power: not green, clean or cheap”, Online Opinion www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4581

Statement of Dr. Thomas Cochran, Natural Resources Defense Council, on the Environmental, Safety, and Economic Implications of Nuclear Power Before the Science and Technology Committee House of Representatives, Washington, April 23, 2008,

http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_08042301A.pdf

John Busby, March 2008, “Why nuclear power is not a sustainable source of low carbon energy”, www.after-oil.co.uk/nuclear.htm

EnergyScience Briefings Papers #2, 3, 4, 5, 16, 21

www.energyscience.org.au/factsheets.html

Links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons

Country case studies

General literature on the interconnections between civil and military nuclear programs:

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NUCLEAR WASTE IN AUSTRALIA

2014-onwards – post-Muckaty developments

http://industry.gov.au/resource/RadioactiveWaste/RadioactivewastemanagementinAustralia

Defeated plan for Commonwealth nuclear dump at Muckaty, NT

Famous victory by Muckaty Traditional Owners!! June 2014: http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/muckaty-winnerz

Beyond Nuclear Initiative www.beyondnuclearinitiative.com

No Waste Alliance www.no-waste.org

Senate SECITA Committee, 2008, Inquiry into the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management (Repeal and Consequential Amendment) Bill 2008, http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate_Committees?url=eca_ctte/completed_inquiries/2008-10/radioactive_waste/

Nuclear Territory News – dump section – www.ntne.ws/articles/article.php?section=waste

Arid Land Environment Centre www.alec.org.au

Central Land Council www.clc.org.au

NT government www.nt.gov.au use search engine – search for nuclear dump

Environment Centre Northern Territory www.ecnt.org

Friends of the Earth www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/nontdump

Rudd Government dumping election commitments, Online Opinion, 23 Dec 2008, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8330

Federal government: www.radioactivewaste.gov.au and/or http://industry.gov.au/resource/RadioactiveWaste/RadioactivewastemanagementinAustralia/Pages/default.aspx

National Store Project-for long-lived intermediate-level waste – abandoned 2004

NSW Inquiry into Nuclear Waste Management 2003-04: NSW Parliament – Joint Select Committee into the Transportation and Storage of Nuclear Waste, 2004 www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/nuclearwaste

Successful campaign against dump in South Australia:

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, Irati Wanti campaign http://web.archive.org/web/20080718193150/www.iratiwanti.org/home.php3

Jim Green website archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20080822035148/http://www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/index.html#ntdump

ARPANSA http://web.archive.org/web/20040610143043/http://www.arpansa.gov.au/reposit/nrwr.htm

Federal Government:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080719051744/http://www.radioactivewaste.gov.au/publications/former_projects.htm

and/or http://industry.gov.au/resource/RadioactiveWaste/RadioactivewastemanagementinAustralia/Pages/NationalRepositoryProject1992abandoned2004.aspx

Abandoned plan for intermediate-level radioactive waste store 2001-04

http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/RadioactiveWaste/RadioactivewastemanagementinAustralia/Pages/NationalStoreProject2001abandoned2004.aspx

Australia as the world’s nuclear waste dump:

FoE webpage: http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/import-waste2

Nuclear Fuel Leasing Group, Submission to UMPNER, 18 August 2006:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070830182528/http://www.pmc.gov.au/umpner/submissions/134_sub_umpner.pdf

Association for Regional and International Underground Storage www.arius-world.org

Pangea (predecessor of ARIUS) www.anawa.org.au

J.J. Veevers, Disposal of British RADwaste at home and in antipodean Australia, Australian Geologist,

http://web.archive.org/web/20120410062832/http://eps.mq.edu.au/media/veevers1.htm

2003 submission and article by Australian academic Ian Holland (PDF) http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/sites/default/files/Holland%20on%20import%20HLW.pdf

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NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Various

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons www.icanw.org

Oxford Research Group: www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk

Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (Australia), 2009, Inquiry into Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament,

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jsct/nuclearnon_proliferation/index.htm

US bases in Australia / nuclear alliance / missile defence

Medical Association for the Prevention of War – PowerPoint presentation on various aspects of the nuclear alliance

http://www.mapw.org.au/download/mapw-presentation-australia-us-defence-links

Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition www.anti-bases.org

Federation of Atomic Scientists fas.org/news/australia

Talisman sabre military exercises, war and the environment, Sue Wareham, Online Opinion, 10 July 2009, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9148

Pine Gap 6 www.pinegap6.org

Australia’s secret nuclear weapons push – 1940s to 1970s

Friends of the Earth webpages: www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/ozbombs

Jacques E.C. Hymans, 2000, “Isotopes and Identity: Australia and the Nuclear Weapons Option, 1949-1999”, Nonproliferation Review, Vol.7, No.1, Spring, pp.1-23, http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/hym71.pdf

Jim Walsh, 1997, ‘Surprise Down Under: The Secret History of Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions’, The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, pp.1-20, http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/walsh51.pdf

Alice Cawte, “Atomic Australia: 1944-1990”, Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1992.

Richard Broinowski, Australian nuclear weapons: the story so far, Austral Policy Forum 06-23A 17 July 2006, http://nautilus.org/apsnet/0623a-broinowski-html/

Richard Broinowski, 2006, Australia’s New Nuclear Ambitions, http://nautilus.org/apsnet/0624a-broinowski-html/

Wayne Reynolds, “Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb”, Melbourne University Press, 2000. (For a review of Reynold’s book, click here.)

Several web-pages at Jim Green Nuclear & Environmental research

Military implications of the former Howard government’s nuclear push in Australia

Max Walsh, June 7, 2006, The Nuclear Club, The Bulletin http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/ozbombs

Hugh White, Don’t mention the bomb, The Age March 1, 2007

www.theage.com.au/news/hugh-white/dont-mention-the-bomb/2007/02/28/1172338702694.html

British nuclear bomb tests in Australia

Friends of the Earth webpages. www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/britbombs

Australian Nuclear Map – information, photos, videos: australianmap.net/category/nuclear-weapon-test-site/

Paul Langley’s detailed research on the nuclear bomb tests in Australia: http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, Irati Wanti (‘The poison, stop it’) http://web.archive.org/web/20080718193150/www.iratiwanti.org/home.php3
and see the links section at the Irati Wanti site.

The Report of the Royal Commission into the British Nuclear Tests in Australia, 1985:

Conclusions and recommendations (PDF)

Volume 1 of the Royal Commission Report (PDF)

Volume 2 of the Royal Commission Report (PDF)

The Advertiser: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/search-results?q=maralinga

Roger Cross, “Fallout: Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia”, Wakefield Press, 2001.

Australian Nuclear Veterans Association web archives http://anva.org.au/ and http://web.archive.org/web/20080723072017/http://users.bigpond.net.au/anva

Collection of articles by journalist Colin James (Word file) http://archive2.foe.org.au/sites/default/files/Advertiser%20Maralinga%20Dossier.doc

Links to various websites and other literature: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/30410/20090218-0153/www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/maralingalinks.html

BBC material www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/falloutatmaralinga.shtml

South Australia’s nuclear (weapons) history. SA Nuclear Information Centre paper: “Nuclear weapons proliferation in South Australia 1945-1965” www.ccsa.asn.au/nic/NucHazards/SAweapons.htm

National Archives of Australia information: www.naa.gov.au/about-us/publications/fact-sheets/fs129.aspx

ARPANSA Report, “Strontium-90 Testing Program 1957 – 1978 
Use of Human Bone Tissue”, PDF:

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/testing/PDFs/sr90pubrep%5B1%5D.pdf

Brian Martin, Nuclear Knights www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/80nk/ or http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/80nk/index.html

Flawed ‘clean up’ of Maralinga

Information and links/references posted at http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/britbombs/clean-up

Lots of articles posted at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080815194933/http://www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/#bwt

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PRO-NUCLEAR

Australian Uranium Association www.aua.org.au

Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (non-independent Commonwealth regulator) www.arpansa.gov.au

Nuclear Energy Institute http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=australia

Melbourne Uni physics team www.nuclearinfo.net

nuclearaustralia.blogspot.com

Australian Nuclear Association www.nuclearaustralia.org.au

Australian Nuclear Forum http://oznucforum.customer.netspace.net.au

Australian uranium – news, charts, company info etc: www.australianuranium.com.au

Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation www.ansto.gov.au

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) www.iaea.org

OECD Nuclear Energy Agency www.nea.fr

Main pro-nuclear website in Australia was the Uranium Information Centre – which is now defunct. Critique of UIC www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/u/uic

Pro-nuclear environmentalists: There are just a handful of genuine pro-nuclear environmentalists. Most of the discussion and media commentary about pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists’ focuses on people such as self-described eccentric James Lovelock and industry hack Patrick Moore. See the critique posted at http://archive2.foe.org.au/sites/default/files/nuke-enviros.doc

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PRO-NUCLEAR PR, SPIN, FRONT GROUPS etc

PR Watch: www.prwatch.org/taxonomy/term/75/9

Critique of Patrick Moore et al: http://archive2.foe.org.au/sites/default/files/nuke-enviros.doc

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MISCELLANEOUS

Map of Australian nuke sites australianmap.net

Political parties

Greens’ Senator Scott Ludlam’s website: http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/portfolios/nuclear

Uranium enrichment for Australia?

‘Enriching Australia’, Online Opinion, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4786

UMPNER / Switkowski report (see above)

EnergyScience Coalition, Briefing paper #7, http://www.energyscience.org.au/factsheets.html or click here to download (PDF file)

‘Enrichment, The coming oversupply’, Nuclear Engineering International, 3 November 2009, www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=76&storyCode=2054563

Greenpeace 2004 report on the controversial Silex laser enrichment technique: ‘Secrets, Lies & Uranium Enrichment’, click here to download (PDF file)

Lucas Heights nuclear research reactor

Friends of the Earth webpages: http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/lh

ANSTO Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation www.ansto.gov.au

Jean McSorley’s analysis of the foreign policy agenda driving the new reactor plan http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/30410/20090218-0153/www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/mcsorley.html

Medical Association for the Prevention of War www.mapw.org.au

Sutherland Shire Environment Centre http://ssec.org.au/our_environment/issues_campaigns/nuclear/index.htm

Jim Green’s website

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/30410/20090218-0153/www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/index.html

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/30410/20090218-0153/www.geocities.com/jimgreen3/info.html

ARPANSA www.arpansa.gov.au

Food Irradiation Watch http://foodirradiationwatch.org

Leslie Kemeny (nuclear advocate):

The Naked Experts http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82ecol.html

Investors fuming over Nu-Tec investment scheme, ABC TV 7:30 Report, March 2005 www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1328610.htm

Leslie Kemeny a nuclear crusader in his own write, Crikey, 11 November 2009,

www.crikey.com.au/2009/11/11/leslie-kemeny-a-nuclear-crusader-in-his-own-write

Friends of the Earth: http://www.archive2.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/kemeny

Controversies involving Heathgate and General Atomics

Here’s a short video from ABC TV ‘Hungry Beasts’ program on 5 November 2009 about Neal Blue who is involved in Heathgate Resources (Beverley and Beverley Four Mile uranium mines in SA), including a mention of Heathgate’s employment of a spy who attempted to infiltrate FoE, and Blue’s various weapons-related corporate and political connections in Australia and around the world.

From the ABC ‘Hungry Beasts’ website: “Earlier this year [2009] the Australian Financial Review published their ‘Covert Power’ List featuring the major string-pullers in Australia – big guns like Therese Rein.  If you’ve ever wondered who has the real covert power in Australia, you might be interested in reclusive American billionaire Neal Blue. Neal is CEO and Chairman of US arms manufacturer General Atomics, and the man behind Australia’s newest uranium mine, Four Mile.”

The scarcely-believable story of General Atomics / Heathgate Resources

Jim Green – national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia.

A version of this article was published in The Punch, 2 August 2012.

The story behind the corporation that owns the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia is scarcely believable.

Heathgate Resources − a 100% owned subsidiary of General Atomics (GA) − owns and operates Beverley and has a stake in the adjacent Beverley Four Mile mine. GA CEO Neal Blue has had commercial interests in oil, Predator drones, uranium mining and nuclear reactors, cocoa, bananas and real estate. His primary political interests appear to be fighting Communism and supporting the far-right.

Radioactive spills and gas leaks at a uranium processing plant in Oklahoma led to the plants closure in 1993. The plant was owned by a GA subsidiary, Sequoyah Fuels Corporation, and processed uranium for use in reactors and for use in depleted uranium munitions. A nine-legged frog may have GA to thank for its dexterity. A government inquiry found that GA had known for years that radioactive material was leaking and that the radioactivity of water around the plant was 35,000 times higher than US laws permitted.

In 1992, a leak at the Oklahoma plant forced the evacuation of a building only two weeks after federal inspectors allowed it to resume operating. Later that year, the company announced that the plant would be closed after it had been ordered to temporarily shut down three times in the previous six years. Sequoyah Fuels Corporation President Joe Sheppard said the company could no longer afford rising costs related to regulatory demands.

The shenanigans and jiggery-pokery at the Oklahoma plant − such as the disposal of low-level radioactive waste by spraying it on company-owned grazing land, and the company’s attempt to reduce the amount of property tax it paid on the grounds that radioactive contamination reduced the value of the land − are documented by the World Information Service on Energy.

GA / Heathgate in Australia

Fortune Magazine recounts one of the controversies surrounding GA / Heathgate’s uranium ventures in Australia. When uranium prices increased in the mid-noughties, the company was locked into long-term contracts to sell yellowcake from Beverley at earlier, lower prices. Heathgate devised plans to renegotiate its legally-binding contracts. Customers were told that production costs at Beverley were higher than expected, that production was lower than expected, and that a failure to renegotiate contracts would force Heathgate to file for bankruptcy.

However former employees said that Blue had allegedly directed Heathgate to increase its production costs. Customers were not told that bankruptcy was unlikely since GA had agreed to continue providing Heathgate with financial assistance.

Two of Heathgate’s Australian directors, Mark Chalmers and David Brunt, consulted an attorney who advised them that the plan could be considered a conspiracy to defraud. Chalmers and Brunt left the company.

Exelon, one of Heathgate’s uranium customers, sued. The lawsuit was settled for about $41 million. Because of the increased uranium price, Blue ended up well in front despite the cost of the settlement with Exelon − more than $200 million in front by some estimates. Blue was unrepentant: “It made more sense to, in essence, just pay the fine.”

Blue has even been sued by his own company. Several years ago, ConverDyn, a uranium conversion plant jointly owned by GA and Honeywell, sued Blue, Heathgate and GA in relation to allegations of a failure to meet contractual obligations to deliver certain amounts of uranium.

Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson declined to comment when asked about GA / Heathgate’s activities in 2009.

The US Center for Responsible Politics calculated that GA spent over US$1.5 million annually in lobbying efforts from 2005 to 2011. GA / Heathgate has repeatedly flown US politicians (and their families and aides) to Australia for high-level talks and it has paid for Labor MPs to travel to the US. The company has used the services of PR firm Hawker Britton, which includes many former Labor politicians and staffers.

Money well spent, it seems. In 2006, then SA Treasurer Kevin Foley said: “I have visited the Beverley mine and, recently, in San Diego I met Mr Neal Blue, the chairman of General Atomics – an outstanding company that is producing uranium oxide from the Beverley mine. I only hope that further deposits of uranium can be found. The sooner we can find it, dig it up and get it out of the country, the better.”

Infiltration of environment groups

GA / Heathgate has employed at least one private investigator to infiltrate environment groups in Australia. The infiltrator, known as Mehmet, had previously infiltrated green groups as part of an undercover police operation before he moved into the private sector to set up his own security company, Universal Axiom. He also provided personal protection to visiting GA executives. When asked about the company’s tactics, a Heathgate spokesperson said the company was privately owned and had a policy of not responding to media questions.

People who worked at Friends of the Earth at the time − around the turn of the century − say they were highly suspicious about Mehmet from the get-go. His activities might have been laughable and pathetic except that he provided exaggerated information to police about the likely attendance at a protest at the Beverley uranium mine in May 2000. That led to an excessive police presence at the protest and police brutality against environmentalists and local Aboriginal people. An video of this brutality is posted at australianmap.net/beverley-uranium-mine. Heathgate applauded the police action.

After a 10-year legal case, 10 people were awarded a total of $700,000 damages. Supreme Court Judge Timothy Anderson described the imprisonment of protesters in shipping crates as “degrading, humiliating and frightening” and noted that the action constituted an “affront to the civil liberties of the protestors”. He added: “The conditions were oppressive, degrading and dirty, there was a lack of air, there was the smell from capsicum spray and up to 30 persons were crammed into a very small space.”

Judge Anderson also strongly criticised the SA government’s withdrawal from attempts to resolve the case through mediation. He said that SA government Ministers Kevin Foley and Michael Wright “acted with a high-handed and contumelious disregard of the plaintiffs as citizens of the state with a right to protest, and with the right to be treated according to law if they did protest.”

Heathgate’s record at Beverley has been substandard. At least 59 spills have been documented at the mine. The company sells uranium to nuclear weapons states (all of which are in breach of their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), to at least one country with a recent history of secret nuclear weapons research (South Korea), and to countries which refuse to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Heathgate’s activities at Beverley have been extremely divisive among Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners. Some Adnyamathanha Elders have formed an Elders Group as a separate forum from the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association. Enice Marsh said: “There have been many attempts over the past 10 years to try and bring greater accountability to what’s happening in Native Title, and to stop the ongoing assault on our Yarta (country). Many of us have tried with very little resources, limited understanding of the legal system and environmental laws, and despite a mountain of bullying, lies and deceit from mining companies, lawyers, and self-inflated thugs in our own community who dare to call themselves ‘leaders’.”

The predator

Neal Blue, CEO of defense contractor General Atomics, has transformed the way the U.S. military fights wars. But it is his take-no-prisoners approach to business that has made him infamous.

By Barney Gimbel, October 31, 2008

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/28/magazines/fortune/predator_gimbel.fortune/index.htm

(Fortune Magazine) — It’s hard to pin down exactly when Neal Blue decided to start building weapons. It was probably in the early 1980s, around the time he bought much of Telluride, Colo., but before he began mining uranium and sometime after he gave up growing cocoa and bananas in the Nicaraguan jungle.

Back then Blue was a Denver oilman and real estate investor who happened to spend a lot of time thinking about how to defeat communists. He was particularly interested in seeing the overthrow of the Soviet-backed Sandinistas, who had recently seized control of Nicaragua. He had known the Somozas, the ousted ruling family, from his cocoa and banana days, and, well, he hated Reds.

Crippling the regime, Blue figured, was simple: just send GPS-equipped unmanned planes on kamikaze missions to blow up the country’s gasoline storage tanks. “You could launch them from behind the line of sight,” he recalls matter-of-factly, “so you would have total deniability.”

Blue pauses, leans back in his white-leather swivel chair, and quickly adds that he had nothing to do with any of the Reagan-era operations there – nor, of course, did he launch his own attack. We are sitting in his small, sunny office near San Diego, not far from the Navy’s so-called Top Gun Academy.

Behind him unfolds a rambling campus of 1950s-futuristic buildings, home to General Atomics Technologies Corp., parent of one of the most important defense companies in the world and the centerpiece of Blue’s privately held – and secretive – business empire. Over the course of his five-decade career he’s built a sprawling global business that spans four continents and enriched his family. But he has also made enemies and infuriated customers.

Blue is one of the last of the old-school industrialists, a breed that is all but extinct in professionally managed, post-Sarbanes-Oxley corporate America – a modern-day Howard Hughes (minus that whole starlet-dating, obsessive-handwashing part).

Through a combination of entrepreneurial instincts, bold legal maneuvers, and all-out bullying, Blue and his younger brother, Linden, have assembled assets worth billions of dollars (it’s all private, so no outsider knows exactly how much), including an environmental cleanup firm in Germany, extensive uranium mines in Australia, real estate in Colorado, substantial oil and gas interests in Canada, and an airplane de-icing company in Iowa.

But General Atomics is best known for manufacturing one of the most important tools in modern warfare: the Predator, an unmanned spy plane that commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan credit with helping them fight insurgents. (The Pentagon recently announced that the Predator would increasingly take over the hunt for Osama bin Laden.)

“I once asked Neal how he does it,” says Harold Agnew, the former director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, who sits on GA’s board. “And he said, ‘My golden rule is to always buy straw hats in the winter.'”

Blue is a razor-sharp businessman, and interviews with dozens of Blue’s associates and sparring partners suggest that he will do anything to maximize profit – even if it means violating agreements. And while some who have locked horns with him simply shrug their shoulders and move on, a few have taken him to court for breach of contract, fraud, and racketeering.

Blue admits to breaking contracts but won’t comment on the rest. In Telluride, not far from where he grew up, the town even seized much of his land after a bitter fight with residents.

“I have used his house there periodically,” says David Goldberg, Blue’s friend and longtime business advisor, “and I have always advised my guests never to sit on the porch for fear of being ‘duly rewarded’ by the passing populace.” (Translation: Duck and cover.)

Neal Blue is 73 years old but could easily pass for 50, thanks to his boyish face and fit build. Although shy in public, he’s a good storyteller and speaks with authority about everything from John Locke to nuclear physics. Conversations can easily turn into often mind-bending monologues that last hours – a phenomenon some of his employees call “Blue-speak.”

Blue’s father was a real estate investor, and his mother the first woman to be Colorado’s treasurer. He was a born opportunist. One high school friend remembers that during a public-speaking class he unabashedly played to the teacher’s Catholic faith: When Blue was to practice giving an award, he presented a national championship trophy to the University of Notre Dame. When he had to talk about great architecture, he picked the Vatican.

“Everyone in the class would just roll their eyes,” says Norman Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin, who grew up with him in Denver. “But Neal got an A, and the rest of us didn’t. That was vintage Blue.”

It was also vintage Blue, friends say, to finance a road trip from France to India with his Yale buddies by selling articles to the New York Times and persuading Chrysler to donate a Dodge station wagon.

Blue outdid himself the following summer when he and Linden decided to fly a small plane over the Andes Mountains. It didn’t matter that they didn’t yet know how to fly. “Those were just details,” Blue says with a wry smile.

That exploit, which was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1957, laid the groundwork for the Blue brothers’ future. After hearing that cocoa farming was a way to make money quickly, the brothers arranged financing to buy a slice of Nicaraguan jungle on the Caribbean coast, built an airstrip, and started planting.

While that venture failed, they had more success investing in sugar plantations, petroleum, and real estate. Neal was always looking for those straw hats. One morning in mid-1985 he read in the Wall Street Journal that Chevron (CVX, Fortune 500) was looking to sell some of the assets of newly acquired Gulf Oil. Sensing a bargain, he called Goldberg, his trusted advisor.

Soon Goldberg and the Blues flew to San Diego to look at an odd research entity that came with Gulf Oil. Founded as the nuclear think tank for General Dynamics (GD, Fortune 500), the unit, called General Atomics, had lost direction after being sold and resold to various oil companies. It built small nuclear reactors and pioneered a gas-cooled reactor for power generation – a technological coup but a commercial failure. The company also ran the country’s largest fusion reactor.

“Neal was exceedingly unimpressed by it,” says Goldberg. “But he was smart enough to spot it as a terrific real estate opportunity…. And he was smart enough to realize it might even be a place where he could do something with his ideas of transforming military doctrine.”

Blue has long believed that when it comes to innovation, the military is almost always wrong. The armed forces are always buying overpriced technology designed for the last war. During his first days at General Atomics in 1986, Blue gathered the company’s employees and laid out his vision: General Atomics would be remade in the image of the Hughes Aircraft Corp., back when its founder was still running it.

And like Howard Hughes, who often used his companies as vehicles for pursuing his obsessions, Blue soon announced that the company would begin research on his pet project: unmanned aerial vehicles. The company’s employees, mostly engineers and nuclear physicists, were shocked.

Blue had originally conceived the aircraft as kamikaze strike weapons or as cheap cruise missiles, but after the Pentagon put out a call for an unmanned surveillance plane in 1993, Blue changed his mind. To execute his vision, he hired Tom Cassidy, a retired Navy admiral and commander of the service’s elite Top Gun Academy. (When the producers of the Tom Cruise movie needed a gruff admiral for a bit part, they cast him.)

Cassidy’s team stuck to off-the-shelf parts, using cameras made for traffic helicopters and a Bombardier engine originally designed for snowmobiles. He named it the Predator.

Air Force officials were initially unmoved: After all, many of them were former pilots – and no pilot has ever picked up a girl in a bar by bragging he flew a remote-controlled plane. More important, the Air Force was sinking hundreds of millions into a next-generation fighter jet, the F-22.

But the Predator was cheap (the original Predator cost a mere $10 million per plane) and scarily effective at providing intelligence. It was quiet and could fly for a full day at 25,000 feet, recording and relaying real-time video to commanders on the ground. Current versions even shoot Hellfire missiles.

Although the first Predator was launched during the mid-1990s Balkans conflict, it wasn’t until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that military commanders integrated it into their arsenals.

“It is difficult,” says Dyke Weatherington, the Pentagon’s deputy director of unmanned warfare, “for us to keep up with the demand for these from the field.”

While GA refuses to disclose its revenue or profits, the aeronautics business, which operates as a separate company, has sold more than $2.4 billion worth of drones and other equipment to the U.S. military in the past decade.

There are many sides of Neal Blue. There is the charming side he shows to reporters – military innovator, gutsy entrepreneur, and learned scholar. And there is the relentless side known only to his customers and the people who survive working for him.

ConverDyn, a uranium-processing subsidiary that GA co-owns with industrial giant Honeywell, recently sued Blue (that’s right, his own company sued him) and described his business practices as “fraudulent, malicious, and willful and wanton.”

This and other related lawsuits highlight Blue’s unique blend of questionable conduct and business foresight. He got into the sugar business in the early 1970s before it hit its all-time high. He invested in natural gas when prices were controlled, and he minted money after it was deregulated.

And he recognized that uranium was a commodity that was so “out” that it had to be “in” one day. During the 1980s he bought tracts of land in the Australian outback when mining uranium there was banned. He gambled that a new administration would rewrite the laws to his advantage, then patiently waited a decade to be proven right.

In 2001, when Blue started producing the radioactive metal, it sold for approximately $8 a pound on the spot market. Three years later the price had about doubled, but Blue was locked into long-term contracts to sell much of the metal to utilities at close to 2001 prices.

Realizing the company was losing a tremendous opportunity, his subordinates allegedly devised a plan. An internal memo prepared by General Atomics’ uranium subsidiary, Heathgate, in March 2004, recommended canceling or restructuring the contracts. The memo presented four options for backing out of the various deals, ranging from an intentional failure to deliver to allowing the subsidiary to file for bankruptcy.

Blue’s company chose a controversial middle ground. It would approach customers and ask for concessions, saying its cost of production was higher than expected and that the mine was producing less than it had anticipated. Some customers were handed documents confirming those assertions and suggesting that if the contracts weren’t renegotiated, Heathgate would have to file for bankruptcy.

What the companies weren’t told was that, according to former employees, Blue had allegedly directed the company to increase its costs. Plus the company couldn’t immediately go broke, since GA had agreed to continue providing Heathgate financial assistance – another fact conveniently left out of reports to customers.

Many of Blue’s longtime employees saw this as tantamount to railroading customers. Two of Heathgate’s Australian directors, Mark Chalmers and David Brunt, were so worried about the legality of what they were doing that they consulted an outside attorney. That lawyer advised them that implementing the plan could be considered a “conspiracy to defraud and the commission of at least one criminal offense by each director, which would be very difficult to defend.” Soon Chalmers and Brunt were no longer employed by Heathgate.

Most customers agreed to renegotiate. But as the price of uranium continued to skyrocket – it had reached over $40 by early 2006 – Heathgate again told its customers that it was experiencing higher than expected production costs, lower than anticipated volumes, and did not have enough uranium to fulfill its orders.

The lawsuits allege that these contentions were grossly exaggerated. That year, Blue’s executives told Chicago-based Exelon (EXC, Fortune 500), a $19-billion-a-year utility, that Heathgate would not deliver any uranium unless Exelon released them from the rest of the contracts. When the company refused, Heathgate and GA informed it that they would make no more deliveries. Exelon sued.

But Blue figured that didn’t matter. He says the most they could sue him for was the “maximum liquidated price,” or the amount of uranium times the price in the contract. In the meantime he could sell that disputed metal on the spot market for prices that peaked last year at nearly $140 a pound.

Exelon’s lawsuit against General Atomics’ parent company was settled in the spring for about $41 million, according to Exelon’s SEC filings. The amount Blue made selling that same uranium on the spot market? More than $200 million, by some estimates.

While Blue won’t discuss the specifics of the case – the settlement agreement is confidential – he doesn’t seem concerned by the allegations in the lawsuits. In fact, he is utterly unrepentant.

“If you’re a profit-center manager, you look at what are your contractual obligations,” Blue says. “It’s not your obligation to give as much as possible from your company to someone else…. It made more sense to, in essence, just pay the fine.”

One afternoon this past summer, Blue pulled up in his brand-new silver Volkswagen outside one of his company’s manufacturing facilities north of San Diego. It was 85 degrees, and he was wearing a short-sleeved blue dress shirt and dark-gray pants. Inside the warehouse were row upon row of remote cockpits for Predators.

From takeoff to landing, the Predator can be controlled with a joystick by a pilot sitting in a trailer thousands of miles away. But the original Predator “cockpit” looked more like a computer console than the deck of a fighter jet.

The new prototype Blue was here to inspect aimed to fix that. Indeed, it looked like a cross between a high-end videogame and the multimillion-dollar simulator airlines use to train pilots. But the system was buggy, and the video was so jittery that it hurt your eyes to look at it.

Blue’s face dropped. “This shouldn’t be like this,” he snapped at a young programmer who was demonstrating the machine. His voice rose. “This is totally unacceptable. Wouldn’t you agree? What is your problem? Why can’t you get this stuff right?”

The pressure of GA’s success – and the challenges Blue is facing in his other operations – may be taking a toll. The aeronautics business has grown so fast that it has apparently experienced production problems.

Northrop Grumman (NOC, Fortune 500) recently beat it out for a $1.6 billion contract to produce drones for the Navy. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the Navy had “substantial doubt” that the company would deliver the drones as promised. The Predator maker says the GAO report references “select instances of past performances,” and it has since increased resources and staffing.

“That’s just part of the capitalist world, which has provided so much to so many,” Blue says. “But I suppose the fundamental essence of our portfolio, aside from some measure of economic balance, is ‘Okay, how do you make a difference?’ And in my case, it is in developing transformational technologies that could change the world. The rest of all this doesn’t really matter.”

It is a prime example of Blue-speak – a measured but completely unremorseful response that belies the sharp elbows and strong-arm tactics Blue often uses to achieve his goals. And it is perfectly in keeping with his stubbornly old-fashioned brand of doing business.

As Howard Hughes said, “Once you do consent to some such concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they were.” He didn’t have an heir, but Neal Blue sure comes close.

Arms maker behind uranium mine settled fraudulent pricing case

Nick O’Malley and Ben Cubby, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 July 2009

http://www.smh.com.au/national/arms-maker-behind-uranium-mine-settled-fraudulent-pricing-case-20090729-e1lx.html

THE arms manufacturer that received approval through an Australian subsidiary for a new uranium mine in central Australia this month was sued for fraudulently hiking uranium prices and manipulating costs at a neighbouring mine.

Neal Blue, owner and chairman of General Atomics, was accused in the proceedings of instructing executives at his Australian subsidiary, Heathgate Resources, to prepare false reports for customers, telling them costs at Heathgate’s Beverley uranium mine were higher than anticipated, and production lower.

The strategy was allegedly calculated to break contracts with US companies buying Australian uranium from Mr Blue’s company at low, fixed prices. According to court documents, the plan was hatched in 2004 when world uranium prices spiralled, as nuclear power came to be seen as a way of achieving greenhouse gas cuts.

Those companies that did not agree to allow Heathgate to break its contracts and increase prices were allegedly told Heathgate would file for bankruptcy. Mr Blue contested the claims and the proceedings were eventually settled.

Mr Blue was not available to speak to the Herald, but when questioned about the case by Fortune magazine last year said: “If you’re a profit-centre manager, you look at what are your contractual obligations. It’s not your obligation to give as much as possible from your company to someone else … It made more sense to, in essence, just pay the fine.”

The Illinois District Court case was settled last year. One of General Atomics’s customers, Exelon, received $US41 million from the company. It is estimated Mr Blue made $US200 million by breaking the contracts and selling uranium on the spot market as commodity prices rose.

As Mr Blue’s strategy unfolded, two Heathgate directors, Mark Chalmers and David Brunt, were so concerned they hired a lawyer who advised “the plan could be considered a ‘conspiracy to defraud and the commission of at least one criminal offence by each director, which would be very difficult to defend’.”

Soon after, the men’s relationship with Heathgate ended. Today they are respectively managing director and director with Uranium Equities. Neither would comment for this story.

The Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, and the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, who approved the Four Mile uranium mine, were unavailable for comment yesterday.

General Atomics is best known for making the Predator drones playing an increasing role in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it also has interests in uranium processing and mining.

Four Mile mine will be owned by a General Atomics subsidiary, Quasar Resources, and an Australian-owned minerals explorer, Alliance Resources.

The company with the right contacts

Ben Cubby, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 July 2009

http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-company-with-the-right-contacts-20090729-e1lk.html

GENERAL ATOMICS, the company behind the nation’s newest uranium mine, has been patiently lobbying Australian politicians for more than a decade to encourage it to allow mining, to develop nuclear reactors and buy high-tech weapons.

The company has ferried members of the US Congress, their families and aides to Australia for high-level talks. It has paid for Labor MPs to travel to the United States to see its weapons and nuclear reactors first-hand, as well as hosting taxpayer funded trips.

In 1999, a federal Labor opposition frontbencher, Martyn Evans, was flown to the US for a four-day visit to the General Atomics headquarters in San Diego. This was at the expense of Heathgate Resources, the General Atomics subsidiary that operates the Beverley Uranium Mine in South Australia.

To put its case for more mines and more weapons in Canberra, the company uses Hawker Britton, a lobbying firm that includes many former ALP staffers and MPs.

But among the biggest supporters of uranium mining expansion is the South Australian Premier, Mike Rann, who was on the Greenpeace executive that launched the Rainbow Warrior protest ship to try to block French nuclear weapons tests in 1972.

Mr Rann, who also chaired the Nuclear Hazards Committee of the ALP in the early 1980s when the party was opposed to uranium mining, now believes that modern mining techniques are safe enough. He travelled to Dallas to meet Mr Blue last year and said on his return that he was an “unashamed supporter” of uranium mining.

In 2006 the South Australian Treasurer, Kevin Foley, spent $120,000 travelling the US to meet leading arms manufacturers including General Atomics, but it was apparently not his first visit. The previous year he told South Australia’s Parliament that he had already visited Mr Blue.

“I have visited the Beverley mine and, recently, in San Diego I met Mr Neal Blue, the chairman of General Atomics – an outstanding company that is producing uranium oxide from the Beverley mine. I only hope that further deposits of uranium can be found. The sooner we can find it, dig it up and get it out of the country, the better,” he said.

Also in 2006, General Atomics flew a group from the US Congress to Australia, accompanied by company executives, to persuade the Federal Government to buy the company’s Predator unmanned aircraft. The colourful group included a retired US Navy admiral, Tom Cassidy, a former pilot who had a cameo role in the Tom Cruise film Top Gun.

A report by the US Centre for Public Integrity found the trip cost $US184,000, and established that General Atomics was the biggest corporate sponsor of travel for US Congress officials since 2000.

The members of the US Congress on the Australia trip denied attempting to boost General Atomics sales on the trip, saying it focused on strengthening military ties and discussion on the war against terrorism. The Australian Defence Force tested a General Atomics robot surveillance aircraft that year.

As well as its interest in unmanned spy planes, General Atomics has employed human spies. Last year it was caught hiring a former undercover police officer turned private investigator to infiltrate Australian environment groups and report on their actions. The former officer was posing as a Kurdish refugee and feeding information back to General Atomics.

Digging dirt with a sledgehammer

Nick O’Malley and Ben Cubby, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 July 2009

www.smh.com.au/national/digging-dirt-with-a-sledgehammer-20090729-e1lj.html

The weapons manufacturer who converted Labor’s staunchest opponents to nuclear development has a controversial past, writes Nick O’Malley and Ben Cubby.

As a rule, Neal Blue’s employees – past or present – don’t like to talk about the boss. Not on record, anyway. Off the record, the same words keep coming up when they describe him. They say the man behind Australia’s newest uranium mine is brilliant and tough, private and autocratic. They say he is ruthless.

“Look at Telluride,” says one former associate. “That’s who Neal Blue is.”

Telluride is a ski town of astonishing beauty in the Rocky Mountains. In 1983 Blue, then making his first fortune in real estate, bought the valley floor beneath Telluride and, in 1998, moved to subdivide it and build mansions. Many objected and convinced the county to protect the land. After a string of legal battles a court decided that if Blue was paid $US50 million the county could keep its rolling green meadow.

The tight-knit community rallied to raise the money. Married couples cancelled honeymoons and donated their savings, sports teams passed the hat around, children sold lemonade. The county met the fund-raisers dollar for dollar and wealthy benefactors, including the actress Daryl Hannah, kicked in the last few millions. With days to spare the money was raised and the campaigners celebrated.

Blue wasn’t bowed. He turned to the state legislature, which introduced a retrospective law preventing the county from resuming the land. A judge found the law unconstitutional and Blue fought that too, in the Colorado Supreme Court. He lost.

After 25 years had passed and about $US60 million was spent in compensation and legal fees, the valley floor was saved, but the town of Telluride was divided and its budget blown.

One of the campaigners was bewildered by Blue’s ferocity. A judge involved in mediation told her the residents never understood that to Blue the issue was not the money but winning.

“That’s what I’m saying,” a former associate told the Herald. “He’s just an asshole.”

The battle for Telluride reveals much about Blue. It demonstrates his willingness to invest over the long term on long shots. His golden rule is said to be “always buy straw hats in winter”. There is ruthlessness too, and tenacity. And the tale suggests that to Blue, now 74, the law is a weapon to be wielded.

Such single-mindedness emerged during the battle over a Blue-owned uranium processing plant on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.

After a series of radioactive spills a nine-legged frog was discovered outside the yellowcake factory.

A government investigation eventually established the company had known for years that radioactive material was leaking and that radioactivity in water around the plant was at levels 35,000 times higher than US federal laws permitted.

After a toxic gas leak in 1992 it was finally closed. A clean-up of the site should finish by 2012.

Blue and his younger brother and business partner, Linden, first came to public notice in a picture on the cover of Life magazine in 1957. The two high school graduates are crammed into the tiny cockpit of the light aircraft they had just piloted over the Andes.

The same cover carries the headline “Soviet inroads in Arab world”. This too is part of the Blue story.

Last year Blue, who would not be interviewed for this story, told Fortune magazine how in the 1980s he first thought of using pilotless aircraft as weapons. The fervent anti-communist figured remote control light aircraft could be used to blow up oil pipelines to cripple the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

Those idle thoughts bore fruit. In 1986 Blue bought General Atomics, the research arm of a larger nuclear power company.Just a decade later the company’s Predator drone aircraft were in the air over the Balkans and the company was on its way to earning Pentagon contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

As General Atomics grew, Blue kept an eye on Australia. One of his former employees recalls that in the late 1980s Blue was sure the future was nuclear and Australia was going to be a key part of it.

He went about buying pastoral leases sitting on uranium deposits in South Australia and the Northern Territory, gambling that bans on uranium would one day be lifted.

He was right. In 1990 Blue established Heathgate Resources to operate the new Beverley uranium mine, near Lake Frome in South Australia.

The South Australian Government has recorded 59 spills of radioactive material on the surface at the site, though none are considered serious and the company has not breached its licence conditions. Because the mine does little surface damage there is no requirement it decontaminate the site when mining ceases.

The environmental impact assessment for Blue’s nearby Four Mile mine, approved this month by the federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, similarly carries no such requirement.

General Atomics and Blue did run into trouble over the sale of its Australian yellowcake overseas, however. Exelon Generation, a US energy company, sued General Atomics for allegedly lifting its uranium prices and preparing false reports for customers. The case settled last year.

Blue was unrepentant, telling one journalist it made more sense to pay a fine than lose more money using less confrontational practices.

“He did teach me one thing, though,” says a former associate. “Given the will, and the way, and a sledgehammer, you can achieve almost anything.”

As his uranium interests in Central Australia began to realise their potential, another Blue company was locked in combat over the rich oil and gas fields of the Timor Gap. Blue had acquired the company Oceanic, which claimed to have secured the rights to the resources from Portuguese Timor in 1974.

Once Indonesia’s occupation ended it sought – and failed – to resume those rights.

In 2004 Blue took on the successful bidder, ConocoPhillips, the Timor Sea Designated Authority and the Indonesian Government-owned resources giant Pertamina, demanding $30 billion in damages. Oceanic claimed the then East Timor prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, and other Fretilin members of parliament had been bribed.

In May last year a judge in Houston, Texas, dismissed the last claims, declaring that “Oceanic asserts abstract operative facts – bribery, hostility, causation, and damage. It supports the abstractions with over 50 pages of trivia.”

An appeal by Oceanic is continuing.

One man who will speak about Blue is Geoff McKee, a petroleum engineer whom Blue hired to work on the Timor Gap bid. McKee remembers Blue as a charming dinner companion and a warm father to his two sons – both now in business with him – and as a genius.

“If Alkatiri had gone with Blue they [East Timor] would have an LPG plant with a pipeline to Australia up and running by now.”

McKee believes that Blue’s dogged pursuit of the lawsuit was driven in part by Alkatiri’s refusal to meet him. “He is used to powerful people taking his calls,” McKee says.

Peter Garrett’s U Sky Mining

Jim Green, Chain Reaction #107, November 2009, www.foe.org.au/chain-reaction

And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing’s as precious, as a hole in the ground
— Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining

Federal environment minister Peter Garrett justified his July 14 decision to approve in situ leach (ISL) uranium mining at Beverley Four Mile in South Australia with the claim that he had “set the bar to the highest level” and was applying “world’s best practice” environmental standards.

Thus Garrett added another chapter to the history of spin surrounding ISL mining. He has not insisted on rehabilitation of polluted groundwater at Beverley Four Mile. Moreover, he did not insist on an Environmental Impact Statement from the mining proponents but allowed a lower level of assessment, a Public Environment Report. On both counts, Garrett failed to live up to his own rhetoric.

ISL mining involves pumping an acidic solution into an aquifer, dissolving uranium and other heavy metals and pumping the solution back to the surface. After the uranium has been separated, liquid waste – containing radionuclides, heavy metals and acid – is simply dumped 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 that “mines utilising the ISL technique should be subject to strict regulation, including prohibition of discharge of radioactive liquid mine waste to groundwater”. Garrett has rejected that Senate Committee recommendation.

Geoscience Australia has been commissioned by the federal government to carry out a review of ISL mining. Its draft guidelines include consideration of alternatives to dumping liquid waste in groundwater − specifically, it mentions the option of “evaporation to solid residues and disposal on site (or at a low level radioactive waste repository)”. Garrett had the draft report from Geoscience Australia before making his decision but still chose to allow liquid waste to be dumped in groundwater.

Following the 2003 Senate inquiry, The SA Labor government commissioned a study by scientists from the CSIRO and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. The study 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.

ISL uranium mining is used at the Beverley uranium mine (10 kms from Beverley Four Mile) and it is the mining method proposed for Beverley Four Mile, Oban and Honeymoon. The future of ISL mining is plain to see − short-lived mines leaving a lasting legacy of polluted aquifers.

In addition to the pollution of groundwater, surface spills and leaks are a common feature of ISL mining. The SA Department of Primary Industry and Resources lists 59 spills at the Beverley mine from 1998-2007.

The horrendous environmental legacy of ISL mining in former Soviet and eastern European states is dismissed by ISL proponents as being a result of Soviet-era mismanagement and neglect. But the same problems are evident in Australia: captured bureaucracies; slack regulation; Orwellian doublespeak (e.g. ‘world’s best practice’); secrecy (for example, the Australian Conservation Foundation had to appeal to the SA Ombudsman to get Heathgate to release crucial information about the Beverley mine, such as the Groundwater Monitoring Summary); and questionable corporate practices (for example, Heathgate employed a private investigator in the late 1990s who attempted to infiltrate Friends of the Earth).

Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners

Garrett noted that there is an agreement between the mining proponents and the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association in relation to Beverley Four Mile. But he knows that the agreement falls a long way short of free, prior and informed consent. Traditional Owners have no right of veto under SA or federal legislation.

In a July 15 statement, Adnyamathanha Elders Enice Marsh and Geraldine Anderson called on Garrett to reverse his decision at least until the completion of an investigation being conducted by the SA government into long-standing Aboriginal heritage concerns raised by Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners.

Enice Marsh said:

“Adnyamathanha Elders wrote to [SA Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jay Weatherill] weeks ago raising our concerns, and he promised to do an investigation into the Four Mile proposal. His jobs is to make sure heritage laws are followed. If he won’t use his powers he should be sacked. …

“We have no decision making power under Native Title, we have been forced into signing a Native Title Mining Agreement that gives us royalty compensation. If we refused to sign it the proponent has the right to take the matter to the ERD [Environment, Resources and Development] Court and cut us out of the process altogether. Aboriginal people have no rights under Native Title to protect out heritage. Look at what’s already happened and how people have just given in to the pressures. …

“What more can we do to protect our land from being raped by mining companies that are allowed to pollute the water and carve up the waterways, even contaminate the soil with radioactive waste? The general public need to know what is going on and ordinary people need to take action to stop the abuse of our environment.”

In addition to their battle with state and federal governments and mining companies, some Adnyamathanha Elders are battling within their own community. They have formed an Elders Group as a separate forum from the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association. According to Enice Marsh: “There have been many attempts over the past 10 years to try and bring greater accountability to what’s happening in Native Title, and to stop the ongoing assault on our Yarta (country). Many of us have tried with very little resources, limited understanding of the legal system and environmental laws, and despite a mountain of bullying, lies and deceit from mining companies, lawyers, and self-inflated thugs in our own community who dare to call themselves ‘leaders’.”

Even those Adnyamathanha custodians who supported the agreement to mine Beverley Four Mile seem unimpressed with the process. Vince Coulthard, chair of the Adnyamathanha Traditional Land Association, told ABC radio on July 17: “Well I think people have come to the understanding that if they didn’t support it, it’s going to happen in any case so the best thing to do is to negotiate an agreement.”

Traditional Owner Geraldine Anderson said: “This Labor Government is saying sorry to the Stolen Generation, on the other hand they’re taking the way of destroying our sites and taking our identity away. So when’s this going to stop?”

If and when the abuse stops, it will be despite and not because of Peter Garrett. Presumably Garrett is prepared to sell out on long-held principles in the pursuit of broader political goals. He ought to have asked Adnyamathanha custodians if they are willing to be sacrificed in the pursuit of his goals and ambitions.

Military links

The Four Mile lease is owned by Quasar Resources (an affiliate of Heathgate Resources) and Alliance Craton Explorer, and the mine will be operated by Heathgate Resources (an affiliate of US weapons and nuclear energy corporation General Atomics).

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on July 16 that James Neal Blue, a “colourful but reclusive billionaire”, is a director of Quasar Resources and chair of General Atomics. Blue first came to prominence in the 1980s as a self-described “enthusiastic supporter” of US involvement in the covert war against the Nicaraguan government.

The Beverley Four Mile deposit is estimated at 30,000 tonnes of uranium. Used in power reactors, that amount of uranium would produce 4,500 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (in the form of spent nuclear fuel) and enough plutonium to build 4,500 nuclear weapons.

The major customer for the uranium is likely to be the US, a nuclear weapons state which has no intention of fulfilling its binding disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and which has for many years blocked progress on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the proposed Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.

Jim Green is the national nuclear campaign with Friends of the Earth, Australia.

The successful campaign against nuclear dumping in SA

Howard’s nuclear dump backdown

On July 14, 2004, the federal government announced that it had abandoned plans to build a national radioactive waste dump in South Australia. The backdown was a major victory for the environmental and Aboriginal organisations which fought the dump plan for over six years.

The government announced its intention to build the dump near Woomera, 500 kms north of Adelaide, in February 1998 – just a few months after it announced its intention to build a new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney. The two plans were closely linked. Up to 90% of the waste to be dumped in SA is stored at Lucas Heights. And the political agenda was simply to get radioactive waste out of Lucas Heights in order to reduce public opposition to the new reactor.

A campaign to oppose the dump took shape. The Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – a senior Aboriginal women’s council from northern SA – took up the fight, as did the Kokatha traditional owners. The Kungkas – victims of the British nuclear testing program at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s – have been supported by the GANG (Girls Against Nuclear Genocide) who have moved to Coober Pedy to help fight the proposed nuclear dump.

The Kungka Tjuta recounted time and again their experiences of the Maralinga nuclear test program in South Australia in the 1950s. They knew first hand about the problems of the nuclear industry and pleaded with the politicians to ‘get their ears out of their pockets’.

The Maralinga experience also influenced the dump campaign in another way. The federal government completed a ‘clean-up’ of Maralinga in the late 1990s, but it was grossly inadequate. Even after the ‘clean-up’, kilograms of plutonium remain buried in shallow, unlined trenches in totally unsuitable geology. The botched ‘clean-up’ was hardly reassuring.

The federal government planned to build two facilities at Woomera – an underground dump for lower-level waste, and an above-ground store for ‘interim’ storage of higher-level wastes including those arising from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods from the Lucas Heights reactor. As public and media opposition to the dump plans grew, the Olsen Liberal government in SA sniffed the political wind and announced in 1999 that it would accept the underground dump but would legislate in an attempt to ban the higher-level waste store. The Labor Party – state and federal – trumped them by announcing opposition to both the dump and the store.

Several environment groups have fought the dump plan since it was first announced, including Friends of the Earth and the Australian Conservation Foundation. Opposition to the dump grew along the transport corridor linking Lucas Heights to Woomera, in no small part because of Friends of the Earth’s Nuclear Freeways project. On numerous occasions FoE activists took a mock nuclear waste castor along the transport corridor, building relations with communities all the time. This project was highly successful. Of the 18 councils along the transport corridor, 16 took a position of opposing the dump and the trucking of radioactive waste through their communities. FoE also organised numerous ‘radioactive exposure’ tours, taking hundreds of students to nuclear sites in SA – the proposed dump site and the uranium mines at Honeymoon, Beverley and Roxby Downs.

The Nuclear Freeways project was also significant in linking the dump proposal to the root of the problem – the planned new reactor at Lucas Heights. While the federal government mounted scare campaigns about waste stored in urban areas, it became increasingly well known that the dump plan had nothing to do with the small volumes of waste stored around the country and the everything to do with Lucas Heights. The NSW government was persuaded to hold a parliamentary inquiry into radioactive waste management in 2003-04, and that inquiry concluded that the dump proposal could not be justified and should be abandoned.

The Labor Party won the 2002 election in SA, and in the following year it legislated in an attempt to ban any form of national radioactive waste facility being built in SA.

The SA Labor government also tried a legal manoeuvre to stop the dump in 2003 – announcing its intention to declare the dump site a public park, which would make it immune from compulsory acquisition by the federal government. That led the federal government to use an urgency provision in the land acquisition act to seize control of the dump site with the stroke of a pen in mid-2003. The SA Labor government challenged the land seizure in the federal court, but lost. The SA government appealed the judgement to the full bench of the Federal Court, and that appeal was upheld in June 2004 – reversing the land seizure.

By July 2004, the Howard government was in trouble. It had the option of appealing the Federal Court decision to the High Court, but that appeal would have been deeply unpopular and it probably would not have succeeded in any case. And already, the dump was shaping up as a key issue in marginal seats in SA. For example, in the marginal seat of Adelaide, polling showed that the dump was second only to Medicare as a vote-swinging issue.

The Howard government decided to cut its losses and abandon the dump plan. The government said it would instead attempt to find a site to co-locate both lower and higher level wastes.

The victory of the dump campaign is something to savour – a fantastic result reflecting an enormous amount of hard work by a broad, effective alliance.

The Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta’s ‘Irati Wanti’ website is archived at

http://web.archive.org/web/20080718193150/www.iratiwanti.org/home.php3

and the Kungka’s victory message is posted below and at

http://web.archive.org/web/20050614071014/http://www.iratiwanti.org/iratiwanti.php3?page=news&id=244

================================================

‘We are winners because of what’s in our hearts, not what’s on paper.’

Open Letter from the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – senior Aboriginal women’s council from northern SA – after the Federal Government abandoned its plan to build a national radioactive waste dump in South Australia.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050614071014/http://www.iratiwanti.org/iratiwanti.php3?page=news&id=244

August 2004

People said that you can’t win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. Government has big money to buy their way out but we never gave up. We told Howard you should look after us, not try and kill us. Straight out. We always talk straight out. In the end he didn’t have the power, we did. He only had money, but money doesn’t win.

Happy now – Kungka winners. We are winners because of what’s in our hearts, not what’s on paper. About the country, bush tucker, bush medicine and Inma (traditional songs and dances). Big happiness that we won against the Government. Victorious. And the family and all the grandchildren are so happy because we fought the whole way. And we were going away all the time. Kids growing up, babies have been born since we started. And still we have family coming. All learning about our fight.

We started talking strong against the dump a long time ago, in 1998 with Sister Michelle. We thought we would get the Greenies to help us. Greenies care for the same thing. Fight for the same thing. Against the poison.

Since then we been everywhere talking about the poison. Canberra, Sydney, Lucas Heights, Melbourne, Adelaide, Silverton, Port Augusta, Roxby Downs, Lake Eyre. We did it the hard way. Always camping out in the cold. Travelling all over with no money. Just enough for cool drink along the way. We went through it. Survivors. Even had an accident where we hit a bullock one night on the way to Roxby Downs. We even went to Lucas Heights Reactor. It’s a dangerous place, but we went in boldly to see where they were making the poison – the radiation. Seven women, seven sisters, we went in.

We lost our friends. Never mind we lost our loved ones. We never give up. Been through too much. Too much hard business and still keep going. Sorry business all the time. Fought through every hard thing along the way. People trying to scare us from fighting, it was hard work, but we never stopped. When we were going to Sydney people say “You Kungkas cranky they might bomb you”, but we kept going. People were telling us that the Whitefellas were pushing us, but no everything was coming from the heart, from us.

We showed that Greenies and Anangu can work together. Greenies could come and live here in Coober Pedy and work together to stop the dump. Kungkas showed the Greenies about the country and the culture. Our Greenie girls are the best in Australia. We give them all the love from our hearts. Family you know. Working together – that’s family. Big thank you to them especially. We can’t write. They help us with the letters, the writing, the computers, helped tell the world.

Thank you very much for helping us over the years, for everything. Thank you to the Lord, all our family and friends, the Coober Pedy community, Umoona Aged Care, the South Australian Government and all our friends around Australia and overseas. You helped us and you helped the kids. We are happy. We can have a break now. We want to have a rest and go on with other things now. Sit around the campfire and have a yarn. We don’t have to talk about the dump anymore, and get up and go all the time. Now we can go out together and camp out and pick bush medicine and bush tucker. And take the grandchildren out.

We were crying for the little ones and the ones still coming. With all the help – we won. Thank you all very much.

No Radioactive Waste Dump in our Ngura – In our Country!

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta

Ivy Makinti Stewart

Eileen Kampakuta Brown

Eileen Unkari Crombie

Emily Munyungka Austin

Angelina Wonga

Tjunmutja Myra Watson

Coober Pedy, South Australia

Nuclear disarmament report masks a hidden agenda

MEDIA RELEASE – 15 DECEMBER 2009
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH, AUSTRALIA

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT REPORT MASKS A HIDDEN AGENDA

Friends of the Earth today questioned the credibility of the Australian-led International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which has today released its first report, ‘Eliminating Nuclear Threats’.

Friends of the Earth’s national nuclear campaigner Dr Jim Green said: “The report makes repeated reference to the three S’s – safeguards, security and safety. It makes no reference to the dollar signs that constitute a hidden agenda to the Commission’s work including avoiding making any recommendations which would in any way jeopardise the Australian uranium export industry – an industry which accounts for a paltry one-third of one percent of Australia’s export revenue. The report trivialises the proliferation risks associated with nuclear power programs even though daily news coverage of the programs in Iran and North Korea provide a constant reminder of the risks.

“Co-chaired by Australian Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi from Japan, the Commission is silent about Japan’s grossly irresponsible stockpiling of plutonium, the regional tensions arising from Japan’s plutonium program, and Australia’s complicity in Japan’s plutonium stockpiling.

“The report advocates new technologies ‘to avoid current forms of reprocessing altogether’ – so why not take immediate steps to reduce the risks of reprocessing and plutonium stockpiling rather than awaiting the development of new technologies? Kevin Rudd could announce tomorrow that he will no longer allow reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel produced from Australian uranium. Instead he waffles on about the fracturing of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime while doing nothing to address the problems.

“The ICNND got off to a bad start by giving the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) an advisory role. ASNO has a long track record of dishonest and unprofessional behaviour. Last year, ASNO misled the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties with false claims that safeguards would ensure peaceful use of Australian uranium in Russia – even though there hasn’t been a single IAEA inspection in Russia since 2001. Other ASNO lies include its claims that nuclear power does not present a weapons proliferation risk, that Australia sells uranium only to countries with ‘impeccable’ non-proliferation credentials, and that all Australian uranium is ‘fully accounted for’.

“If the Commission was serious about non-proliferation and disarmament, it would have recommended that:

* Australia and Japan both immediately renounce their reliance on the ‘extended deterrence’ of the US nuclear weapons ‘umbrella’ and take practical steps commensurate with that policy shift, e.g. prohibiting visits of US nuclear warships.

* Uranium exports should be prohibited to: countries in breach of their NPT disarmament obligations, including the five ‘declared’ weapons states; non-NPT countries including India; countries blocking progress on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty; and countries stockpiling plutonium, including Japan.

Dr Green concluded: “The Commission should have taken heed of the statements of physicist Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this year. Gilinsky said: ‘We should support as much nuclear power as is consistent with international security; not as much security as the spread of nuclear power will allow.'”

Contact: Jim Green 0417 318368

Uranium Miners Turning Water Into Liquid Waste

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.

Michels Warren and Nuclear Waste Dumping in SA

Michels
Warren PRopaganda

Introduction

June
2004 marks the fifth anniversary of PR company Michel Warren’s involvement in
the federal government’s plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump in
South Australia. A great deal of information is now available about the role of
Michels Warren in this controversy thanks to documents released under Freedom
of Information (FoI) legislation.

Parts
of the FoI material were discussed in a media release from the SA environment
minister John Hill on May 5, 2004 (included below), but a closer reading of the
FoI documents reveals much else of interest – including proof that federal
science minister Peter McGauran has misled the Parliament.

Misleading
statements by the federal government

While
this paper focusses on the role of Michels Warren, it should be noted that the
FoI material reveals evidence of the federal government misleading the Parliament
and the public.

The
FoI material reveals that the dump could be 25 times larger than the government
has ever publicly acknowledged. A February 10, 2000 email from a senior
government official, Rosemary Marcon, says that the “actual disposal area is a
500mx500m” (250,000 square metres) and she repeats that statement in a March
22, 2000 email. Yet public statements from the government refer to a 100mx100m
disposal area – 10,000 square metres (e.g. Environmental Impact Statement,
p.11.) Had the reference to a much larger dump been made once, and/or had it
been made by a junior official, it might be passed over as an error. But the
statement is made twice, and it is made by a senior government official.

In
response to a Question on Notice, federal science minister Peter McGauran
asserted unequivocally that departmental officers had not developed a list of
‘experts’ to make public comments in support of the proposed nuclear waste
dump. (Senate Hansard, October 27, 2003, p.16471, Question No. 2134, full text
copied below.) However, the FoI material makes it clear that such a list was
indeed developed. A July 6, 2000 email from Caroline Perkins, a senior
government official, lists four “technical experts … who have agreed to
assisting us in general”, though their names are blanked out. McGauran’s
unequivocal assertion that departmental officers had not developed a list of
‘experts’ to comment on the dump was clearly false – and he was clearly
misleading the Parliament and the public.

A
2002 government document released under FoI legislation (and previously
leaked), titled “Communication Strategy for the National Radioactive Waste
Repository Project”, states that: “An Adelaide based communications consultant,
Michels Warren, has been subcontracted … to assist with the development,
implementation and refinement of this strategy which has entailed the
following: … enlistment of a scientific liaison officer and other willing
experts”.

A
2003 document written by Michels Warren discusses plans to organise eminent
Australians and members of South Australian medical and science community to
participate in the ‘communications’ program. Michels Warren states: “This would
involve a concerted program of letters to the editor of The Advertiser and
responding and participating on talk radio programs.”

The
government and Michels Warren seem to have struggled to find “willing experts”.
For example, Mike Duggan from Michels Warren said in a July 6, 2000 email that
it would be a “great idea” to gather experts for a media conference, “if
possible at one of the universities or hospitals where waste is held”, in
support of the dump – but no such media conference eventuated.

Those
‘experts’ that have been enlisted have been error-prone. For example, the FoI
material contains a summary of a May 2000 radio interview with Dr Leon Mitchell
of Flinders University, who falsely claimed the dump would be lined with an
impermeable layer to isolate it from the underlying earth (the dump trenches
will be unlined). Mitchells also said the dump was for things such as watch
dials not nuclear power plants and reactors. In fact, dismantled nuclear
reactor components will be sent to the dump (if it proceeds), and that reactor
waste will amount to up to 5,000 cubic metres, which is greater than the entire
existing stockpile of 3,700 cubic metres of waste destined for the dump.
Michels Warren was involved in organising radio interviews with Mitchell, the
FoI material reveals. Other enlisted ‘experts’ have falsely claimed that the
dump is only for low-level waste, and one ‘expert’ even claimed that the waste
would not be buried!

McGauran
misled Parliament on another point. He asserted unequivocally in a response to
a Question on Notice that no ‘experts’ were provided with media training by
consultants to the department. The FoI material reveals that McGauran’s claim
was false. On July 12, 2000, Michels Warren charged the government $240 to
provide a written briefing to one of the enlisted ‘experts’, Dr. Gerald
Laurence, in preparation for media interviews. On July 7, 2000, Michels Warren
briefed another enlisted ‘expert’, Dr. John Patterson, for a radio interview.
Then on July 12-13, 2000, Michels Warren billed the federal government $800 for
media training with the government’s scientific liaison officer on the dump
project, Dr. Keith Lokan.

Why
Michels Warren would be conducting briefings about the dump is anyone’s guess.
The FoI material is replete with factual errors. For example, a draft letter to
a newspaper, states: “Unequivocally, it [the dump] will only ever contain
low-level waste.” Yet the dump will take both low- and intermediate-level
waste, including (according to the EIS, pp.45-46) long-lived intermediate-level
waste. The draft letter also states that “Australia produces no high-level waste
…” Yet the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, operator
of the reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney, acknowledges that its spent nuclear
fuel meets the heat and radiological criteria for classification as high-level
waste, and the New South Wales Environment Protection Agency has also
acknowledged that the Lucas Heights reactor generates high-level waste.

The
context for the “willing experts” strategy is made clear in the FoI documents.
Market research by the McGregor Tan company revealed: “A knee-jerk negative
reaction to sighting the Commonwealth crest – it is interpreted as the symbol
accompanying government propaganda.” The market research also revealed:
“Cynical responses to government promises and attempts at reassurance.” And McGregor
Tan found that: “Ministers’ statements are rarely believed, regardless of the
individual Minister’s honourable intentions.”

Michels
Warren’s nuclear dump PRopaganda

Michels
Warren has been involved in the following campaigns (among others): a controversy
over cadmium at West Lakes, Bridgestone tyres, bacteria in fast food, SA Water
contamination, ETSA Utilities, the SA Freemasons, Telstra, WMC Ltd., and
campaigns on behalf of the corporate owners of the Beverley and Honeymoon
uranium mines in South Australia.

Michels
Warren has been involved in the nuclear dump campaign since June 1999. Its
involvement has consisted of several discrete contracts rather than an ongoing
involvement. A July 8, 1999 letter from Stephen Middleton from Michels Warren
states that the company is “delighted to be part of the project” and has “hit
the ground running” since it started on the project in the previous month.
Michels Warren has maintained its enthusiasm. A 2003 document – a tender
seeking involvement in the federal government’s covert plan to seize control of
land for the dump site – states that: “We are available 24-hours-a-day,
seven-days-a-week to provide our support to the Minister and this project.”

A
September 27, 2000 email written by Stephen Middleton from Michels Warren talks
about the need to “soften up the community” and “sell” the repository: “We will
lose ground once again unless we can soften up the community on the need for
the repository and the reasons why SA has been identified as the best location.
The prospect of the Minister announcing the preferred site before we can get to
the community with something that explains what it all means makes my head
spin. The wider research into issues such as Lucas Heights, uranium mining, the
nuclear fuel cycle etc etc can be tackled as a separate issue. It should not
hold up anything we are doing in terms of selling the repository to South
Australians. The rest of the country probably doesn’t care less about the
repository, but it is a big issue in SA. Further delays could be potentially
disastrous.”

Why
on earth is a South Australian company willingly involving itself in the
federal government’s nuclear dump plans? After all, Michels Warren itself
acknowledges that the dump is an unwanted imposition on SA. A 2003 Michels
Warren document released under FoI legislation states:

“The
National Repository could never be sold as “good news” to South Australians.
There are few, if any, tangible benefits such as jobs, investment or improved
infrastructure. Its merits to South Australians, at the most, are intangible
and the range and complexity of issues make them difficult to communicate.”

So
why is Michels Warren dumping on its home state? Money, of course. The federal
government has acknowledged making the following payments to Michels Warren (in
response to a Question on Notice from Senator Bob Brown – copied in full
below):

*
$359,000 in financial years 2000-01, 2001-02, 2002-03 (Senate Hansard, October
27, 2003, p.16471 – copied in full below).

*
in 2003, Michels Warren and the federal government signed a $107,000 contract
for work connected to the government’s compulsory seizure of land for the dump.
At least $26,000 of that amount was paid (and quite possibly the entire
$107,000).

*
undisclosed payments to Michels Warren in 1999-2000.

The
1999-2000 payments amount to at least $102,000 up to May 31, 2000, according to
a document included in the FoI material (Progress Payment Certificate, Number
12, August 24, 2000).

So
in total, Michels Warren has been paid at least $487,000 to dump on SA … and
possibly much more.

Michels
Warren staff have been paid at rates up to $192.50 per hour (GST inclusive) for
their work on the nuclear dump campaign.

The
detailed breakdowns of payments to Michels Warren raise further concerns about
whether tax-payers are getting value for money. For example:

*
$160 to draft a letter to editor of Mt Barker Times

*
$894 for Michels Warren employees to attend a public meeting organised by the
Australian Conservation Foundation and for preparatory and debriefing work
surrounding the meeting (a full house at the Adelaide Town Hall, with
approximately 1000 people attending).

*
$225 to draft a letter to a constituent.

*
$240 to schedule talk-back radio interviews.

Michels
Warren is not the only company in receipt of government funding for PR and
research in relation to the nuclear waste dump, e.g.

*
$61,369 paid to Worthington Di Marzio in 2003 for market research. (Senate
Hansard, October 29, 2003, pp.16681-2, Question No. 2139.)

*
$72,000 paid to Hill & Knowlton in 2002-03. (Senate Hansard, October 27,
2003, p.16471, Question No. 2136.) Hill & Knowlton is well known for its
involvement in the imaginative ‘babies in the incubator’ fiasco in Iraq in
1990-91, and for its work with tobacco companies, Enron, etc.

Monitoring
protesters

An
August 16, 2000 “high priority” email reveals that Caroline Perkins, a senior
official in the Department of Industry, Science and Resources – at that time
under the direction of Senator Nick Minchin – was asked to compile information
on protesters. "[T[he minister wants a short biography of our main
opponents in the Ivy campaign by about 11am our time (pre-rally)”, the email
said. The rest of the email is blacked out under FoI provisions. The email refers
to a Michels Warren employee – no doubt Michels Warren helped compile the
biographies.

In
1999 Michels Warren was working hard “obviating the impact of campaigns by
opponents and the ‘I’m With Ivy Campaign’ run by Ch 7.”

The
Michels Warren worksheet for February 2000 includes the following: “Liaise
investigator re green planning. Liaise R Yeeles [from WMC Ltd.] re updated
intelligence.” Was Michels Warren employing a private investigator as that
comment suggests?

And
on March 28, 2000, $150 for activities concerned with a “Protest at South
Australian Parliament”, and $160 four days earlier to “Liaise WMC, Police and
media re weekend protests.”

And
in April 2000: “check re new protest activities”, “liaise SA Police re same”,
“internet search re protests”, and “update intelligence re OHMS Not Boms
protest group”.

In
March 2000, Rosemary Marcon, a government official, asked Michels Warren for
the details of  an “activist website
which we should monitor”. She was advised by Michels Warren that the site is
<www.lockon.org>. Evidently that piece of ‘intelligence’ was off-beam –
the website advertises streaming live shows from nude male dancers in Montreal!

The
FoI documentation is frequently contemptuous of opponents of the planned
nuclear waste dump (about 80% of the South Australian population). The option
of displaying the Environmental Impact Statement in the Conservation Centre of
South Australia is treated as a joke. Opponents of the dump are described as
“anti-nuclear anarchists”. Michels Warren co-founder Daryl Warren refers in a
July 14, 2003 email to protests and “demons”. On July 10, 2003, Warren stated
that: “It has become apparent during the week that people seem to have lost the
plot on the repository as it becomes embroiled in a political fight.”

In
response to an invitation to the federal science minister to attend a
conference at Adelaide University in March 2000, Michel’s Warren employee
Stephen Middleton recommends against attending the conference. Middleton wrote:
“The better option is to:

(i)
dismiss the gathering as nothing more than a stunt

(ii)
attempt to discredit it with counter media measures before, during and after.”

Doctoring
photos

The
FoI material suggests that photographs have been doctored to suit the
government’s ends. A February 14, 2000 email from a senior government official
to Michels Warren’s graphic designer refers to a photo “with the sandhills
removed.” The rationale was explained in a December 13, 1999 email by the same
government official: “Dunes are a sensitive area with respect to Aboriginal
Heritage.”

The
February, 2000 email also asked: “Can the horizon be straightened up as well.”

Scare
campaign

A
recurring theme in the exchanges between the federal government and Michels
Warren is the attempt to justify the dump by mounting a scare-campaign in
relation to existing storage facilities. Yet they get their lines muddled up.
One document released under FoI includes that statement that “none” of the
waste “is stored satisfactorily” in existing stores. That is in direct
contradiction to a June 2000 document document under Senator Nick Minchin’s
name (“Radioactive waste: the eight biggest myths”), which states: “The safety
of the storage of radioactive waste is proven by the fact that there are fifty
stores around Australia housing radioactive waste and there has never been an
accident exposing a person to unsafe levels of radiation.”

And
in a May 17, 2000 media release, Minchin said: "South Australians have
nothing to fear from radioactive waste. The fact is that waste is already
stored in downtown Adelaide in complete safety." Anyone claiming otherwise
was merely trying to "whip up anti-radioactive waste hysteria",
Minchin claimed. So by his logic, Michels Warren and the federal government
itself are guilty of trying to whip up hysteria.

1" height=

WMC was not financially penalised for it’s failure to prevent escape of the contaminated water.

Due to the immense public outrage that such a breach of public
trust could happen, a major parliamentary inquiry was setup to
investigate the cause of the problem, possible solutions, and comment
on ‘the
desirability of the Department of Mines and Energy having prime
responsibility for environmental matters in relation to mining
operations’.

Overall Conclusions

  • credit for calling attention to the leak was due to Dr Phil Crouch of the SA Health Commission.
  • WMC and the Dept. of Mines & Energy and the Dept. of
    Environment were reluctant to acknowledge that there was a leak.
    Acknowledgement eventually occurred in May 1993.
  • By August 1993 an initial estimate had been made of the magnitude of the leak.
  • Government departments and WMC discussed the drafting of a press release in November 1993.

    • In view of the above, the Minister for Mines &
    Energy, Mr Blevins, should have known about the seriousness of the
    problem at Olympic Dam before the State elections in December 1993. The
    fact that a public announcement was not made until February 1994 is a
    damning indictment of the Labour and Liberal governments and of the
    Dept. of Mines & Energy.

    The inquiry into the leak at Olympic Dam clearly shows that even
    experienced mining companies like WMC still cannot properly manage
    their dangerous wastes.

    The leak at Olympic Dam was not an isolated event. According to
    WMC’s Annual Environmental Progress Reports (1994-95 and 1996) there
    were at least two other cases of leaks at WMC operations in Western
    Australia, and negligent mismanagement of their Yeelirrie trial uranium
    mine :

  • Groundwater monitoring at the Baldivis nickel residue storage
    facility indicated that ammonium sulphate has leaked into the
    groundwater adjacent to Lake Cooloongup.
  • At the St. Ives gold mine at Kambalda, water from a TSF is seeping into the local aquifer causing a rise in the groundwater.
  • The Yeelirrie trial mine, abandoned in 1983 when the ALP Three
    Mines Policy was introduced, had been left without adequate fencing and
    signs for more than 10 years. Drums of uranium were left exposed, used
    for road building and the open pit dam, with high levels of radiation
    and salts, open to the public for swimming (see the Yeelirrie page for more info).

    • There was no substantive, quantifiable, accountable response of the SA
    Government to the failure of the Tailings Retention System (TRS) at
    Olympic Dam.

    In the "bad old days" many embarrassing pollutants were
    disposed of by tanks and dams that "leaked". The cases of Roxby,
    Baldivis and St Ives suggest that we have progressed from leakage to
    seepage, but the result is much the same.

    More regulatory power may be given to the EPA and the Health
    Commission but the recommendations from the leakage inquiry call for too little too late.

    Principal Findings and Recommendations of Note

    Below are excerpts from the Nineteenth report of the Environment, Resources and Development Committee of the Parliament of South Australia, released April 24, 1996, titled "Roxby Downs Water Leakage".

    page 49 :
    The Committee finds that the final design of the Olympic Dam
    tailings retention system was deficient in that there was only one
    storage area and no decant of tailings liquor was provided.

    The Committee also finds that the decision remove the coarse
    fraction from the tailings exacerbated these design deficiencies and
    made management of the system more difficult.

    page 49 :
    The Committee agrees that the concept of unlined evaporation ponds
    was a deficiency in the final design of the Olympic Dam tailings
    retention system.

    Comment :
    This, the first major finding of the committee, sets an unfortunate precedent – it got it’s terminology wrong, and thereby set the stage for confusion, a result which can be attributed to WMC.

    The above statement was actually referring to Tailings Storage Facility
    (TSF), which is only one element of the Tailings Retention System
    (TRS), the other elements include the Mine Water Evaporation Pond
    (MWEP) and Wash Water Evaporation Ponds (EP). The confusion can be
    traced to the WMC submissions and WMC literature which defines the TSF
    as being "Holding areas for tailings, sometimes referred to as a
    Tailings Retention System".

    What the finding refers to is that by not dividing the TSF into
    a number of cells so that the tailings could be rotated from one to
    another, and by not having a mechanism for drawing off excess liquid
    into a sealed evaporation pond, the tailings could not dry out
    sufficiently to provide a seal to the otherwise unsealed TSF.

    The above finding amounts to a condemnation not only of WMC and
    the SA Department of Mines & Energy, which approved of the changes,
    but of the environmental impact assessment process. After going through
    the motions of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), receiving
    submissions, and modifying it’s proposal, the operators were allowed to
    radically modify the design of the TSF, without public consultation,
    subject to the approval of the Department of Mines & Energy in
    consultation with the Health Commission and the Department of
    Environment & Planning.

    page 54 :
    While being satisfied that the approvals process
    was handled conscientiously and competently by the agencies
    involved…….the Committee is concerned that potentially valuable
    public comment or comment by disinterested experts was not available to
    the then joint venturers.

    Such comment may conceivably have alerted agencies or the joint
    venturers to the deficiencies in design…….and may also have helped
    to reduce some of the problems experienced with operation of the
    system.

    Comment :
    Thus the committee acknowledges this deficiency in the approvals process. It then goes on to recommend the following :

    page 132 :
    Recommendation 13
    The Committee
    recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy reviews any statutory
    and practical impediments to the free flow of information about the
    environmental impact of Olympic Dam operations with a view to ensuring
    that all relevant information is freely available to interested members
    of the public.

    Comment :
    Indeed Recommendation 14 (below) states the need for more public scrutiny, but even here it is only for "information exchange" and not measures designed to improve assessment of environmental performance at Olympic Dam.

    As long as the Dept. of Mines & Energy (now Mines & Energy South Australia, "MESA") maintains the environmental regulator of the mine it has a clear and unequivocal conflict of interest. It is both the promoter and regulator of mining – two very opposing roles.

    This is contrary to the widely accepted practice of keeping industry and regulators at arms length as far as possible.

    Not only was the TSF radically modified but the modifications were such
    that they were clearly contrary to the design concept which formed the
    basis of the original proposal and it should have been apparent to the
    most junior mining engineer that the redesigned TSF would leak
    profusely. Both the joint venturers and the Dept. of Mines & Energy
    were clearly at fault in permitting such a TSF to be built.

    The fact that it was not the Dept. of Mines & Energy which
    raised the alarm, but Dr Crouch of the Health Commission, and the
    absence of any attempt until then, to carry out a mass balance is an
    indictment of the Dept. of Mines & Energy.

    Despite clear evidence that the Dept. of Mines & Energy is
    not the appropriate department to monitor environmental issues the
    committee made the following two recommendations :

    page 55 :
    Recommendation 4
    The Committee
    recommends that requests for approval for future developments at
    Olympic Dam beyond those considered in the course of the recent public
    Environmental Review should be made in a similarly public manner.

    Recommendation 5
    The Committee
    recommends that, as with the recent Olympic Dam Environmental Review,
    future reviews should be carried out in accordance with guidelines
    issued by the Minister for Mines and Energy which should be developed
    by the Minister following consultation with relevant agencies.

    Comment :
    Environmental Reviews and regulations should be set by the Environment
    Protection Authority in consultation with community, environmental and
    interested groups, not by an agency with a mission to promote mining.
    As pointed out above, this is a clear conflict of interest.

    The Dept. of Environment and Planning was presumably considered to be
    either incompetent or too radical to be trusted with environmental
    management. The Committee, however, seems to recognise the potential
    conflict of interest with Recommendation 15 :

    page 136 :
    Recommendation 15
    The Committee
    recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy and the Minister of
    Environment and Natural Resources consult with the Olympic Dam
    operators and relevant government agencies with a view to establishing
    a system of periodic, independent, external, environmental audit
    arrangements in relation to Olympic Dam operations.

    Comment :
    The Roxby Indenture Act prevents such a process and until the Act is
    revoked entirely there can be no truly independent, external
    environmental assessment of the impacts of Olympic Dam.

    page 63 :
    The Committee finds that there were deficiencies in the monitoring and reporting systems in place at Olympic Dam….

    Comment :
    This finding is an understatement. The inadequacy of the
    monitoring and it’s regulation were pitiful. Despite constant problems
    with surface water entering boreholes, as late as November 1992, the
    operators had still not secured all bore holes against contamination by
    surface waters.

    page 73 :
    The Committee finds that the Olympic Dam tailings retention system
    did not receive the degree of informed supervision of its various
    components it required to operate efficiently as designed and that this
    inadequate supervision by the operators of the tailings retention
    system, particularly the system as extended in 1991, contributed to the
    massive leakage from it.

    Comment :
    This understatement stops short of accusing the operators of negligence.

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that, although admitting difficulties of
    interpretation, the operators were reluctant to accept that a leakage
    from the tailings retention system was occurring, despite mounting
    evidence to that effect.

    Comment :
    One disturbing aspect of this denial was the claim by WMC that a
    localized leak was not a breach of the restricted release zone (RRZ)
    because the zone extends underground indefinitely! WMC argued that as
    no lower boundary had been defined, and the leakage went straight down,
    there was no breach of the zone, and in any event the leakage would be
    returned to the mine.

    WMC also tried to deny the deficiencies in the design and operation of the TSF :

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that, confident of the benign impact of any
    seepage, the operators were reluctant to admit deficiencies in the
    design and difficulties with the operation of the tailings retention
    system which were contributing to the leakage from it and that this
    reluctance coloured their reporting of operations at Olympic Dam and
    delayed measures necessary to understand the leakage and reduce its
    impact.

    Comment :
    This recommendation refers to the fact that the operators relied on
    laboratory studies to support their contention that any leakage would
    be blocked by the underlying limestone. This ignores defects in the
    limestone structure and advice from mining consultants.

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that it was only when the leakage was too big to
    ignore or to explain away and only in response to hard prompting from
    regulatory agencies that ad hoc operational changes were converted into
    radical remedial action to alter the original defective design concept.

    Comment :
    When this "radical remedial action" was finally taken, the agency which
    did the prompting was not, as one might have expected, the Dept. of
    Environment or the Dept. of Mines & Energy, but the Health
    Commission, especially Dr Phil Crouch. The Dept. of Mines & Energy
    was as reluctant as the operators to accept the obvious. Basic measures
    like doing a mass balance, ie., comparing the liquid put into the TRS
    with the amount lost by evaporation, were not even attempted until
    mid-1993.

    The report then goes on to make a few more findings and proceeds to a gigantic leap of faith concerning the harmful effects :

    page 87 :
    The Committee finds that the monitoring systems designed in part to
    detect leakage from the Olympic Dam tailings retention system were
    defective….

    page 95 :
    The Committee finds that the leakage is not attributable to any
    single cause and that, although it does not come from any single
    source, the minewater evaporation pond has made a significant
    contribution to the amount of leaked liquid.

    page 108 :
    The Committee finds that, on the basis of current evidence, there
    have been no harmful effects to employees, the local community or the
    environment arising out of the leakage from the tailings retention
    system at Olympic Dam and that it is highly unlikely that any such
    harmful effects will emerge in the future.

    Comment :
    Despite recognising a "lack of knowledge about what has happened to the
    leaked liquor under Olympic Dam" and that "more scientific studies are
    obviously necessary", the report confidently asserts that there has
    been no harmful effects to date and any such effects are "highly
    unlikely" to emerge in the future.

    Such polarized findings can hardly be an oversight. Bearing in mind
    that the mine is expected to have a life of more than 100 years and
    that many of the radioactive contaminants in the ground under the TRS
    will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, it is very hard
    to see where the Committee finds it’s confidence.

    page 123 :
    As in its Sellicks Hill Quarry Cave report,
    having looked at some of the mistakes of the past, the Committee is
    anxious to look positively to the future and to make recommendations
    which will prevent their reoccurence and increase public confidence in
    the operations.

    Comment :
    Thus it becomes clear that the Committee is not
    intending to seriously question Olympic Dam’s competence in properly
    managing it’s own operations, the Inquiry is merely an exercise in
    public relations.

    page 126 :
    Recommendation 11
    The Committee recommends that the operators be encouraged to continue
    their commitment to improving their environmental management of Olympic
    Dam operations and that government agencies commit themselves to
    establishing environmental goals and overseeing their attainment while
    leaving the prime responsibility for day to day environmental
    management to the operators.

    Comment :
    In one sentence the Committee is openly critical of the recalcitrant
    behaviour which Olympic Dam displayed in their concern over the
    seepage, that the tailings retention system did not get the degree of
    professional supervision such a system unequivocally demands, and yet
    they are still allowed responsibility for their own environmental
    management despite proven gross incompetence ? This is clearly
    unacceptable.

    page 131 :
    However, with the company, the Committee sees considerable benefits in
    the Olympic Dam operations being more ‘open to public scrutiny’.

    Comment :
    The Roxby Indenture Act provides a secure channel
    between the company and the government in order to fast-track approvals
    and permits and thereby avoid rigorous public scrutiny. If "being more
    open to public scrutiny" is going to achieve anything, it would have to
    involve the removal of the Roxby Indenture Act. So far this is not
    being considered at all.

    page 132 :
    Recommendation 14
    The Committee recommends that the Minister for Mines and Energy consult
    with the Olympic Dam operators, other relevant state and Commonwealth
    agencies and other interested bodies with a view to providing a forum
    for information exchange and policy consultation among groups on the
    effect of operations at Olympic Dam on the environment.

    Comment :
    The Federal Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, has released a
    press statement saying that such a forum is currently being planned. As
    noted above, the recommendation is for "information exchange" and not a
    two way dialogue as it is being marketed as. It remains to be seen that
    even if such a form were established whether it would be anything more
    than a sleek public relations campaign.

    page 136 :
    The Committee finds that although there is a separate, fully
    professional environment group within the Department of Mines and
    Energy committed to a high standard of environmental management, this
    does not overcome the public’s perceived lack of objectivity of the
    regulatory process currently in place in relation to the Olympic Dam
    operations.

    Comment :
    Until the Roxby Indenture Act is revoked there is no "perceived" lack
    of objectivity on behalf of the public at all – environmental
    regulation of a large mining operation by a body with a mission to
    promote mining is a clear and unequivocal conflict of interest.