This is an excerpt from a March 2012 briefing paper by Friends of the Earth, ‘Japan’s nuclear scandals and the Fukushima disaster’, online at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power/

Was TEPCO − operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan − responsible for the nuclear disaster which began on March 11 last year? Or was the disaster the result of unfortunate but unavoidable natural disasters which could not be anticipated − an ‘Act of God’?

Many nuclear advocates want to absolve TEPCO from responsibility for the March 2011. However there is an abundance of evidence that TEPCO did not adequately protect the Fukushima plant against earthquake and tsunami risks. In particular, the failure to adequately protect back-up power generators was a direct cause of the nuclear disaster that began unfolding shortly after the other two disasters on March 11 − the earthquake and the tsunami.

The greatest problem was the location of most of the water-cooled generators in the basement of a poorly-protected turbine building. Fukushima Dai-ichi was equipped with 13 emergency diesel generators, one of which was out of service for maintenance on March 11. TEPCO had three air-cooled backup generators located 10−13 metres above sea level. In addition there were the 10 water-cooled generators.

After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, only one of the air-cooled generators, which sat 13 metres above sea level, was still functional after the tsunami (it helped protect reactors #5 and #6). The other two air-cooled generators were rendered useless by the tsunami despite being 10 metres above sea level. All 10 of the plant’s water-cooled generators were inundated by the tsunami.

Without back-up generators, it was only a matter of time before the situation spiralled out of control as it so dramatically did with a succession of meltdowns, fires and explosions in the days after March 11.

Experts speak with one voice: this was a man-made disaster not an Act of God. The Investigation Committee established by the Japanese government last year said: “TEPCO did not implement measures against tsunami as part of its Accident Management strategy. Its preparedness for such accident as severe damage at the core of reactor as a result of natural disasters was quite insufficient.”

A June 2011 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that there were “insufficient defense-in-depth provisions” for tsunami hazards at Fukushima and that “severe accident management provisions were not adequate to cope with multiple plant failures.”

TEPCO lacked “common sense” and “absolutely should have known better,” said Dr Costas Synolakis, a US engineering professor with expertise in tsunami modelling.

Former TEPCO executive Masatoshi Toyota said: “Backup power generators are critical safety equipment, and it should’ve been a no-brainer to put them inside the reactor buildings. It’s a huge disappointment that nobody at TEPCO − including me − was sensitive enough to notice and do something about this discrepancy.”

Another former TEPCO executive said: “We took it for granted that the quake-resistant design of our Fukushima and other nuclear plants was fail-safe. But I now doubt how serious we were about preparing for a severe disaster. If only we’d put the backup generators on even higher ground away from the reactors, the Nos. 1 to 4 reactors might not have been damaged.”

Former TEPCO engineer Toshio Kimura said: “I asked my boss back in the late ’90s what would happen if a tsunami hit the Fukushima reactors. I said surely a meltdown will happen. He said ‘Kimura, you are right’. But it was made clear that the issue of a big tsunami was taboo. … If they’d moved the emergency diesel generators to a position above the expected tsunami level it would have cost the company a lot. So nobody proposed it. … A few years later I quit the company because of its culture of cover-ups.”

Another TEPCO engineer said that when he was preparing for a government inspection in 1987, the inconsistent placement of the generators “stood out like a sore thumb.”

For many years, TEPCO either denied the possibility of an earthquake and tsunami of March 11 proportions or argued that such events were so improbable that they could be ignored. In 2001, TEPCO submitted a document on tsunami preparedness to the Nuclear Safety Agency − a one-page document.

Uranium’s long and shameful journey to Fukushima

Dave Sweeney

The signs that all is not as it should be start gently enough: weeds appear in fields, the roadside vegetation covers signs and structures, and there are few people about. The country looks peaceful, green and sleepy. Then the radiation monitor two seats away wakes up and starts clicking.

I am on a bus heading along a narrow and winding road towards the Fukushima exclusion zone. The trip has been organised by a Japanese medical group and my fellow travellers are doctors, academics and radiation health specialists from around the world. They have come to see and hear the story behind the headlines and to bring their considerable expertise to support the continuing relief and response efforts.

Fukushima is a name known around the world since the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex was shattered and radiation scattered following the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The world held its breath as images of emergency workers in radiation suits, bewildered and fearful locals sleeping at schools and grainy aerial footage of an increasingly vulnerable reactor filled our screens and press.

While the headlines might have faded, the radiation, dislocation and complexity has not and 18 months after the meltdown this trip is part of a widespread effort in Japan to ensure that the impacts and implications of the Fukushima nuclear disaster are neither forgotten nor repeated.

Fukushima means ‘fortunate island’ but the region’s luck melted down alongside the reactor. Over 150,000 people cannot return to their homes and last September a United Nations special report detailed some of the massive impacts: “hundreds of billions of dollars of property damage”, “serious radioactive contamination of water, agriculture, fisheries” and “grave stress and mental trauma” to a swathe of people. Lives have been utterly disrupted and altered and the Fukushima nuclear accident was and remains a profound environmental and social tragedy.

A grandmother hosts us in her new home. The cluster of caravan park style cabins on tarmac are in every way a long way from her former life in a village. Her eyes light up and her years drop when she speaks of her three grandchildren and the three great-grandchildren due later this year. But then she is asked how often she sees them and the light fades. The interpreter stumbles, the room falls silent and we all look down and feel sad and strangely ashamed.

A doctor at a nearby medical centre tells how more than 6,000 doctors, nurses and patients were re-located there from the adjacent exclusion zone. People were sleeping everywhere he says before proudly showing the centre’s new post-evacuee carpet. As he talks a group of elderly people sit listlessly in chairs or lie in beds before a happy daytime TV game-show while the hill behind is criss-crossed with red tape that marks the areas of active decontamination work.

A farmer accepts that his current rice crop will be destroyed after harvest because it will be too contaminated. But he hopes next year’s might be better. I sit by a pond in his rice paddy as he explains his hope that if the ducks eat enough worms and grubs they might remove the radiation. No one has the heart to contradict him. Beside his house is a cedar tree that is 1,200 years old and his ancestors had the honour of supplying rice to the Shogun feudal lords. The rice from those same fields is now radioactive.

As we drive from site to site we pass skeletal abandoned greenhouses, the fields are increasingly wild, houses are empty, sheds are rotting, vehicles have grass in the wheel arches and the landscape is dotted with contaminated soil wrapped like round bale hay in blue plastic. The smaller side roads are blocked by traffic cones and stern signage both to deter looting and because many are damaged. Police and relocated residents share patrols to keep thieves away but the biggest thief is invisible: radiation has robbed this region of much of its past, present and future.

An earnest teacher is happy that the local school has re-opened but sad that while once around 250 kids used to attend, now there are 16. The local mayor picks up the theme stating, “we have very few young people or children”. Radiation hits hardest at growing cells and many concerned parents have understandably moved. The old remain and the in the absence of the young the old look older.

“We have a very serious issue with the exodus of young people,” says the mayor who is running an active campaign urging locals to return home while admitting “the accident isn’t completed”.

The manager of the local store shows us sophisticated point of sale radiation monitoring equipment and warns us against eating wild mushrooms. A doctor speaks of the lack of community confidence in the official radiation data and declares that another nuclear accident would be “the ruin of Japan”. Meanwhile, the monitor on the bus keeps clicking.

Australian uranium fuelled Fukushima

Each click counts the decay of a piece of rock dug up in Australia. In October 2011, Dr Robert Floyd, director-general of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade admitted “that Australian obligated nuclear material was at the Fukushima Daiichi site and in each of the reactors”. Australian uranium fuelled Fukushima.

Australian uranium is now radioactive fallout that is contaminating Japan and beyond and the response of the Australian government and the Australian uranium producers and their industry association has been profoundly and shamefully deficient. Prime Minister Gillard speaks of business as usual, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson talks of the “unfortunate incident” and the more bullish of the uranium miners have called the crisis a “sideshow”.

This denial and failure to respond to changed circumstances is in stark contrast to the views of Aboriginal landowners from where the uranium has been sourced. Yvonne Margarula, the Mirarr senior Traditional Owner of that part of Kakadu where Energy Resources of Australia’s Ranger mine is located wrote to UN Secretary General to convey her communities concerns and stated that the accident, “makes us very sad. We are all diminished by the awful events now unfolding at Fukushima”.

Arabunna man Peter Watts, whose water continues to be plundered to service BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, told a Japanese audience in Yokohama earlier this year how the company “use up the water that gives life to dig up the uranium that brings death”.

There can be no atomic business as usual in the shadow of Fukushima. The novelist Haruki Murakami has called Fukushima a massive nuclear disaster and stated “but this time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives. While we are the victims, we are also the perpetrators. We must fix our eyes on this fact. If we fail to do so, we will inevitably repeat the same mistake again, somewhere else.”

There is intense political debate around all things nuclear in contemporary Japan and the potential restart of the countries suspended nuclear fleet has seen unprecedented political mobilisation and action in Japan. Another growing concern relates to the human, environmental and financial cost of the massive decontamination and clean-up program and the persistent stories of cut corners, substandard subcontracting and Yakuza or organised crime connections.

One of the doctors who organised our trip put the issue sharply and starkly: “The restart debate is about nuclear power plants but it is also about democracy and the future of the nation.” The debate is live in Japan and a similar debate now needs to come alive in Australia − our shared and fragile planet’s energy future is renewable not radioactive.

We need a genuine assessment of the costs and consequences of our uranium trade. To fail to change or to learn from this tragedy is deeply disrespectful and increases the chance of Australian uranium fuelling future nuclear accidents.

Dave Sweeney is the Nuclear Free campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation

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Australia’s role in the Fukushima disaster

Jim Green / Friends of the Earth Australia

Sunday March 11 was the first anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in north-east Japan and the meltdowns, explosions and fires at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The impacts of the nuclear disaster have been horrendous. Over 100,000 people are still homeless and some will never be able to return. Homeless, jobless, separated from friends and family, the toll on people’s health and mental well-being has been significant − one indication being a sharp increase in suicide rates. One farmer’s suicide note simply read: “I wish there wasn’t a nuclear plant.”

Preliminary scientific estimates of the long-term cancer death toll range from some hundreds to “around 1000”. The death toll could rise significantly if many people resettle in contaminated areas. Contamination with long-lived radionuclides will persist for many generations − caesium-137 will be a concern for around 300 years.

Direct and indirect economic costs of the disaster will amount to several hundred billions dollars. It will be decades before the ruined reactors are decommissioned. Decades before the legal battles have concluded.

Come in, spinner

The Fukushima anniversary was accompanied by extraordinary spin from the nuclear industry and its supporters. They claim that no-one will die from radiation exposure from the Fukushima disaster. That could only be true if low-level radiation exposure is risk-free − a proposition rejected by expert bodies such as the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the US Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation.

The nuclear lobby generally accepts that there have been horrendous impacts from the evacuation of over 100,000 people (in additional to the large number of evacuees whose homes were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami). They spin this issue by saying that evacuees should be allowed to return to their homes.

Sometimes government agencies are blamed for maintaining the 20 km evacuation zone. Sometimes environment groups are blamed − apparently the cruel, exploitative ‘radiophobia’ of green groups leads to governments setting unnecessarily cautious radiation protection standards. That argument is a stretch at the best of times, and completely ludicrous in Japan where nuclear ‘regulation’ has been marked by corruption, collusion, conflicts of interest, and complete indifference to the views and concerns of environment groups or the public at large.

If anything the Japanese government has been rather too keen for evacuees to return to their homes. The ‘permissible’ radiation dose has been raised from 1 millisievert per year to 20 mSv. To give a sense of the hazard involved, if 50,000 people are exposed to 20 mSv/year for five years, about 250 fatal cancers would result. For any individual receiving that radiation dose over five years, the risk of fatal cancer is about one in 200.

Evacuees

Evacuees want the option of returning to contaminated areas if they so choose or moving elsewhere if they choose. They want financial support to help them through the current period and to resettle in their old homes or to find new ones. They want to see a decent clean-up of contaminated areas to reduce future radiation exposure. And they want those responsible for the disaster to be held to account.

Environment groups and other NGOs have been supporting evacuees in their many battles to achieve the above outcomes. NGOs have been active in the clean-up operations. They have actively fundraised to support disaster relief efforts. NGOs such as the Tokyo-based Citizens Nuclear Information Centre (cnic.jp/english) have played a vital role in providing expert information in circumstances where, for good reasons, no-one trusts the government or Fukushima plant operator TEPCO or the so-called nuclear regulator.

The nuclear lobby is right that many Japanese are suffering from anxiety as a result of the Fukushima disaster. But that’s not a result of NGO ‘radiophobia’ − it is an understandable reaction to the circumstances people face. It’s difficult to know whether food or milk is contaminated. The radioactive fallout from the Fukushima disaster has been highly uneven − even within a small area the radiation readings can vary by orders of magnitude. Compensation has been too little, too late. The clean-up has been slow and contentious.

All that human misery as a result of an easily preventable disaster.

Whereas the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 were natural disasters, Fukushima was a man-made disaster. TEPCO failed to adequately prepare for and protect against earthquakes and tsunamis. The Japanese government’s Investigation Committee is blunt about the company’s culpability: “The nuclear disaster prevention program had serious shortfalls. It cannot be excused that the nuclear accidents could not be managed because of an extraordinary situation that the tsunamis exceeded the assumption.”

TEPCO’s greatest failure was that it did not properly protect back-up power generators from flooding. Without back-up generators to maintain reactor cooling, it was only a matter of time before the situation spiralled out of control as it so dramatically did with a succession of meltdowns, fires and explosions in the days after March 11.

Australia’s role

There is no dispute that Australian uranium was used in the Fukushima reactors. The mining companies won’t acknowledge that fact − instead they hide behind bogus claims of ‘commercial confidentiality’ and ‘security’. But the truth is out. The Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office acknowledged in October that:  “We can confirm that Australian obligated nuclear material was at the Fukushima Daiichi site and in each of the reactors – maybe five out of six, or it could have been all of them”.

It is likely that TEPCO has been supplied with uranium from BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine, ERA’s Ranger mine, and Heathgate’s Beverley mine.

Yuki Tanaka from the Hiroshima Peace Institute noted: “Japan is not the sole nation responsible for the current nuclear disaster. From the manufacture of the reactors by GE to provision of uranium by Canada, Australia and others, many nations are implicated.”

Mirarr senior Traditional Owner Yvonne Margarula said she is “deeply saddened” that uranium from the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory has been exported to Japanese nuclear power companies including TEPCO.

No such humility from the uranium companies. They get tetchy at any suggestion of culpability, with the Australian Uranium Association describing it as “opportunism in the midst of human tragedy” and “utter nonsense”.

Moreover, the Association said: “The Australian uranium industry has led the global nuclear industry’s efforts to create a framework of stewardship for the safe and responsible management of uranium throughout the nuclear fuel cycle.”

Led the effort to create a framework of stewardship for meaningless rhetoric, more like it. Here’s an example of the sort of gibberish they come up with: “When the principle is actively applied, Stewardship becomes a driver for innovation in the ways we view our businesses and operate them. … Leading companies will see Stewardship not as a compliance issue but as a means to shape their future operational processes, products, services and relationships.”

To translate: uranium ‘stewardship’ means flogging off uranium, counting the money, flogging off more uranium, counting more money.

Scandals and accidents

Australia’s uranium industry did nothing as TEPCO lurched from scandal to scandal and accident to accident over the past decade. It did nothing in 2002 when it was revealed that TEPCO had systematically and routinely falsified safety data and breached safety regulations for 25 years or more.

The industry did nothing in 2007 when over 300 incidents of ‘malpractice’ at Japan’s nuclear plants were revealed (104 of them at nuclear power plants). It did nothing even as the ability of Japan’s nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis came under growing criticism from industry insiders and independent experts. It did nothing about the multiple conflicts of interest plaguing the Japanese nuclear ‘regulator’.

Australia could have played a role in breaking the vicious cycle of mismanagement in Japan’s nuclear industry by making uranium exports conditional on improved management of nuclear plants and tighter regulation. Even a strong public statement of concern would have been heard by the Japanese utilities (unless it was understood to be rhetoric for public consumption) and it would have registered in the Japanese media.

But the uranium industry did nothing. And since the industry is in denial about its role in fuelling the Fukushima disaster, there is no reason to believe that it will behave more responsibly in future.

Successive Australian governments have done nothing about the unacceptable standards in Japan’s nuclear industry. And since Prime Minister Gillard said the Fukushima disaster “doesn’t have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports”, there is no reason to believe that the government will behave more responsibly in future.

The Australian Uranium Associated issued a media release on March 8 titled: “Nuclear industry takes Fukushima opportunity to demonstrate transparency and responsibility”.

In fact the industry has lacked transparency − refusing even to acknowledge whether it supplied uranium to TEPCO. Nor has the industry been responsible − it has brought shame to all Australians by turning a blind eye to serious problems in customer countries and responding with mock indignation when anyone calls its bluff.

Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Australia and author of a detailed March 2012 briefing paper on the events leading up to the Fukushima disaster, online at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power/

Ben Heard founded the South Australia-based  ‘Bright New World’ nuclear advocacy group that accepts secret corporate donations from the nuclear industry.

Like so many other nuclear advocates, Heard very rarely or never says or does anything about the problems of the nuclear industry such as its systemic racism (abundantly evident in his home state, South Australia) or the inadequate nuclear safeguards system and the associated WMD proliferation risks.

A big part of Heard’s schtick is his conversion from a nuclear critic to a supporter. It is a back-story built on slender foundations. A mining industry magazine article said Heard was “once a fervent anti-nuclear campaigner” but in fact he never had any involvement whatsoever in anti-nuclear campaigning. Heard made no effort to correct the error in the magazine article — indeed he put the article, uncorrected, on his own website and only corrected it after the falsehood was publicly exposed. Likewise, Heard made no effort to correct an ABC article which described him as a “former anti-nuclear advocate”.

Heard has a recurring disclosure problem. He rarely disclosed his consulting work for uranium company Heathgate when spruiking for the nuclear industry. He said the reason he rarely disclosed his consulting work with Heathgate was that it was mentioned on his website. So any time you hear anyone speaking about anything in the media, it’s your responsibility to do a web-search to see if they have a financial interest! More recently, he rarely discloses corporate funding — indeed his lobby group (closed in 2021) had a policy of accepting secret corporate donations. And Heard rarely if ever discloses his connection to nuclear power company Terrestrial Energy.

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Table of Contents (with links)

Ben Heard’s industry-funded SMR / Gen IV misinformation

• Small nuclear reactors, huge costs
• Small modular reactor rhetoric hits a hurdle, see below in this webpage. 
• Ben Heard’s “outright lie”, massive hypocrisy and extreme censorship
• More SMR spin and misinformation from Ben Heard
• More misinformation from Ben Heard re SMR costs
• Ben Heard promoting floating nuclear power plants that will be used to exploit Arctic fossil fuel reserves!
• New nuclear push digs deep into vault of alternative facts
• Australia Institute critique of Ben Heard’s idiotic waste-to-fuel Generation IV nuclear fantasies
• Ben Heard’s epic fail … but will he have the decency to repay the $55,593?
• Pyroprocessing flops

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More SMR spin and misinformation from Ben Heard

In 2020, Ben Heard repeatedly wrote and talked about the ‘real costs of small modular reactors’ (SMRs), attacking anyone who thinks that the real costs of SMRs (predictably over-budget and behind-schedule SMR construction projects) ought to factor in a discussion about the real costs of SMRs. Instead, Heard bases his estimates on self-serving, absurdly low company estimates (which are several times lower than expert estimates presented in the report of the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission).

Could Heard get any sillier? Well, yes. Here’s the beginning of an Oct. 2020 article by Heard. Spoiler alert: Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is 100% government-owned.

Heard:

“Based on the events of 2020, we might now find ourselves at the dawn of the very fast change in the journey of advanced, small modular reactors to commercialisation. A veritable flurry of recent announcements can hearten everyone who cares about a clean energy future.

“A new force is coming that can greatly accelerate our energy transition. On October 6, Canadian utility Ontario Power Generation announced the long awaited outcomes of a comprehensive assessment of SMR technologies, declaring a commitment of support to advance the engineering and design work of three SMRs designs: the BWRX-300 from General Electric-Hitachi, the Integral Molten Salt Reactor from Terrestrial Energy, and the Xe-100 pebble bed reactor from X-energy. To settle on these three designs, vendors passed through a due diligence process described by X-energy as the most comprehensive it has ever been through. That statement highlights the significance of this announcement.

“One of the flippant barbs aimed at the SMR sector by commentators (normally of the ideologically entrenched kind) is that private money is not interested in mere paper reactors, and that the whole class of technology is a distant prospect. It is one of those lazy critiques that are easy to say, and safe from dispute all through the long lead time to falsification. OPG’s decision, along with its joint venture formation with Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation and Global First Power, goes a long way to putting this simplistic assertion to rest.”

So a 100% government-owned entity is supporting SMR ‘engineering and design work’ (far short of a commitment to invest billions in actually constructing reactors) and that “goes a long way” to dispelling abundant evidence that private funding is far short of getting reactor construction projects off the ground? Could Heard’s nuclear advocacy get any sillier?

Will OPG and some or all of the three above-mentioned companies get reactor construction projects off the ground? Here’s a downbeat Nov. 2020 assessment in World Nuclear News, an industry publication not known for downbeat assessments:

“Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has announced it is resuming planning activities for building new nuclear generating capacity at its Darlington site in Ontario. However, it is now considering the construction of a small modular reactor (SMR) rather than a large conventional reactor, as previously envisaged. …

“No decision on technology has been made yet, OPG said, but it has begun work aimed at identifying potential options. Last month, OPG announced advancement of engineering and design work with three grid-scale SMR developers: GE Hitachi, Terrestrial Energy and X-energy. It said work with the three developers continues and will help inform OPG on potential options for future deployment.”

Does the OPG collaboration with the three companies involve a significant commitment of resources from any of the parties? The relevant announcements don’t mention any financial commitment from any of the parties. An Oct. 2020 World Nuclear News article suggests low-level, low-commitment collaboration: “GEH said it will provide detailed information on the design process, licensing, scheduling and contracting that will help inform OPG on options for siting an SMR in Ontario.” Heard’s comments about the announcement amount to hyperbole.

As for the “flurry” of other announcements noted in Heard’s article which purportedly prove private-sector commitment to SMRs:

— Canadian GOVERNMENT funding for Terrestrial Energy design / pre-licensing work. (Evidently Terrestrial Energy can’t even find private capital for design / pre-licensing work let alone serious capital for reactor construction.)

— GOVERNMENT funding for the US Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. This “will bring two advanced reactor designs into full operation in the next 7 years”, Heard says, although he surely knows that statement to be implausible and he surely knows about the history of failure of such programs e.g. the US Next Generation Nuclear Plant Project which was abandoned in 2011 because of the unwillingness of the private sector to commit adequate funding.

— US GOVERNMENT funding for NuScale Power (without mentioning that expert evidence from economists, commissioned by the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, estimated a hopelessly uneconomic cost of A$225/MWh …  the Minerals Council of Australia says that there will be no market for SMRs above a cost of A$60‒80/MWh).

— Potential GOVERNMENT SMR funding by the US International Development Finance Corporation.

— GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy begins a licencing process in the US for BWRX-300 SMR (no mention of the government subsidies, or of the vast gulf between beginning a licensing process and completing reactor construction … or even beginning reactor construction for that matter).

— Russia’s GOVERNMENT-funded floating reactor (no mention of the fact that its purpose is to support fossil fuel mining operations, or that the capital cost increased four-fold, or that the power it produces costs a hopelessly uneconomic US$200/MWh (A$260/MWh) according to the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency).

— A consortium of British businesses submits proposals to build SMRs (no mention of the fact that they won’t move an inch without vast government funding).

Heard writes: “With so many critics insisting the nuclear sector must develop the flexibility to accommodate variable renewables, the sector is delivering in spades with nimble designs, and now directly embedded storage.” Except that nothing in the real world supports what Heard is saying … not one of the reactors Heard is describing is operating or under construction, and the only things the sector is “delivering in spades” are paper designs, press releases and proposals for government funding. Most (perhaps all) of the handful of actual SMR construction projects have exhibited a familiar pattern of massive cost overruns and multi-year / multi-decade delays.

Heard writes: “In a seeming blink of an eye, the SMR sector has evolved into the strong probability of six or more vendors delivering first power before 2030.” There is literally zero chance of six or more vendors delivering first power before 2030, and a strong probability of zero vendors delivering first power before 2030. For reference, the flurry of worldwide SMR propaganda in the 1990s led to the construction of zero SMRs.

Heard’s lobby group ‘Bright New World’ accepts secret corporate donations from the nuclear industry. It’s a safe bet that the secret corporate donors include companies with an interest in SMRs. Note also that Heard’s article fails to declare his interest in one of the companies mentioned — he is a member of a Terrestrial Energy advisory board. He believes that it’s your responsibility to do the research to ascertain whether or not he has any conflicts of interest!

Heard mentions “the improving development and prospects in large nuclear in many markets”. Really? He is making stuff up.

Heard writes: “2020 looks like being the year a new clean energy sector was born”. But in the past two calendar years (2019 and 2020), nearly 500 gigawatts of renewable capacity was added worldwide while nuclear went marginally BACKWARDS. With the ageing of the global reactor fleet, nuclear power is certain to continue to decline. Its contribution to global electricity supply has already declined from a peak of 17.6% to 10% (whereas renewables now supply around 30%). Numerous industry insiders and supporters freely acknowledge that the nuclear power industry is in crisis — they have in recent years acknowledged nuclear power’s “rapidly accelerating crisis“, a “crisis that threatens the death of nuclear energy in the West“, “the crisis that the nuclear industry is presently facing in developed countries“, while noting that “the industry is on life support in the United States and other developed economies” and engaging each other in heated arguments about what if anything can be salvaged from the “ashes of today’s dying industry”.

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More misinformation from Ben Heard re SMR costs

Brief comments on the Jan. 2021 Ben Heard / BNW submission re AEMO/CSIRO GenCost

The Heard / Bright New World recommendation to exclude SMRs from the AEMO/CSIRO costing work has merit. SMRs could be included at a later stage, if and when there is further information on real-world projects as opposed to mere speculation. The federal, NSW and Victorian governments have all completed nuclear inquiries in recent years and all three governments plan to retain laws banning nuclear power. No state/territory governments are promoting nuclear power. There is a bipartisan consensus at the federal level to retain legal bans.  There is no obvious reason for AEMO/CSIRO to be costing SMRs (or nuclear power more generally) at this stage.

In their Jan. 2021 submission, Heard / BNW promote the report by the Economic and Finance Working Group (EFWG) of the Canadian government-industry ‘SMR Roadmap’ initiative.

The Canadian EFWG report gives a wide range of SMR cost estimates ‒ all but the lowest of the cost estimates suggest that SMRs would be uneconomic in Australia (e.g. the Minerals Council of Australia has said that costs would need to be A$60/MWh or less to be competitive).

The lowest estimates in the Canadian EFWG report assume near-term deployment from a standing start (with no-one offering to risk billions of dollars to build demonstration reactors), plus extraordinary learning rates in an industry notorious for its negative learning rates.

Dr. Ziggy Switkowski noted in his evidence to the federal nuclear inquiry that “nuclear power has got more expensive, rather than less expensive”. Yet the EFWG paper takes a made-up, ridiculously-high learning rate and subjects SMR cost estimates to eight ‘cumulative doublings’ based on the learning rate.

That is creative accounting and one can only wonder why Ben Heard and Bright New World would present it as a credible estimate. One possible answer is nuclear industry funding of Bright New World, and Heard’s role as an adviser to wannabe SMR developer Terrestrial Energy. The Heard / BNW submission ought to declare those interests but fails to do so.

Here are the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) SMR cost estimates from the EFWG paper:

300-megawatt (MW) on-grid SMR:    C$162.67 / MWh

125-MW off-grid heavy industry:       C$178.01 / MWh

20-MW off-grid remote mining:         C$344.62 / MWh

3-MW off-grid remote community:    C$894.05 / MWh

In Australian dollars, the range is A$167 to A$914 / MWh. The Minerals Council of Australia says that SMRs would need to produce power at A$60/MWh to be competitive … almost three times lower than the lowest of the Canadian FOAK estimates.

The government and industry members on the Canadian EFWG are in no doubt that SMRs won’t be built without public subsidies:

“The federal and provincial governments should, in partnership with industry, investigate ways to best risk-share through policy mechanisms to reduce the cost of capital. This is especially true for the first units deployed, which would likely have a substantially higher cost of capital than a commercially mature SMR.”

The EFWG paper used a range of estimates from the literature and vendors. It notes problems with its inputs, such as the fact that many of the vendor estimates have not been independently vetted, and “the wide variation in costs provided by expert analysts”. Thus, the EFWG qualifies its findings by noting that “actual costs could be higher or lower depending on a number of eventualities”.

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Small modular reactor rhetoric hits a hurdle

Heard has been repeatedly writing and talking about ‘the real cost of SMRs’ but insists that the real costs of SMRs — i.e. data on actual SMR construction projects, showing a familiar pattern of massive cost escalations — should be excluded from the discussion about the real cost of SMRs. Beyond ridiculous.

Small modular reactor rhetoric hits a hurdle

Jim Green, 23 June 2020, RenewEconomy

https://reneweconomy.com.au/small-modular-reactor-rhetoric-hits-a-hurdle-62196/

Obviously, the starting point for any serious discussion about SMR costs would be the cost of operational SMRs ‒ ignored by CSIRO/AEMO and by lobbyists such as BNW.

There is just one operational SMR, Russia’s floating plant. Its estimated cost is US$740 million for a 70 MW plant. That equates to A$15,200 per kW ‒ similar to the CSIRO/AEMO estimate of A$16,304 per kW. Over the course of construction, the cost quadrupled and a 2016 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency report said that electricity produced by the Russian floating plant is expected to cost about US$200 (A$288) per megawatt-hour (MWh) with the high cost due to large staffing requirements, high fuel costs, and resources required to maintain the barge and coastal infrastructure.

Figures on costs of SMRs under construction should also be considered ‒ they are far more useful than the estimates of vendors and lobbyists, which invariably prove to be highly optimistic.

The World Nuclear Association states that the cost of China’s high-temperature gas-cooled SMR (HTGR) is US$6,000 (A$8,600) per kW. Costs are reported to have nearly doubled, with increases arising from higher material and component costs, increases in labour costs, and increased costs associated with project delays.

The CAREM SMR under construction in Argentina illustrates the gap between SMR rhetoric and reality. In 2004, when the reactor was in the planning stage, Argentina’s Bariloche Atomic Center estimated an overnight cost of USS$1,000 per kW for an integrated 300-MW plant (while acknowledging that to achieve such a cost would be a “very difficult task”). When construction began in 2014, the cost estimate was US$15,400 per kW (US$446 million / 29 MW). By April 2017, the cost estimate had increased US$21,900 (A$31,500) per kW (US$700 million / 32 MW).

To the best of my knowledge, no other figures on SMR construction costs are publicly available. So the figures are:

A$15,200 per kW for Russia’s light-water floating SMR

A$8,600 per kW for China’s HTGR

A$31,500 per kW for Argentina’s light-water SMR

The average of those figures is A$18,400 per kW, which is higher than the CSIRO/AEMO figure of A$16,304 per kW and double BNW’s estimate of A$9,132 per kW.

The CSIRO/AEMO report says that while there are SMRs under construction or nearing completion, “public cost data has not emerged from these early stage developments.” That simply isn’t true.

BNW’s imaginary reactor

BNW objects to CSIRO/AEMO basing their SMR cost estimate on a “hypothetical reactor”. But BNW does exactly the same, ignoring real-world cost estimates for SMRs under construction or in operation. BNW starts with the estimate of US company NuScale Power, which hopes to build SMRs but hasn’t yet begun construction of a single prototype. BNW adds a 50% ‘loading’ in recognition of past examples of nuclear reactor cost overruns. Thus BNW’s estimate for SMR construction costs is A$9,132 per kW.

Two big problems: NuScale’s cost estimate is bollocks, and BNW’s proposed 50% loading doesn’t fit the recent pattern of nuclear costs increasing by far greater amounts.

NuScale’s construction cost estimate of US$4,200 per kW is implausible. It is far lower than Lazard’s latest estimate of US$6,900-12,200 per kW for large reactors and far lower than the lowest estimate (US$12,300 per kW) of the cost of the two Vogtle AP1000 reactors under construction in Georgia (the only reactors under construction in the US). NuScale’s estimate (per kW) is just one-third of the cost of the Vogtle plant ‒ despite the unavoidable diseconomies of scale with SMRs and despite the fact that independent assessments conclude that SMRs will be more expensive to build (per kW) than large reactors.

Further, modular factory-line production techniques were trialled with the twin AP1000 Westinghouse reactor project in South Carolina ‒ a project that was abandoned in 2017 after the expenditure of at least US$9 billion, bankrupting Westinghouse.

Lazard estimates a levelised cost of US$118-192 per MWh for electricity from large nuclear plants. NuScale estimates a cost of US$65 per MWh for power from its first plant. Thus NuScale claims that its electricity will be 2-3 times cheaper than that from large nuclear plants, which is implausible. And even if NuScale achieved its cost estimate, it would still be higher than Lazard’s figures for wind power (US$28-54) and utility-scale solar (US$32-44).

BNW claims that the CSIRO/AEMO levelised cost estimate of A$258-338 per MWh for SMRs is an “extreme overestimate”. But an analysis by WSP / Parsons Brinckerhoff, prepared for the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, estimated a cost of A$225 per MWh for a reactor based on the NuScale design, which is far closer to the CSIRO/AEMO estimate than it is to BNW’s estimate of A$123-128 per MWh with the potential to fall as low as A$60.

Cost overruns

BNW proposes adding a 50% ‘loading’ to NuScale’s cost estimate in recognition of past examples of reactor cost overruns, and claims that it is basing its calculations on “a first-of-a-kind vendor estimate [NuScale’s] with the maximum uncertainly associated with the Class of the estimate.” Huh? The general pattern is that early vendor estimates underestimate true costs by an order of magnitude, while estimates around the time of initial construction underestimate true costs by a factor of 2-4.

Here are some recent examples of vastly greater cost increases than BNW allows for:

* The estimated cost of the HTGR under construction in China has nearly doubled.

* The cost of Russia’s floating SMR quadrupled.

* The estimated cost of Argentina’s SMR has increased 22-fold above early, speculative estimates and the cost increased by 66% from 2014, when construction began, to 2017.

* The cost estimate for the Vogtle project in the US state of Georgia (two AP1000 reactors) has doubled to more than US$13.5 billion per reactor and will increase further. In 2006, Westinghouse said it could build an AP1000 reactor for as little as US1.4 billion ‒ 10 times lower than the current estimate for Vogtle.

* The estimated combined cost of the two EPR reactors under construction in the UK, including finance costs, is £26.7 billion (the EU’s 2014 estimate of £24.5 billion plus a £2.2 billion increase announced in July 2017). In the mid-2000s, the estimated construction cost for one EPR reactor in the UK was £2 billion, almost seven times lower than the current estimate.

* The estimated cost of about €12.4 billion for the only reactor under construction in France is 3.8 times greater than the original €3.3 billion estimate.

* The estimated cost of about €11 billion for the only reactor under construction in Finland is 3.7 times greater than the original €3 billion estimate.

Timelines

BNW notes that timelines for deployment and construction are “extremely material” in terms of the application of learning rates to capital expenditure. BNW objected to the previous CSIRO/AEMO estimate of five years for construction of an SMR and proposed a “more probable” three-year estimate as well as an assumption that NuScale’s first reactor will begin generating power in 2026 even though construction has not yet begun.

For reasons unexplained, CSIRO/AEMO also assume a three-year construction period in their latest report, and for reasons unexplained the operating life of an SMR is halved from 60 years to 30 years.

None of the real-world evidence supports the arguments about construction timelines:

* The construction period for the only operational SMR, Russia’s floating plant, was 12.5 years.

* Argentina’s CAREM SMR was conceived in the 1980s, construction began in 2014, the 2017 start-up date was missed and subsequent start-up dates were missed. If the current schedule for a 2023 start-up is met it will be a nine-year construction project rather than the three years proposed by CSIRO/AEMO and BNW for construction of an SMR. Last year, work on the CAREM SMR was suspended, with Techint Engineering & Construction asking Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission to take urgent measures to mitigate the project’s serious financial breakdown. In April 2020, Argentina’s energy minister announced that work on CAREM would resume.

* Construction of China’s HTGR SMR began in 2012, the 2017 start-up date was missed, and if the targeted late-2020 start-up is met it will be an eight-year construction project.

* NuScale Power has been trying to progress its SMR ambitions for over a decade and hasn’t yet begun construction of a single prototype reactor.

* The two large reactors under construction in the US are 5.5 years behind schedule and those under construction in France and Finland are 10 years behind schedule.

* In 2007, EDF boasted that Britons would be using electricity from an EPR reactor at Hinkley Point to cook their Christmas turkeys in December 2017 – but construction didn’t even begin until December 2018.

Learning rates

In response to relentless attacks from far-right politicians and lobby groups such as BNW, the latest CSIRO/AEMO GenCost report makes the heroic assumption that SMR costs will fall from A$16,304 per kW to as little as A$7,140 per kW in 2030, with the levelised cost anywhere between A$129 and A$336 per MWh. The report states that SMRs were assigned a “higher learning rate (more consistent with an emerging technology) rather than being included in a broad nuclear category, with a low learning rate consistent with more mature large scale nuclear.”

But there’s no empirical basis, nor any logical basis, for the learning rate assumed in the report. The cost reduction assumes that large numbers of SMRs will be built, and that costs will come down as efficiencies are found, production capacity is scaled up, etc.

Large numbers of SMRs being built? Not according to expert opinion. A 2017 Lloyd’s Register report was based on the insights of almost 600 professionals and experts from utilities, distributors, operators and equipment manufacturers, who predicted that SMRs have a “low likelihood of eventual take-up, and will have a minimal impact when they do arrive”. A 2014 report produced by Nuclear Energy Insider, drawing on interviews with more than 50 “leading specialists and decision makers”, noted a “pervasive sense of pessimism” about the future of SMRs. Last year, the North American Project Director for Nuclear Energy Insider said that there “is unprecedented growth in companies proposing design alternatives for the future of nuclear, but precious little progress in terms of market-ready solutions.”

Will costs come down in the unlikely event that SMRs are built in significant numbers? For large nuclear reactors, the experience has been either a very slow learning rate with modest cost decreases, or a negative learning rate.

If everything went astonishingly well for SMRs, it would take several rounds of learning to drastically cut costs to A$7,140 per kW. Several rounds of SMR construction by 2030, as assumed in the most optimistic scenario in the CSIRO/AEMO report? Obviously not. The report notes that it would take many years to achieve economies, but then ignores its own advice:

“Constructing first-of-a-kind plant includes additional unforeseen costs associated with lack of experience in completing such projects on budget. SMR will not only be subject to first-of-a-kind costs in Australia but also the general engineering principle that building plant smaller leads to higher costs. SMRs may be able to overcome the scale problem by keeping the design of reactors constant and producing them in a series. This potential to modularise the technology is likely another source of lower cost estimates. However, even in the scenario where the industry reaches a scale where small modular reactors can be produced in series, this will take many years to achieve and therefore is not relevant to estimates of current costs (using our definition).”

Even with heroic assumptions resulting in CSIRO/AEMO’s low-cost estimate of A$129 per MWh for SMRs in 2030, the cost is still far higher than the low-cost estimates for wind with two hours of battery storage (A$64), wind with six hours of pumped hydro storage (A$86), solar PV with two hours of battery storage (A$52) or solar PV with six hours of pumped hydro storage (A$84). And the CSIRO/AEMO high-cost estimate for SMRs in 2030 ($336 per MWh) is more than double the high estimates for solar PV or wind with 2-6 hours of storage (A$90-151).

Reality bats last

The economic claims of SMR enthusiasts are sharply contradicted by real-world data. And their propaganda campaign simply isn’t working ‒ government funding and private-sector funding is pitiful when measured against the investments required to build SMR prototypes let alone fleets of SMRs and the infrastructure that would allow for mass production of SMR components.

Wherever you look, there’s nothing to justify the hype of SMR enthusiasts. Argentina’s stalled SMR program is a joke. Plans for 18 additional HTGRs at the same site as the demonstration plant in China have been “dropped” according to the World Nuclear Association. Russia planned to have seven floating nuclear power plants by 2015, but only recently began operation of its first plant. South Korea won’t build any of its domestically-designed SMART SMRs in South Korea ‒ “this is not practical or economic” according to the World Nuclear Association ‒ and plans to establish an export market for SMART SMRs depend on a wing and a prayer … and on Saudi oil money which is currently in short supply.

‘Reality bats last’, nuclear advocate Barry Brook used to say a decade ago when a nuclear ‘renaissance’ was in full-swing. The reality is that the renaissance was short-lived, and global nuclear capacity fell by 0.6 gigawatts last year while renewable capacity increased by a record 201 gigawatts.

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Ben Heard’s “outright lie”, massive hypocrisy and extreme censorship

June 2020 ‒ Long story short … RenewEconomy published a FoE article about small modular reactor economics. Ben Heard demanded a right of reply. RenewEconomy told him that anyone is welcome to submit a contribution and it would be reviewed. Heard said he had been denied a reply. That was an “outright lie” according to the RenewEconomy editor. Heard’s response to the FoE article was published on his Bright New World website. He denied me (Jim Green) a right of reply (!) so I replied in the comments section and my reply was deleted by Heard (!) and my comment alerting readers to a substantive response on this FoE webpage was not published!

Here are the comments censored by Heard.

Ben Heard: “Then find the cost estimates, add them up and divide it by three, and float that as the cost of SMR nuclear that will inform decision-making in Australia.”

Response: Yes, real-world SMR construction cost data is limited but it is a better guide than self-serving industry claims. Also relevant are real-world data about cost overruns including the huge overruns with SMR projects and the A$10+ billion-dollar overruns with large reactors in western Europe and the US.

Ben Heard: “If Friends of the Earth thinks +50% is too low, they could have stated their reasoning, made their case (succinctly, if at all possible) and proposed their loading.”

Response: The general recent pattern is that EARLY vendor estimates underestimate true costs by an order of magnitude (see my article – citing AP1000s, EPRs, and Argentina’s SMR as examples), while estimates around the time of initial construction underestimate true costs by a factor of 2-4 (numerous examples cited in my article).

So a 100% loading above NuScale’s estimate would be the minimum starting point.

Note that the WSP / Parsons Brinckerhoff LCOE estimate for a NuScale SMR (A$225 or ~US$150 per MWh) is 2.5 times greater than NuScale’s estimate, and it is roughly twice the BNW estimate.

Ben Heard: “We went with vendor first-of-a-kind estimate +50%, consistent with this being a Class 4 cost estimate, independently verified, based on well-known and understood technology …”

Response: None of that changes the fact that numerous recent real-world reactor projects have been subject to vastly greater cost overruns.

Ben Heard: “We look forward to the author securing employment with a major accounting firm and explaining this [that NuScale’s cost estimate is bollocks] the next time the estimates are verified.”

Response: Heard himself adds a 50% loading. WSP / Parsons Brinckerhoff’s LCOE estimate is 2.5 times greater than NuScale’s estimate. No-one believes NuScale’s estimate.

Ben Heard: “Friends of the Earth didn’t understand ‘Class 4 estimate’. It is a defined term, established for estimates of engineer/procure/construct in civil projects. This is clearly described in our submission. We doubt they read it.”

Response: Yes, I do understand the term and have read your various articles and submissions – and referenced three of them at the top of my article. The real-world evidence, for both small and large reactors, demonstrates that Class 4 estimates need a rethink, especially the demonstrably false assertion (or assumption) that a 50% loading will cover any conceivable overruns.

Ben Heard: “‘NuScale’s estimate (per kW) is just one-third of the cost of the Vogtle plant’. Drawing comparison with large nuclear units, the very paradigm SMR is devised to disrupt, while not entirely irrelevant, is pretty dubious.”

Response: The relevance is that there is a solid body of expert opinion that construction costs per kW and LCOE will be greater for SMRs compared to large reactors. For example a 2015 report by the IEA and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency predicts that costs per MWh for SMRs will typically be 50−100% higher than for current large reactors, and a UK report estimated a 30% cost increase per MWh.

Ben Heard: “‘BNW objected to the previous CSIRO/AEMO estimate of five years for construction of an SMR and proposed a “more probable” three-year estimate’. We neither objected, nor proposed a ‘more probable’ 3 years, nor even used the words ‘more probable’!”

Response: From the cited BNW paper: “No SMR developer is working on the basis of 5-year construction. This would also raise the LCOE considerably compared with a more probable 3 three years on the basis of what those bringing SMR to market are actually devising.”

As noted in my article, SMR projects typically take about a decade from start of construction to completion or near-completion (8 to 12.5 years).

Ben Heard: “‘100% agreed with Friends of the Earth [that there’s no empirical basis, nor any logical basis, for the learning rate assumed in the GenCost report]. There remains lack of transparency and replicability as regards the SMR learning rates applied in GenCost.”

Response: So do the maths … what is a reasonable learning rate based on the 12.5 year Russian floating plant?

What is a reasonable learning rate based on the Argentinian SMR, conceived in the 1980s, with construction of the first prototype currently stalled due to the project’s ‘serious financial breakdown’?

What is a reasonable learning rate based on mPower, abandoned after the expenditure of US$500 million and before construction of a first prototype began?

What is the learning rate for fast neutron reactors? That question could be answered based on 70 years of mostly-failed projects and would usefully inform current SMR / Gen 4 debates. My guess is that the FNR learning rate is negative.

What are the learning rates for large light water reactors? Well, we can answer that question, and I did so in my article: a very slow learning rate with modest cost decreases, or a negative learning rate.

Heard / Bright New World claims about SMR learning rates are 100% speculative.

Ben Heard: “‘Even with heroic assumptions resulting in CSIRO/AEMO’s low-cost estimate of A$129 per MWh…’. Friends of the Earth has studiously avoided all of the other necessary corrections identified by Bright New World, in particular operating costs and capacity factor, which bring this right down to more like $100/MWh.”

We have considered all the real-world data and plenty more besides. That research is synthesised in the RenewEconomy article and there’s loads more info in submissions such as this:

https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/SCEP/Inquiry_into_Nuclear_Prohibition_Inquiry_/Submissions/S22_-_Friends_of_the_Earth_Australia.pdf

Our conclusions are shared by informed expert opinion (cited in the submission), e.g. the pro-nuclear US academic researchers who concluded that for SMRs to make a significant contribution to US energy supply, “several hundred billion dollars of direct and indirect subsidies would be needed to support their development and deployment over the next several decades”.

Ben Heard: “‘NuScale Power…hasn’t yet begun construction of a single prototype’. The reference case technology uses the most commercially established fuel cycle in the world, with standard fuel.”

Response: mPower was based on conventional light water technology, but still went bust after the expenditure of US$500 million. Rolls-Royce is proposing light water technology for SMRs in the UK but won’t proceed unless and until a long list of demands are met and hefty subsidies granted.

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Ben Heard promoting floating nuclear power plants that will be used to exploit Arctic fossil fuel reserves!

2018 – Ben Heard at his corporate-funded greenwashing worst – actively promoting Russian Rosatom’s floating nuclear power plant that will be used to exploit Arctic fossil fuel reserves … even as he claims to be an environmentalist and claims to be concerned about climate change!

Heard appears to be collaborating with Rosatom in this work … is Rosatom one of the secret corporate donors to Heard’s fake environment group ‘Bright New World’?

State news agency Sputnik News, 2017: “Last week, officials from over a dozen countries gathered in Arkhangelsk, Russia for the international forum ‘The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue’. Among the forum’s senior participants was Russian nuclear energy giant Rosatom. Officials from the company and from the government previewed Rosatom’s role in the new wave of intensive Arctic development. Speaking at the forum, Rosatom CEO Aleksei Lihachev emphasized that the company has a wide array of projects and proposals in the areas of transport, energy, mining, and environmental protection, many of them taken into account by the government and by companies operating in the region. For example, Rosatom’s nuclear icebreakers are actively assisting in the creation of the so-called Northern Sea Route, the new northern shipping route running along the Russian Arctic coast from the Kara Sea to the Bering Strait. The Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant, meanwhile, provides power to the Arctic territories.”

More information:

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201704021052211048-rosatom-arctic-development-prospects/

www.greenpeace.org/international/story/16277/5-reasons-why-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant-in-the-arctic-is-a-terrible-idea/

www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/16562/floating-nuclear-power-plant-reaches-arctic-greenpeace-demands-safety-controls/

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New nuclear push digs deep into vault of alternative facts

In 2017, Heard facilitated an Australian speaking tour by the US Breakthrough Institute. RenewEconomy published a critique of the Breakthrough Institute’s Gen 4 / SMR silliness.

New nuclear push digs deep into vault of alternative facts

Jim Green, 31 May 2017, RenewEconomy

http://reneweconomy.com.au/new-nuclear-push-digs-deep-vault-alternative-facts-90295/

Australia’s nuclear energy debate reaches Peak Idiocy this week with the visit of Jessica Lovering from the U.S. Breakthrough Institute. Lovering has and will be speaking at public events alongside Australian university student Ben Heard.

Both the Breakthrough Institute and Heard’s ‘Bright New World’ present themselves as progressive environment groups but they are single-issue, pro-nuclear lobby groups with little interest in broader environmental issues. Australia’s environment groups ‒ i.e. real environment groups ‒ are united in our opposition to nuclear power.

Real environment groups celebrate the spectacular growth of renewables and the spectacular cost reductions whereas pro-nuclear lobby groups, including Lovering’s Breakthrough Institute and Heard’s Bright New World, are on a never-ending campaign against renewables. Global renewable energy capacity has doubled over the past decade and current renewable capacity of 2,006 gigawatts (GW) is 5.1 times greater than nuclear power capacity of 392 GW (including idle reactors in Japan). Actual electricity generation from renewables (23.5% of global generation) is more than double that from nuclear power (10.7%) and the gap is widening every day.

Lovering’s opinion piece in The Australian on Monday fails to note that her speaking trip is sponsored by the Minerals Council of Australia. Likewise, Heard has also been paid as a uranium industry consultant.

Lovering brings a suitcase full of alternative facts to Australia. The most egregious is that the nuclear industry is in the middle of some sort of renaissance. Even her own institute contradicts this, bleating about nuclear power’s “rapidly accelerating crisis“, a “crisis that threatens the death of nuclear energy in the West“, “the crisis that the nuclear industry is presently facing in developed countries“, the “ashes of today’s dying industry”, and noting that “the industry is on life support in the United States and other developed economies”

As discussed in RenewEconomy in April, the industry is definitely in crisis. US nuclear giant Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy protection. Westinghouse’s parent company Toshiba states that there is “substantial doubt” about Toshiba’s “ability to continue as a going concern”. These industry giants have been brought to their knees by cost overruns ‒ estimated at US$13 billion ‒ building four power reactors in the U.S.

Likewise, French nuclear utilities EDF and Areva survive only because of repeated, multi-billion-dollar bailouts by the French government. The combined cost overruns for two French EPR reactors under construction in France and Finland amount to at least US$13.5 billion. South Korea is now looking to exit the industry.

As the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger wrote in February:

“Nuclear energy is, simply, in a rapidly accelerating crisis:

• Demand for nuclear energy globally is low, and the new reactors being built may not keep up with the closure of nuclear plants around the world. Half of all U.S. nuclear plants are at risk of closure over the next 13 years.
• Japan has only opened two of its 42 shuttered nuclear reactors, six years after Fukushima. Most experts estimated it would have two-thirds open by now. The reason is simple: low public acceptance.
• While some still see India as a sure-thing for nuclear, the nation has not resolved key obstacles to building new plants, and is likely to add just 16 GW of nuclear by 2030, not the 63 GW that was anticipated.
• Vietnam had worked patiently for 20 years to build public support for a major nuclear build-out before abruptly scrapping those plans in response to rising public fears and costs last year. Vietnam now intends to build coal plants.
• Last month Entergy, a major nuclear operator, announced it was getting out of the nuclear generation business in states where electricity has been de-regulated, including New York where it operates the highly lucrative Indian Point.”

Lovering’s solution to the nuclear power crisis is to sell moonshine. From The Australian on Monday: “Advanced nuclear designs have the capability to be meltdown-proof, using a combination of coolants, fuels, and basic physics. Reactors that are intrinsically safe can also be radically cheaper, especially by making much smaller, modular reactors in factory settings.”

But the only ‘meltdown-proof’ reactors are those that come pre-melted, i.e. concepts based on liquid nuclear fuels. As for WMD proliferation, the UK Royal Society notes: “There is no proliferation proof nuclear fuel cycle. The dual use risk of nuclear materials and technology and in civil and military applications cannot be eliminated.”

As for small modular reactors (SMRs), only a few are under construction: one in Argentina, a twin-reactor floating nuclear power plant in Russia, and three SMRs in China (including two high-temperature gas-cooled reactors). The broad picture for SMRs is much the same as that for fast neutron reactors: lots of hot air, some R&D, but few concrete plans and even fewer concrete pours.

There isn’t the slightest chance that SMRs will fulfil the ambition of making nuclear power “radically cheaper” unless and until a manufacturing supply chain is mass producing SMRs for a mass market ‒ and even then, it’s doubtful whether the power would be cheaper and it is inconceivable that it would be “radically cheaper”. After all, economies-of-scale have driven the long-term drift towards larger reactors.

As things stand, no country, company or utility has any intention of betting billions on building an SMR supply chain. The prevailing scepticism is evident in a February 2017 Lloyd’s Register report based on “insights and opinions of leaders across the sector” and the views of almost 600 professionals and experts from utilities, distributors, operators and equipment manufacturers. Respondents predicted that SMRs have a “low likelihood of eventual take-up, and will have a minimal impact when they do arrive”.

In the absence of a mass supply chain, SMRs will be expensive curiosities. The construction cost of Argentina’s 25-megawatt CAREM reactor is estimated at US$446 million, which equates to a whopping US$17.8 billion/GW. Estimated construction costs for the Russian floating plant have increased more than four-fold and now equate to over US$10 billion / GW.

Ben Heard thinks Australia should take the lead building his preferred version of Generation IV fast neutron reactors. So Australia ‒ a country with virtually no relevant expertise and even less experience ‒ should take the lead developing Generation IV reactors despite the fact that global nuclear industry giants face crippling debts and possible bankruptcy due to cost overruns building a handful of conventional reactors?

That proposition is beyond stupid and it was even rejected by the (stridently pro-nuclear) SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission last year. The Royal Commission said: “[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment. Moreover, electricity generated from such reactors has not been demonstrated to be cost competitive with current light water reactor designs.”

Lovering offers one more alternative fact ‒ the claim that South Australia could accrue A$6 billion in annual economic benefits by importing vast amounts of nuclear waste from around the world.

That claim was tested by the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, commissioned by a Joint Select Committee of the SA Parliament. The NECG report notes that the $6 billion claim, presented in the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission’s 2016 report, fails to consider some important issues which “have significant serious potential to adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes”; that assumptions about price are “overly optimistic” in which case “project profitability is seriously at risk”; that the 25% cost contingency for delays and blowouts is likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had “little support or justification”.

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Australia Institute critique of Ben Heard’s idiotic waste-to-fuel Generation IV nuclear fantasies

February 2016: An important new report from The Australia Institute shows that a proposal to establish a global nuclear waste industry in South Australia would fail to secure 90% of the imported waste, leaving an expensive and risky legacy for the state. Predictably, Ben Heard responded with an abusive, defamatory attack, saying the Australia Institute “seeks to deliberately mislead, misrepresent and misdirect. ”

In a nutshell, Heard wants South Australia to import 60,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent fuel). 4,000 tonnes would be converted to fuel for Generation IV reactors. Or perhaps it won’t, since those Generation IV reactors are a figment of his imagination. He has no idea about the remaining 56,000 tonnes. He claims that this half-baked, hare-brained nonsense “offers a solution to the spent fuel problem”.

See also a separate Australia Institute report, ‘Digging for Answers’, on the economics of plans to import thousands of tonnes of spent fuel / high-level nuclear waste.

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Ben Heard’s epic fail … but will he have the decency to repay the $55,593?

The 2015/16 SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission was led by Kevin Scarce, who’s only prior contribution to nuclear debates was to uncritically parrot the nuclear industry’s lies. A majority of the members of the ‘Expert Advisory Committee’ appointed by Scarce were strident nuclear advocates. Nuclear lobbyists – led by Ben Heard – united behind a plan to import spent nuclear fuel and to build Gen IV ‘fast reactors’, specifically a non-existent reactor type called ‘integral fast reactors’.

To its credit, the Royal Commission flatly rejected the Gen IV fast reactor propaganda peddled by Heard and others. This is what the Royal Commission says in its February 2016 interim report: “fast reactors or reactors with other innovative designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in South Australia in the foreseeable future. No licensed and commercially proven design is currently operating. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment. Moreover, the electricity generated has not been demonstrated to be cost-competitive with current light water reactor designs.”

The Royal Commission said that nuclear power would not be economically viable in South Australia for the foreseeable future and it added: “If nuclear power were to be developed in South Australia, a proven design should be used that has been constructed elsewhere, preferably on multiple occasions …”

Heard’s consultancy was paid $55,593 by the SA government’s Economic Development Board and he came up with a crackpot idea based on non-existent Generation IV reactors which was completely rejected by the stridently pro-nuclear Royal Commission! Heard should have the decency to repay the $55,593 to the people of South Australia, so it can be used for schools, hospitals, public transport, medical research, civic amenities, extending the Glenelg tram all the way to the end of the jetty, etc.

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Pyroprocessing flops

The USA has infinitely more nuclear expertise and experience than Australia yet Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy due to crippling debts building CONVENTIONAL nuclear power plants. Two of the reactors were cancelled after A$13 BILLION had been spent on the project (V.C. Summer project, South Carolina).

Ben Heard’s bright idea: Australia – a country with infinitely less nuclear expertise and experience – should take the lead building RADICAL GENERATION-4 reactors. What could possibly go wrong?!

As mentioned elsewhere, the stridently pro-nuclear SA Royal Commission completely rejected Heard’s idiotic idea and Heard refused to repay the $55,000 of taxpayers’ money he was given to concoct his Gen 4 fantasy.

Another set of problems is discussed here: the Gen 4 reactors Heard wants you to pay for rely on pyroprocessing … a failed technology. Dr Ed Lyman explains below – Dr Lyman is a physicist whereas Ben Heard is a uni student with a background in occupational therapy. (Note that the sting is in the tail of Dr Lyman’s article: “Everyone with an interest in pyroprocessing should reassess their views given the real-world problems experienced in implementing the technology over the last 20 years at INL. They should also note that the variant of the process being used to treat the EBR-II spent fuel is less complex than the process that would be needed to extract plutonium and other actinides to produce fresh fuel for fast reactors. In other words, the technology is a long way from being demonstrated as a practical approach for electricity production.”)

Here’s a summary of Dr Lyman’s research plus links to short and long versions of his research:

Pyroprocessing: the integral fast reactor waste fiasco

In theory, integral fast reactors (IFRs) would gobble up nuclear waste and convert it into low-carbon electricity. In practice, the IFR R&D program in Idaho has left a legacy of troublesome waste. This saga is detailed in a recent article¹ and a longer report² by the Union of Concerned Scientists’ senior scientist Ed Lyman.

Lyman notes that the IFR concept “has attracted numerous staunch advocates” but their “interest has been driven largely by idealized studies on paper and not by facts derived from actual experience.”¹ He discusses the IFR prototype built at Idaho ‒ the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), which ceased operation in 1994 ‒ and subsequent efforts by the Department of Energy (DOE) to treat 26 metric tons of “sodium-bonded” metallic spent fuel from the EBR-II reactor with pyroprocessing, ostensibly to convert the waste to forms that would be safer for disposal in a geological repository. A secondary goal was to demonstrate the viability of pyroprocessing ‒ but the program has instead demonstrated the serious shortcomings of this technology.

Lyman writes:¹

“Pyroprocessing is a form of spent fuel reprocessing that dissolves metal-based spent fuel in a molten salt bath (as distinguished from conventional reprocessing, which dissolves spent fuel in water-based acid solutions). Understandably, given all its problems, DOE has been reluctant to release public information on this program, which has largely operated under the radar since 2000.

“The FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] documents we obtained have revealed yet another DOE tale of vast sums of public money being wasted on an unproven technology that has fallen far short of the unrealistic projections that DOE used to sell the project to Congress, the state of Idaho and the public. However, it is not too late to pull the plug on this program, and potentially save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. …

“Pyroprocessing was billed as a simpler, cheaper and more compact alternative to the conventional aqueous reprocessing plants that have been operated in France, the United Kingdom, Japan and other countries.

“Although DOE shut down the EBR-II in 1994 (the reactor part of the IFR program), it allowed work at the pyroprocessing facility to proceed. It justified this by asserting that the leftover spent fuel from the EBR-II could not be directly disposed of in the planned Yucca Mountain repository because of the potential safety issues associated with presence of metallic sodium in the spent fuel elements, which was used to “bond” the fuel to the metallic cladding that encased it. (Metallic sodium reacts violently with water and air.)

“Pyroprocessing would separate the sodium from other spent fuel constituents and neutralize it. DOE decided in 2000 to use pyroprocessing for the entire inventory of leftover EBR-II spent fuel – both “driver” and “blanket” fuel – even though it acknowledged that there were simpler methods to remove the sodium from the lightly irradiated blanket fuel, which constituted nearly 90% of the inventory.

“However, as the FOIA documents reveal in detail, the pyroprocessing technology simply has not worked well and has fallen far short of initial predictions. Although DOE initially claimed that the entire inventory would be processed by 2007, as of the end of Fiscal Year 2016, only about 15% of the roughly 26 metric tons of spent fuel had been processed. Over $210 million has been spent, at an average cost of over $60,000 per kilogram of fuel treated. At this rate, it will take until the end of the century to complete pyroprocessing of the entire inventory, at an additional cost of over $1 billion.

“But even that assumes, unrealistically, that the equipment will continue to be usable for this extended time period. Moreover, there is a significant fraction of spent fuel in storage that has degraded and may not be a candidate for pyroprocessing in any event. …

“What exactly is the pyroprocessing of this fuel accomplishing? Instead of making management and disposal of the spent fuel simpler and safer, it has created an even bigger mess. …

“[P]yroprocessing has taken one potentially difficult form of nuclear waste and converted it into multiple challenging forms of nuclear waste. DOE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars only to magnify, rather than simplify, the waste problem. This is especially outrageous in light of other FOIA documents that indicate that DOE never definitively concluded that the sodium-bonded spent fuel was unsafe to directly dispose of in the first place. But it insisted on pursuing pyroprocessing rather than conducting studies that might have shown it was unnecessary.

“Everyone with an interest in pyroprocessing should reassess their views given the real-world problems experienced in implementing the technology over the last 20 years at INL. They should also note that the variant of the process being used to treat the EBR-II spent fuel is less complex than the process that would be needed to extract plutonium and other actinides to produce fresh fuel for fast reactors. In other words, the technology is a long way from being demonstrated as a practical approach for electricity production.”

References:

1. Ed Lyman / Union of Concerned Scientists, 12 Aug 2017, ‘The Pyroprocessing Files’, http://allthingsnuclear.org/elyman/the-pyroprocessing-files
2. Edwin Lyman, 2017, ‘External Assessment of the U.S. Sodium-Bonded Spent Fuel Treatment Program’, https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/nuclear-power/Pyroprocessing/IAEA-CN-245-492%2Blyman%2Bfinal.pdf

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#followthemoney

Really important for South Australians and others to expose paid nuclear lobbyist Ben Heard and his fake environment group ‘Bright New World’:

• Heard’s fake ‘environment’ group ‘Bright New World’ accepts secret corporate donations. In his words, he “will respect the company’s right to privacy”! On what principle is that ‘right’ based, Ben?
• Heard’s last gig was for the coal industry-funded, viciously racist Minerals Council of Australia.
• Before that, he did consulting work for General Atomics ‒ a US corporation which is up to its neck in drone warfare and thus in the slaughter of innocents.
• Heard rarely disclosed his General Atomics funding when spruiking for nukes … disclosure wasn’t his strong point then, and it isn’t now (see above re secret corporate donations).
• Heard is possibly the first and hopefully the last person to ask for donations when speaking to small, unfunded community groups.
• This is what the stridently pro-nuclear South Australian Royal Commission said about Heard’s Gen IV nuclear power plans: “[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment.”
• Heard got a $55,000 government grant to come up with his eccentric Gen IV proposal and, needless to say, he refused to repay one cent of that money. And that neatly sums up Heard’s nuclear lobbying business ‒ lots of money, not much sense, and he can’t even win over the most strident nuclear advocates to his crackpot ideas.

Heard’s response to all this – he says he is “proud” to do consulting work for the Minerals Council and General Atomics, to ask for money from small community groups, etc.

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Does Ben Heard’s fake environment group accept secret corporate donations from the coal industry?

Here is an excerpt from this article: Jim Green, 13 June 2019, ‘Nuclear power exits Australia’s energy debate, enters culture wars’, https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-power-exits-australias-energy-debate-enters-culture-wars-47702/

Of course, support for nuclear power in Australia isn’t exclusively limited to the far-right, although it is heading that way. A tiny number of self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ or ‘ecomodernists’ continue to bang the drum. Ben Heard, for example, continues to voice his support for nuclear power ‒ his advocacy lubricated by secret corporate donations and amplified by the right-wing media and by invitations to any number of nuclear-industry talk-fests.

Heard continues undeterred by the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission’s clear acknowledgement that nuclear power is not economically viable in Australia or by its complete rejection of his ‘next generation’ nuclear fantasies.

But what impact could Heard’s nuclear advocacy possibly have in the current context, with fossil fuel interests fighting to protect their patch and to curb the growth of renewables, and with nuclear power being so exorbitantly expensive that isn’t part of any serious debate about Australia’s energy options? Surely the only effect of nuclear advocacy in the current context is to muddy the debate about transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables and thus to shore up incumbent fossil fuel interests.

Australian economist John Quiggin discussed these issues last year (emphasis added):

“The problem is that nuclear fans like Ben Heard are, in effect, advocates for coal. Their line of argument runs as follows:

(1) A power source with the characteristics of coal-fired electricity (always on) is essential if we are to decarbonise the electricity supply
(2) Renewables can’t meet this need
(3) Nuclear power can

“Hence, we must find a way to support nuclear. The problem is that, on any realistic analysis, there’s no chance of getting a nuclear plant going in Australia before about 2040. So, the nuclear fans end up supporting the Abbott crew saying that we will have to rely on coal until then. And to make this case, it is necessary to ignore or denounce the many options for an all-renewable electricity supply, including concentrated solar power, large-scale battery storage and vehicle-to-grid options. As a result, would-be green advocates of nuclear power end up reinforcing the arguments of the coal lobby. … In practice, support for nuclear power in Australia is support for coal. Tony Abbott understands this. It’s a pity that Ben Heard and others don’t.“

(Also see elsewhere in this webpage: ‘Ben Heard promoting floating nuclear power plants that will be used to exploit Arctic fossil fuel reserves!’)

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Ben Heard’s friends on the far right

An article in an IPA publication … consulting work with the far-right MCA … consulting work for the appalling General Atomics … sympathetic coverage from the Murdoch press and from the AFR’s far-right anti-journalist Aaron Patrick. What to make of Ben Heard’s impressive far-right connections? One explanation is to follow the money (see #followthemoney in this webpage). Another explanation (which doesn’t contradict the first) is offered by Australian economist Prof. John Quiggin:

Not everyone likes the grand bargain

John Quiggin, September 3, 2019, http://blogotariat.com/node/3823006

I’ve been very surprised by the extent to which some commentators on the right have been willing to entertain the idea of a carbon price in return for lifting the ban on nuclear power. I mentioned Aaron Patrick in the Fin yesterday. And today, here’s Adam Creighton at the Oz

Reviving the carbon tax debate is probably anathema for many, but if one were set up correctly, with all the money being returned to taxpayers by way of an annual payment, it would make nuclear power stations more viable and provide a political springboard to abandon the massively inefficient clutter of state and federal renewable energy targets. Carbon dividends for all is a much better sell than a carbon tax on everything

On the other hand, one person from whom I confidently expected unqualified support has jibbed at it. As I said a while back, the proposal should appeal to anyone who seriously believes that nuclear power should be adopted as a response to climate change.

The obvious example, for me at any rate, is Ben Heard. So, I was quite surprised when, in a lengthy Twitter discussion (here’s his feed), he would not endorse a carbon price, or any other specific measure to reduce emissions. Not only that, but he professed greater sympathy for rightwing science deniers than for anti-nuclear environmentalists.

It’s easy enough to guess what is going on here. I imagine Heard started out with genuine concern about the climate, and convinced himself that nuclear power was an essential part of the solution. That entailed arguing that renewables couldn’t do the job, even with storage. At this point, Heard would have got plenty of hostility from environmentalists, and plenty of support from denialists. So, when he’s faced with something like a carbon price (or, for that matter, any effective climate policy) that his new friends will hate (check out the old white male Oz commenters on Creighton’s post), he backs away. I’ve previously seen the same pattern with Barry Brook and (from a different starting point) Ted Trainer.

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Heard’s lobby group ‘Bright New World’ closes down

June 2021: Ben Heard’s ‘Bright New World’ group — which received secret corporate donations from the nuclear industry — is closing down.

Concerted efforts to have state and federal laws banning nuclear power repealed have failed in recent years.

At a guess, corporate donors have given up and will no longer fund Bright New World.

A stocktake of Heard’s 10 years of pro-nuclear, anti-renewables campaigning:

1. Renewables capacity grew by an incredible 1500+ gigawatts worldwide and renewables now account for 29% of global electricity generation. Nuclear generation was stagnant and nuclear’s contribution to global electricity generation fell to 10%. In Heard’s home state of South Australia, renewables have grown to 60% of electricity generation (over 70% as of 2023) and the conservative state government is enthusiastically committed to 100% net renewables by 2030.

2. Heard’s efforts to turn South Australia into the world’s nuclear waste dump were unsuccessful.

3. Heard’s efforts to promote ‘Generation IV’ reactors fell flat on their face. Heard and other nuclear enthusiasts united behind a push for (non-existent) ‘Integral Fast Reactors’ and this is how the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission responded in its final report: in 2016: “[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment.”

Good riddance to Bright New World. #epicfail

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Ben Heard does consulting work for the far-right, climate-denying Minerals Council of Australia

Minerals Council of Australia makes global top 10 climate policy opponents

Minerals Council of Australia – with deep ties to Morrison government – gets number eight global ranking for groups acting against climate policies.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/minerals-council-of-australia-makes-global-top-10-climate-policy-opponents-57698/

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Ben Heard supports a nuclear waste dump in SA despite the UNANIMOUS opposition of Barngarla Traditional Owners

Shamefully, the federal government refused a request from Barngarla Traditional Owners, native title holders of the area, to be included in a community ballot regarding a proposed national nuclear waste ‘facility’ (dump and store) near Kimba in South Australia. So the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation (BDAC) engaged an independent agent to conduct a confidential postal ballot.

Not a single Barngarla Traditional Owner voted in favour of the dump. BDAC wrote to Mr. Canavan calling on him to abandon the nuclear dump in light of their unanimous opposition, and stating that BDAC will take whatever steps are necessary to stop the dump being imposed on Barngarla Country against their will.

The SA Labor Party argues that Traditional Owners ought to have a right of veto. Deputy Leader of the Opposition Susan Close says that SA Labor are “utterly opposed to the process”, which she described as “appalling”.

Compare that to the federal government, which wants to push ahead despite unanimous Aboriginal opposition. The government’s mind-set seems not to have advanced from the ‘Aboriginal natives shall not be counted’ clause in the Constitution Act 1900.

So where does ‘progressive ecomodernist’ Ben Heard stand on this? He supports the dump despite unanimous Aboriginal opposition. Sickening and disgusting, but we shouldn’t expect any more from a fake environment group which accepts secret corporate donations from the nuclear industry.

See elsewhere in this webpage:

• Aboriginal First Nations and Australia’s pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists’
• Would you do consulting work for General Atomics?
• Ben Heard parrots the racist lies of the right-wing Liberal Party

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Aboriginal First Nations and Australia’s pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists’

Jim Green, 3 July 2018, Online Opinion, http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=19825&page=0

The plan to turn South Australia into the world’s nuclear waste dump has lost momentum since 2016 though it continues to be promoted by some politicians, the Business SA lobby group, and an assortment of individuals and lobbyists including self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ or ‘ecomodernists‘.

In its 2016 report, the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission established by the state government promoted a plan to import 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (about one-third of the world’s total) and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste. The state Labor government then spent millions on a state-wide promotional campaign under the guide of consultation.

The government also initiated a Citizens’ Jury process. However two-thirds of the 350-member Citizens’ Jury rejected the waste import proposal “under any circumstances” in their November 2016 report. The Jury’s verdict was non-binding but it took the wind out of the dumpsters’ sails.

A key factor in the Jury’s rejection of the waste import plan was that Aboriginal people had spoken clearly in opposition. The Jury’s report said: “There is a lack of aboriginal consent. We believe that the government should accept that the Elders have said NO and stop ignoring their opinions. The aboriginal people of South Australia (and Australia) continue to be neglected and ignored by all levels of government instead of respected and treated as equals.”

The respect shown by the Citizens’ Jury to Aboriginal Traditional Owners had been conspicuously absent in the debate until then. The SA government’s handling of the Royal Commission process systematically disenfranchised Aboriginal people.

The Royal Commission

Royal Commissioner Kevin Scarce ‒ a retired Navy officer ‒ didn’t appoint a single Aboriginal person to the staff of the Royal Commission or to his Expert Advisory Committee. Aboriginal people repeatedly expressed frustration with the Royal Commission process.

The Royal Commission acknowledged the opposition of Aboriginal people to its nuclear waste import plan – but it treated that opposition not as a red light but as an obstacle to be circumvented. The Commission opted out of the debate regarding land rights and heritage protections for Aboriginal people, stating in its report: “Although a systematic analysis was beyond the scope of the Commission, it has heard criticisms of the heritage protection framework, particularly the consultative provisions.”

Despite its acknowledgement that it had not systematically analysed the matter, the Royal Commission nevertheless arrived at unequivocal, favourable conclusions, asserting that there “are frameworks for securing long-term agreements with rights holders in South Australia, including Aboriginal communities” and these “provide a sophisticated foundation for securing agreements with rights holders and host communities regarding the siting and establishment of facilities for the management of used fuel.”

Such statements were conspicuously absent in submissions from Aboriginal people and organisations. There is in fact an abundance of evidence that land rights and heritage protection frameworks in SA are anything but “sophisticated.”

Enter the ecomodernists

Ben Heard from the ‘Bright New World’ pro-nuclear lobby group said the Royal Commission’s findings were “robust”. Seriously? Failing to conduct an analysis and ignoring an abundance of contradictory evidence but nevertheless concluding that a “sophisticated foundation” exists for securing agreements with Aboriginal rights-holders … that’s “robust”? Likewise, academic Barry Brook, a member of the Commission’s Expert Advisory Committee, said he was “impressed with the systematic and ruthlessly evidence-based approach the [Royal Commission] team took to evaluating all issues.”

In a November 2016 article about the nuclear waste import plan, Ben Heard and Oscar Archer wrote: “We also note and respect the clear message from nearly all traditional owner groups in South Australia that there is no consent to proceed on their lands. We have been active from the beginning to shine a light on pathways that make no such imposition on remote lands.”

In Heard’s imagination, the imported spent nuclear fuel would not be dumped on the land of unwilling Aboriginal communities, it would be processed for use as fuel in non-existent Generation IV ‘integral fast reactors‘. Even the stridently pro-nuclear Royal Commission gave short shrift to Heard’s proposal, stating in its final report: “[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk.”

Heard claims his imaginary Generation IV reactor scenario “circumvents the substantial challenge of social consent for deep geological repositories, facilities that are likely to be best located, on a technical basis, on lands of importance to Aboriginal Australians”.

But even in Heard’s scenario, only a tiny fraction of the imported spent fuel would be converted to fuel for imaginary Generation IV reactors (in one of his configurations, 60,000 tonnes would be imported but only 4,000 tonnes converted to fuel). Most of it would be stored indefinitely, or dumped on the land of unwilling Aboriginal communities.

Despite his acknowledgement that there was “no consent” to proceed from “nearly all traditional owner groups in South Australia”, Heard nevertheless wrote an ‘open letter‘ promoting the waste import plan which was endorsed by ‘prominent’ South Australians, i.e. rich, non-Aboriginal people.

One of the reasons to pursue the waste import plan cited in Heard’s open letter is that it would provide an “opportunity to engage meaningfully and partner with Aboriginal communities in project planning and delivery”. There is no acknowledgement of the opposition of Aboriginal people to the waste import plan; evidently Heard believes that their opposition should be ignored or overridden but Aboriginal people might be given a say in project planning and delivery.

A second version of Heard’s open letter did not include the above wording but it cited the “successful community consultation program” with Aboriginal communities. However the report arising from the SA government’s community consultation program (successful or otherwise) stated: “Some Aboriginal people indicated that they are interested in learning more and continuing the conversation, but these were few in number.”

Geoff Russell, another self-styled pro-nuclear environmentalist, wrote in a November 2016 article in New Matilda:

“Have Aboriginals given any reasons for opposing a waste repository that are other than religious? If so, then they belong with other objections. If not, then they deserve the same treatment as any other religious objections. Listen politely and move on.

“Calling them spiritual rather than religious makes no difference. To give such objections standing in the debate over a repository is a fundamental violation of the separation of church and state, or as I prefer to put it, the separation of mumbo-jumbo and evidence based reasoning.

“Aboriginals have native title over various parts of Australia and their right to determine what happens on that land is and should be quite different from rights with regard to other land. This isn’t about their rights on that land.

“Suppose somebody wants to build a large intensive piggery. Should we consult Aboriginals in some other part of the country? Should those in the Kimberley perhaps be consulted? No.

“They may object to it in the same way I would, but they have no special rights in the matter. They have no right to spiritual veto.”

Where to begin? Russell’s description of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs as “mumbo-jumbo” is beyond offensive. He provides no evidence for his claim that Traditional Owners are speaking for other people’s country. Federal native title legislation provides limited rights and protections for some Traditional Owners ‒ and no rights and protections for many others (when the federal Coalition government was trying to impose a national nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in SA in 2003, it abolished all native title rights and interests over the site).

National nuclear waste dump

The attitudes of the ecomodernists also extend to the debate over the siting of a proposed national nuclear waste dump. Silence from the ecomodernists when the federal government was passing laws allowing the imposition of a national nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory without consent from Traditional Owners. Echoing comments from the Liberal Party, Brook and Heard said the site in the Northern Territory was in the “middle of nowhere”. From their perspective, perhaps, but for Muckaty Traditional Owners the site is in the middle of their homelands.

Heard claims that one of the current proposed dump sites, in SA’s Flinders Ranges, is “excellent” in many respects and it “was volunteered by the landowner”. In fact, it was volunteered by absentee landlord and former Liberal Party politician Grant Chapman, who didn’t bother to consult Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners living on the neighbouring Indigenous Protected Area. The site is opposed by most Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners and by their representative body, the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association (ATLA).

Heard claims there are “no known cultural heritage issues” affecting the Flinders Ranges site. Try telling that to the Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners who live on Yappala Station, in the Indigenous Protected Area adjacent to the proposed dump site. The area has many archaeological and culturally-significant sites that Traditional Owners have registered with the SA government over the past decade.

So where did Heard get this idea that there are “no known cultural heritage issues on the site”? Not from visiting the site, or speaking to Traditional Owners. He’s just repeating the federal government’s propaganda.

Silence from the ecomodernists about the National Radioactive Waste Management Act (NRWMA), which dispossesses and disempowers Traditional Owners in every way imaginable. The nomination of a site for a radioactive waste dump is valid even if Aboriginal owners were not consulted and did not give consent. The NRWMA has sections which nullify State or Territory laws that protect archaeological or heritage values, including those which relate to Indigenous traditions. The NRWMA curtails the application of Commonwealth laws including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 in the important site-selection stage. The Native Title Act 1993 is expressly overridden in relation to land acquisition for a radioactive waste dump.

Uranium mining

Silence from the ecomodernists about the Olympic Dam mine’s exemptions from provisions of the SA Aboriginal Heritage Act.

Silence from the ecomodernists about sub-section 40(6) of the Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which exempts the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory from the Act and thus removed the right of veto that Mirarr Traditional Owners would otherwise have enjoyed.

Silence from the ecomodernists about the divide-and-rule tactics used by General Atomics’ subsidiary Heathgate Resources against Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners in relation to the Beverley and Four Mile uranium mines in SA.

Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Dr Jillian Marsh, who in 2010 completed a PhD thesis on the strongly contested approval of the Beverley mine, puts the nuclear debates in a broader context: “The First Nations people of Australia have been bullied and pushed around, forcibly removed from their families and their country, denied access and the right to care for their own land for over 200 years. Our health and wellbeing compares with third world countries, our people crowd the jails. Nobody wants toxic waste in their back yard, this is true the world over. We stand in solidarity with people across this country and across the globe who want sustainable futures for communities, we will not be moved.”

Now, Traditional Owners have to fight industry, government, and the ecomodernists as well.

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Would you do consulting work for General Atomics?

Would you do consulting work for – or promote – a company that supported police brutality against a peaceful protest including the pepper-spraying of the 11-year old grand-daughter of an Adnyamathana Elder? Ben Heard has done both.

Would you do consulting work for – or promote – a company whose parent company in the U.S. is up to its neck in the slaughter of innocents via drone warfare? Ben Heard has done both.

Would you do consulting work for – or promote – a company which has employed spies to infiltrate environment groups? Ben Heard has done both.

Would you do consulting work for – or promote – a company with an appalling environmental record? If so, would you call yourself an environmentalist?!

Please follow this link to read about General Atomics’ disgusting behaviour, and watch the short video below, and ask yourself: Would you do consulting work for this company or promote its uranium mine in South Australia? Ben Heard has done both.

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Ben Heard parrots the racist lies of the right-wing Liberal Party

A new low from Ben Heard, parroting the racist lies of the right-wing Liberal government.

Here is an extract from an article posted at:

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987853/radioactive_waste_and_the_nuclear_war_on_australias_aboriginal_people.html

Australia’s self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ – academic Barry Brook (a member of the Royal Commission’s Expert Advisory Committee), uranium and nuclear industry consultant Ben Heard, and one or two others – have never once voiced concern about attempts to impose nuclear waste dumps on unwilling Aboriginal communities. Their silence suggests they couldn’t care less about the racism of the industry they so stridently support.

Silence from Brook and Heard when the federal government was passing laws allowing the imposition of a national nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory without consulting or securing consent from Traditional Owners.

Echoing comments from the right-wing Liberal Party, Brook and Heard said the Muckaty site in the Northern Territory is in the “middle of nowhere”. From their perspective, perhaps, but for Muckaty Traditional Owners the site is in the middle of their homelands – and claims that it is in the middle of nowhere are deeply offensive.

Heard’s comments about the current proposed dump site on Adnyamathanha land in South Australia have been just as offensive. He claims there are “no known cultural heritage issues on the site”. Try telling that to the Adnyamathanha Traditional Owners who live on Yappala Station, in the Indigenous Protected Area right next to the dump site.

So where did Heard get this idea that there are “no known cultural heritage issues on the site”? Not from visiting the site, or speaking to the Traditional Owners. He’s just parroting the federal government’s racist lies.

Brook and Heard are also offering up the state of South Australia for an international high-level nuclear waste dump as if it was their personal property. No mention of Aboriginal Traditional Owners or their fierce opposition to the proposal.

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Ben Heard in the Australian Financial Review

Some notes by FoE’s national nuclear campaigner Jim Green responding to comments in an Australian Financial Review article in September 2019:

“A South Australian energy modeller and pro-nuclear campaigner, Ben Heard, says that before pretty much every second public appearance he agrees to, the organisers express second thoughts after lobbying by Friends of the Earth or others.”

‒ Sometimes FoE suggests that organisers require Heard to disclose his financial interests including his solicitation and acceptance of secret corporate donations for his lobby group … because Heard has a track record of failing to disclose financial interests. Sometimes we have suggested that a ‘debate’ requires representation from more than one viewpoint, since Heard evidently believes otherwise (see elsewhere in this webpage: ‘Ben Heard’s fake ‘debates”).

“I have been called a racist,” he says.

‒ See elsewhere in this webpage: ‘Ben Heard parrots the racist lies of the right-wing Liberal Party’. Also see elsewhere in this webpage: ‘Aboriginal First Nations and Australia’s pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists’

“I have been called corrupt.”

‒ Not by FoE.

“I have been accused of taking public money to deliver ridiculous ideas.”

‒ The obscenely pro-nuclear South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission flatly rejected Heard’s Generation IV fantasies which were developed with the assistance of taxpayers’ money. See below: ‘Ben Heard’s epic fail … but will he have the decency to repay the $55,593?’

“I have been called not an environmentalist. I am an environmentalist. I am associated with a company that makes drones and I am somehow accused of being associated with killing children.”

‒ An environmentalist who is “proud” to do consulting work for a company that has hired private investigators to infiltrate environment groups!! Sounds more like a corporate-funded greenwasher.

‒ Heard can call himself whatever he wants. I call him a nuclear lobbyist whose fake environment group accepts secret corporate donations.

‒ Heard says he is proud to have consulted for a General Atomics’ subsidiary. Plenty of people would be ashamed to work for the company in light of its appalling environmental record and its involvement in drone warfare, etc. See elsewhere in this webpage: ‘Would you do consulting work for General Atomics?’ and see this information and video about General Atomics.

“I receive thinly veiled death threats.”

‒ A serious death threat, reported to the police? Or is Heard referring to a mentally-ill man in Adelaide who sings an offensive ‘song’ attacking nuclear advocates, and verbally attacks me and many others (not just nuclear advocates).

“This is my life.”

‒ I’ve had cordial, interesting communications with pro-nuclear people over the years. Heard’s problem is not that he is pro-nuclear – it is everything else: failure to disclose financial interests, aggressive and sometimes defamatory attacks, peddling misinformation, fake ‘debates’ with only pro-nuclear speakers, etc. etc.

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Ben Heard’s fake ‘debates’

In 2011, Heard organised a fake ‘debate’ with all pro-nuclear speakers! Referring to the fake ‘debate’, Heard claimed that Friends of the Earth “tried to have our event shut down”. That claim was another one of Heard’s blatant lies.

In 2018, Heard is involved in another fake ‘debate’ featuring all pro-nuclear speakers – organised (or at least hosted) by the Warren Centre. We don’t know if Heard helped to organise the fake debate including the speaking list. Friends of the Earth wrote to the Warren Centre asking why this fake ‘debate’ features all pro-nuclear speakers and seeking assurance that the audience would be made aware that Heard’s so-called environment group accepts secret corporate donations. There was no response from the Warren Centre. Here’s a link to the unanswered questions we sent to the Warren Centre.

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Exposing Ben Heard’s misinformation regarding nuclear waste import business proposals

Feb. 3, 2017

EXPOSING THE LATEST MISINFORMATION FROM BEN HEARD – THE PAID NUCLEAR LOBBYIST WHOSE FAKE ENVIRONMENT GROUP ACCEPTS SECRET CORPORATE DONATIONS.

The Advertiser has today run an article including false claims from nuclear lobbyist / uranium industry consultant / PhD student Ben Heard that Jay Weatherill’s plan to turn SA into the world’s high-level nuclear waste dump could be pursued without the need to gamble hundreds of millions or billions of dollars with no guarantee of any return on the investment.

Mr Heard is quoted saying that the “notion of high upfront cost to South Australia is a persistent and deliberate lie first peddled by deceitful environmental groups and now, sadly, taken up by the Liberal Party.”

In fact, the necessity of gambling hundreds of millions or billions of dollars ‒ without the slightest guarantee of any return on the investment ‒ is clearly spelt out by Jacobs, the economics consulting firm commissioned by the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission.

Jacobs Project Manager / Consultant Tim Johnson told the SA Joint Select Committee that “total expenditure prior to the decision to proceed” is likely to be from around A$300 million to in excess of A$600 million, depending on the timing of the decision to proceed. (Letter to Joint Standing Committee, 5 July 2016.)

Dr Johnson told the Joint Select Committee that the project entails very significant economic risks: “It isn’t a risk-free process to go into this. There is a very significant risk.” Yet the nuclear waste dump lobby persist with the fabrication that the project can be pursued without economic risks.

Jacobs noted the potential for initial outlays in the billions in its report for the Royal Commission: “Under the cash-flow assumptions of the baseline, where no revenues ahead of delivery are assumed (a deliberately conservative assumption), there is an initial outlay of A$2.4 billion (real) in net terms.” (Jacobs, Paper 5, sec 4.4, Cash flow profile for the baseline, p.205.)

Any suggestion that the nuclear waste dump project could be a quick fix for the SA economy were dispelled by the Royal Commission’s report, which stated (emphasis added): “Careful characterisation over several decades is required to confirm the suitability of the geological conditions.”

The only way to avoid gambling hundreds of millions or billions of SA taxpayers’ dollars would be in the wildly improbable scenario that potential client countries would take that gamble. If anyone needs any convincing as to the improbability of that scenario, it came late last year in correspondence from the Taiwanese government’s energy and nuclear agencies. As Daniel Wills reported in The Advertiser: “Taiwan’s state-owned energy company has bluntly rejected Investment and Trade Minister Martin Hamilton-Smith’s claim the country would consider paying to help set up a nuclear waste dump in SA, saying in a letter that it “hereby declares this is a false information”.”

Taipower clearly states that it would not consider sending waste to another country unless and until that country has developed a repository. Yet the economic case developed by Jacobs and MCM collapses if revenue (and waste) is not received before construction of a repository. The Final Report of the Royal Commission states (p.300) (emphasis added): “Figure J.8 also demonstrates that a facility configuration scenario is viable only with the establishment of a surface interim storage facility capable of accepting used fuel prior to construction of geological disposal facilities. Configurations 3 and 4, which did not include interim storage facilities (see Table J.1), did not generate profits because of the delay in receiving waste and associated revenues.”

Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council is clearly sensitive to SA public opinion, pointing to the Citizen Jury’s rejection of the proposal and noting that: “Without the understanding and support from Australian … nuclear waste storage cannot be developed.”

The nuclear waste dump lobbyists are hanging on to the ludicrous proposition that potential client countries will gamble hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on a waste dump plan that is:

* Opposed by three political parties in SA (Liberals, Greens, NXT) and by many within the ALP.

* Opposed by a majority of South Australians (e.g. 31% support vs. 53% opposition in the SA Government’s statewide consultation process; and a November 2016 poll commissioned by the Sunday Mail found just 35% support.)

* Opposed by a vast majority of Aboriginal Traditional Owners on whose land the high-level nuclear waste dump would necessarily be located. (The SA government’s Community Views Report said: “There was a significant lack of support for the government to continue pursuing any form of nuclear storage and disposal facilities. Some Aboriginal people indicated that they are interested in learning more and continuing the conversation, but these were few in number.”)

* Rejected by two-thirds of the 350-strong Citizens’ Jury “under any circumstances”.

Taiwan has clearly stated that it has no intention of gambling vast sums of money on a nuclear dump in SA and it is equally improbable that any other potential client country would do so. In which case South Australians would need to gamble hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on a project with no guarantee of any return on the investment.

Late last year, Mr Heard had to correct a statement falsely claiming that most South Australians support the high-level nuclear dump plan and he begins 2017 with another falsehood. He should have the decency to apologise to the Liberal Party and to environment groups for his latest falsehood and slander.

Interestingly, the statement falsely claiming that most South Australians support the high-level nuclear dump plan was endorsed by SA’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Leanna Read. Shamefully, the state’s chief fact-checker didn’t bother to check her facts.

Mr Heard also conveniently ignores real-world experience with nuclear waste projects:

* Estimates of the clean-up costs for a range of (civil and military) UK nuclear sites including Sellafield have nearly doubled from a 2005 estimate of £56 billion (A$91.6 billion) to over £100 billion (A$163.6 billion)

* In 2005, the French government’s nuclear waste agency Andra estimated the cost of a deep geological repository at between €13.5 and €16.5 billion (A$19.0‒23.2 billion). In 2016, Andra estimates the cost of the repository at between €20 billion to €30 billion (A$28.1‒42.2 billion). As with the UK, the latest French estimates are nearly double the earlier estimates.

* Between 2001 and 2008, the estimated cost of constructing the Yucca Mountain high level nuclear waste repository in the USA and operating it for 150 years increased by 67%, from US$57.5 billion to US$96.2 billion (A$75.1 billion ‒ $125.7 billion). Yucca Mountain was abandoned – so the USA wasted US$13.5 billion (A$17.6 billion) and still doesn’t have a repository.

The Nuclear Economics Consulting Group report commissioned by the SA Joint Select Committee concluded that the nuclear waste import project could be profitable under certain assumptions but the report then raises serious questions about most of those assumptions. The NECG report notes that the Royal Commission’s economic analysis didn’t even consider some important issues which “have significant serious potential to adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes”; that assumptions about price are “overly optimistic” and if that is the case “project profitability is seriously at risk”; that the 25% cost contingency for delays and blowouts is likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had “little support or justification”.

Finally, Mr Heard’s promotion of fast breeder reactors is beyond stupid. For all the rhetoric about Generation IV fast breeder reactors, and the US$100+ billion invested worldwide, only five such reactors are operating worldwide (three of them experimental) and only one is under construction (in India). Most of the countries that invested in fast breeder reactors have given up, deciding not to throw good money after bad. Last year, Japan decided to give up on the Monju fast breeder reactor, a fiasco that will cost Japanese taxpayers A$17.3 billion in construction, operation and decommissioning costs despite the fact that the reactor rarely operated.

The Royal Commission completely rejected proposals advanced by Heard and others for ‘advanced fast reactors’, noting in its final report that such reactors are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future; that the development of such a first-of-a-kind project would have high commercial and technical risk; that there is no licensed, commercially proven design and development to that point would require substantial capital investment; and that electricity generated from such reactors has not been demonstrated to be cost competitive with current light water reactor designs.

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Scientists debunk the disgraceful anti-renewables propaganda of Ben Heard, the paid nuclear lobbyist whose fake environment group accepts secret corporate donations

Can we get 100 percent of our energy from renewable sources?

New article gathers the evidence to address the sceptics

Public release ‒ 17 May 2018

Lappeenranta University of Technology

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/luot-cwg051718.php

Is there enough space for all the wind turbines and solar panels to provide all our energy needs? What happens when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? Won’t renewables destabilise the grid and cause blackouts?

In a review paper last year in the high-ranking journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Master of Science Benjamin Heard and colleagues presented their case against 100% renewable electricity systems. They doubted the feasibility of many of the recent scenarios for high shares of renewable energy, questioning everything from whether renewables-based systems can survive extreme weather events with low sun and low wind, to the ability to keep the grid stable with so much variable generation.

Now scientists have hit back with their response to the points raised by Heard and colleagues. The researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Delft University of Technology and Aalborg University have analysed hundreds of studies from across the scientific literature to answer each of the apparent issues. They demonstrate that there are no roadblocks on the way to a 100% renewable future.

“While several of the issues raised by the Heard paper are important, you have to realise that there are technical solutions to all the points they raised, using today’s technology,” says the lead author of the response, Dr. Tom Brown of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

“Furthermore, these solutions are absolutely affordable, especially given the sinking costs of wind and solar power,” says Professor Christian Breyer of Lappeenranta University of Technology, who co-authored the response.

Brown cites the worst-case solution of hydrogen or synthetic gas produced with renewable electricity for times when imports, hydroelectricity, batteries, and other storage fail to bridge the gap during low wind and solar periods during the winter. For maintaining stability there is a series of technical solutions, from rotating grid stabilisers to newer electronics-based solutions. The scientists have collected examples of best practice by grid operators from across the world, from Denmark to Tasmania.

Furthermore, these solutions are absolutely affordable, especially given the sinking costs of wind and solar power.

The response by the scientists has now appeared in the same journal as the original article by Heard and colleagues.

“There are some persistent myths that 100% renewable systems are not possible,” says Professor Brian Vad Mathiesen of Aalborg University, who is a co-author of the response.

“Our contribution deals with these myths one-by-one, using all the latest research. Now let’s get back to the business of modelling low-cost scenarios to eliminate fossil fuels from our energy system, so we can tackle the climate and health challenges they pose.”

The research papers for further information:

T.W. Brown, T. Bischof-Niemz, K. Blok, C. Breyer, H. Lund, B.V. Mathiesen, “Response to ‘Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems’,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, DOI:10.1016/j.rser.2018.04.113, 2018.

B.P. Heard, B.W. Brook, T.M.L. Wigley, C.J.A. Bradshaw, “Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, DOI:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114, 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114

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Another scientific critique of Ben Heard’s anti-renewables propaganda

(The following article also critiques the anti-renewables propaganda of Barry Brook, the academic who self-promoted a bogus Outstanding Scientist award and insisted there was no credible risk of a serious accident at Fukushima even as nuclear meltdowns were in full swing.)

Mark Diesendorf and Ben Elliston, ‘The feasibility of 100% renewable electricity systems: A response to critics’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 93, October 2018, Pages 318–330.
Highlights
‒ Large-scale electricity systems based on 100% renewable energy can meet the key requirements of reliability, security and affordability.
‒ This is even true where the vast majority of generation comes from variable renewables such as wind and solar PV.
‒ Thus the principal myths of critics of 100% renewable electricity are refuted.
‒ Arguments that the transition to 100% renewable electricity will necessarily take as long or longer than historical energy transitions are also refuted.
‒ The principal barriers to 100% renewable electricity are neither technological nor economic, but instead are primarily political, institutional and cultural.
Abstract:
The rapid growth of renewable energy (RE) is disrupting and transforming the global energy system, especially the electricity industry. As a result, supporters of the politically powerful incumbent industries and others are critiquing the feasibility of large-scale electricity generating systems based predominantly on RE. Part of this opposition is manifest in the publication of incorrect myths about renewable electricity (RElec) in scholarly journals, popular articles, media, websites, blogs and statements by politicians. The aim of the present article is to use current scientific and engineering theory and practice to refute the principal myths. It does this by showing that large-scale electricity systems that are 100% renewable (100RElec), including those whose renewable sources are predominantly variable (e.g. wind and solar PV), can be readily designed to meet the key requirements of reliability, security and affordability. It also argues that transition to 100RElec could occur much more rapidly than suggested by historical energy transitions. It finds that the main critiques published in scholarly articles and books contain factual errors, questionable assumptions, important omissions, internal inconsistencies, exaggerations of limitations and irrelevant arguments. Some widely publicised critiques select criteria that are inappropriate and/or irrelevant to the assessment of energy technologies, ignore studies whose results contradict arguments in the critiques, and fail to assess the sum total of knowledge provided collectively by the published studies on 100RElec, but instead demand that each individual study address all the critiques’ inappropriate criteria. We find that the principal barriers to 100RElec are neither technological nor economic, but instead are primarily political, institutional and cultural.

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Ben Heard’s dishonesty regarding nuclear power/weapons connections

Ben Heard claims that: “Peace is furthered when a nation embraces nuclear power, because it makes that nation empirically less likely to embark on a nuclear weapons program. That is the finding of a 2017 study published in the peer-reviewed journal International Security.”

That’s a lie twice over. Firstly, it isn’t true. Secondly, Heard’s assertion isn’t supported by the International Security journal article, written by Nicholas Miller from Dartmouth College.

Miller’s article downplays the power/weapons connections but much of the information in his article undermines his own argument (and Heard’s). In Miller’s own words, “more countries pursued nuclear weapons in the presence of a nuclear energy program than without one”, “the annual probability of starting a weapons program is more than twice as high in countries with nuclear energy programs, if one defines an energy program as having an operating power reactor or one under construction”, and countries that pursued nuclear weapons while they had a nuclear energy program were “marginally more likely” to acquire nuclear weapons ‒ almost twice as likely if North Korea is considered to have had a nuclear energy program while it pursued weapons.

So why does Heard claim that “when a nation embraces nuclear power, because it makes that nation empirically less likely to embark on a nuclear weapons program”? He ignores most of Miller’s article (and Miller himself ignores much that is known about power/weapons connections) and focuses on these findings:

1. The annual probability of starting a weapons program is more than twice as high in countries with an operating power reactor or one under construction (a statistically-significant finding).
2. The annual probability of starting a weapons program is somewhat lower in countries with operating power reactors compared to countries without them (a statistically non-significant finding).

So why does Heard privilege the second of those findings when only the first is statistically significant? Why does Heard privilege the finding that excludes countries with power reactors under construction (but not in operation) when the inclusion of such countries provides a fuller, more accurate assessment of the power/weapons connections? Perhaps Heard’s selectivity is connected to his work as a nuclear lobbyist whose fake environment group accepts secret corporate donations.

Nuclear power/weapons connections are multifaceted, repeatedly demonstrated, disturbing and dangerous:

‒ Nuclear power programs were involved in the successful pursuit of weapons in four countries (France, India, Pakistan, South Africa) according to Miller (and India and North Korea could be added to that list) and have provided many other countries with a latent weapons capability.

‒ Power programs have provided ongoing support for weapons programs to a greater or lesser degree in seven of the nine current weapons states (the exceptions being Israel and North Korea).

‒ The direct use of power reactors to produce plutonium for weapons in all or all-but-one of the declared weapons states (and possibly other countries, e.g. India and Pakistan).

‒ The use of power reactors to produce tritium for weapons in the US (and possibly other countries, e.g. India).

‒ Power programs (or real or feigned interest in nuclear power) legitimising enrichment and reprocessing programs that have fed proliferation.

‒ Power programs (or real or feigned interest in nuclear power) legitimising research (reactor) programs which can lead (and have led) to weapons proliferation.

‒ And last but not least, the training of experts for nuclear power programs whose expertise can be (and has been) used in weapons programs.

More information:

Power / weapons connections

Links to literature on power / weapons connections

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Dear Electric Energy Society of Australia 

February 2018
Re the Feb 21, 2018 Electric Energy Society of Australia (EESA) webinar with nuclear lobbyist Ben Heard talking about nuclear power:
1. Will EESA be organising a separate webinar to provide a perspective from someone who isn’t a nuclear lobbyist? If not, is that lack of balance consistent with the Engineers Australia Code of Ethics and Guidelines on Professional Conduct?
2. Will you amend the bio-note on the EESA webpage to note that Heard’s so-called environment group accepts secret corporate donations? If not, why not? The bio-note on the EESA webpage claims that his group ‘represents the community’ … if such dubious claims are allowed to stand then it surely needs to be acknowledged that his group accepts corporate donations including secret corporate donations. Is such disclosure not required by the Engineers Australia Code of Ethics and Guidelines on Professional Conduct?
3. During the webinar, will it be made clear that Heard’s group accepts corporate donations including secret corporate donations? Is such disclosure not required by the Engineers Australia Code of Ethics and Guidelines on Professional Conduct?
4. During the webinar, will you make it clear that Heard’s asinine contribution to the SA Royal Commission was rejected by the Commission? Specifically, the final report of the Royal Commission said: “[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment.”
5. Will you ensure that webinar participants are provided with some basic factual information that Heard certainly won’t be volunteering, e.g.
— A$40 billion capital cost for two new reactors in the UK (A$20 billion each)
— A$16 billion capital cost for new reactors in France and Finland
— bankruptcy filing of Westinghouse due to catastrophic cost overruns building conventional reactors in the US (including A$13+ billion wasted on reactors in South Carolina that were cancelled last year).
— Westinghouse, Toshiba and a number of other utilities exiting the reactor construction business
— Ziggy Switkowski, head of the Howard government’s Nuclear Energy review, now says he believes “the window for gigawatt-scale nuclear has closed”. He also said that nuclear is no longer lower cost than renewables and that the levelised cost of electricity of the two is rapidly diverging.
6. Will you ensure that webinar participants are informed that Heard has continued lobbying for the importation of 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste to SA despite being well aware of the overwhelming opposition of Aboriginal Traditional Owners?
7. What steps will you take to ensure that participants are provided with some credible information about high-temperature gas-cooled reactors given that these seem to be Heard’s latest fixation? Some information is copied below.
8. If Heard claims that high-temperature gas-cooled reactors are ‘meltdown-proof’, or other such inanities, will you ensure that his falsehoods are corrected?
Yours sincerely, Jim Green
—————————————
HIGH-TEMPERATURE GAS-COOLED REACTORS (HTGRs)
Excerpt from M. V. Ramana, April 2016, ‘The checkered operational history of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2016.1170395
“Proponents of HTGRs often claim that their designs have a long pedigree. … But if one examines that very same experience more closely – looking in particular at the HTGRs that were constructed in Western Europe and the United States to feed power into the electric grid – then one comes to other conclusions. This history suggests that while HTGRs may look attractive on paper, their performance leaves much to be desired. …
“Although Germany abandoned this technology, it did migrate to other countries, including China and South Africa. Of these, the latter case is instructive: South Africa pursued the construction of a pebble-bed reactor for a decade, and spent over a billion dollars, only to abandon it in 2009 because it just did not make sense economically. Although sold by its proponents as innovative and economically competitive until its cancellation, the South African pebble-bed reactor project is now being cited as a case study in failure. How good the Chinese experience with the HTGR will be remains to be seen. …
“From these experiences in operating HTGRs, we can take away several lessons – the most important being that HTGRs are prone to a wide variety of small failures, including graphite dust accumulation, ingress of water or oil, and fuel failures. Some of these could be the trigger for larger failures or accidents, with more severe consequences. … Other problems could make the consequences of a severe accident worse: For example, pebble compaction and breakage could lead to accelerated diffusion of fission products such as radioactive cesium and strontium outside the pebbles, and a potentially larger radioactive release in the event of a severe accident. …
“Discussions of the commercial viability of HTGRs almost invariably focus on the expected higher capital costs per unit of generation capacity (dollars per kilowatts) in comparison with light water reactors, and potential ways for lowering those. In other words, the main challenge they foresee is that of building these reactors cheaply enough. But what they implicitly or explicitly assume is that HTGRs would operate as well as current light water reactors – which is simply not the case, if history is any guide. …
“Although there has been much positive promotional hype associated with high-temperature reactors, the decades of experience that researchers have acquired in operating HTGRs has seldom been considered. Press releases from the many companies developing or selling HTGRs or project plans in countries seeking to purchase or construct HTGRs neither tell you that not a single HTGR-termed “commercial” has proven financially viable nor do they mention that all the HTGRs were shut down well before the operating periods envisioned for them. This is typical of the nuclear industry, which practices selective remembrance, choosing to forget or underplay earlier failures.”

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A new low from Ben Heard

This is a response to the latest defamatory spray from Ben Heard – the paid nuclear lobbyist whose fake environment group ‘Bright New World’ accepts secret corporate donations. Heard’s latest defamatory spray is directed at the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). [1] The ACF has actively and tirelessly supported the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for over a decade. ICAN was largely responsible for the United Nation’s nuclear weapons ban treaty established in mid-2017, and ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in late-2017 in recognition of its extraordinary ‒ and extraordinarily successful ‒ work.

Heard says that his fake environment group Bright New World “stands with efforts to rid the world of the abhorrence that is nuclear weapons.” That’s not true. Heard has never lifted a finger in support of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament campaigns. His only connection to the Nobel laureates responsible for the UN nuclear weapons ban treaty is that he routinely attacks and slanders them.

Note that this isn’t Ben’s first attempt at pretending to be something that he isn’t. He once posted an article on his website stating that he was “once a fervent anti-nuclear campaigner” before he saw the nuclear light.[2] In fact, he literally never lifted a finger in support of anti-nuclear campaigns, and that fabrication was only corrected on his website after it was publicly exposed.

Heard notes that the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize was received by Dr Mohamed ElBaradei on behalf of the International Atomic Energy Agency.[3] True, but why doesn’t Heard note that Dr ElBaradei was best known for his striking honesty regarding the severe limitations of the so-called safeguards system? During his tenture as Director General of the IAEA, Dr ElBaradei noted that the IAEA’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and it “clearly needs reinforcement”, that efforts to improve the system have been “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department “.

So why is Heard silent about the clearly inadequate safeguards system? Perhaps his secret corporate donors include uranium mining companies who have a vested interest in ignoring and lying about the inadequacies of the safeguards system.

Heard attacks the ACF for failing to acknowledge the “obvious distinction” between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. But in fact, there are manifold connections and 20+ countries have deliberately sought to bring themselves closer to a weapons capability via ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs.[4] Five of the 10 countries to have built nuclear weapons did so under cover of ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs. And in the other five countries ‒ the ‘declared’ nuclear weapons states ‒ there are important connections between power and weapons, not least the direct use of power reactors to produce plutonium for bombs (or the current use of power reactors in the US to produce tritium for nuclear weapons).[5] Australia’s only serious pursuit of nuclear power was driven by a hidden weapons agenda as then Prime Minister John Gorton later acknowledged.[4]

It is important to note that prominent nuclear advocates are now openly acknowledging ‒ repeat, openly acknowledging ‒ the connections between nuclear power and weapons, particularly in the US and the UK.[6] Even the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents nuclear power companies, has been openly acknowledging the connections.[6] And to give one more example, an organisation headed by former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz argues that the US nuclear power industry “helps the U.S military meet specific defense priorities” and is “essential to the global projection of U.S. military capability.”[6,7]

Why would the nuclear power industry and some of its prominent supporters openly acknowledge the power/weapons connections? It’s a sign of their desperation: they are seeking to increase the already massive government subsidies for nuclear power by arguing that nuclear weapons programs will be adversely affected if not underpinned and supported by a strong, heavily-subsidised nuclear power industry.[6]

It’s disappointing that Heard ignores the obvious connections between nuclear power and weapons. But we should have some sympathy for his position: his secret corporate donors wouldn’t be impressed if he was to talk openly and honestly about the repeatedly-demonstrated connections between ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs (including nuclear power programs) and nuclear weapons. His secret corporate donors wouldn’t be impressed if he was to talk openly and honestly about the severe limitations of the nuclear safeguards system. And his secret corporate donors would be even less impressed if he was to do something about the problems, such as campaigning for a strengthened safeguards system.

References:
[1] www.brightnewworld.org/media/2017/12/12/acfnot4peace
[2] https://decarbonisesa.com/2012/04/29/not-so-strange-bedfellows/
[3] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/nobel-peace-prize
[4] https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power-weapons/#casestudies
[5] www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/804/myth-peaceful-atom
[6] https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/850/nuclear-power-weapons-and-national-security
[7] https://energyfuturesinitiative.org/news/2017/8/15/efi-releases-nuclear-energy-enterprise-study

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Ben Heard campaigns against renewables and then denies doing so!

Ben Heard – the paid nuclear lobbyist whose fake environment group ‘Bright New World’ accepts secret corporate donations – actively campaigned against a solar thermal plant being built at Port Augusta in South Australia … then said it was a “complete lie” that he campaigned against a solar thermal plant!

Specifically, Heard wrote a report arguing that plans for a solar thermal plant at Port Augusta should be abandoned in favour of nuclear power, and he used the report as a tool for public, political and media lobbying and campaigning.

Meanwhile, real environmentalists successfully campaigned for the coal plant at Port Augusta to be replaced with renewables!

By the way, why is it that none of these self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ such as Ben Heard play any role whatsoever in campaigns against fossil fuels? We (i.e. real environmentalists) have never once had any support from them whatsoever in fossil fuel campaigns in SA or Victoria or anywhere else. Presumably Heard’s excuse is that he’s too busy campaigning against renewables!

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Ben Heard’s misinformation about the Fukushima death toll

Heard trumpets that “absence of radiologically-related health impacts” from the Fukushima disaster.[1] He is well aware of ‒ but chooses to ignore ‒ the World Health Organisation report that concluded that for people in the most contaminated areas in Fukushima Prefecture, the estimated increased risk for all solid cancers will be around 4% in females exposed as infants; a 6% increased risk of breast cancer for females exposed as infants; a 7% increased risk of leukaemia for males exposed as infants; and for thyroid cancer among females exposed as infants, an increased risk of up to 70% (from a 0.75% lifetime risk up to 1.25%).[2]

Heard ignores numerous other impacts from the Fukushima disaster. For example, he is silent on the plight of evacuees. Six years after the disaster, over half of the original 164,000 evacuees remain dislocated, with tens of thousands still living in temporary housing.[3] Local authorities said in January 2017 that only 13% of the evacuees in five municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture have returned home after evacuation orders were lifted.[4]

The Japanese government’s estimate of Fukushima clean-up and compensation costs has doubled and doubled again and now stands at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187bn). Indirect costs will likely exceed that figure and total long-term direct and indirect costs will likely exceed US$500 billion.[5]

References:
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58254e216a496325c2d90145/t/58bcada9579fb33e05be9098/1488760245016/AIIB_BNW.pdf
[2] www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_report_20130228/en/
[3] www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/topics/Progress_to_date/pdf/201608_process_and_prospects.pdf
[4] http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170129/p2g/00m/0dm/047000c
[5] www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/836/economic-impacts-fukushima-disaster

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Ben Heard’s misinformation about the Chernobyl death toll

28 April 2016 ‒ This is a response to Ben Heard’s response to a Friends of the Earth article (for a much longer, referenced version of the FoE article see this article in The Ecologist).

Heard ignores a fundamental point: it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to follow the lead of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and argue that the long-term Chernobyl death toll is uncertain, but conflating that uncertainty with a long-term death toll of zero clearly isn’t defensible. Heard could refute the evidence that nuclear advocates (including Heard himself) routinely conflate or confuse an uncertain long-term death toll with a long-term death toll of zero. But the evidence is there for all to see and Heard doesn’t attempt to refute it. So Heard’s entire article can be read as an exercise in obfuscation.

Following UNSCEAR’s lead, Heard objects to the use of collective radiation dose estimates and risk estimates to arrive at an estimate of the Chernobyl cancer death toll. Fair enough, except that there’s no other way to arrive at an estimate of the death toll. That’s why UNSCEAR itself has previously used that approach (as Heard concedes) … as have the IAEA, the WHO etc. etc. (see here for links to some of their literature). That’s why articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals use the approach (e.g. this one).

That’s why Timothy Jorgensen, an Associate Professor of Radiation Medicine, writing in The Conversation a few days ago, notes that “an international team of scientists completed a comprehensive analysis of the dose and health data” and estimated 22,800 radiation-induced non-thyroid cancers from exposure to Chernobyl radiation … based on radiation dose estimates! Heard completely ignores thyroid cancers but as Jorgensen notes: “Scientists estimate that there will ultimately be about 16,000 excess thyroid cancers produced as a result of iodine-131 exposure from Chernobyl.”

Heard thinks the epidemiological record can be used to estimate the Chernobyl death toll. The Jorgensen article notes that the estimated 22,800 radiation-induced non-thyroid cancers represents a 0.01% increase in cancer incidence across 40 exposed countries. So Heard apparently believes that epidemiological studies ought to be able to detect a 0.01% increase in cancer incidence across 40 countries and to confidently ascribe that increase to Chernobyl.

Jorgensen is discussing cancer incidence but the same point applies to cancer mortality. See for example Table 12, p.108 of the WHO 2006 report: very small percentage increases in cancer mortality (ranging from 0.003% to 1%) add up to an estimated 9,000 cancer fatalities in the three most heavily exposed ex-Soviet states.

Heard states: “Then comes the area of credible uncertainty: the possibility, based on modelled impacts, that some additional thousands of fatalities may be attributable based on the most exposed populations.” So having completely rejected the use of radiation dose estimates and risk factors to estimate the Chernobyl death toll, Heard now regards this as “an area of credible uncertainty”. Idiot.

Earlier comments on Heard’s misinformation regarding the Chernobyl death toll

Heard acknowledges a total of 43 deaths from the Chernobyl disaster from acute radiation exposure and thyroid cancer. He argues that the long-term non-thyroid cancer death toll is zero. He arrives at that conclusion by repeatedly misrepresenting a report by the UNSCEAR and ignoring all other estimates of the long-term cancer death toll.

The UNSCEAR report argues that the long-term cancer death toll from Chernobyl cannot be meaningfully estimated because of “unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions”, i.e. the limitations of epidemiological studies, and the uncertainties of applying a risk estimate (e.g. based on the linear no-threshold theory) to the collective radiation dose estimate (e.g. the IAEA’s collective dose estimate of 600,000 person-Sieverts).

Heard conflates UNSCEAR’s unknown long-term cancer death toll with a long-term cancer death toll of zero. Obviously they are two very different propositions yet the distinction is lost on Heard. An obvious question for Heard − how could UNSCEAR arrive at a long-term cancer death toll of zero at the same time as it argues that the death toll cannot be estimated because of “unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions”? In truth, UNSCEAR doesn’t estimate a long-term cancer death toll of zero − it simply declines to provide any estimate whatsoever.

UNSCEAR participated in the Chernobyl Forum study which estimates a death toll of 4,000 among the highest-exposed populations (with a follow-up World Health Organisation study estimating an additional 5,000 deaths among populations exposed to lower doses in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.) On the broader issue of the cancer risks of exposure to low-level ionising radiation, UNSCEAR’s view is that “the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates.”

Back to the Chernobyl death toll:

• A study published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2006 estimates that Chernobyl will have caused 16,000 thyroid cancers and 25,000 other cancers in Europe by 2065, and that 16,000 of these cancers will be fatal. The study does not consider emergency workers exposed to relatively high doses.
• Research published in 2006 by UK radiation scientists Ian Fairlie and David Sumner estimates 30,000 to 60,000 deaths.
• A 2006 scientific study commissioned by Greenpeace estimates a death toll of about 93,000.

Studies such as those listed above typically use a risk estimate derived from the linear no-threshold theory (LNT). There is uncertainty about the accuracy of the LNT-derived risk estimate in relation to low doses and low dose rates. However that does not mean − as many nuclear advocates state or imply − that the LNT-derived risk estimate overstates the true risk. It may be accurate or it may understate or overstate the true risk. Thus the 2005 report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (BEIR) of the US National Academy of Sciences states that (p.6) “combined analyses are compatible with a range of possibilities, from a reduction of risk at low doses to risks twice those upon which current radiation protection recommendations are based.”

Heard makes great play of the psychological impacts of nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, which he blames on radiophobia spread by nuclear critics. However the enormous psychological impact of the Fukushima disaster is not a result of ‘radiophobia’ — it is an understandable reaction to the circumstances people face, in particular the 160,000 people evacuated from the 20-km exclusion zone. They are homeless, jobless, and many are separated from friends and family. Compensation has been too little, too late. The clean-up of contaminated areas has been slow and contentious. Likewise, the enormous psychological impact of the Chernobyl disaster is a result of the circumstances people face, in particular the 350,000 people evacuated from the exclusion zone.

Some useful discussions on the Chernobyl death toll:

• Lisbeth Gronlund, 17 April 2011, ‘How Many Cancers Did Chernobyl Really Cause?’, http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/4704112149/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated
• Sue Wareham, 2009, ‘The nuclear industry: a history of misleading claims’, Briefing Paper #20, http://www.energyscience.org.au/factsheets.html
• An article exposing the misinformation of Heard and other self-styled ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ regarding the Chernobyl death toll.

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Nuclear Waste

Some comments from an article by Ben Heard and Barry Brook (BH/BB) and my (Jim Green) responses.

BH/BB: “The best start for responsible management of any hazardous waste is to capture and contain it at the source. Nuclear power does this.”

About one-third of the spent fuel produced in power reactors has been reprocessed and this results in considerable releases of radioactive materials (it is “environmentally dirty” according to the Deputy Director General of the World Nuclear Association). Then there are accidents and leaks − for example in April 2005 it was revealed that 83,000 litres of highly-radioactive liquid containing dissolved spent nuclear fuel (and 160 kgs of plutonium) had leaked from the THORP reprocessing plant in the UK, and the leak went undetected for at least eight months.

Uranium mine tailings waste isn’t captured and contained, nor is the liquid waste from in-situ leach mining.

Hanford, Dounreay, Sellafield, Chelyabinsk/Mayak − these are synonymous with environmental pollution as a result of serious, protracted nuclear waste management problems.

BH/BB: “[R]adioactive waste is perceived as complex. This is far from the truth. Radioactive material is one of the most predictable, easily monitored and best understood forms of waste. We know what it does, and how it does it, forever, and we manage it accordingly.”

Obviously there is no experience with the management of high-level nuclear waste over periods of centuries or millenia let alone “forever”. Research continues to throw up surprises, e.g. colloidal migration of plutonium, and studies from the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in Sweden suggesting that copper-encapsulated canisters will corrode much faster than previously expected.

2023 update: The only operating deep underground nuclear waste repository anywhere in the world – the WIPP repository in the USA – suffered a chemical explosion in 2014 following years of staggering mismanagement and under-regulation.

BH/BB: “[T]he quantities in question are relatively very small. … A large-scale 25 GW nuclear power industry would add a mere 50 tons, taking up just 250 m3 (six-and-a-half standard shipping containers).”

BH/BB ignore waste streams across the nuclear fuel cycle − mine tailings waste, depleted uranium, etc. Over a 50-year lifespan, a 25 GW nuclear power industry would be responsible for:

• 900 million tonnes of low-level radioactive tailings waste − assuming the uranium came from the Olympic Dam mine in SA. (If the uranium came from in-situ leach mines, there would be no tailings waste but there would be many aquifers polluted with radionuclides, heavy metals and acid.)
• 215,000 tonnes of depleted uranium waste, a by-product of the uranium enrichment process.
• 37,500 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent fuel).
• 375,000 cubic metres of low-level and intermediate-level waste.

(The Switkowski report is the basis for most of the above calculations. The figure on tailings waste comes from BHP Billiton’s literature regarding the Olympic Dam open-cut mine expansion plan.)

The figures for one reactor (1 GW) for one year are: 720,000 tonnes of radioactive tailings waste (Olympic Dam), 170 tonnes of depleted uranium waste, 30 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent fuel) and 300 cubic metres of low-level and intermediate-level waste.

Volume and mass are not the only parameters to consider. High-level nuclear waste (spent fuel) produced in power reactors around the world contains enough plutonium to build about 200,000 nuclear weapons. Heat generated by high-level nuclear waste is another concern.

The interesting part of the BH/BB article concerns fast reactor technology. In theory fast reactor technology is attractive (potentially consuming more waste and weapons-useable material than the reactors produce) but in practice it has been highly problematic − fast reactor programs have contributed to several nuclear weapons programs; they have been leak-prone, fire-prone, and accident-prone; and there are a number of multi-billion-dollar white elephants such as the French Superphenix fast reactor. (On fast reactor technology see this report (PDF) by the International Panel on Fissile Materials.) Likewise the theory of conventional reprocessing is attractive but in practice it has been highly problematic.

BH/BB conclude their fast reactor promo: “So nuclear waste stops being a major headache, and turns into an asset. An incredibly valuable asset, as it turns out. In the US alone, there is 10 times more energy in already-mined depleted uranium (about 700,000 tonnes) and spent nuclear fuel, just sitting there in stockpiles, than there is coal in the ground. This is a multi-trillion dollar, zero-carbon energy resource, waiting to be harnessed.” Nuclear utilities around the world disagree − they are keen to dump their nuclear waste in Australia or anywhere else that will take it and they are prepared to pay billions of dollars to get rid of it. In theory, nuclear waste is a multi-trillion dollar asset; in reality it is a multi-billion dollar liability.

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Heard platforms self-confessed liar Michael Shellenberger

Why did Ben Heard’s ‘Bright New World’ invite Michael Shellenberger to speak at a mid-2020 zoom public meeting? Shellenberger is, amongst other things:

— a serial liar who acknowledges a long history of failing to be truthful

— a dangerous nutjob who promotes the worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons

— a dangerous nutjob who promotes the abolition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

So why provide a platform for Shellenberger to promote his misinformation and dangerous nonsense? If Heard provides an answer, it will be posted here.

More info: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/michael-shellenbergers-pro-nuclear-lobby-group-environmental-progress/

Click here to download a March 2012 briefing paper, ‘Japan’s Nuclear Scandals and the Fukushima Disaster’.

Here is a brief summary of the paper:

1. Safety breaches and cover-ups

The Japanese nuclear industry has been plagued by safety breaches, scandals, cover-ups, inadequate regulation and a myriad of other failings over a long period of time.

2. Corruption and collusion in Japan’s ‘nuclear village’

Japan’s nuclear industry is run by a clique of public- and private-sector interests that have promoted personal and corporate gain at the expense of public safety.

3. Nuclear accidents in Japan

Managerial and regulatory failures have contributed to numerous nuclear accidents in Japan.

4. Earthquake and tsunami risks

TEPCO (operator of the Fukushima plant) did not adequately protect against earthquake and tsunami risks, nor was it forced to by the government regulator.

5. Responsibility for the Fukushima disaster

Primary responsibility for the disaster lies with TEPCO. Others are culpable including Japanese government agencies and regulators, and overseas suppliers who have turned a blind eye to serious problems in Japan’s nuclear industry over a long period of time.

6. Australia’s role in the Fukushima disaster

Australia’s uranium mining industry has done nothing to try to rectify the patterns of unsafe mismanagement in Japan’s nuclear industry, or the inadequate regulation. Successive Australian governments have been equally passive.

Appendix: Spinning Fukushima

Two ABC opinion articles (March 2011 and February 2012)  on the ‘spinning’ of the Fukushima disaster by nuclear power advocates.

Barry Brook, Pinchy Lobster and Clive Palmer: Three Outstanding Scientists & Intellectuals

Tas Uni academic Barry Brook’s university webpage (see the Career tab, under “Awards and Prizes”) says that in 2005 he was listed as one of the “2000 Outstanding Scientists of the 21st Century” by the International Biographical Centre (IBC). But the IBC is a zero-credibility, money-making operation.

The WA Government’s Dept of Commerce ‘ScamNet’ website states: “The material promoting the International Biographical Centre creates a false impression about the credentials of the organisation. It also wrongly implies that the receiver of the letter has been picked through a special research process considering their work and qualifications.”

If there was any doubt about the IBC’s illegitimacy, one of Brook’s academic colleagues nominated a squeaky toy lobster and Prof. Lobster was accepted for inclusion as one of the ‘2000 Outstanding Scientists of the 21st Century’.

And the IBC has accepted a nomination for Clive Palmer to be listed as one of the ‘2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century’. A ‘Medal of Intellect’ will be sent to Palmer on payment of a $240 fee. Following an “investigation” by the its “research and editorial departments”, the IBC further decided to include Clive Palmer in its list of ‘Top 100 Professionals 2016’, and invited Palmer to part with $775 for a Certificate and Commemorative Medal – laminated for an extra $150.

Feel free to test the IBC’s credibility yourself … you’ll have no trouble getting the Wiggles or the Bananas in Pyjamas or Thomas the Tank Engine or Humphrey B. Bear or even Ben Heard accepted as Outstanding Scientists or Outstanding Intellectuals or Top Professionals.

Given that the illegitimacy of the IBC is beyond doubt, why does the IBC accolade remain on Brook’s university webpage?

Update – the sham award was removed from Brook’s university webpage approx. 12-18 months after it was publicly revealed and 12+ months after the Tas Uni V.C. was alerted to Brook’s self-promotion of a sham award.

Barry Brook promotes barking-mad conspiracy theorists

Excerpt from an article posted at The Ecologist.

Australian ‘ecomodernist‘ academic Barry Brook says that before 2009 he hadn’t given much thought to nuclear power because of the ‘peak uranium’ argument. By 2010, Brook was in full flight, asserting that the linear no-threshold (LNT) model is “discredited” and has “no relevance to the real world”.

In fact, LNT enjoys heavy-hitting scientific support. For example the US National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR report states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” Likewise, a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.”

On Chernobyl, Brook said: “The credible literature (WHO, IAEA) puts the total Chernobyl death toll at less than 60. The ‘conspiracy theories’ drummed up against these authoritative organisations rings a disturbingly similar bell in my mind to the crank attacks on the IPCC, NASA and WMO in climate science.”

But the WHO, IAEA and other UN agencies estimated 9,000 deaths in ex-Soviet states in their 2005/06 reports, and more recently UNSCEAR has adopted the position that the long-term death toll is uncertain.

Brook repeatedly promotes the work of Ted Rockwell from ‘Radiation, Science, and Health’, an organisation that peddles dangerous conspiracy theories such as this: “Government agencies suppress data, including radiation hormesis, and foster radiation fear. They support extreme, costly, radiation protection policies; and preclude using low-dose radiation for health and medical benefits that apply hormesis, in favor of using (more profitable) drug therapies.”

Brook promotes the discredited ‘hormesis’ theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health (for a scientific assessment see Appendix D in the BEIR report).

And for comic relief Brook promotes his citation as one of the ‘Outstanding Scientists of the 21st Century’. But in fact the citation comes from the International Biographical Centre, an organisation whose raison d’etre is to separate the gullible and the narcissistic from their money. One of Brook’s academic colleagues nominated a squeaky toy lobster and Prof. Lobster was accepted for inclusion in the list of Outstanding Scientists.

Barry Brook loses plot, temper

Jim Green, Spinning Fukushima, New Matilda, 16 March 2011, http://newmatilda.com/2011/03/16/spinning-fukushima

When will they call it a disaster? Jim Green looks at just how wrong Australia’s leading advocates of nuclear power got it on Fukushima this week

How have Australian scientists handled the difficult task of keeping us informed about the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan? Well, precious few Australian scientists have actually featured in the media. The most prominent have been Professor Aidan Byrne from the Australian National University, RMIT Chancellor Dr Ziggy Switkowski, and Professor Barry Brook from Adelaide University.

A clear pattern is evident: those with the greatest ideological attachment to nuclear power have provided the most inaccurate commentary.

The best of the bunch has been Byrne. He has presented the facts as he understands them — and has willingly acknowledged major information gaps.

Switkowski has been gently spinning the issue, repeatedly reassuring us that lessons will be learned, improvements will be made. However, history clearly shows that nuclear lessons are not properly learned. The OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency notes that lessons may be learned but too often they are subsequently forgotten. Or they are learned but by the wrong people. Or they are learned but not acted upon. The Nuclear Energy Agency says the pattern of the same type of accident recurring time and time again at different nuclear plants needs to be “much improved”.

The situation in Japan illustrates the point — it has become increasingly obvious over the past decade that greater protection against seismic risks is necessary, but the nuclear utilities haven’t wanted to spend the money and the Japanese nuclear regulator and the government haven’t forced the utilities to act.

Barry Brook is a strident nuclear power advocate and host of the bravenewclimate.com blog, which has received an astonishing half a million web hits since the crisis in Japan began. Right now, Brook has egg on his face. Make that an omelette. He has maintained a running commentary in the media and on his website insisting that the situation in Japan is under control and that there is no reason for concern.

His message has not changed, even after efforts to cool the nuclear reactor cores met with mixed success, even as deliberate and uncontrolled radiation releases occurred, even as the outer containment buildings exploded, even as 200,000 people were being evacuated, even as a fire led to spent nuclear fuel releasing radiation directly to the environment — and even as radiation monitors detected alarming jumps in radioactivity near the reactor and low levels of radiation as far away as Tokyo.

On Saturday, Brook came out swinging, insisting that “There is no credible risk of a serious accident.” Phew.

That afternoon, after the first explosion at Fukushima, Brook kept going, making numerous assertions in the comments section of his website, most of which turned out to be wrong. Try this one:

“The risk of meltdown is extremely small, and the death toll from any such accident, even if it occurred, will be zero. There will be no breach of containment and no release of radioactivity beyond, at the very most, some venting of mildly radioactive steam to relieve pressure. Those spreading FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] at the moment will be the ones left with egg on their faces. I am happy to be quoted forever after on the above if I am wrong … but I won’t be. The only reactor that has a small probability of being ‘finished’ is unit 1. And I doubt that, but it may be offline for a year or more.”

On Saturday night, Brook continued, responding to a commenter on his website with the following words: “When the dust settles, people will realise how well the Japanese reactors — even the 40 year old one — stood up to this incredibly energetic earthquake event.” The dust is (hopefully) settling and it seems likely that four reactors will be write-offs.

It didn’t stop all weekend. On Sunday morning, Brook reflected on the unfolding disaster: “I don’t see the ramifications of this as damaging at all to nuclear power’s prospects” and that “it will provide a great conversation starter for talking intelligently to people about nuclear safety.” Actually Fukushima will likely prove a great conversation starter for talking intelligently to people about nuclear hazards. Not recommended at parties.

On Sunday afternoon, Brook was congratulating himself on his “just the facts” approach in media interviews. He pondered on the comments thread: “What has this earthquake taught us? That it’s much, much riskier to choose to live next to the ocean than it is to live next to a nuclear power station.” Well, the lesson for people in Fukushima is that if you live next to the ocean and next to a nuclear power station, then you’re really stuffed.

On Monday, when the second explosion at Fukushima occurred, Prof. Brook was still insisting that “the nuclear reactors have come through remarkably well”. On Monday evening, half a dozen people were banned from posting comments directly on the website. True, some of their comments were silly and unhelpful, but by that criterion Brook ought to have banned himself. And on Tuesday, with a fire at Fukushima spewing long-lived radioisotopes directly into the environment, Brook was rallying the pro-nuclear lobby, arguing that “now, more than ever, we must stand up for what we believe is right”.

Cracks were starting to appear on Tuesday night, with Brook finally acknowledging an “ongoing crisis situation”, banning another 40-50 “random nobodies” from posting comments directly on his website, and quoting Rudyard Kipling:

“If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools”

Make of that what you will.

One contributor to Brave New Climate summed it up nicely: “Unfortunately, Prof. Brook has really abdicated a neutral position on this event. His clear support of nuclear power seems to have impacted his critical thinking skills. … Every time he states something in this crisis is ‘impossible’, it seems to happen the next day.”

Andrew Bolt has been urging people to read the “marvellously sane and cool explanation” from “our friend Professor Barry Brook”. Both Bolt and Brook claim that no more than 50 people died from the Chernobyl catastrophe. More on that next month — the 25th anniversary falls on 26 April 2011. The scientific estimates of the Chernobyl death toll vary. The World Health Organisation puts the figure at 9000. A 2006 report based on Belarus national cancer statistics, paints a much gloomier picture: approximately 270,000 cancers and 93,000 fatal cancer cases caused by Chernobyl.

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Barry Brook’s nuclear misinformation

To read a detailed, referenced critique of Barry Brook’s nuclear misinformation online click here.

A shorter version of this material was published in New Matilda on 12 March 2012 and a similar version from Indymedia is copied below.

The detailed paper covers these topics: Introduction – Energy options – Nuclear power and WMD proliferation – Ionising radiation and Chernobyl – Safety and Fukushima- Terra Nullius – Radioactive waste – The responsible nuclear advocate – Conclusion

Conclusion to the detailed paper:

Many people concerned about climate and energy are wrestling with some enormous dilemmas:

• Coal burning is a major cause of climate change, and efforts to develop ‘clean coal’ technology have been half-hearted and progress has been glacial.
• Widespread nuclear power proliferation will run the WMD proliferation risks “off the reasonability scale” as Al Gore puts it. There is no reason to believe that the industry will seriously improve its performance on this front − it refuses even to address relatively simple problems such as stopping the stockpiling of separated plutonium. There is no reason to believe that fast reactor technology will come to the rescue − attractive theories notwithstanding − given that fast reactor programs have to date contributed to several WMD proliferation programs (e.g. India, France, Yugoslavia) without contributing in any way to the resolution of any WMD proliferation problems anywhere.
• Renewables are generally benign but there are limitations to consider (and hopefully overcome through concerted R&D) and interrelated cost issues.

Some people live in a parallel universe where global warming is a myth, or clean coal technology is just around the corner. Some people live in a parallel universe where a global transition to renewables is simple, cheap, and potentially quick. Prof. Brook lives in a parallel universe where nuclear power is benign − the WMD connection is trivialised, nuclear waste is a multi-trillion-dollar asset, nuclear power is the safest energy source, low-level ionising radiation is harmless, Chernobyl killed less than 60 people, ‘integral fast reactors’ can’t produce fissile material for weapons, reactor-grade plutonium can’t be used in weapons, and problems such as inadequate safeguards and the (further) disempowerment of Aboriginal people are ignored.

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Prof Barry Brook – Brave New Climate

Jim Green, 31 March 2012, Indymedia

http://www.indymedia.org.au/2012/03/31/prof-barry-brook-brave-new-climate

One of the loudest nuclear advocates in Australia is Professor Barry Brook, a climate change scientist at the University of Adelaide who runs the Brave New Climate website.

The Brook mantra is this: “it’s nuclear power or it’s climate change”. However numerous studies exist that map out the options to sharply reduce emissions without recourse to nuclear power. See for example the UNSW study a more ambitious scenario that replaces all coal and gas with renewables.

Brook has shown himself willing to trivialise the repeatedly demonstrated connections between nuclear power and weapons. He has slipped up on this, claiming for example that North Korea never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty although Pyongyang’s accession to — then withdrawal from — the NPT is central to the unfolding story of North Korea’s nuclear program.

Brook claims to be concerned about nuclear weapons proliferation but the evidence suggests otherwise. Here is an example of his indifference: asked at a public forum what needs to be done to fix the safeguards system and what role he sees for scientists such as himself to help address the problems, Brook responded: “That’s a political and legal question and I have no further comment.”

To get a handle on the proliferation risks of the nuclear “renaissance”, if it eventuates, here are some figures:

• Of the 65-odd countries with a nuclear program of any significance (involving power and/or research reactors), over one-third have used their ‘peaceful’ programs to advance weapons ambitions.
• Of the 10 countries to have built nuclear weapons, six did so with support and political cover from their “peaceful” programs (India, North Korea, South Africa, Pakistan, France and Israel).
• About 45 countries have the capacity to produce significant quantities of fissile material (more or less depending on where you draw the line with small-medium research reactors), and a vast majority of those countries acquired their fissile material production capacity through peaceful nuclear research or power programs.

As former US Vice President Al Gore has argued, a major horizontal expansion of nuclear power will “run the proliferation risk off the reasonability scale”.

Brook claims that the integral fast reactors (IFRs) he champions “cannot be used to generate weapons-grade material.” The claim isn’t true. To quote George Stanford, who worked on an IFR research program in the US: “If not properly safeguarded, they could do [with IFRs] what they could do with any other reactor — operate it on a special cycle to produce good quality weapons material.”

The misconceptions pile up. Brook states: “Prior to the Fukushima Daiichi accident, caused when a 14 metre tsunami crashed into a 40-year old power station in Japan, no member of the public had ever been killed by nuclear power in an OECD country.” However the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has estimated the collective effective dose to the world population over a 50-year period of operation of nuclear power reactors and associated nuclear facilities to be two million person-Sieverts (it does not provide OECD figures separately). Applying a standard risk estimate (0.05 fatal cancers per Sievert of exposure to low-dose radiation) gives an estimated 100,000 fatalities. Whatever the uncertainties with the dose and risk estimates, and whatever the OECD/non-OECD breakdown, Brook’s statement clearly doesn’t hold up.

Brook states that the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory of radiation exposure and cancer causation is “discredited” and has “no relevance to the real world”. However, the 2005 report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation of the US National Academy of Sciences states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” And one further example of many, a study published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003 concluded that: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.”

Brook gets it wrong on Chernobyl, too. He states: “The credible literature (WHO, IAEA) puts the total Chernobyl death toll at less than 60.” However the studies he is referring to do not estimate a death toll of less than 60. He is referring to reports by the UN Chernobyl Forum  and the World Health Organisation in 2005-06 which estimate up to 4000 eventual deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations and an additional 5000 deaths among populations exposed to lower doses in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. (The Chernobyl Forum includes UN agencies such as the IAEA, UNSCEAR, and WHO.)

Still Brook is adamant that “nuclear power is the safest energy option”. Safer than wind and solar? He could only arrive at that conclusion by using the nuclear industry’s methodology: only consider accidents at nuclear power plants rather than accidents across the energy chain; understate the death toll from accidents by several orders of magnitude; only consider accidents rather than routine emissions; and ignore the greatest hazard associated with nuclear power — its repeatedly demonstrated connection to WMD proliferation (most recently with North Korea’s use of an “experimental power reactor” to produce plutonium for weapons).

As the Fukushima nuclear disaster unfolded in March 2011, Brook maintained a running commentary in the media and on his website insisting that the situation was under control and that there was no reason for concern. There was no correction until Brook had been publicly held to account for spreading misinformation. Andrew Bolt from the Herald Sun was urging people to read the “marvellously sane and cool explanation” from “our friend Professor Barry Brook”. Both Bolt and Brook subscribe to conspiracy theories about environmentalists with a hidden, authoritarian “political manifesto” to return to a pre-industrial society.

Brook wrote an ABC opinion piece in December 2011 which states that “no-one was killed by radioactivity” from Fukushima and is silent on the problem of long-term cancer deaths from exposure to radioactive fallout [see here for a recent estimate of the long-term cancer death toll, ~5,000].

Many people concerned about climate and energy are wrestling with some enormous dilemmas about how to move to a less emissions intensive energy economy. Some people live in a parallel universe where global warming is a myth, or clean coal technology is just around the corner. Some people live in a parallel universe where the global transition to renewables is simple, cheap, and potentially quick. Barry Brook lives in a parallel universe where nuclear power is benign, the WMD problem is trivial, nuclear waste is a multi-trillion-dollar asset, nuclear power is as safe as wind and solar power, ionising radiation is harmless, Chernobyl killed less than 60 people, and problems such as inadequate safeguards will magically fix themselves.

Finally, a few examples of Prof. Brook’s attacks against environmentalists − a problem that his employer, Adelaide University, needs to address:

• accusing a Friends of the Earth campaigner of “intellectual dishonesty” with no attempt to justify that defamatory accusation.
• another defamatory accusation of dishonesty (“anti-intellectual sleight-of-hand”) directed at Friends of the Earth in relation to a World Water Day statement.
• falsely accusing anti-nuclear and climate action groups of vote-rigging at a public debate in Melbourne (“frankly pathetic, but not unexpected”).
• claiming that “all they [Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace] care about is being anti-nuclear” and that Friends of the Earth “doesn’t care about climate change” − despite an abundance of readily-available evidence to the contrary.

[Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Australia.]

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Tas Uni academic less than “abundantly clear” about Generation IV nuclear reactors

Jim Green, 23 June 2015

http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/Tas-Uni-academic-less-than-abundantly-clear-about-G/

Academic Barry Brook began working at the University of Tasmania last year. He is a strident nuclear power supporter and is particularly enthusiastic about non-existent ‘Generation IV’ reactor types.

The enthusiasm is understandable. Theoretically, Generation IV fast neutron reactors could gobble up waste and weapons material and convert them into low-carbon power, solving several problems at once. Unfortunately, these fast neutron reactors aren’t actually new and they have failed spectacularly to live up to their potential. The history of fast reactors has largely been one of extremely expensive, underperforming and accident-prone reactors.

For example, Japan’s Monju fast reactor operated for 205 days after it was connected to the grid in August 1995, and a further 45 days in 2010; apart from that it has been shut-down because of a sodium leak and fire in 1996, and a 2010 accident when a 3.3 tonne refuelling machine fell into the reactor vessel. The lifetime load factor of the French Superphenix fast reactor − the ratio of electricity generated compared to the amount that would have been generated if operated continually at full capacity − was a paltry 7%, making it one of the worst-performing reactors in history.

Fast reactors haven’t helped to resolve weapons proliferation problems; on the contrary, France has used a fast reactor to produce plutonium for weapons and India plans to do the same in the coming years.

Not easily deterred, Brook and other nuclear lobbyists promise a new generation of fast neutron reactors. A recent guest post on Brook’s website claims that Generation IV fast neutron reactors will be mass produced and “dominating the market by about 2030.”

Compare that claim with the following:

1. The intergovernmental Generation IV International Forum states: “Depending on their respective degree of technical maturity, the first Generation IV systems are expected to be deployed commercially around 2030-2040.” (emphasis added)

2. The International Atomic Energy Agency states: “Experts expect that the first Generation IV fast reactor demonstration plants and prototypes will be in operation by 2030 to 2040.” (emphases added)

3. A 2015 report by the French government’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) states: “There is still much R&D to be done to develop the Generation IV nuclear reactors, as well as for the fuel cycle and the associated waste management which depends on the system chosen.”

IRSN is also sceptical about safety claims: “At the present stage of development, IRSN does not notice evidence that leads to conclude that the systems under review are likely to offer a significantly improved level of safety compared with Generation III reactors, except perhaps for the VHTR …” Moreover the VHTR (very high temperature reactor) system could bring about significant safety improvements “but only by significantly limiting unit power”.

4. The World Nuclear Association noted in 2009 that “progress is seen as slow, and several potential [Generation IV] designs have been undergoing evaluation on paper for many years.”

In 2009 Brook wrote a puff-piece about Generation IV fast reactors for the Murdoch press. On the same day he said on his website that “although it’s not made abundantly clear in the article”, he expects conventional reactors to play the major role for the next two to three decades but chose to emphasise Generation IV reactors “to try to hook the fresh fish”.

So that’s the game plan − making absurd claims about Generation IV reactors, pretending that they are near-term prospects, and being less than “abundantly clear” about the truth.

The guest post on Brook’s website was written by conspiracy theorist Geoff Russell (who holds me personally responsible for all the death and suffering from the Fukushima disaster … go figure).

Russell cites the World Nuclear Association (WNA) in support of his claim that “The Chinese expect these [fast reactors] to be dominating the market by about 2030 and they’ll be mass produced.”

Does the WNA reference support the claim? Not at all. Russell is making stuff up. According to the WNA, China has one very small experimental fast reactor and plans for a larger ‘Demonstration Fast Reactor’ by 2023 and plans its first fast reactor “for commercial operation from 2030”.

So China doesn’t expect fast reactors to be dominating the market by 2030. China may have one commercial fast reactor by 2030 … but almost certainly won’t. One of the reasons China’s fast reactor program is going nowhere fast is that China is collaborating with Russia, and Russia’s fast reactor program is going nowhere fast.

Rosatom subsidiary Rosenergoatom recently indefinitely postponed construction of the BN-1200 sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor, citing the need to improve fuel for the reactor and amid speculation about the cost-effectiveness of the project. The decision to indefinitely postpone the project might be reviewed in 2020. The reactor had been scheduled to start commercial operation in 2025, depending on experience operating a pilot BN-800 fast-neutron reactor which achieved first criticality in June 2014 but has not yet started commercial operation.

As recently as July 2014, Rosenergoatom’s director general said that Russia planned to begin construction of three BN-1200 reactors before 2030. OKBM − the Rosatom subsidiary that designed the BN-1200 reactor − previously anticipated that the first BN-1200 reactor would be commissioned in 2020, followed by eight more by 2030.
Rosenergoatom spokesperson Andrey Timonov the BN-800 reactor “must answer questions about the economic viability of potential fast reactors because at the moment ‘fast’ technology essentially loses this indicator [when compared with] commercial VVER units.”

Another fast neutron reactor project − the BREST-OD-300 − is stretching Rosatom’s funds. Bellona’s Alexander Nikitin said that Rosatom’s “Breakthrough” program to develop the BREST-OD-300 reactor was only breaking Rosatom’s piggy-bank.

Nuclear lobbyists claim that the next generation of fast neutron reactors are near-term prospects and they will be the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, fast neutron reactors have a long and troubled history, and most of the countries that invested in fast reactor technology have abandoned those efforts; they decided not to throw good money after bad.

Small modular reactors

The federal government’s 2014 Energy Green Paper promotes ‘small modular reactors’. Here’s a sample of the government’s rhetoric: “The main development in technology since 2006 has been further work on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). SMRs have the potential to be flexibly deployed, as they are a simpler ‘plug-in’ technology that does not require the same level of operating skills and access to water as traditional, large reactors.”

Perhaps SMRs would be an ideal fit for Tasmania? Some nuclear lobbyists certainly think so. But as with fast neutron reactors, the rhetoric doesn’t match reality. Interest in SMRs is on the wane. Thus Thomas W. Overton, associate editor of POWER magazine, states: “At the graveyard wherein resides the “nuclear renaissance” of the 2000s, a new occupant appears to be moving in: the small modular reactor (SMR). … Over the past year, the SMR industry has been bumping up against an uncomfortable and not-entirely-unpredictable problem: It appears that no one actually wants to buy one.”

Overton explains the chicken-and-egg problem: “The problem has really been lurking in the idea behind SMRs all along. The reason conventional nuclear plants are built so large is the economies of scale: Big plants can produce power less expensively per kilowatt-hour than smaller ones. The SMR concept disdains those economies of scale in favor of others: large-scale standardized manufacturing that will churn out dozens, if not hundreds, of identical plants, each of which would ultimately produce cheaper kilowatt-hours than large one-off designs. It’s an attractive idea. But it’s also one that depends on someone building that massive supply chain, since none of it currently exists. … That money would presumably come from customer orders − if there were any.”

Dr Mark Cooper, Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment, Vermont Law School, notes that two US corporations are pulling out of SMR development because they cannot find customers (Westinghouse) or major investors (Babcock and Wilcox). Cooper points to some economic constraints: “SMR technology will suffer disproportionately from material cost increases because they use more material per MW of capacity. Higher costs will result from: lost economies of scale; higher operating costs; and higher decommissioning costs. Cost estimates that assume quick design approval and deployment are certain to prove to be wildly optimistic.”

Westinghouse CEO Danny Roderick said in January 2014: “The problem I have with SMRs is not the technology, it’s not the deployment − it’s that there’s no customers.” Westinghouse is looking to triple its decommissioning business. “We see this as a $1 billion-per-year business for us,” Roderick said. With the world’s fleet of mostly middle-aged reactors inexorably becoming a fleet of mostly ageing, decrepit reactors, Westinghouse is getting ahead of the game.

Some SMR work continues. Argentina is ahead of the rest, with construction underway on a 27 megawatt reactor − but the cost equates to an astronomical US$15.2 billion per 1000 megawatts. And that cost would be greater still if not for Argentina’s expertise and experience with reactor construction − a legacy of its covert weapons program from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

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The myth of the peaceful atom − debunking the misinformation peddled by the nuclear industry and its supporters

Click here for a detailed article responding to misinformation peddled by Barry Brook, Corey Bradshaw and others.

See also: Response to Barry Brook / Corey Bradshaw’s 2014 ‘open letter to environmentalists’

See also these three responses to the Brook/Bradshaw article:

Diesendorf M. Subjective judgments in the nuclear energy debate. Conservation Biology 2016;30:666–9. doi:10.1111/cobi.12692, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cobi.12692

Henle K et al. Promoting nuclear energy to sustain biodiversity conservation in the face of climate change: Response to Brook and Bradshaw 2015. Conservation Biology 2016;30:663–5. doi:10.1111/cobi.12691, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.12691

Hendrickson O. Nuclear energy and biodiversity conservation: Response to Brook and Bradshaw 2015. Conservation Biology 2016;30:661–2. doi:10.1111/cobi.12693, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cobi.12693

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Nuclear power and biodiversity – don’t forget WMD proliferation!

Jim Green, 18 Dec 2014, The Ecologist

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2680005/nuclear_power_and_biodiversity_dont_forget_wmd_proliferation.html

Nuclear energy is essential to preserve the world’s biodiversity, according to 69 conservation scientists. But there’s a mysterious omission in their analysis, writes Jim Green: nuclear weapons proliferation. And after a major exchange of nuclear bombs, and the ‘nuclear winter’ that would follow, exactly how much biodiversity would survive?

A group of conservation scientists has published an open letter urging environmentalists to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power. The letter is an initiative of Australian academics Barry Brook and Corey Bradshaw. The co-signatories from 14 countries “support the broad conclusions drawn in the article ‘Key role for nuclear energy in global biodiversity conservation’, published in Conservation Biology.”

The open letter states: “Brook and Bradshaw argue that the full gamut of electricity-generation sources – including nuclear power – must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.”

So, here’s my open letter in response to the open letter initiated by Brook and Bradshaw:

Dear conservation scientists …

If you want environmentalists to support nuclear power, get off your backsides and do something about the all-too-obvious problems associated with the technology. Start with the proliferation problem since the multifaceted and repeatedly-demonstrated links between the ‘peaceful atom’ and nuclear weapons proliferation pose profound risks and greatly trouble environmentalists and many others besides.

The Brook / Bradshaw journal article emphasises the importance of biodiversity – but even a relatively modest exchange of some dozens of nuclear weapons could profoundly effect biodiversity, and large-scale nuclear warfare undoubtedly would.

The Brook / Bradshaw article ranks power sources according to seven criteria: greenhouse gas emissions, cost, dispatchability, land use, safety (fatalities), solid waste, and radiotoxic waste. WMD proliferation is excluded. By all means ignore lesser concerns to avoid a book-length analysis, but to ignore the link between nuclear power and weapons is disingenuous and the comparative analysis of power sources is a case of rubbish in, rubbish out.

Integral fast reactors

While Brook and Bradshaw exclude WMD proliferation from their comparative assessment of power sources, their journal article does address the topic. They promote the ‘integral fast reactor‘ (IFR) that was the subject of R&D in the US until was abandoned in the 1990s. If they existed, IFRs would be metal-fuelled, sodium-cooled, fast neutron reactors.

Brook and Bradshaw write: “The IFR technology in particular also counters one of the principal concerns regarding nuclear expansion – the proliferation of nuclear weapons – because its electrorefining-based fuel-recycling system cannot separate weapons-grade fissile material.”

However Brook’s claim that IFRs “cannot be used to generate weapons-grade material” is false. George Stanford, who worked on an IFR research program in the US, states: “If not properly safeguarded, [countries] could do [with IFRs] what they could do with any other reactor – operate it on a special cycle to produce good quality weapons material.” IFR advocate Tom Blees notes that: “IFRs are certainly not the panacea that removes all threat of proliferation, and extracting plutonium from it would require the same sort of techniques as extracting it from spent fuel from light water reactors.”

Brook and Bradshaw argue that “the large-scale deployment of fast reactor technology would result in all of the nuclear waste and depleted uranium stockpiles generated over the last 50 years being consumed as fuel.” Seriously? An infinitely more likely outcome would be some fast reactors consuming waste and weapons-useable material, while other fast reactors and conventional uranium reactors continue to produce such materials.

The reality of fast reactor technology

The Brook/Bradshaw article ignores the sad reality of fast reactor technology: over US$50 billion invested, unreliable reactors, numerous fires and other accidents, and one after another country abandoning the technology.

Moreover, fast reactors have worsened, not lessened, proliferation problems. John Carlson, former Director-General of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office, discusses a topical example: “India has a plan to produce such [weapon grade] plutonium in fast breeder reactors for use as driver fuel in thorium reactors. This is problematic on non-proliferation and nuclear security grounds. Pakistan believes the real purpose of the fast breeder program is to produce plutonium for weapons (so this plan raises tensions between the two countries); and transport and use of weapons-grade plutonium in civil reactors presents a serious terrorism risk (weapons-grade material would be a priority target for seizure by terrorists).”

The fast reactor techno-utopia presented by Brook and Bradshaw is theoretically attractive. Back in the real world, there’s much more about fast reactors to oppose than to support.

Creative accounting

Brook and Bradshaw also counter proliferation concerns with the following argument: “Nuclear power is deployed commercially in countries whose joint energy intensity is such that they collectively constitute 80% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. If one adds to this tally those nations that are actively planning nuclear deployment or already have scientific or medical research reactors, this figure rises to over 90%. As a consequence, displacement of fossil fuels by an expanding nuclear-energy sector would not lead to a large increase in the number of countries with access to nuclear resources and expertise.”

The premise is correct − countries operating reactors account for a large majority of greenhouse emissions. But even by the most expansive estimate − Brook’s − less than one-third of all countries have some sort of weapons capability, either through the operation of reactors or an alliance with a nuclear weapons state. So the conclusion − that nuclear power expansion “would not lead to a large increase in the number of countries with access to nuclear resources and expertise” − is nonsense and one wonders how such jiggery-pokery could find its way into a peer-reviewed journal.

The power-weapons conundrum is neatly summarised by former US Vice-President Al Gore: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”

Safeguards

The Brook / Bradshaw article adds one further comment about proliferation: “Nuclear weapons proliferation is a complex political issue, with or without commercial nuclear power plants, and is under strong international oversight.”

They cite a book by the committed IFR advocate Tom Blees in support of that statement. But Blees argues for the establishment of an international strike force on full standby to attend promptly to any detected attempts to misuse or to divert nuclear materials. That is a far cry from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards system. In articles and speeches during his tenure as the Director General of the IAEA from 1997-2009, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei said that the Agency’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”. The safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and “clearly needs reinforcement”, he went on, while efforts to improve the system had been “half-hearted”, and the safeguards system operated on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department”.

Blees doesn’t argue that the nuclear industry is subject to strong international oversight – he argues that “fissile material should all be subject to rigorous international oversight” (emphasis added). This conflation between reality and wishful thinking is a recurring feature of Barry Brook’s nuclear advocacy.

Strengthening safeguards

Of course, the flaws in the nuclear safeguards system are not set in stone. And this gets me back to my original point: if nuclear lobbyists want environmentalists to support nuclear power, they need to get off their backsides and do something about the all-too-obvious problems such as the inadequate safeguards system.

Environmentalists have a long record of working on these problems and the lack of support from nuclear lobbyists has not gone unnoticed.

To give an example of a topical point of intervention, Canada has agreed to supply uranium and nuclear technology to India with greatly reduced safeguards and non-proliferation standards, and Australia seems likely to follow suit. Those precedents will likely lead to a broader weakening of international safeguards – and make it that much more difficult for nuclear lobbyists to win support from environmentalists and others. The seriousness of the problem has been acknowledged by, among others, a former Chair of the IAEA Board of Governors and a former Director-General of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office. It is a live debate in numerous nuclear exporting countries and there isn’t a moment to lose.

To mention just one more point of intervention, the separation and stockpiling of plutonium from power reactor spent fuel increases proliferation risks. There is virtually no demand for the uranium or plutonium separated at reprocessing plants, and no repositories for the high-level waste stream. Yet reprocessing continues, the global stockpile of separated plutonium increases year after year and now stands at around 260 tons. It’s a problem that needs to be solved; it’s a problem that can be solved.

Endorsing the wishful thinking and misinformation presented in the Brook / Bradshaw journal article is no substitute for an honest acknowledgement of the proliferation problems associated with nuclear power, coupled with serious, sustained efforts to solve those problems.

“Radioactive by-products of Australian uranium have been spewing into the atmosphere from Fukushima” reported Natalie Lowrey of FoE Australia  at the recent FoE Asia Pacific meeting in Seoul, Korea.

“BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto export uranium from Australia to TEPCO’s Fukushima nuclear power plant from the Olympic Dam and Ranger mines in Australia, respectively. Heathgate Resources, operator of the Beverley uranium mine in South Australia, has probably also supplied TEPCO.

“Approximately 70% of uranium used in nuclear reactors are sourced from the homelands of Indigenous minorities worldwide, this is no different in Australia. Aboriginal communities in Australia have publicly announced their sadness at the uranium that has be taken from their lands without their consent and resulted in the nuclear disaster in Japan. These Aboriginal communities know too well that the nuclear industry has lead to sickness, divided communities and contaminated land.

“On 6th April in a letter to Ban Ki Moon the Secretary General of the UN, Yvonne Margarula of the Mirrar people, Traditional Owners of the land that the Ranger uranium mine is located on in Australia, expressed solidarity with the people of Japan and much sorrow that uranium from the land of the Mirrar was used in the Fukushima plant.

“Yvonne like many people around the world believe that the Fukushima disaster is a dire warning of the risks posed by the nuclear industry. Production and exports from Australian uranium mines have averaged 9600 tonnes of uranium oxide (8140 tU) per year since 2004.

“Australia exports uranium to both Korea and Japan. As a major uranium supplier, Australia could have played a role in breaking the vicious cycle of nuclear safety breaches, data falsification and cover-ups in Japan over the past decade by making uranium exports conditional on improved management of nuclear plants and tighter regulation.

“But the mining companies and state/territory governments did nothing. And they continue to do nothing.

“The Fukushima disaster has not changed the situation for uranium mining in Australia, but it has had some effect. Public opposition to uranium mining has strengthened in Australia. A recent poll found 50% opposition to uranium exports compared to 44% support.

“This heightened opposition has had flow-on effects such as the Western Australia Labor Party’s reaffirmation of its no-uranium-mining policy at its state conference last week. Uranium is the first link in the toxic nuclear fuel chain, and is the primary source of radioactive materials used in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Uranium mining adversely affects Indigenous peoples, our global environment and health, and when enriched for use in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, threatens our security and survival.

“The nuclear-free world envisioned by Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific will require an end to uranium mining. The nuclear option does not make sense on any level: economically, environmentally, politically or socially. It is too costly, too dangerous, too slow and has too small an impact on global warming.

“We MUST turn off the toxic tap with an end to uranium mining. We MUST challenge the green washing of governments and the nuclear industry that nuclear power is a solution to climate change. We MUST bring an end to the deadly and toxic nuclear cycle that results in poisoned lands, sickness and the potential for nuclear weapon proliferation.

“Friends of the Earth Australia joins our colleagues in South Korea, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Japan, and all our brothers and sisters in the Asia Pacific region to build a nuclear free Asia Pacific and create a clean energy future for the next generations.”

Natalie Lowrey Friends of the Earth Australia Thursday 30 June 2011 Seoul, Korea

Secret advice: avoid reactor health study

By ANDREW CLENNELL in Canberra
28/6/2000

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0006/28/national/national14.html

The Federal Government was at pains to avoid a detailed health study of residents living near the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor before a
replacement reactor was built, according to a document released under Freedom of Information laws.

“Be careful in terms of health impacts – don’t really want a detailed study done of the health of Sutherland residents,” the document warns.

Obtained by Sutherland Shire Council, it was prepared by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources to offer advice to officers on how they
might answer questions at a Senate inquiry into the proposed reactor. It includes suggested questions on public health.

Question: “Is it better to locate a replacement reactor in a remote location or in a suburban location?”

Answer: “There is no difference where it is located in terms of public health.”

Question: “Was it not the case that persons living next to lead smelters were perfectly happy with those establishments, but were not truly aware of the risk they were facing?”

Answer: “The replacement is going to be a safe facility wherever it is located, because it will be safe by design.”

It says there is “no point in consulting with potential/hypothetical recipients of a new reactor. It was discovered through the course of inquiry into the new airport that such a course of action serves only to inflame the communities for no good reason.”

A spokesman for the Industry, Science and Resources Minister, Senator Minchin, said the only reason the department would not have wanted a detailed health study was because it “wasn’t required”.

“There was already extensive evidence there was no impact on the health of people in the Sutherland Shire,” he said. “There is absolutely no evidence of cancer clusters, as claimed by Sutherland Shire Council.”

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation said the maximum dose of radiation from the reactor was “one-hundredth the annual rate approved by the National Health and Medical Research Council”.

It also emerged yesterday that the Government is about to sign the contract for the new reactor without knowing if the proposed fuel will be ready in time.

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Revealed: A Nuclear Nightmare in Sydney’s Backyard

Anthony Hoy, The Bulletin, November 12, 2003

The deportation of accused al Qaeda bomber Willie Brigitte, suspected of plotting an attack on Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor or other military sites, coincides with warnings of a major public health catastrophe resulting from a terrorist attack. Why residents have not been told and how emergency services may be hamstrung by all the secrecy are just two of the serious questions raised by a former ANSTO employee turned whistleblower. Anthony Hoy reports.

Australia is about to confront the reality of the war on terrorism. The head of the nuclear watchdog, the Australian Radiation Protection and Safety Agency (ARPANSA), has warned of the danger of an aerial terrorist attack on the Lucas Heights nuclear research reactor, 40km to the south-west of the Sydney CBD.

Reports that suspected al Qaeda bomber Willie Brigitte, who was deported to France last month, may have been plotting attacks against Lucas Heights or other military sites followed a briefing to local government by the NSW government last week on plans to evacuate people within 3km of the nuclear reactor in the event of such an attack.

ASIO reportedly reaffirmed suspicions that Brigitte was a skilled bomb-maker sent to Australia to commit a serious terrorist act.

The NSW Health Department has told both council and emergency services that other households – possibly within an 80km radius of the reactor – would be advised to stock up on iodine tablets at their own expense as a protective measure against radioactive contamination.

But fire brigade, ambulance and some other emergency services personnel, concerned about a lack of preparedness for a possible strike and the state government’s refusal to distribute iodine tablets, have indicated their personnel might refuse to respond to any attack on Lucas Heights on the grounds of personal safety.

Speculation is growing that a secret “radiation consequences analysis” commissioned by ARPANSA confirms that an estimated 4 million residents living within 80km of the reactor – virtually Sydney’s entire population – risk radioactive contamination in the event of a successful strike on the reactor.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States show that the most wildly imaginative incident is possible, ARPANSA CEo Dr John Loy told a Senate inquiry. “And of course it is incumbent on me, as a safety regulator, to think about that [and] to think about the implications of it. We certainly looked at what might be the consequences of crashing an aircraft into the facility.”

Loy argued that if a terrorist attack penetrated the reactor’s shielding, exposing its nuclear core, “there would be a buoyancy because of the fire and the radiation distribution would go higher into the atmosphere than in an accident, and that you might expect some radioactive contamination at a distance further from the reactor than in the case of an accident”.

Loy detailed government sensitivity about the threat, plus the possible misuse by terrorists of any official radiation data, to a Senate community affairs estimates hearing in June. ARPANSA, ASIO and bureaucrats involved in the “children overboard affair” have joined forces to prevent the public release of the radiation consequences analysis.

“At one end, you can characterise a report like that as a description of how to go about the sabotage of an installation and a suggestion on how to produce maximum consequences,” Loy said. “If you go to the extreme of assuming everything away – nothing works and the whole inventory is released and you get an absolute extreme case – the value of advising the public of that seems to me to be pretty limited.”

Bureaucrat Jane Halton, who had a key role in the children overboard affair, told the Senate inquiry: “I do not think that [the radiation consequences analysis] has a value in public discussion … My view is that, in the present security environment, releasing that information would not be of assistance to the public.”

The local government custodian in and around Lucas Heights, Sutherland Shire Council, has confirmed that the principal player in the children overboard affair, then-cabinet secretary Max Moore-Wilton, has also played a key role in frustrating the community’s “right to know” charter concerning the reactor’s operations.

“Our extensive freedom of information applications concerning Lucas Heights were blocked by Moore-Wilton with what are kn ˇown as conclusive certificates, generally on the grounds that the material we sought was ultimately contained in cabinet documents,” said Dr Gary Smith, the council’s principal science officer and a member of the federal government’s Nuclear Safety Committee.

Loy has confirmed that, in a revised security plan developed by federal security agencies in conjunction with ARPANSA and the operator of the reactor, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, about $18m is being spent over four years on increased security at the Lucas Heights site.

But in the face of a terrorist threat, ANSTO continues to operate with what was described in a Senate report as “a culture of secrecy so embedded that it has lost sight of its responsibility to be accountable to parliament”.

Loy confirms that it is whistleblower John Mulcair, a former ANSTO employee, who has been alerting ARPANSA and the federal government over the operator’s continuing secretive modus operandi, continuing accidents involving Lucas Heights staff, and serious shortcomings in the construction of a replacement nuclear reactor on the site.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER

John Mulcair was ANSTO’s communications manager for 51D′ years. From 1994 to 1999, he trudged daily through ANSTO’s security gates and along avenues named after prominent research scientists. One was named for Marie Curie, who discovered radium and provided the key to a basic understanding of matter and energy, thus ushering in a new era in medical research and treatment to which the Lucas Heights reactor is dedicated.

During his time there, Mulcair doggedly but unsuccessfully championed the rights of the broader Sutherland Shire community to know more about Lucas Heights’ operations. In particular, he was a strong advocate of the community’s right to information on the likely local impact of any serious major nuclear accident or incident.

The existing research reactor, which first achieved fission power in 1958 ⁄ and began routine operation in 1960, was to be shut down and decommissioned by 2005. In June 2000, the government announced the Argentine company INVAP S.E. was the successful tenderer for the construction of a replacement research reactor.

Mulcair oversaw the community processes associated with the environmental impact statement for the new reactor. “It was a case of ‘do I really need this shit anymore?’,” he said. “Basically, I got to the end of my time for doing the job. It is part of the make-up in being a journalist. So I paid off my mortgage and resigned. It was one step removed from winning the lottery and pouring the inkwell over the boss’ head. I contacted Fairfax Community Newspapers and while I left ANSTO on very good terms I took a job Fairfax created for me on the St George Leader.” His role as a reporter on the Lucas Heights hometown newspaper has effectively lifted the veil of secrecy that had surrounded the research facility.

It was to Mulcair that many ˜ ANSTO staff living with their families in the immediate environs – in suburbs such as Engadine, Heathcote, Lucas Heights (now called Baden Ridge) and Menai – turned when they felt the need to discreetly raise their concerns about aspects of ANSTO’s operations.

Mulcair alerted the Sutherland Shire community, John Loy and ARPANSA to serious problems with standards and communications between the parties building the replacement reactor. Mulcair also disclosed that ANSTO had intentionally withheld some of that information from ARPANSA for more than three months. “Indeed, and he [Mulcair] appears to have some good sources,” Loy told the Senate inquiry.

Says Mulcair: “All the motivations of my sources have been of the very best order. These people have only one interest, and that is to get the job done properly. I have a great deal of faith in the people I worked with at ANSTO to make good decisions. They are driven by principle. They don’t want something dodgy to affectthem and their families. From a public relations perspective, the replacement reactor should have been built somewhere else.”

A BOTCHED JOB

The worst fears of the community – and Mulcair – about the construction of the replacement reactor were quickly confirmed: the inquiring senators calling it “a comedy of errors”.

ANSTO was meant to seek ARPANSA approval for the construction of individual structures and components. Through the press, Mulcair progressively advised ARPANSA, the government and the community of repeated licence breaches by ANSTO and the contractor. As far as Loy was concerned, these mistakes raised the question of whether other mistakes had been made, and whether the system that allowed for the mistakes to be made needed further examination. Fresh licensing conditions were progressively imposed.

But Mulcair eventually blew the whistle on a communications gap between ARPANSA, ANSTO and INVAP, and the Argentine company’s Australian construction partners, John Holland, Evans Deakin and their subcontractors. He confirmed that ANSTO had, in effect, defied ARPANSA’s licence conditions preventing penetrations for the heavy water system in the bottom of the reactor’s pool tank. Mulcair’s alert, Loy says, resulted in “a significant investigation as to how that happened”. Such a communications gap was “a concern, yes”.

From then on, Loy required that INVAP’s procedures be amended to ensure ARPANSA’s directions were “explicitly included in all … written chains of command”.

ANSTO’s subsequent three-month delay in informing ARPANSA of the discovery of faulty welds in the pipework was, according to Loy, “a matter of concern” requiring “further investigation”. A full-time ARPANSA officer was to begin “intelligence gathering” and conduct full-time inspections at the new reactor site and manufacturing points.

Loy told the Senate inquiry: “There will be complexi kties of instrumentation and control and there will be issues connected with the fuel, the fuel type and the core complex systems … I would expect issues to arise in many of those, just from a priori experience.”

Loy has also confirmed that before he even considers issuing an operating licence for the replacement reactor, he will need to be satisfied there will be storage for Lucas Heights’ spent fuel waste when it is brought back from conditioning overseas. “ANSTO has talked about 2005 for the operation of the reactor, but whether that comes to pass or not, I do not know.”

HELL ON EARTH

Sydney residents will be relieved to know that in the event of a worst-case scenario, there is an evacuation contingency plan for those living within 3km of Lucas Heights.

But officers of the Ambulance Service of NSW have refused to join any post-incident distribution of iod ?ine “due to the lack of appropriate Personal Protective Equipment”. Similar arguments exist for the NSW Police Force, the Rural Fire Service, the State Emergency Service and crews under the umbrella of the Volunteer Rescue Association. The NSW Fire Brigade Employees Union is also among those highly critical of the contingency plans.

Only this month, the NSW government reluctantly agreed to accept the World Health Organisation’s safe level of radioactive exposure of 10milligray (mGy) – a third of the level advocated by ANSTO and ARPANSA, according to FBEU president Darryl Snow. “ANSTO and ARPANSA are concerned that their advocacy of the WHO contamination threshold would amount to their tacit admission that a nuclear incident is a possibility,” he says. “A comprehensive and effective emergency response to the affected ar Lea is beyond the scope of agencies tasked with dealing with such an incident. Our critical concern is whether an evacuation might take place smoothly, effectively and in a timely manner.”

The NSW Fire Brigade is the designated combat agency for radioactive incidents. “There is no guarantee that contaminated water will be contained and that local water supply and catchment areas will not be affected,” Snow says, warning that crews may cease to respond “to unsafe levels of radioactivity”.

There were also concerns that “any actions taken by firefighters may be ultimately ineffective in containing the incident. Consideration must also be given to the possibility that a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility will be but one part of a co-ordinated attack.” In short, Snow says, procedures in place in the event of a terrorist attack “are -breathtakingly inept in their inability to comprehend how an incident might be fought effectively”.

 

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Sydney’s nuclear target

Jim Green
October 2001

Introduction

The terrorist attack in the United States on September 11 has led to renewed calls for the Australian government to cancel its plan to build a 20-megawatt nuclear research reactor in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights.

The Coalition government insists that the reactor plan will proceed. Labor is being pressed to state unequivocally that a Labor government would cancel the contract with Argentinean reactor constructor INVAP; to date, Labor has only committed to reviewing the contract. A firm commitment from Labor may be necessary to secure preferences from the Australian Greens in the November 10 election.

If built, the new reactor will replace the 10-megawatt HIFAR reactor operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at Lucas Heights.

In the 1970s, an assessment of the danger of a terrorist attack on the HIFAR reactor found that the reactor could be vulnerable and an explosive in the ‘right’ place could have severe consequences.

In 1983, nine sticks of gelignite, 25 kilograms of ammonium nitrate, three detonators and an igniter were found in an electrical sub-station inside ANSTO’s boundary fence. Two detonators failed, and one exploded but did not ignite the main charge. Two people were charged over this incident.

In 1984, a threat was made to fly an aircraft packed with explosives into the HIFAR reactor; a person was charged and found guilty on two counts of causing public mischief. In 1985, after vandalism of a pipe, radioactive liquid drained into Woronora river, and this incident was not reported for 10 days. In 1986 an act of vandalism resulted in damage to the sampling pit on the effluent pipeline.

On October 9, 2001, NSW and federal police were alerted to a bomb threat directed at ANSTO. Australian Protective Services and NSW police conducted a full search of ANSTO after a threat was made, Sergeant Jim McGrath of Sutherland police said. Channel Ten received the anonymous call at about 10pm. “There was a veiled threat the reactor was going to go up,” McGrath said. The grounds of ANSTO were searched but no device was found. (news.ninemsn.com.au/national/story_19935.asp)

Increased terrorist risk?

A number of recent reports on possible terrorist activities in Australia are summarised below. It should be noted that:
* in most cases it is impossible to judge the accuracy of these reports;
* some of the statements/activities reported below may be politically motivated and/or may constitute racist scapegoating (just as the New Zealand saga evoked ignorant, racist commentary). Again, it’s difficult to comment on the basis of the limited information on the public record.

Prime Minister John Howard said on September 21 that terrorist cells linked to Osama bin Laden could be operating in Australia. “It’s possible”, he told Melbourne radio 3AW. “I said earlier you can’t assume that Australia is immune from the threat of terrorism. We are not as high on the scale of vulnerability as other countries but we are on it and you can’t rule it out.” (Sydney Morning Herald Online, September 21, 2001.)

Howard said on October 3, “We should also understand that this country is more vulnerable as a result of what happened on September 11. … We should not be alarmed, nor should we be complacent, nor should we lazily assume that it can’t happen here.” Asked about suggestions terrorist organisations were present in Australia, Howard said, “It’s always hard in an area like this as to what one can say to keep the public informed and equally what one can’t say so as not to compromise traditional approaches to intelligence and security”. (“Howard warns Australia more vulnerable to terrorism”, Sydney Morning Herald Online, October 3, 2001.)

Howard said on October 8 that Australia will be involved in a long military campaign with the US against the Taliban that will result in casualties and a greater risk of retaliation from terrorists. He said, “I don’t want to overdramatise, but equally I don’t want to underestimate or understate the obvious, and that is that all of those who stand with our American friends are potential targets.” (“We are potential targets, warns PM”, The Age, October 9, 2001.)

The (Melbourne) Age reported on September 22 that a number of Australian-based supporters of bin Laden, based primarily in New South Wales, came to the attention of Australian authorities in the late 1990s as ASIO and the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence made security preparations for the Olympics. The CIA and the FBI discovered the link during investigations into the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. The investigations found that those eventually convicted had telephoned Australia in the months before and after the bombing. Australian DIO operatives have expressed alarm at the growth of bin Laden “cells” throughout South-East Asia. (Paul Daley, Bin Laden’s Australian links, The Age, September 22, 2001.)

The Sun Herald reported on September 30 that ASIO agents investigating “sympathy links” to the US terrorist attacks have conducted a series of home raids in Sydney’s south-west. Backed by 70 federal and NSW police, operatives from ASIO executed warrants on at least five houses in Sydney, seizing passports, financial records and other documents. According to the Sun Herald report, one address targeted is believed to be that of a Middle Eastern Australian employed as a baggage handler at Sydney airport. (“ASIO swoop in hunt for bin Laden link”, John Kidman, The Sun Herald, 30 September, 2001; also Sydney Morning Herald Online www.smh.com.au)

The Australian reported on October 12 that “About 100 members of four international terrorist groups linked to Osama bin Laden have been identified living in Sydney and Victoria raising funds for the holy war against the United States.” (“Bin Ladin groups in our suburbs”, The Australian, October 12, 2001.)

The Australian reported on September 29 that “Australian intelligence sources have confirmed that associates of terrorist Osama bin Laden are active in Australia. … Senior intelligence sources told The Weekend Australian yesterday that information about activities of bin Laden’s associates in Australia was uncovered during intensive investigations shortly before the 2000 Sydney Olympics. … The official confirmed that ASIO was investigating a number of individuals in Australia suspected of having links with bin Laden or his terrorist groups.” (Cameron Stewart, “Bin Laden’s men are here”, The Australian, September 29, 2001.)

Dr Rohan Gunaratna of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland says there is evidence of terrorist operations in Australia. He said terrorist groups were increasingly looking for money and support within countries such as Australia and New Zealand because of tighter anti-terrorist measures in Europe and America. (Mark Metherell, “Terrorist groups already here, academic warns”, Sydney Morning Herald, September 27, 2001.)

Howard said on September 16 that the risk of terrorist activity against Australia was greater than in the past. “I don’t share the complacency of some that this can’t happen in Australia. I think it can”, he said. Howard said that Australia may be at a greater risk because of Federal Cabinet’s decision to invoke the ANZUS treaty. (Chelsey Martin and Steve Lewis, “Threat of terrorist attack in Australia is rising: PM”, Australian Financial Review, September 17, 2001.)

ANSTO and its reactor are connected to the ANZUS alliance – and therefore potentially more attractive terrorist targets. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Australian Safeguards Office stated in 1998 that the operation of a research reactor “first and foremost” serves “national interest requirements”. One of the “national interest requirements” said to justify the operation of a reactor, and the construction of a new reactor, is the ANZUS alliance. The Coalition and the Labor Party not only support the US nuclear weapons program, but also consider the US nuclear umbrella to be a centerpiece of Australian defence policy.

New reactor challenge

During the debate over the planned new reactor, ANSTO has dismissed the possibility of a sabotage event leading to a ‘loss of coolant’ accident which would expose the reactor core. This has been challenged by nuclear engineer Tony Wood, former head of ANSTO’s Division of Reactors and Engineering. Wood told a Senate inquiry on October 25 last year that a sabotage event “has the potential to have much worse consequences [than ANSTO’s selected ‘reference’ accident] and the environmental impact statement admits there is no way of assessing its likelihood.”

Industry minister Nick Minchin said in an August 26, 2000 media release that “The ANSTO facility is a research reactor and as such its fundamental design greatly limits the risk to public safety from an accident.” In fact, research reactors are designed for ease of access in order to facilitate the range of purposes for which they are used – isotope production, scientific research and commercial applications such as silicon irradiation. This ease of access bring with it obvious risks. Wood told the Senate inquiry last year, “Pool reactors have a free water surface and this very feature, which is desirable for flexible access to the core, also makes it vulnerable. The EIS claims credit for the massive reinforced concrete block of the pool but this is the very thing which would direct the force of an explosion into the reactor core and expel fuel and water.”

Wood asked for an assessment to be carried out and the results published “of a true upper-bound event based on major sabotage” with involvement from the SAS or other military experts: “When it comes to the confidential assumptions about types and quantities of explosives which could realistically be used I would like to see input from SAS or other military experts because I believe, in the light of what has been said on this topic in the EIS, a degree of realism is missing at ANSTO.”

Wood does not believe that such an assessment would conclude that the risks are unacceptable, but merely asks that an assessment be carried out. ANSTO prefers to stick its head in the sand and to continue to deny the possibility of a loss of coolant accident.

US-based nuclear expert Daniel Hirsch, in a 1998 report commissioned by Sutherland Shire Council, makes the important point that the trivialisation of safety risks actually increases risks: “… a blind belief that no serious harm can occur, no matter what goes wrong with the reactor, no matter how serious the operator error, produces a markedly increased risk, as any review of past nuclear accidents will demonstrate.”

Wood says he has “confidence that the security arrangements will match the perceived threat”. Perhaps so, but one aspect of the security system is vetting access to ANSTO’s reactor plant, and I’ve entered on numerous occasions without showing my visitor’s pass or having my bag inspected – and I’m sure the same applies to others. Yet ANSTO says on its website, “Employees and long term visitors always have to show passes – this is nothing new and car boots are often checked. Indeed ANSTO security is constantly under review to ensure that the highest standards are maintained.” Bollocks.

Another risk is the possibility of sabotage carried out by an ANSTO staff member. Anonymous ANSTO staff members, self-described as ANSTO “Staff Representing Truth in Science”, said in a March 3, 2000 letter to a Sutherland Shire councillor: “The last 4 years have seen unprecedented industrial actions resulting in lost-time for ANSTO. The staff morale is exceptionally low … because of unprecedented ineptitude at senior management level.” In October 2000, an ANSTO scientist described management/staff relations as being on a “permanent war footing”.

If an act of sabotage or terrorism, or a serious accident, does occur, the consequences could be serious. Wood told the Senate inquiry that the proposed new reactor “when operating at full power will contain sufficient fission products to cause great damage off site if a large fraction were to escape.”

Sutherland Shire Council has obtained documents from the (now defunct) Nuclear Safety Bureau saying that a loss of coolant accident would be 1000 times worse than the maximum hypothetical accident being planned for by ANSTO and the Argentinean contractor INVAP. Daniel Hirsch said in a written submission to the Senate inquiry: “We [Hirsch and ANSTO] all appear now to agree that if the replacement reactor were to suffer a loss of coolant, or a power excursion accident that tosses out the coolant, and if the confinement fails or is bypassed, radioactivity releases thousands of times higher than that assumed in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) could result. Indeed, we are in fairly close agreement how large those releases would be, and presumably, how many cancers would result.”

Puppet regulator

Last year, the CEO of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, John Loy, issued a licence to ANSTO to prepare a site for a new reactor at Lucas Heights. That licence was granted despite the absence of a detailed reactor design. Loy issued a statement saying: “I accept that the critical point in the evaluation of the reference accident is the exclusion of a fast loss of coolant. But I believe that the ARPANSA review and the international peer reviews commissioned in the EIS process demonstrate that this is a valid scenario. Of course, it is possible to posit all sorts of simultaneous disasters and suggest superhuman powers to saboteurs or enemies; but that does not help the careful evaluation of a real life proposal.”

ARPANSA will not commit to insisting on changes to design specifications for the proposed new reactor in the wake of September 11 terrorist attack and subsequent events. ARPANSA’s regulatory branch is inhabited by no less than six former ANSTO staff members, and the executive director of ANSTO sat on the panel which interviewed applicants for the position of CEO of the ‘independent’ regulator, ARPANSA.

ANSTO’s website says that if an aircraft hit HIFAR, “even in the unlikely event that an aircraft was able to hit the relatively small target presented by HIFAR, the radiation doses to persons beyond the buffer zone would be relatively low (comparable to natural background radiation in some parts of the world).” ARPANSA says that “even if the HIFAR was struck by a large aircraft, radiation doses to persons beyond the 1.6 km buffer zone would be relatively low (comparable to natural background radiation in some parts of the world).” The near-identical wording may say something about the lack of independence of ARPANSA.

Decoded, these statements from ANSTO/ARPANSA mean that in the event of an aircraft hitting the reactor, the radiation doses within ANSTO’s nuclear plant could be significant, and beyond the 1.6 km buffer zone, thousands of people might be subjected to smaller radiation doses, but would still be at slightly greater risk of fatal cancers and other pathologies. In addition to direct exposure to radiation, the contamination of land and property could have major social and economic consequences.

ANSTO says the planned new reactor will be designed to withstand the impact from a Cessna 500 Citation aircraft. Sutherland Shire Council is concerned about the adequacy of this standard given the close proximity of both the Sydney and Bankstown airports, which cater for aircraft much larger than a Cessna 500.

Target-rich environment

The existing reactor, and the proposed new reactor, are not the only risks at Lucas Heights; it is a target-rich environment, to use the military jargon.

The isotope processing plant, in which irradiated targets, including enriched uranium targets, are processed, is vulnerable. The targets and the liquid waste stream contain uranium fission products and transuranics including long-lived plutonium isotopes. As at mid 1996, 6000 litres of this waste was stored at Lucas Heights. The waste is slowly being solidified by ANSTO. It was identified as having potential for off-site consequences in the event of an accident (such as an earthquake or a major fire) by the government’s Safety Review Committee, which complained on several occasions in the 1990s about the delays in the solidification of this waste. There are no plans for long-term storage or disposal of the solidified waste.

Another obvious target at Lucas Heights is the irradiated (spent) fuel from the reactor. On April 2, 1996, maritime workers refused to load a shipment of spent fuel from ANSTO because they had not been forewarned of the shipment. The spent fuel was driven aimlessly around Sydney while the dispute was resolved, because of a law preventing the convoy being stationary for more than two hours (presumably for security reasons). (Sydney Morning Herald, September 5, 1998.)

A previous spent fuel shipment was no less farcical: a spent fuel convoy from Lucas Heights was followed onto a ship by a truck driven by Greenpeace campaigners.

Insurance

In the event of a serious reactor accident at Lucas Heights, Sydney residents would find it extremely difficult or impossible to pursue compensation claims. (For more information click here.)

With respect to government indemnity, Tony Wood said in his written submission to the Senate inquiry that both ANSTO and the government have “misled” the public and that ANSTO’s EIS was “genuinely confused, or … had set out deliberately to confuse.”

Wood notes that, unlike many countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, Sydney residents are not protected by absolute liability, which frees the claimant from having to prove anything other than damage as a result of a reactor accident. Instead, Sydney residents effected by a nuclear accident would only have recourse to common law, which requires that the aggrieved party prove both damage and negligence.

Wood says it is a “mystery” to him why the Government has not accepted absolute liability: “It looks as if the Commonwealth lacks confidence in the low level of public risk claimed for the new reactor in the EIS. If it is so low what is to be lost by offering the guarantee.”

Nuclear weapons

A perception that ANSTO might be involved in weapons production might make it more attractive as a terrorist target. From the 1940s to the early 1970s, successive Australian governments pursued nuclear projects which, by design or accident, brought Australia closer to a nuclear weapons capability. Consequently, as former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott noted in a submission during the reactor EIS process, there has been an accumulation of programs and facilities at Lucas Heights which could be seen internationally to have ambiguous potential for weapons development. These facilities, which have been publicly declared and in most cases shut down, include a fluorine plant, a uranium hexafluouride synthesis plant, a laser enrichment project, a centrifuge cascade development (uranium enrichment), a split table experimental facility, fuel irradiation facilities in HIFAR, and hot cells in current use for chemical extraction of components from irradiated uranium targets.

There is no interest in pursuing a nuclear weapons program in Australia, although anyone (e.g. state or sub-state terrorists) could be forgiven for believing otherwise given that the stated objectives of the plan for a new reactor – isotope production and scientific research – are barely credible. The real agenda behind the reactor – which the government describes as the “national interest” agenda – includes supporting the nuclear alliance with the US, continuing to play a nuclear watch-dog role in the Asia Pacific (which also ties into the US alliance), maintaining Australia’s place on the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and other such activities.

Radioactive materials at Lucas Heights might be fashioned by terrorists or saboteurs into a ‘radiation bomb’ in combination with explosive materials – not nearly so lethal as a nuclear bomb but nonetheless capable of spreading radiation far and wide.

Fresh fuel and spent fuel at Lucas Heights contain highly enriched uranium which might provide the fissile material for a nuclear weapon, although it would require extensive facilities and expertise; far simpler for a terrorist to blow up the reactor, spent fuel, or the isotope processing plant or associated liquid waste stockpile.

 

More articles on the security issue:

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

 

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Sydney’s new nuclear reactor: safe as houses?

Jim Green
November 2000
Despite ANSTO’s attempts to trivialise the safety risks of the proposed new reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney, there’s no doubt that it would contain sufficient radioactivity to cause major off-site contamination in the event of a major accident and the failure of containment systems. Nuclear engineer Tony Wood, former head of ANSTO’s Division of Engineering and Reactors, told the 2000-2001 Senate inquiry into the reactor plan that the proposed new reactor “when operating at full power will contain sufficient fission products to cause great damage off site if a large fraction were to escape.”

Likewise, a 1995 report from MHB Technical Associates, commissioned by the Sutherland Shire Council, said that HIFAR, or any similar or larger reactor, “is potentially subject to severe accidents involving fuel melting which have the potential to release sizable quantities of radioactive material into the environment.”

The safety debates involve issues such as what type of accident would constitute a worst-case accident (or “reference accident”), the likelihood of such an accident, what proportion of the reactor’s radioactivity might escape to the environment, and what consequences a serious accident would have.

The Senate inquiry heard from Daniel Hirsch, the former director of a nuclear policy research program at the University of California and currently co-chair of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory Advisory Panel, an independent oversight body for the US Department of Energy. Hirsch is visiting Australia at the invitation of the Sutherland Shire Council.

Hirsch disputes ANSTO’s dismissal of an accident in which coolant (or water) would be lost thus exposing fuel rods. Hirsch says that at least half a dozen loss-of-coolant accidents have occurred around the world.

ANSTO’s assertion that a loss-of-coolant accident can be dismissed as being too unlikely to  contemplate is premature, since a detailed design for the proposed reactor has yet to be produced. ANSTO uses the conditional clause, as in the Final EIS: “The pool structure and beam tube penetrations would be designed to be so robust that a large loss of coolant accident is not considered credible.”

Hirsch said he was astonished to find that the environmental impact statement for the proposed new reactor took place in the absence of a reactor design.

An October 31 media release from ANSTO says, “three independent peer reviews of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the replacement research reactor … confirmed that the “reference accident” assumptions and outcomes, were appropriate.” This assertion is partly misleading, partly false:
* the review by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said “full justification for the selected Reference Accident is not included in the EIS”.
* the Review by Parkman Safety Management said, “As no specific design has yet been chosen, it is not possible for a full and detailed safety assessment to be undertaken at this stage.”
* and the Review by CH2M Hill said “The probability of occurrence and potential consequences of a given accident sequence are highly dependent on the specific design and operational features of a reactor facility. Because these details have not yet been finalised for the proposal, it is not possible to develop a detailed quantitative assessment of accident hazards and risks at this stage.”

Sabotage

The Sutherland Shire Council is concerned that ANSTO all but ignores sabotage as a risk, particularly in light of previous attempts at sabotage such as the 1983 discovery of significant quantities of gelignite and ammonium nitrate, and three detonators, inside ANSTO’s boundary fence.

Tony Wood says a sabotage event “has the potential to have much worse consequences [than ANSTO’s selected reference accident] and the EIS admits there is no way of assessing its likelihood.”

At the October 25 hearing of the Senate inquiry, Wood expressed concern about the pool-type reactor proposed by ANSTO: “Pool reactors have a free water surface and this very feature, which is desirable for flexible access to the core, also makes it vulnerable. The EIS claims credit for the massive reinforced concrete block of the pool but this is the very thing which would direct the force of an explosion into the reactor core and expel fuel and water.”

Wood urged the Senate committee to urge the federal government and ANSTO to conduct an assessment of the potential consequences of sabotage:  “When it comes to the confidential assumptions about types and quantities of explosives which could realistically be used I would like to see input from SAS or other military experts because I believe, in the light of what has been said on this topic in the EIS, a degree of realism is missing at ANSTO.”

A related issue is the poor status of staff/management relations at ANSTO. ANSTO staff members, self-described as ANSTO “Staff Representing Truth in Science” said in a March 3 letter to a Sutherland Shire Councillor that, “The last 4 years have seen unprecedented industrial actions resulting in lost-time for ANSTO. The staff morale is exceptionally low … because of unprecendented ineptitude at senior management level.” This raises the spectre of sabotage, and it could lead to an exacerbation of an already critical problem: the lack of nuclear and engineering expertise at ANSTO.

Earthquake

ANSTO’s dismissal of earthquakes as a potential initiator of a serious accident has also been called into question. The federal government commissioned the New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences and other experts to assess the likelihood and potential impacts of an earthquake on the Lucas Heights nuclear plant.

The chair of the technical review committee concluded that: “The TRC considers the assessment provided by IGNS Ltd. does represent the most comprehensive review of potential earthquake motion in the Lucas Heights region that has been undertaken to date, and the general methodology employed conforms to recognised international standards.”

The IGNS report found that the impact of an earthquake could be almost twice that previously predicted. Subsequently, the government refused to release the report for some months, and the IGNS report is currently being “reviewed” by government agencies behind closed doors.

Dr. Garry Smith, from the Sutherland Shire Council, told the October 25 Senate hearing, “The report of that independent consultant was to the effect that the estimation for earthquake came up with an earthquake size, a peak ground acceleration, approximately twice the size of that previously assessed by ANSTO and others. Our concern is that that measure of twice the earthquake has not entered into the specification process for the design of the reactor. From what we have seen – we are addressing this with ANSTO and ARPANSA – it was to some degree the earlier earthquake specifications that were initially used for the tendering process and so on. And we do not know what the current earthquake specification for the design is: whether that New Zealand study, which is agreed to be the most comprehensive study to date, has been taken on board, or whether there is some earthquake number in between, or whether it is the low number. … What is of particular concern is that the process of assessing this issue is occurring post-EIS, it is occurring in a non-public process between ANSTO and ARPANSA, and the public has no access to how that government information is being used. It is a real concern to us.”

Smith said, “If there is any uncertainty with respect to the size of an earthquake which can potentially affect radioactivity release, surely the public can expect that the government will err on the side of caution and safety. You do not ignore a report just because you are not sure or the estimates have some level of uncertainty. You build in an inherent level of safety to overcome the uncertainty. I am not confident, having been part of those committee processes and now part of ARPANSA, that under the current process those levels of uncertainty are being adequately addressed. … I have real concerns about the level of safety that will be achieved by the reactor with respect to things like earthquake specification. It costs money to build in safety features.”

Consequences

ANSTO claims the most “credible serious accident” would release one millionth of the radioactivity of the core of the reactor. Based on previous reactor accidents, Daniel Hirsch says that a more appropriate figure would be several-hundredths of the core radioactivity. ANSTO arrived at its optimistic conclusion in part by ignoring many of the radionuclides that would be released in the event of a serious reactor accident.

A serious reactor accident at Lucas Heights would have health effects (e.g. fatal cancers, non-fatal cancers, genetic effects) and many other effects: decontamination costs, evacuation costs, restrictions on food consumption, litigation costs, and overall impacts on economic output. As MHB Technical Associates notes, “Even relatively small radiological accident releases have resulted overseas in large societal costs within the ‘evacuation shadow’.”

Dr. Greg Storr, an ANSTO scientist giving evidence to the Senate inquiry on October 25, described a fatal research reactor accident at the SL-1 reactor in the USA in 1961:  “Three operators died. It was a research sized reactor. It was caused by what was called a reactivity excursion. It was caused by one of the operators deliberately withdrawing one of the control rods – that is one of the pieces of material which controls the neutron reaction –  and that action sent the reactor to what they call superprompt critical. When it went superprompt critical, there was a large increase in the temperature in the reactor core, the water boiled and it caused a water hammer effect which accelerated the slug of water above the core up in to the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel broke and it accelerated up and hit the roof, pinning one of the operators to the roof. The two other operators died later from radiation exposure. That is the SL-1 accident.”

Several other fatal research reactor accidents have been recorded, most recently in the USA in 1998 during maintenance operations at a research reactor.

Health effects of radiation

Another safety-related debate concerns the health effects of low-level radiation.  Despite being Australia’s largest nuclear agency, ANSTO cannot make up its mind on this topic. On October 30 (as reported in the October 31 Sydney Morning Herald), ANSTO said that in the “improbable event of an accident, community impacts would be negligible”. The following day, ANSTO announced that a reactor accident would have “no health impacts on the community” (emphasis added).

This confusion was also evident in an internal Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) 1998 briefing document, obtained by the Sutherland Shire Council under freedom of information legislation. The document ponders the best euphemism to describe the health risks from radioactive emissions from the planned new reactor. “Don’t say no extra risk – acceptable risk?? … There are risks associated with everything.”

“Be careful in terms of health impacts – don’t really want a detailed study done of the health of Sutherland residents”, the DISR document said. (Alan Parkinson noted in his Senate submission that a senior DISR bureaucrat did not one of the most basic facts in the field of radiation studies – the difference between alpha and gamma radiation. An adviser to Senator Minchin is revealed by Parkinson not to know the difference between an acid and a base.)

Further safety concerns derive from the lack of nuclear expertise at Lucas Heights. Tony Wood said in his submission, “It is a fact … that ANSTO now only has a small team of dedicated reactor professionals most of whom are operating HIFAR and they are fully extended. … I suggest that the [Senate] Committee seek assurance from the Government that experienced reactor engineers be hired by ANSTO to pursue the proposal from now on. So far they have been conspicuous by their absence in the team.”

ANSTO staff members – self-described as “Staff Representing Truth in Science” – wrote to a Sutherland Councillor on March 3, saying, “Because of inept executive management there is no succession planning within the organisation. Although it will be strongly denied by ANSTO, it is well known by those in the field that the new reactor project is having difficulty finding sufficient nuclear literate staff to address the tender process. It is understood that the current full-time staff on the program had their origins in the AAEC and are up for retirement. Inept management, no succession planning? Who is going to safely operate a new reactor in Sutherland Shire.”

Another issue which impinges on safety is the significant likelihood of a cost blow-out associated with the new reactor project, which could lead to cost-cutting in areas affecting safety (e.g. design parameters for the proposed new reactor, e.g. staff retrenchments). Jim Fredsall, former president of the Australian Nuclear Association and a former ANSTO nuclear engineer, said in his submission to the Senate Inquiry that the new reactor would be a constant drain on the taxpayers of this country for the next half century.

ANSTO “Staff Representing Truth in Science” wrote in their March 3 letter, “it is known that the reactor replacement costs are projected to blow out considerably more than the amounts told to the Federal Government, but once the project is started it will have to be completed irrespective of costs. A number of staff believe there should be an independent external review of financial management at ANSTO and the real costs of a new reactor.”

ANSTO claims that even for the “hypothetical maximum credible accident”, no countermeasures beyond the 1.6km buffer zone would be required. Emergency planning is inadequate and will remain so because of the head-in-the-sand approach taken by ANSTO and by federal and state governments.

Daniel Hirsch makes the important point that the trivialisation of the safety risks associated with the Lucas Heights nuclear plant actually increases the risks: “… a blind belief that no serious harm can occur, no matter what goes wrong with the reactor, no matter how serious the operator error; produces a markedly increased risk, as any review of past nuclear accidents will demonstrate.”

Insurance

In the event of a serious reactor accident at Lucas Heights, Sydney residents would find it extremely difficult or impossible to pursue compensation claims.

According to Michael Priceman from the Sutherland Shire Environment Centre, “The [ANSTO EIS] report on the suitability of Lucas Heights as the site for a new reactor … found that it was perfect, based on what ANSTO described as its pessimistic assumptions that the frequency of a worst case accident was one in a million per year and therefore the maximum risk to an individual developing a fatal cancer was one in 6 billion per year. Armed with those sporting odds the Insurance Council of Australia still refuses to insure the public.”

With respect to government indemnity, Tony Wood said in his written submission to the Senate inquiry that both ANSTO and the government have “misled” the public and that ANSTO’s EIS was “genuinely confused, or … had set out deliberately to confuse.”

Wood notes that, unlike many countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, Sydney residents are not protected by absolute liability, which frees the claimant from having to prove anything other than damage as a result of a reactor accident. Instead, Sydney residents effected by a nuclear accident would only have recourse to common law, which requires that the aggrieved party prove both damage and negligence.

The government knows that it has misled the public, Wood says, “yet not only has it chosen to do nothing about it, but it has misinformed the community that a Deed of Indemnity it has produced for a different purpose does provide equivalent financial security, when clearly it does not.”

Wood says the Deed of Indemnity was designed to attract bidders for the reactor project: “In the absence of absolute liability of the operator in Australia the Government faced a dilemma because no overseas reactor vendor would consider bidding because if he (sic) were successful he (sic) could be held liable in the event of an accident. Although the Government has chosen not to indemnify its own citizens, it must indemnify the reactor vendor if it wants a new reactor. Hence the Deed of Indemnity was produced last year, which does in fact indemnify the vendor.”

Wood says it is a “mystery” to him why the Government has not accepted absolute liability: “It looks as if the Commonwealth lacks confidence in the low level of public risk claimed for the new reactor in the EIS. If it is so low what is to be lost by offering the guarantee.”

Wood quoted the US Presidential Commission on Catastrophic Accidents, which said in 1988 that applying common law principles to nuclear accidents would result in an outright denial of recovery or a difficult and protracted process.

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Reactor engineer says safety inadequate

Sydney Morning Herald
December 17, 2001

A former engineering director at Australia’s only nuclear reactor said today that safety measures at the existing facility were inadequate and did not cover public safety.

Speaking at the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) public forum on the building of a new reactor at Sydney’s Lucas Heights, Tony Woods said the facility “didn’t have adequate protection for anything”.
“Our (safety) procedures are so cumbersome, and they’d take so long to implement, they’d be ineffective,” he said.

Mr Woods, who retired in 1991 after 30 years service at Lucas Heights, said the “safety culture” at the facility had to be greatly improved.

He said the current Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) safety plan only considered plant employees and did not include any measures for the public.

Mr Woods said the Sutherland Shire Council’s contingency plan anticipated many emergencies, including earthquakes, but did not consider a nuclear accident.

“If you look at the plan regarding the public, there’s no mention of the reactor. It’s like it isn’t there,” he said.
He cited the example of a reactor employee who was refused admission to Sutherland Hospital, one of the nearest medical facilities to Lucas Heights, because of a wound that was contaminated.

Mr Woods urged planning for a worst-case scenario of complete core meltdown plus major containment failure, including evacuation procedures and prior distribution of medicines.

He also said a smaller research reactor like the one planned would be more vulnerable to an act of sabotage or terrorism because it isn’t as well fortified.

“The main reason a terrorist would attack this (facility) is not to kill a lot of people but to terrify them,” he said.
“If we’ve got a good plan we can protect people … that’s more effective than fortifying the reactor.”

But there was one very significant positive in Mr Woods’ presentation – nuclear accidents were not as catastrophic as people imagined.

He said research showed that many of the illnesses anticipated after the accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, including leukaemia, did not manifest themselves among the population as expected.

Thyroid cancer was the only illness that boomed after Chernobyl, which Mr Woods said could be nipped at the bud by using iodine tablets.

He said the biggest health hazard in the event of a reactor accident was the psychological effect of the incident, and better communication was needed.

“People don’t have the correct perspective as far as radiation is concerned,” he said.

“You’d go in an get an X-ray and you wouldn’t ask what the dosage is.

“I think ANSTO has a problem in so much as it likes to sugar-coat its information.

“They feel the public can’t take information that could cause them concern.

“I think (consulting and informing external bodies) is better for the project and better for everyone.”

–AAP

 

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Insurance and the Lucas Heights nuclear plant

In the event of a serious reactor accident at Lucas Heights, Sydney residents would find it extremely difficult or impossible  to pursue compensation claims.

According to Michael Priceman from the Sutherland Shire Environment Centre, “The [ANSTO EIS] report on the  suitability of Lucas Heights as the site for a new reactor … found that it was perfect, based on what ANSTO described as its  pessimistic assumptions that the frequency of a worst case accident was one in a million per year and therefore the maximum  risk to an individual developing a fatal cancer was one in 6 billion per year. Armed with those sporting odds the Insurance  Council of Australia still refuses to insure the public.”

With respect to government indemnity, nuclear engineer Tony Wood, former head of ANSTO’s Division of Engineering and Reactors, said in his written submission to the Senate inquiry that both ANSTO  and the government have “misled” the public and that ANSTO’s EIS was “genuinely confused, or … had set out deliberately  to confuse.”

Wood notes that, unlike many countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, Sydney residents are not protected by absolute liability, which frees the claimant from having to prove anything other than damage as a result of a reactor  accident. Instead, Sydney residents effected by a nuclear accident would only have recourse to common law, which requires  that the aggrieved party prove both damage and negligence.

The government knows that it has misled the public, Wood says, “yet not only has it chosen to do nothing about it, but it has  misinformed the community that a Deed of Indemnity it has produced for a different purpose does provide equivalent  financial security, when clearly it does not.”

Wood says the Deed of Indemnity was designed to attract bidders for the reactor project: “In the absence of absolute liability  of the operator in Australia the Government faced a dilemma because no overseas reactor vendor would consider bidding  because if he were successful he could be held liable in the event of an accident. Although the Government has  chosen not to indemnify its own citizens, it must indemnify the reactor vendor if it wants a new reactor. Hence the Deed of  Indemnity was produced last year, which does in fact indemnify the vendor.”

Wood says it is a “mystery” to him why the Government has not accepted absolute liability: “It looks as if the  Commonwealth lacks confidence in the low level of public risk claimed for the new reactor in the EIS. If it is so low what  is to be lost by offering the guarantee.”

Wood quoted the US Presidential Commission on Catastrophic Accidents, which said in 1988 that applying common law principles to nuclear accidents would result in an outright denial of recovery or a difficult and protracted process.

Wood told the Senate inquiry on October 25, 2000, “If I had to sum up my concerns in one sentence, it would be that for the first time in my long association with … ANSTO, I do not feel comfortable with what the organisation is telling the public and its own staff.”

Senate inquiry into the contract for a new reactor at Lucas Heights
October 25, 2000
Tony Wood (former head of ANSTO’s Division of Engineering and Reactors)
Transcript of comments on insurance from: www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/comsen.htm

“I would like to concentrate now mainly on the two questions of ‘nuclear liability’ and ‘the worst accident’, because these two items are still both open to the committee to influence change, should it choose to do so. First, on nuclear liability, in our society, if we feel exposed to some risk of financial loss from the activities of some third party, we have two options: we can take out insurance, or we can accept the risk, knowing that if we are damaged later we may exercise our common law right to seek damages through the law courts. However, it would be prudent to check first on the financial status of the party we intend to sue—it could be a man of straw and not worth suing.

It is little different with respect to possible damage from nuclear installations, as Mr Priceman mentioned earlier, because we all know that we are not insured against this risk. He mentioned in Australia; I say around the world, because nobody around the world these days is insured against nuclear risk. For the last 20 years or so, all of our insurance policies have had nuclear exclusion clauses. This does not worry most of us because we are not exposed to the risk.

But let us consider the people living near the reactor, who are exposed to the risk. Let us think the unthinkable: say there was a reactor accident at Lucas Heights and the affected people wanted to sue ANSTO for damages. There are no worries about ANSTO’s ability to pay—the Commonwealth owns ANSTO. However, you may be aware that it is a common law requirement that, for a damages claim to be successful, the claimant must be able to establish not only that he has been damaged, but also that the damage arose from the defendant’s negligence. This last part is the tricky part, because the classical defence is to show there has been no negligence. It would be claimed that either all reasonable steps had been taken or that someone else was to blame. There is no doubt that this would happen. If it did not, the crown lawyers would be in breach of their ethical duty to their client.

In the USA, this is what the Presidential Commission on Catastrophic Accidents had to say in 1988 on the effectiveness of common law in nuclear accidents, and I am quoting from the OECD report, Liability and compensation for nuclear damage: “The Commission expressed the belief that applying the common law principles of actions for damages would result in an outright denial of recovery or a difficult and protracted process.” That is quite unambiguous. Other nations have recognised this too and responded, through conventions or other means, by waiving the requirement to prove negligence. They did this through legislation based on certain conventions in which the plant operator was declared absolutely liable. This removed fault from the basis of liability, just leaving causation.  The citizens of Britain, USA, Canada, Japan, Germany, France and the Netherlands all enjoy this concession.

Given that the Australian government is looking for public support for the project, and given that the EIS tells us that the worst accident would have trivial consequences and hence a close to zero pay-out, one would think there would be a rush to offer this concession to Australian citizens. But, no, the government has refused to offer absolute liability. As a consequence, Australians seeking compensation would have to prove negligence. Recall that the American commission said that this may amount to outright denial of recovery. You might ask: why would the government take such an extraordinarily negative position on this matter? I tried to pursue this in Canberra, with conflicting responses from two ministries. Finally I think I have a clue. It comes from a letter I received from Senator Minchin’s head of science and technology policy, Dr Tucker, which says:

“You have raised the issue of absolute liability. I understand this means the liability irrespective of intention or negligence. It is apparent that the issue of absolute liability has financial implications well beyond the risks associated with research reactor operations at Lucas Heights. I am informed that the Commonwealth, as a matter of financial policy, does not accept such liability.”

What does this mean? I think that the lawyers and advisers in Canberra are not familiar with the concept of absolute liability and are worried and suspicious that if this is offered to the nuclear industry others will want it too. My response to this is that the lawyers in North America, Japan, Britain and other places have managed to negotiate this hurdle. Their world has not fallen in.

Perhaps our people need a little shove from this committee.

Now I come to the worst part of the liability story and that is the deception part. A not so well known aspect of the nuclear liability problem is that no reactor vendor around the world would build a reactor here or anywhere else without receiving indemnity. The government’s response was to produce the so-called deed of indemnity, which we heard about earlier, which indemnifies ANSTO and its officers and agents against loss. There is nothing wrong with this and the vendor was satisfied but then someone had the idea of misrepresenting the deed of indemnity as being something that it is not. ANSTO said in its submission to the parliamentary works committee: “The deed therefore ensures residents are adequately protected in terms of nuclear compensation claims.”

And Senator Minchin said in a letter dated 18 February 1999, which justifies the absence of absolute indemnity, that the same ends will be achieved by alternative means. He then went on to describe these means as being the deed of indemnity. This invites us to believe that offering the assurance that ANSTO will pay its bills provides adequate compensation protection to residents and somehow this is equivalent to waiving the legal obligation to prove negligence in a court of law.

I do not know whether you would believe this but I cannot. I seek the committee’s support in influencing the government to offer absolute liability then the deed of indemnity can go back to being what it truly is and that is just a means of indemnifying INVAP. The residents could then enjoy the degree of protection offered to their overseas counterparts and this at no cost to the government.”

 

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Whistleblower exposes Lucas Heights nuclear accidents

Jim Green
March/April 1999 (plus updates)

An employee of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has revealed information about a series of accidents at the nuclear reactor plant in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights.

The ANSTO whistle blower provided a statement to a journalist from the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader and to Sutherland Shire councillor Genevieve Rankin.

The statement began, “Some very serious accidents have happened at ANSTO over the last few weeks. The first accident was, while retrieving a spent fuel rod from its mortuary hole in the waste management section, the operators didn’t realise that the rod was in a very poor condition. The rod fell off the retaining mechanism while being transported in its flask. As the operators opened the flask door the spent fuel rod fell out of its shielded flask and onto the floor in front of them. These rods, although they have been stored for many years, are in very poor condition and are highly radioactive. The operators quickly lowered the transport flask onto the rod so that they were shielded from massive doses of radiation. I believe this happened a few weeks ago and they still do not know how they will ever retrieve the rod from the floor under the flask.”

ANSTO released a statement acknowledging that the accident occurred on February 1. According to ANSTO, four staff members were exposed to radiation doses between 50 to 500 microsieverts; the upper figure is half the ANNUAL limit for members of the public.

On March 16, ANSTO confirmed that the spent fuel rod remains where it fell. ANSTO says it intends to design and build a device to grasp the fuel rod and place it inside its flask.

Last year, it was revealed that a number of “airtight” tubes containing spent fuel rods had been breached by water and a number of fuel rods had corroded as a result. Increased humidity levels suggested other tubes also contained water, and it was during investigation of these tubes that the February 1 accident occurred. When the revelations were made last year, ANSTO’s executive director, Helen Garnett, said the fuel rods posed “no safety or environmental hazard” regardless of the infiltration of water.

Former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott says “the corrosion of old spent fuel HIFAR rods is a real concern. A few rods are already deemed unacceptable for reprocessing in the US.”

Radioisotope processing emissions

The ANSTO whistle blower described another accident which occurred in February 1999 and involved the processing of radioisotopes: “A large amount of radioactive gas was emitted from building 54 two weeks ago. I am told the filters were bypassed at the time, a mistake was made and radioactive gas was emitted into the atmosphere. The escape was that large that the monitors in the HIFAR nuclear reactor were set off. This distance would be about 500 metres. I am also led to believe that staff members working outside were contaminated. ANSTO have covered this incident up and have not even told the staff that this incident occurred. Many staff believe that a site emergency should have been declared.”

Yet another accident was described as follows by the ANSTO employee: “A large amount of radioactive iodine was released into the atmosphere from ARI (ANSTO’s radioisotope processing plant). Again ANSTO has covered up the incident. I received this information from a very reputable source and we think these incidents have been covered by ANSTO as they are desperate to get the new reactor approved. These incidents I’m sure would not go down well with the environmental impact statement being considered at the moment.”

Responding to these claims, ANSTO acknowledged that during a period of three weeks in February 1999, there were two occasions when radiation releases above routine levels required its isotope processing plant to be shut down. One involved the release of xenon and krypton, and the other, iodine. According to ANSTO, “On neither occasions did the release exceed the permitted level of emissions. There were no significant personnel exposures and no offsite health impacts.” ANSTO did not confirm or deny the claim that alarm systems in the HIFAR reactor were triggered by the release of radiation some distance away.

At odds with ANSTO management’s version of the accidents were the ANSTO staff members who wrote in a March 3, 2000, letter to Genevieve Rankin: “The ANSTO Board has a very limited idea of what is really transpiring at Lucas Heights. For instance, the radiation contamination scare last year was only brought to the staff’s attention because of a local newspaper. The incident was of such gravity, that the executive should have made an announcement over the site emergency monitor about the incident to inform the staff. Instead the management practiced a culture of secrecy and cover up, even to the extent of actively and rudely dissuading staff from asking too many questions about the event. The unions were outraged at the executive management concerning this incident but passively towed the management line because they wanted job security with a new reactor.”

Who is to be believed? ANSTO management, despite its documented record of secrecy and its documented record of being fast and loose with the truth? Or anonymous ANSTO staff members?

Cover up

In a clumsy attempt to diffuse concern and anger about the accidents, ANSTO asserted that “None of the events was associated with the HIFAR research reactor.” However the fuel rods were originally used to fuel the reactor, and most or all of the radioisotopes were produced in the reactor.

The accidents, and the cover up, occurred at a crucial juncture in the debate over the plan to replace the HIFAR nuclear reactor. The ANSTO whistle blower said “these incidents have been covered up by ANSTO as they are desperate to get the new reactor approved. These incidents I’m sure would not go down well with the environmental impact statement being considered at the moment.”

Genevieve Rankin said:

“Neither the Health Department, the Sutherland Council or local schools were notified about the February accidents although Council has an agreement with ANSTO that it would be notified of such accidents.”

“It is a disgrace that ANSTO management continues to be allowed to expose the community to high levels of radioactive gases and doesn’t even bother to inform the community when this happens. We only find out by way of information supplied by public spirited staff who believe the community should be informed.”

“Local residents can’t help wondering how many other accidents have been covered up over the years. ANSTO has clearly tried to suppress the information on the latest accidents during the assessment period for the new reactor. The environment minister Senator Hill decided to delay the announcement of the approval for the new reactor until the Monday after the NSW state election in order to minimise public comment on the issues during an election period.”

ARPANSA

ANSTO denies covering up the accidents, saying the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) was notified. However, ARPANSA was nonexistent at the time of the accidents involving fuel rods, the most noteable of which took place on 1 February 1999 when a fuel rod fell from its flask. ARPANSA came into existence on 5 February 1999.

ARPANSA itself said, “These incidents occurred at facilities that are not yet regulated by ARPANSA.” (First Quarterly Report of the Chief Executive Officer for the period 5 February to 31 March 1999.)

If the acting CEO of ARPANSA was notified about the accidents, he did not release the information publicly.

ARPANSA said: “Four incidents at the Lucas Heights Science and Technology Centre run by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), have recently been reported in the media and discussed at the Senate Inquiry hearings at Sutherland, NSW on 14 April 1999. One incident did not involve radiation (the release of water into the Woronora River), while the others were not serious incidents in the sense of causing significant exposures of workers or the public to radiation. These incidents occurred at facilities that are not yet regulated by ARPANSA. Under the ARPANS Act ANSTO has until 5 August 1999 to apply for facility licences. However, the three incidents are being fully investigated by both ANSTO and ARPANSA to determine their root causes and to establish improvements which will help to ensure that such incidents do not recur.” (ARPANSA, First Quarterly Report of the Chief Executive Officer for the period 5 February to 31 March 1999.)

ANSTO says the government appointed Safety Review Committee was notified of the recent accidents. But the Safety Review Committee was abolished during the restructuring of regulatory bodies. What power did the Committee have at the time of the accidents? Perhaps the Safety Review Committee was advised of the accidents, but the Sutherland Council’s representative on the Committee was not.

Evidently the Nuclear Safety Bureau was also notified, but it too was abolished as part of the restructuring. (And approximately half of the NSB staff were former ANSTO employees.)

ALP skeletons

NSW premier Bob Carr attempted to minimise the electoral fall out from the ANSTO accidents and cover up. Carr said the ANSTO nuclear plant is on commonwealth land and that state powers to regulate ANSTO were removed in 1992. He did not note that it was a Labor federal government who passed the 1992 law making ANSTO immune from state environmental and public health regulations.

 

More info on accidents at Lucas Heights:

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

 

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Safety first: Lucas Heights told to face plane truth

By Andrew Stevenson
Sydney Morning Herald
April 22, 2002

The operator of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor has been ordered to significantly upgrade its emergency response plans for its planned new reactor to include the consequences of a successful terrorist attack.

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s application for the replacement reactor had argued off-site emergency arrangements would not be necessary because the facility would be so safe.

But John Loy, the head of the Federal Government’s nuclear watchdog, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority, has confirmed that an independent review of emergency responses must be undertaken before the reactor can begin operation.

The new reactor, near the aging Hifar reactor, is expected to be operational in 2005.

While he does not believe the terrorist threat to be credible, Dr Loy wants the scenario, plus the impact of a commercial aircraft crash, to be considered in emergency response plans.

The strictures – contained in the safety authority’s approval documents – come as the existing emergency plans have been strongly criticised by the chair of the Sutherland Emergency Management Committee, Genevieve Rankin, and Tony Wood, a former ANSTO controller of reactors.

Both say there are no logical plans in place to give residents around Lucas Heights access to iodine tablets if there is a significant radiation leak.

Mr Wood says existing emergency plans are a shambles. He says ANSTO must review its plans for the existing reactor at Lucas Heights in light of a possible terrorist attack.

“There is no recognition this could be a problem; this is the problem,” he said. “The emergency planning is inadequate because they have made assumptions which understate the potential consequences about the worst-case accident.”

Mr Wood said saturating the thyroid gland with potassium iodide tablets would dramatically lower the risk, especially among children, of contracting thyroid cancer.

“It’s like a magic pill, but you’ve got to take it within hours, and I’m not at all confident the people who are going to make the decisions realise how important the time element is.”

Councillor Rankin says the emergency framework is a “disaster plan based on the idea you’ll never have a disaster”.
“It’s very much beset by internal contradictions and these should be sorted out and they should have been sorted out before ARPANSA signed a licence for ANSTO,” Cr Rankin said.

“Fundamentally, the plan calls for shelter and for people to seal off any air source coming into the house. But to get the iodine tablets they’ll have to leave.”

The tablets, stored at Sutherland district ambulance stations, would be made available at potential evacuation points, such as Waratah Park, a fact which is not advertised because the plan is based on taking shelter.

“The emergency management committee, which includes the local chiefs of the fire brigades, ambulance, police and a representative of NSW Health, was unanimous in saying [to ANSTO] that the plans ought to be reassessed,” Cr Rankin said.
ANSTO has rejected a meeting with Cr Rankin and the Sutherland Police Superintendent, Henry Karpic, to discuss the issue, preferring to work through an ANSTO-chaired local liaison group.

Dr Loy said he saw no fundamental problem with the plans. “Maybe we need to work out in a bit more detail about who does what to whom on the day, but I don’t have any sense of concern from the NSW agencies that, provided they have the right information, they can do what they need to do.”