Author: NuclearAdmin

See also: The push for nuclear weapons in Australia 1950s-1970s.

See also: Research reactors and nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons & Lucas Heights

Jim Green
May, 2000

Tony Wood, a former ANSTO scientist, argues that “if it were unacceptable to undertake research which can have both peaceful and military results, the world would not have the jet engine, the transistor or the computer” (Great service to our nation, St. George & Sutherland Shire Leader, May 2, 2000).

A good point, but there are some special considerations with respect to the dual-use civil/military character of nuclear technologies. First, nuclear weapons are far more destructive than any other form of weaponry yet devised. Second, there are ongoing international efforts to reduce and hopefully eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

Third, to relate Wood’s comment to the plan for a new reactor at Lucas Heights, whereas engines, transistors and the like have undoubted value, there has not even been an attempt from ANSTO or the government to argue that a new reactor will yield greater medical and scientific benefits than could be gained by spending an equivalent sum on alternative technologies and programs. In other words, there has been no effort to consider the opportunity costs. As Professor Barry Allen, former Chief Research Scientist at ANSTO, notes, “the cost of replacing the reactor is comparable to the whole wish list that arguably could be written for research facilities by the Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council”. And as the CSIRO noted in 1993, “more productive research could be funded for the cost of a reactor”.

The Department of Foreign Affairs acknowledges that “it is a fact that the possession of nuclear fuel cycle technology and facilities may shorten the time required to develop nuclear weapons”. Needless to say, this applies to Lucas Heights. Murray Scott, another former ANSTO scientist, noted in his EIS submission that over the years there has been an accumulation of programs and facilities at Lucas Heights which could be seen internationally to have ambiguous potential for weapons development.

In most but not all cases, these facilities have been declared and shut down. But now we have a plan for a new reactor, and make no mistake about it, this is raising eyebrows internationally. Perception is everything in the murky world of nuclear proliferation. Last year I was contacted by a South Korean nuclear scientist visiting Sydney. It was clear to him that the medical isotope justification for a new reactor was just dishonest public-relations spin, and he was keenly interested to discover the real agenda behind the reactor plan.

Once you get on the nuclear hobby-horse, it isn’t easy to get off. The government’s plan for a remote store for spent fuel wastes in SA is falling apart at the seams – 86% of South Australians, including the SA Premier, are opposed to it. A likely contingency plan is spent fuel reprocessing at Lucas Heights – ANSTO’s chief executive is on record saying this would be “reasonable”.

Persisting with dual-use nuclear technologies, such as the plan for a new reactor at Lucas Heights, clearly goes against nuclear disarmament initiatives despite the absurd claim to the contrary from ANSTO management. Australia ought to be at the forefront of the development and export of alternative, non-reactor technologies for medical and scientific applications – that in itself would be a small, but useful, contribution to international efforts to stem nuclear proliferation.

ANSTO was deeply complicit in the covert push for nuclear weapons in Australia in the 1950s and ‘60s. And if a future government chose to go down that path, ANSTO would inevitably be drawn into the project. This is not likely to happen any time soon, but it remains a possibility. The international non-proliferation regime is under constant threat because of the intransigence of the nuclear weapons states.

Murray Scott said in his EIS submission, “If future international tensions should ever bring about a decision to build nuclear weapons in Australia, I would not be prepared to live near Lucas Heights, mainly through fear of irradiated uranium reprocessing operations. Apart from the obvious threat of hostile attack, e.g. Israel’s strike destroying an Iraqi research reactor, the environmental and safety record of military nuclear programs worldwide is appalling. …The historical entanglement of military and civil nuclear operations in all the weapons states is well recognised as compromising safety accountability”.

To complicate the matter further, it is unlikely that such a course of action would be made public knowledge – even in general terms let alone the details of a weapons program and the risks it posed to the Sutherland Shire. The only discernible change might be an even more obsessively secretive attitude from ANSTO. Certainly politicians lied blatantly and repeatedly in the 1950s and ‘60s about their interest in, and pursuit of, nuclear weapons, just as politicians and ANSTO management lie on other matters relating to Lucas Heights today.

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Murray Scott (former ANSTO scientist)
Submission on ANSTO’s Draft EIS, 1998

(Summary notes and transcription of relevant comments from Murray Scott’s submission by Jim Green)

“If future international tensions should ever bring about a decision to build nuclear weapons in Australia, I would not be prepared to live near Lucas Heights, mainly through fear of irradiated uranium reprocessing operations. Apart from the obvious threat of hostile attack, e.g. Israel’s strike destroying an Iraqi research reactor, the environmental and safety record of military nuclear programs worldwide is appalling. Disasters at e.g. Chelyabinsk, Windscale and Hanford and the environmental contempt of weapons test programs come as no surprise when national imperatives, urgency and military secrecy override any pretence of community consultation or consideration. Who knows what horrors will eventually emerge from the Chinese, Indian and Pakistani weapons programs. The historical entanglement of military and civil nuclear operations in all the weapons states is well recognised as compromising safety accountability …”

“Over the years 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 have been publicly … declared and in most cases shut down. The facilities were exposed (perhaps only after related programs were terminated) to numerous visiting scientists …”

“On the enrichment path there were at Lucas Heights, ostensibly for commercial purposes, a fluorine plant, a UF6 synthesis plant, a laser enrichment project, and the centrifuge cascade development. … On the alternative plutonium path, which appears more easily accessible at Lucas Heights, there are fuel irradiation facilities in HIFAR and hotcells in B54 in current use for chemical extraction of components from the irradiated uranium. These facilities have been developed for production of Mo-99 medical radioisotopes but differ from a “reprocessing” plant only in respect of the types of chemicals and column materials used to extract specific elements from the dissolved irradiated uranium. The resulting intermediate level radioactive liquid waste is clearly the most dangerous material stored at Lucas Heights and is now belatedly being solidified. The scale of this operation is currently larger than that for reprocessing of HIFAR’s spent fuel … and with the replacement reactor could grow four fold.”

“Whichever path were taken to produce fissile material, the design of an explosive device or a reactor core is highly specific to the purity of the fissile and structural material available. Despite extensive theory, data and computer calculation “codes” maintained worldwide including at Lucas Heights, it would be necessary in achieving military reliability to test particular configurations for “reactivity” without risking an actual nuclear explosion of criticality incident. In 1972 Prime Minister William MacMahon opened at Lucas Heights a Split Table Critical Facility explicitly intended for this purpose. It was ostensibly built for a proposed fast power reactor development program that was never funded.”

The concrete containment building for the split table later used as beamline hall for ANTARES.

“Far from disqualifying this building (JG – the concrete containment building for the split table later used as beamline hall for ANTARES) from housing a refurbished critical facility, the proximity of the tandem accelerator would offer a convenient pulsed neutron source, as commonly used for reactivity measurements. Contrary to the statement in the Draft EIS that “cyclotrons are not a source of neutrons”, any accelerator of more than ~0.4 MeV beam energy can produce neutrons using a variety of e.g. (d,n) and (p,n) reactions, though not at the flux level available from a reactor. During the brief experimental program actually conducted on the critical facility, a small “neutron generator” accelerator was thus employed. The potential conjunction of the much more powerful tandem accelerator and critical facility in B53 is eerily reminiscent of the setup ~20 years previously in B22 where a beamline from the 3 MeV Van der Graaf accelerator was extended into the reflector of the MOATA reactor, and into a number of special BeO moderated and thorium metal reactor core mockups for similar reactivity or “neutron die away” measurements. One might almost think the tandem accelerator installation was designed with this in mind.”

“These ambiguous programs were published and, with the exception of the Mo-99 production, shut down and the equipment mothballed. As with any once-hi-tech equipment, the practicability of refurbishing these facilities is uncertain and perhaps the potential timescale for thus producing even one weapon impractically long. I hope so, but to my understanding these relics remain in storage and now, in considering a 30-40 year extension of reactor operation at the site, I believe we are entitled to know why. It could be suspected that in ANSTO’s interpretation of the “national interest”, the existence of these things at Lucas Heights is one reason that no other site was considered for HIFAR’s replacement.”

Scott’s submission asks for:
* estimates of the capacity of each of the enrichment related facilities and of the replacement reactor together with the B54 irradiated uranium processing facility if adapted for Pu-239 production, in terms of the time it would take to process sufficient material for a nuclear explosive device
* a schedule for complete disposal of the above and any other relic facilities of potential weapons proliferation significance.

 

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Debate

May/June 2001

This (unpublished) debate was prompted by a review of Wayne Reynolds’ book “Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb”, which was published in the Sutherland Shire Historical Society Bulletin (and elsewhere).

JOHN GREEN:

Letters to the Editor.
Editor, Sutherland Shire Historical Society Bulletin
Sutherland Shire Historical Society
PO Box 339, Sutherland, NSW 1499

Dear Les,

I have just received our latest copy of the History Society’s Bulletin, which I must say improves with. every edition. However, one item included in the latest edition has caused me some concern. I refer to the review by Dr Jim Green (no relative of mine!) of W. Reynolds’ book titled “Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb.”

In Dr Green’s review some statements are made which lead me to believe that they are not only Mr Reynolds’ opinion but also those of the reviewer and that such statements may be considered as representing established facts. I believe that such sentiments are totally out of order and not one scintilla of evidence exists which substantiates such assertions.

Two such examples of the type of statements to which I refer are;

“It has been known for many years that Australian governments were considering, and to some extent pursuing, the development of nuclear weapons from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Reynolds reveals that the planning and pursuit of nuclear weapons in Australia stretches back to World War II, and that the project was monumental in scale.”

Then again later in the article the statement is made that;

“The AAEC’s beryllium research was wound down in the mid-1960s, but research into uranium enrichment was pursued from 1965 for both civil and military purposes – initially in secret in the basement of a building at Lucas Heights.”

The implication from both these and other comments is that factual evidence exists which proves that some personnel at Lucas Heights were actually engaged in research related to nuclear weaponry.

Such an implication is, I believe, untrue and is, once again, another case where innuendo and inference are deemed as accepted fact when no tangible evidence exists to support such a conclusion.

I was employed at Lucas Heights for over 20 years and ended my professional career there as a Principal Research Scientist. Throughout my time at the AAEC I worked in Nuclear Technology Research and during the early 1970s was a member of the team of scientists which technically assessed the tenders submitted for the Jervis Bay reactor.

Whilst employed at Lucas Heights I knew most of the professionals and the projects they were engaged upon, not only because of my professional capacity in the organisation but also because of positions I held as Group Secretary, NSW State Secretary; and Federal Councillor of the Professional Officers Association, an association which represented all professionals on the site.

Moreover in 1985, as the thesis for one of my masters degrees (M.Eng. Sci. Soc.), I wrote … “A History of the AAEC and an Analysis of its Research Performance”.

When writing that thesis I had access to documents and papers which would not have been readily available to members of the public.

In consequence of these considerations, I believe that I am well qualified to comment on the assertion that work was conducted at Lucas Heights which was directed toward the military use of Atomic Energy. To such an assertion, I can state quite unequivocally that I have never seen, heard or read of any such work and that I am of the very firm belief that no such work was ever performed at Lucas Heights.

Indeed, at Lucas Heights there were no computational codes either developed or available which were able to investigate the manufacture and testing of nuclear weaponry. No expertise existed on the complex problems of designing, manufacturing and testing of a nuclear bomb nor on the important triggering devices which would be needed. Moreover, work which was conducted in regard to enrichment was directed at low enrichment processes which were only of a commercial interest. Those enrichment research programmes were not carried out in the emotively described “secret basement of a building at Lucas Heights” but were performed in a complex of buildings known as building 64. It is certainly true that building 64 had extra security provisions imposed upon it, but such provisions were imposed not because atomic weaponry was being researched but because the processes being investigated were novel and quite possibly commercially important to Australia.

Having expressed my concern that an article has appeared in the Society’s Bulletin which contains what I believe to be unsubstantiated assertions and which is misleading in regard to the work scientists and technicians undertook at Lucas Heights in the past; I do accept that it may well have been the case that in Canberra, some politicians and bureaucrats might have secretly wished and considered that Australia would, at some time during the period 1945 to 1970, obtain nuclear weaponry.

However, notwithstanding all the rumour and hype which were prevalent in that era, the reality was, as every scientist and technician at Lucas Heights knew, that such technology was not being pursued at Lucas Heights. The sad thing for all those who worked for the AAEC at that time was that the Atomic Energy Act was so draconian that it effectively prevented any scientist or employee from being able to comment on what was really happening within the organisation. Those restrictions were one of the reasons I wrote my Thesis in 1985 on the AAEC.

But that was many years ago and I have now retired and, whilst I have written this letter, I should like to make it perfectly clear that I do not wish to become involved in the nuclear debate which is still occurring in the Shire regarding Lucas Heights. Rather my objective is, as a member of the Sutherland Shire Historical Society;
(a) to provide the members of the Society with factual information of which I am aware and
(b) to point out that assertions by others, who have their own agendas to follow, cannot be considered as proven historical facts.

W. J. Green B.Sc (Hon 1), M Eng Sci, M Sci Soc.
30th May 2001

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JIM GREEN:

John Green says “I do accept that it may well have been the case that in Canberra, some politicians and bureaucrats might have secretly wished and considered that Australia would, at some time during the period 1945 to 1970, obtain nuclear weaponry.”

Secretly wished?! The ‘bomb lobby’ – which involved Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) personnel such as its chief Philip Baxter – not only wanted weapons, they were actively taking steps to bring Australia towards a nuclear weapons capability. Moreover, their manoeuvrings were not infrequently a matter of public record. To give a few examples:
– Baxter publicly advocated weapons construction, as did John Gorton (prior to becoming Prime Minister in 1969) and others.
– the 1963 decision to purchase F-111 aircraft from the US was partly motivated by the ability to modify these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons.
– the AAEC was commissioned to investigate and report on the cost of building nuclear weapons in Australia in 1965 and another study was commissioned by the government in 1967.
– in 1967, the Minister for National Development announced that uranium companies would henceforth have to keep half of their known reserves for Australian use, and he acknowledged in public that this decision was taken because of a desire to have a domestic uranium source in case it was needed for nuclear weapons.
– the decision not to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty from 1969-71 clearly reflected the influence of the ‘bomb lobby’, not least Baxter.

John Green says that he was involved in the assessment of tenders submitted for the Jervis Bay reactor. One wonders how he could have failed to notice the intrigues surrounding the Jervis Bay project vis-a-vis weapons. Any lingering doubts that the project was driven, in part, by a desire to bring Australia closer to a weapons capability have been dispelled by recently declassified Cabinet documents and by John Gorton’s January 1999 admission in the Sydney Morning Herald that: “We were interested in this thing [Jervis Bay] because it could provide electricity to everybody and it could, if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb.”

With respect to the involvement of the AAEC in the historical pursuit of weapons, this issue is complicated by the dual-use nature of many nuclear technologies. For example, AAEC scientists may have been interested only in the commercial applications of uranium enrichment, but others which much greater influence – not least Baxter – were also interested in the military implications. Baxter publicly made the link between enrichment R&D and weapons production. Moreover, archives held at the University of New South Wales include notes from Baxter on the weapons potential of the enrichment R&D carried out at Lucas Heights.

John Green’s statement that the AAEC’s enrichment work was directed “at low enrichment processes which were only of a commercial interest” ignores the obvious point that a low-enrichment plant could be modified for production of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium. As former ANSTO employee Tony Wood noted in the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader (May 2, 2000), “Although the Australian research team contained only a small number of centrifuge units, it is not a secret that one particular arrangement of a large number of centrifuge units could be capable of producing enriched uranium suitable to make a bomb of the Hiroshima type.”

John Green says the enrichment research was not carried out in the “emotively described ‘secret basement of a building at Lucas Heights’ but was performed in a complex of buildings known as building 64”. Clarence Hardy notes in his 1996 book “Enriching Experiences” (published by Glen Haven, NSW, p.31) that the project was given the code name “The Whistle Project” and was carried out initially in the basement of Building 21. It is an established fact that the AAEC’s research was initiated in 1965 but was not publicly revealed until the 1967-68 AAEC Annual Report.

The implications for safeguards of the enrichment research are addressed in chapter 8 of Hardy’s “Enriching Experiences”. The delicacy of the enrichment project was such that even the safeguards work was kept secret!

John Green’s statement that the extra security provisions associated with the enrichment program reflected nothing other than its commercial potential is, at best, extraordinarily naive. Former AAEC scientist Keith Alder notes on page 30 of his 1996 book “Australia’s Uranium Opportunities” (Sydney: P.M. Alder) that the enrichment work at Lucas Heights was kept secret “because of the possible uses of such technology to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium.”

John clearly has not read the recent research on the historical pursuit of weapons in Australia and thus I recommend the following:
– Alice Cawte, 1992, “Atomic Australia: 1944-1990”, Sydney: New South Wales University Press.
– Jim Walsh, “Surprise Down Under: The Secret History of Australia’s Nuclear Ambitions”, The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, 1997, pp.1-20.
– Jacques Hymans, “Isotopes and Identity: Australia and the Nuclear Weapons Option, 1949-1999”, The Nonproliferation Review, March 2000.
– Wayne Reynolds, 2000, “Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb”, Melbourne University Press.
– Jim Green, “Shifting nuclear debates: from ‘Fortress Australia’ to ‘virtual capacity”, Social Alternatives, Volume 18, No.4, October 1999. (This article links the historical pursuit of the weapons with the ‘national interest’ agenda driving the Coalition government’s current plan for a new reactor at Lucas Heights.)
– in recent years, further information on the historical pursuit of weapons has become available each year with the release of federal Cabinet archives under the 30-year rule; some of this information appears in the major newspapers on the first of January each year.

Jim Green
June 2001.

1. Quotes from former IAEA Director-General Dr Mohamed El Baradei

2. Australia

3. International

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1. Quotes from former IAEA Director-General Dr Mohamed El Baradei

“The IAEA’s Illicit Trafficking Database has, in the past decade, recorded more than 650 cases that involve efforts to smuggle such [nuclear and radioactive] materials.” (1)

“Today, out of the 189 countries that are party to the NPT, 118 still do not have additional protocols in force.” (1)

“IAEA verification today operates on an annual budget of about $100 million – a budget comparable to that of a local police department. With these resources, we oversee approximately 900 nuclear facilities in 71 countries. When you consider our growing responsibilities – as well as the need to stay ahead of the game – we are clearly operating on a shoestring budget.” (1)

“… we are only as effective as we are allowed to be.” (1)

“In specific cases of arms control, the Security Council’s efforts have not been very systematic or successful.” (1)

“Under NPT rules, there is nothing illegal about any State having enrichment or reprocessing technology – processes that are basic to the production and recycling of nuclear reactor fuel – even though these operations can also produce the high enriched uranium or separated plutonium that can be used in a nuclear weapon.

An increasing number of countries have sought to master these parts of the “nuclear fuel cycle”, both for economic reasons and, in some cases, as a good insurance policy for a rainy day – a situation that would enable them to develop at least a crude nuclear weapon in a short span of time, should their security outlook change. Whatever the reason, this know-how essentially transforms them into “latent” nuclear-weapon States. That is, regardless of their peaceful intentions, they now have the capability to create weapon-useable nuclear material, which experts consider to be the most difficult step towards manufacture of a nuclear weapon, and can use this capability as a deterrent. In today´s environment, this margin of security is simply not adequate.” (1)

“If a country with a full nuclear fuel cycle decides to break away from its non-proliferation commitments, a nuclear weapon could be only months away.” (2)

“… the Agency’s legal authority to investigate possible parallel weaponisation activity is limited …” (2)

“More countries have sought to master the nuclear fuel cycle, both for economic reasons and, in some cases, as a good insurance policy for a rainy day. Whatever the reason, this know-how essentially transforms them into what might be called a “virtual” or “latent” nuclear-weapon State. Experience has shown that a “choke point” for nuclear weapons development is the acquisition of weapon-useable nuclear material. If a country with a full nuclear fuel cycle decides to break away from its non-proliferation commitments, a nuclear weapon could be only months away. In such cases, we are only as secure as the outbreak of the next major crisis. In today´s environment, this margin of security is simply untenable.” (2)

“If a country with a full nuclear fuel cycle decides to break away from its non-proliferation commitments, a nuclear weapon could be only months away. In such cases, we are only as secure as the outbreak of the next major crisis. In today´s environment, this margin of security is simply untenable.” (3)

“Five years ago, I addressed the 2000 NPT Review Conference – hopeful that the new millennium would bring renewed vigour to these commitments. Many of you were here, and many shared this hope. Are we more or less hopeful now? In five years, the world has changed. Our fears of a deadly nuclear detonation – whatever the cause – have been reawakened. In part, these fears are driven by new realities. The rise in terrorism. The discovery of clandestine nuclear programmes. The emergence of a nuclear black market. But these realities have also heightened our awareness of vulnerabilities in the NPT regime. The acquisition by more and more countries of sensitive nuclear know-how and capabilities. The uneven degree of physical protection of nuclear materials from country to country. The limitations in the IAEA´s verification authority – particularly in countries without additional protocols in force. The continuing reliance on nuclear deterrence. The ongoing perception of imbalance between the nuclear haves and have-nots. And the sense of insecurity that persists, unaddressed, in a number of regions, most worryingly in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula.” (4)

“Earlier this year, four American éminences grises, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn – representing a wealth of experience in defense and security strategies – declared that reliance on nuclear weapons as a deterrent is becoming “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective”. They called for urgent international cooperation to move towards a world free from nuclear weapons. The following week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that they were moving the hands of their famous Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. “Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” they reported, “has the world faced such perilous choices.” In recent years, it is clear that nuclear threats have become more dangerous and more complex. A new phenomenon of illicit trade in nuclear technology has emerged. Countries have managed to develop clandestine nuclear programmes. Sophisticated extremist groups have shown keen interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. In parallel, nuclear material and nuclear material production have become more difficult to control. Energy security and climate change are driving many countries to revisit the nuclear power option. But with that, there is also an increasing interest in mastering the nuclear fuel cycle to ensure a supply of the necessary nuclear fuel. The concern is that by mastering the fuel cycle, countries move dangerously close to nuclear weapons capability. Add to that the threat of the nuclear weapons that already exist. Roughly 27,000 nuclear warheads remain in the arsenals of nine countries. Strategic reliance on these weapons by these countries and their allies undoubtedly motivates others to emulate them. And of course, plans to replenish and modernize these weapons creates a pervasive sense of cynicism among many non-nuclear-weapon States — who perceive a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude.” (5)

“Why, some ask, should the nuclear-weapon States be trusted, but not others – and who is qualified to make that judgment? Why, others ask, is it okay for some to live under a nuclear threat, but not others, who continue to be protected by a ‘nuclear umbrella’?” (5)

(1) Putting teeth in the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime. 2006 Karlsruhe Lecture, Karlsruhe, Germany, 25 March 2006, www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2006/ebsp2006n004.html

(2) Reflections on nuclear challenges today. Alistair Buchan Lecture, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, UK, 6 December 2005

(3) Mohamed El Baradei, December 2005, ‘Reflections on Nuclear Challenges Today’, www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2005/ebsp2005n019.html

(4) Mohamed ElBaradei, 2 May 2005, United Nations, New York, USA. Speech to 2005 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2005/ebsp2005n006.html

(5) Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe: Where Do We Go From Here? May 24, 2007, www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2007/05/24_ElBaradei_Preventing_Nuclear_Catastrophe.htm

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AUSTRALIA

“Nuclear energy is a bad fuel, a dirty fuel, a dangerous fuel. This is not a good industry to encourage, and anyone that has an electricity program, ipso facto ends up with a nuclear weapons capability.”

– Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, October 16, 2006, Herald Sun / AAP.

“Again and again it has been demonstrated here and overseas that when problems over safeguards prove difficult, commercial considerations will come first.”

– Mike Rann, 1982, ‘Uranium: Play It Safe’.

“[T]he Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty disintegrates before our very eyes … the current non-proliferation regime is fundamentally fracturing. The consequences of the collapse of this regime for Australia are acute, including the outbreak of regional nuclear arms races in South Asia, North East Asia and possibly even South East Asia.”

– Kevin Rudd, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Trade & International Security. Leading, not following. The renewal of Australian middle power diplomacy. Sydney Institute, 19 Sep 2006.

“The nuclear non-proliferation treaty continues to fracture. And there has been little if any progress on nuclear arms reduction – let alone nuclear disarmament.”

– Kevin Rudd, 5 July 2007 – Lowy Institute.

“A world free of nuclear weapons will be much more readily achieved and sustained were nuclear power generation being phased out.”

– Assoc. Prof. Tilman Ruff, ‘Hiroshima and the World: We can imagine and build a world free of nuclear weapons’, Nov 9, 2009, www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/mediacenter/article.php?story=20091109140250161_en

“On top of the perennial challenges of global poverty and injustice, the two biggest threats facing human civilisation in the 21st century are climate change and nuclear war. It would be absurd to respond to one by increasing the risks of the other. Yet that is what nuclear power does.”

– Dr Mark Diesendorf, University of NSW, ‘Need energy? Forget nuclear and go natural’, October 14, 2009, www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/need-energy-forget-nuclear-and-go-natural-20091014-gvzo.html

“We were interested in this thing [a planned nuclear power reactor at Jervis Bay] because it could provide electricity to everybody and it could, if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb.”

– Former Prime Minister John Gorton reflecting on the plan to build a nuclear power plant at Jervis bay in the late 1960s and early 1970s, quoted in Pilita Clark, ‘PM’s Story: Very much alive… and unfazed’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 1, 1999.

“The nuclear power industry is unintentionally contributing to an increased risk of nuclear war. This is the most serious hazard associated with the industry.”

– Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, 1977

“Australia, if it so decided, could embark on a nuclear weapons program… It would take some time, it would be expensive, it would involve significant risks, but we have retained a degree of nuclear expertise that could give us the capability to embark on a basic nuclear weapons program.”

– Andrew O’Neil, former analyst with the Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation

“Almost every action, every piece of research, technological development or industrial activity carried out in the peaceful uses of atomic energy could also be looked upon as a step in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. There is such an overlap in the military and peaceful technologies in these areas that they are virtually one.”

– Sir Phillip Baxter, former head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, ‘Australian Doubts on the Treaty’, Quadrant, Vol.XII(3), 1968, p.31.

“The potential for proliferation of weapons is real and needs to be reduced and controlled.”

– Simon Clarke, Australian Uranium Association, CarbonEdge, edition 3, July 2009, www.carbonedge.com.au/CarbonEdge3.pdf

“You can guarantee that mining uranium will lead to nuclear waste. You can’t guarantee that uranium mining will not lead to nuclear weapons.”

– Anthony Albanese, – Australian Labor Party’s environmental spokesman, quoted in the New York Times, August 2, 2006 page A9

“Whether or not Aussie uranium goes directly into Chinese warheads — or whether it is used in power stations in lieu of uranium that goes into Chinese warheads — makes little difference. Canberra is about to do a deal with a regime with a record of flouting international conventions.”

– The Taipei Times editorial 21/1/06.

“…States which possess nuclear weapons must, within a reasonable time-frame, take systematic action to eliminate completely all nuclear weapons in a manner which is safe and does not damage the environment.”

– Gareth Evans, ICJ Oral hearings, Oct 30, 1995

“India has an excellent non-proliferation record other than their own nuclear weapons’ programme.”

– Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, ABC 7.30 Report, Aug 2007

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INTERNATIONAL

“The spread of nuclear technologies and expertise is generating concerns about the potential emergence of new nuclear weapon states and the acquisition of nuclear materials by terrorist groups.”

– US National Intelligence Council, 2008, “Global Trends 2025 – a Transformed World”, www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html

The US National Intelligence Council also warned of the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and noted that a number of states in the region “are already thinking about developing or acquiring nuclear technology useful for development of nuclear weaponry.”

“[T]he rise in nuclear power worldwide … inevitably increases the risks of proliferation”.

– US State Department, 2008, quoted in www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9269&page=0

“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.”

– Former US Vice President Al Gore, 2006, www.grist.org/article/roberts2

“Many believe that a responsible approach to sharply reducing global warming pollution would involve a significant increase in the use of nuclear power plants as a substitute for coal-fired generators. While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity. The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack. Let’s assume for the moment that all three of these problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size – extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand – and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon. Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover, proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.”

– Al Gore, September 2006, speech at NYU Law School, www.grist.org/article/more-on-gores-speech

“The push to bring back nuclear power as an antidote to global warming is a big problem. If you build more nuclear power plants we have toxic waste at least, bomb-making at worse.”

– Former US President Bill Clinton, 2006, Clinton Global Initiative.

“The development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent. … Fear of such surprise violation of pledged word will surely break down any confidence in the pledged word of rival countries developing atomic energy if the treaty obligations and good faith of the nations are the only assurances upon which to rely.”

– Dean Acheson & David Lilienthal, 16 March 1946, A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. This report was the basis of the Baruch Plan for international control of nuclear weapons submitted to the United Nations by the U.S. in 1946.

“There is no prospect of security against atomic warfare in a system of international agreements to outlaw such weapons controlled only by a system which relies on inspection and similar police-like methods. The reasons supporting this conclusion are not merely technical, but primarily the insuperable political, social, and organizational problems involved in enforcing agreements between nations each free to develop atomic energy but only pledged not to use bombs…So long as intrinsically dangerous activities [i.e., production and use of weapons-useable materials such as plutonium and highly-enriched uranium] may be carried out by nations, rivalries are inevitable and fears are engendered that place so great a pressure upon a system of international enforcement by police methods that no degree of ingenuity or technical competence could possibly hope to cope with them.”

– Dean Acheson & David Lilienthal

“We are convinced that if the production of fissionable materials by national governments (or by private organisations under their control) is permitted, systems of inspection cannot be by themselves made “effective safeguards … to protect complying states against the hazards of violations and evasions.”

– Dean Acheson & David Lilienthal

“[R]oughly two-thirds of the energy and effort required to produce HEU goes into enriching natural uranium with 0.711 percent U-235 to fuel grade low-enriched uranium with 3.6 percent U-235, while only about one third goes into further enrichment of that LEU to produce highly enriched uranium with 90 percent U-235.”

– Brice Smith, Insurmountable risks. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Takoma Park, Maryland, May 2006:127.

“Reprocessing provides the strongest link between commercial nuclear power and proliferation.”

– US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear proliferation and safeguards. June 1977:12.

“No system of safeguards that can be devised will of itself provide an effective guarantee against production of atomic weapons by a nation bent on aggression.”

– Harry S Truman, CR Attlee & WL Mackenzie King. Declaration on atomic bomb by President Truman and Prime Ministers Attlee and King. 15 Nov 1945.

“It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads – we have plutonium at nuclear power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such warheads.”

– Ichiro Ozawa, leader of the Liberal Party in Japan, Lecture in Fukuoka, April 2002.

“I admit that we have excessive amounts of plutonium, but our purpose is for research.”

– Yuichi Tonozuka. President, Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, April 2005.

“We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

– UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. A more secure world: Our shared responsibility. Report to the Secretary-General. 30 Nov 2004:39

“In fact, the NPT is the weakest of the treaties on WMD in terms of provisions about implementation.”

– Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. Weapons of Terror. Final Report. WMD Commission, Stockholm, Sweden. 1 June 2006:63.

“It is clear that no international safeguards system can physically prevent diversion or the setting up of an undeclared or clandestine nuclear programme.”

– IAEA, Against the Spread of Nuclear Weapons: IAEA Safeguards in the 1990s, 1993.

“Safeguardability remains a R&D priority. 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. The technical expertise of the International Atomic Energy Agency plays a central role in managing this dual use. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of international safeguards remains a priority for non-proliferation Research and Development (R&D).”

– UK Royal Society, 13 October 2011, Fuel cycle stewardship in a nuclear renaissance

http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/nuclear-non-proliferation/report

“[S]erious consideration should be given to the possibility of phasing out reprocessing plants altogether. …as an adjunct to any nuclear disarmament treaty, it would be essential to create international institutions to operate and safeguard both enrichment and reprocessing plants (if they cannot be eliminated altogether) and spent fuel storage sites. … Even with stringent and equitable new rules to govern nuclear power, its continued operation and certainly any global expansion will impose serious proliferation risks in the transition to nuclear disarmament. A phase-out of civilian nuclear energy would provide the most effective and enduring constraint on proliferation risks in a nuclear-weapon-free world.”

– International Panel on Fissile Materials, Global Fissile Material Report 2009, www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/pages_us_en/documents/documents/documents.php

“The fundamental constraint against effectively protecting against nuclear energy use leading to bombs is the near-universal assumption that we can afford only so much protection as will allow full exploitation of nuclear energy. In international affairs, nuclear energy trumps just about everything. Even so-called arms controllers fall over themselves trying to establish their bona fides by supporting nuclear energy development and devising painless proposals that grandfather everything that’s already in place. … It’s time to take a more serious view. Security should come first–not as an afterthought. We should support as much nuclear power as is consistent with international security; not as much security as the spread of nuclear power will allow.”

– Victor Gilinsky, former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ‘A call to resist the nuclear revival’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 27 January 2009, www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/call-to-resist-the-nuclear-revival

“As we see it, however, the world is not now safe for a rapid global expansion of nuclear energy. Such an expansion carries with it a high risk of misusing uranium enrichment plants and separated plutonium to create bombs. The use of nuclear devices is still a very dangerous possibility in a world where Russian and U.S. ballistic missiles are on hair trigger and long-standing conflicts between countries and among peoples too often escalate into military actions. As two of our board members have pointed out, ‘Nuclear war is a terrible trade for slowing the pace of climate change.'”

– Editorial – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 14 January 2010

www.thebulletin.org/content/media-center/announcements/2010/01/14/it-6-minutes-to-midnight

“I do not like this word bomb. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding.”

– Jacques Le Blanc – French Ambassador to New Zealand (describing France’s nuclear tests).

“In conventional war, mistakes cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. However, if mistakes were to affect decisions relating to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no learning curve. They would result in the destruction of nations.”

– Former US Secretary of Defence, Robert MacNamara, “Apocalypse Soon”, May/June2005.

“A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes … could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors–as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, `the survivors would envy the dead.’ For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.”

– President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

“In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second–more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide.”

– President Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address to the American People, 14 January 1981

“By far the greatest single danger facing human-kind, in fact all living beings on our planet, is the threat of nuclear destruction…”

– The Dalai Lama.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

– Albert Einstein

“The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and therefore we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

– Albert Einstein

“The discussion of the peaceful applications of nuclear explosives has produced some concrete ideas that surely can be realized and it has also produced some promising possibilities which for the time being we must consider as dreams. First, we shall mention those applications about which we can feel quite sure. They boil down to a single fact: We can make a hole in the earth — if anybody wants to do that.”

– Edward Teller, ‘father’ of the hydrogen bomb, 1963.

Information about the flawed ‘clean up’ of the Maralinga (South Australia) nuclear test site in the 1990s.

Lots of articles posted at this link — scroll down to the ‘Maralinga clean-up’ section

Critical analysis of the Maralinga ‘clean up’ by nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson:

• 2015 submission to SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission
• Book: ‘Maralinga: Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up’, Alan Parkinson, ABC Books, 2007, 233 pages, $32.95 (pb). Review posted here. To purchase the book, try ABC book sellers or order online at http://shop.abc.net.au (enter Maralinga or Parkinson in the search engine). Now available as a Kindle e-book at Amazon for $15.99.
• Numerous articles by Alan Parkinson – online web archive, see the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ section.
• Maralinga – Australia’s nuclear waste cover-up, Ockham’s Razor – ABC Radio National, September 2, 2007
• “The Maralinga Rehabilitation Project: Final Report”, Medicine and Global Survival, Volume 7, Number 2, February 2002.
• Maralinga Rehabilitation Project, 2000, text of conference presentation + photos
• Comments in ABC Radio National, Background Briefing program, “Maralinga: The Fall Out Continues”, April 16, 2000
• Maralinga and Lucas Heights, ABC Ockham’s Razor, 22 Sept 2002.
• Second-round submission to ARPANSA 2003-04 inquiry into Proposed National Radioactive Waste Repository
• “Maralinga: Clean-Up or Cover-Up?” Australasian Science, July, 21 (6), 2000, p.16. (not available online)
• ‘The Maralinga Rehabilitation Project: Final Report’, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, Vol.20, 2004, pp.70-80, London: Frank Cass. (not available online)

Plutonium at Maralinga – Alan Parkinson

Dust at Maralinga ‒ Alan Parkinson

Maralinga Mystery – Alan Parkinson

Maralinga MARTAC Muddle – Alan Parkinson

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Critical analysis of the Maralinga ‘clean up’ by nuclear physicist Prof. Peter Johnston:

• See the notes below in this webpage.
• P.N. Johnston, A.C. Collett, T.J. Gara, “Aboriginal participation and concerns throughout the rehabilitation of Maralinga”, presented at the Third International Symposium on the Protection of the Environment from Ionising Radiation, Darwin. See pp.349-56 in this PDF: http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/CSP-17_web.pdf
• Written submission #256 and second-round submission to ARPANSA 2003-04 inquiry into Proposed National Radioactive Waste Repository, both available from jim.green@foe.org.au and see notes below in this webpage.

Critical analysis of the Maralinga ‘clean up’ by scientific whistleblower Dale Timmons:

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

Australian government propaganda:

• http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/radioactive_waste/maralinga/Pages/MaralingaRehabilitationProject.aspx

Propaganda from the Australian nuclear regulator ARPANSA:

• http://arpansa.gov.au/RadiationProtection/basics/maralinga.cfm
• http://arpansa.gov.au/pubs/basics/maralinga.pdf (this PDF file ends with a list of references to literature on Maralinga and the ‘clean up’)

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Cabinet papers reveal British Government denied compensation to people affected Maralinga, Emu Fields nuclear tests

Tory Shepherd, The Advertiser, 1 Jan 2014

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/cabinet-papers-reveal-british-government-denied-compensation-to-people-affected-maralinga-emu-fields-nuclear-tests/story-fni6uo1m-1226793288275

THE British Government did not want to pay to clean up the South Australian Outback after its nuclear testing program and was reluctant to pay compensation to the Australians it exposed to radiation.

Cabinet documents from 1986 and 1987, released by the National Archives of Australia, detail how the Australian Government told the British that people who had to take samples from the toxic cloud were “undoubtedly inadequately protected and monitored for radiation exposure and that was a direct result of British assurances that they faced negligible risks of radiation exposure”.

The Hawke/Keating Government was also keen to “constrain” how much money it gave to the victims of the radioactive material released at Maralinga and Emu Fields.

…

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Fallout from nuclear tests at Maralinga worse than previously thought

ABC 2021 article, here’s the link and here’s a summary:

• Radioactive particles in Maralinga remain reactive for longer than previously thought
• These particles can leach into groundwater, affecting plants, wildlife and humans
• Native foods from around nuclear sites are still too risky to consume

Why cabinet sought only a partial clean-up of British nuclear test site

1 January 2014, Paul Chadwick

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/31/why-cabinet-sought-only-partial-clean-up-of-british-nuclear-test-site

The complete rehabilitation of areas of Australia used to test British nuclear weapons may not be possible, the Hawke cabinet was advised in 1986. Cabinet was warned that a full clean-up may have been more expensive than the British government would be willing to contemplate, according to documents released this week by the National Archives. They provide new insights into the Hawke government’s response to the recommendations of the McClelland royal commission into British nuclear tests in Australia.

The documents cover technical aspects of the clean-up, collection of data about persons who may have been exposed to radiation and compensation issues affecting veterans of the testing and Indigenous people whose lands had been damaged. The material shows how ministers perceived these seemingly distinct issues as being connected.

In addressing the royal commission’s recommendation that the sites be cleaned up “so that they are fit for unrestricted habitation by the traditional Aboriginal owners as soon as possible”, cabinet heard from the minister for resources and energy, Gareth Evans, that such a clean-up of all affected areas would be extraordinarily expensive. At least as expensive as plutonium clean-up operations at Palomares in Spain and in the Marshall Islands – in 1970s dollar values, more than $US200m.

“But even expenditure on this scale cannot on present indications be expected to achieve a fully effective rehabilitation of the area given the experience that residual contamination, albeit at significantly lower levels, would continue to be present,” Evans reported.

This, and the remoteness of Maralinga, the area in South Australia where the tests took place, meant it “may be reasonable to set aside, even at this early stage, the option of absolutely unrestricted habitation”.

A clean-up costing in the order of $20m to $25m was “much more within the ballpark that the UK government is likely, on present indications, to be prepared to contemplate”. Cabinet was looking for a contribution from Britain of 50% of the clean-up cost.

In an overview report to cabinet in May 1986, Evans noted that “a non-confrontational approach had been adopted in all dealings with the UK government and an amicable and productive working relationship has so far been maintained”.

The Thatcher government’s view was interpreted for the Hawke cabinet as follows:

“While the British government will continue to minimise its obligation to clean up the sites, its final willingness to pay in whole or in part will depend on both a mix of legal and moral argument, and on the extent of the clean-up insisted upon. The British have also stated their concern that if personal compensation awards are opened up, precedents will be set for compensation of their own nuclear veterans.

“There is a connection between the compensation and clean-up issues only in so far as restraint by the Australian government on this compensation issue may assist the negotiating climate when it comes to seeking recovery of clean-up costs,” Evans advised his colleagues.

There were indications that Maralinga Aboriginal representatives may accept that, once the main hazards were dealt with cost effectively, the “very large additional sums that may need to be spent to secure the ‘unrestricted habitation’ criterion might be much better spent elsewhere”.

Compensation in the form of services such as water and roads “could be very helpful in securing Aboriginal acceptance of a reasonable ultimate clean-up program”, Evans reported.

Studies necessary for a reduced scale of clean-up were approved by cabinet. An aerial survey of radioactivity around the test sites would be followed by a more detailed ground survey. Five studies would “define the areas – hopefully quite small – which must remain surrounded by fences, and further outer areas in which activities such as food gathering and excavation should not occur”.

A report by technical experts attached to the cabinet submission states: “Aboriginals living and gathering food on the Maralinga lands may be exposed [to contaminants] … in three major ways – by inhalation, by ingestion and by entry of contaminated material through open flesh wounds and abrasions.”

The experts considered options for burial of contaminated soil. They noted that since one of the contaminants had a half life of 24,000 years it was a prerequisite to make a prediction about the sort of changes in the earth expected to occur in the Maralinga area in the timeframe.

Cabinet rejected the royal commission’s recommendation for the creation of a new register of persons who may have been exposed to “black mist” or radiation at the tests. It reasoned that two substantial lists of persons involved in the tests and potentially exposed to radiation already existed and that obtainable information would add nothing of significance.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Clyde Holding, presented cabinet with a submission in response to the royal commission’s recommendation that Aboriginal people be compensated for dispossession of the lands used for testing.

Holding was blunt and evocative: “… we have no option but to accept the principle of compensation for dispossession. The actions of previous Australian government [sic] in shepherding Aboriginal people from their traditional lands for the purpose of conducting atomic tests were both immoral and appallingly executed. The resultant disruption to Aboriginal life has been catastrophic; Yalata, where many were resettled, is testimony to that. If we deny compensation we shall stand condemned as surely as those who committed the outrage of dispossession in the first place.”

Cabinet accepted Holding’s recommendation that $500,000 be provided in 1986-87 for services, such as roads and water, for Indigenous communities with a traditional interest in sites at Maralinga affected by the atomic test program, with future amounts to be subject to further consideration.

Holding advised: “This would in effect be a down payment on an unspecified overall sum, which would need to be calculated at a later stage when more information is available on needs and on the extent of continuing restrictions on use and enjoyment of areas of the Maralinga lands. It will be seen as a low figure and will be criticised for that; we can counter such criticism by pointing out that it is the first instalment, and that there needs first to be consultation with the traditional owners on what is to be done.”

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Maralinga sites need more repair work, files show

November 12 2011

Philip Dorling

http://www.theage.com.au/national/maralinga-sites-need-more-repair-work-files-show-20111111-1nbpp.html

MORE than a decade after the Howard government declared the clean-up of Maralinga to be finished, the Australian government is continuing to support remediation work at the former British nuclear weapons test site.

Confidential federal government files released under freedom of information also show Canberra bureaucrats have at times been primarily concerned with ”perceptions” of radioactive contamination, while rejecting a request by the Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal community for a site near the Maralinga village to be cleared of high levels of toxic uranium contamination.

Files released by the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism show that erosion of the massive Taranaki burial trench north of Maralinga, described by federal bureaucrats as ”a large radioactive waste repository”, has required significant remediation work. Other burial pits scattered across the former nuclear test range have also been subject to subsidence and erosion, exposing asbestos-contaminated debris.

While the released documents indicate ”no radiological contamination of groundwater” has been detected, the federal government has been obliged under its 2009 agreement with Maralinga Tjarutja for the hand-back of the Maralinga test site to initiate a range of further remediation work.

The Taranaki trench was excavated in the mid-1990s and used to bury radioactive-contaminated debris and soil, principally from numerous ”minor trials”, British nuclear weapons safety and development experiments conducted between 1956 and 1963 that caused the heaviest radioactive contamination at Maralinga.

Records of a Maralinga Lands and Environmental Management Committee meeting in October last year show that ”erosion of the Taranaki trench was noted” and that repair work funded by the Commonwealth would be carried out by the Maralinga Tjarutja. An annual survey of 85 debris pits revealed that 19 pits had been subject to erosion or subsidence, with eight requiring ”major work” and at least four containing exposed asbestos.

A brief prepared for Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson in April this year questioned the capacity of the Maralinga Tjarutja to manage the former nuclear test site.

”We understand that [the Maralinga Tjarutja’s] site manager is to be replaced with a community member at the end of June 2011. While it is not for the department to dictate who fills this position, it is necessary that Maralinga Tjarutja appreciates the need for competent management of the site.”

The released files also show that the Australian government declined requests by Maralinga Tjarutja to clean up the trials site closest to the Maralinga Village.

Situated east of the Maralinga airstrip, the Kuli site was used by British nuclear weapons scientists to conduct 262 trials that explosively dispersed 7.4 tonnes of uranium into the environment.

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Maralinga’s nuclear nightmare continues

2 November 2007
By Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/38547

Review of:
Maralinga: Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up
By Alan Parkinson
ABC Books, 2007, 233 pages, $32.95 (pb)

Federal science minister Peter McGauran was almost incontinent with joy in 2003 — the clean-up of the plutonium-contaminated British atomic bomb testing site at Maralinga in South Australia’s remote north had “achieved its goals”, exceeded “world’s best practice” and was “something Australia can be proud of”. Not so happy, however, was nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, whose book Maralinga: Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up shows that the “clean-up” was more a “cover-up” of a cost-cutting dumping of hazardous radioactive waste in shallow holes in the ground.

Seven of the 12 British atomic bombs exploded on Australian territory 50 years ago were at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957. Even more so than the bomb tests, it was the hundreds of related trials, which continued until the mid-1960s, that contaminated 100 square kilometres of land with plutonium and other radioactive elements. Twenty-four kilograms of highly dangerous plutonium was used but only 0.9kgs was repatriated to Britain. The remainder was spread over a wide area, while thousands of tonnes of plutonium-contaminated debris (concrete, steel, cable, etc) lay in poorly covered bare earth pits following inadequate British clean-ups, the last in 1967.

By 1993, Parkinson had become the key person on the project, representing the then federal Labor government (through the Department of Primary Industry and Energy) and as a member of the minister’s advisory committee, MARTAC (the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee). What followed was a mounting catalogue of problems that became a fully-fledged disaster after Parkinson was sacked in 1997 by the new Coalition government.

The main problem concerned the clean-up of the contaminated debris in the pits. In-situ vitrification (ISV), which used electricity to melt the pit contents and soil, cooling to form a hard glass-like rock that immobilises the radioactive contaminants, had been adopted as the best available solution. The project team, however, were badly misled by inaccurate, 20-year old British recollections of the pits and their contents. Parkinson’s team found that the total volume of contaminated debris was three times greater than they had been led to believe. The ISV treatment would therefore cost much more and the government department went into zealous cost-cutting mode.

The situation had been exacerbated from mid-1997 with a changing of the management guard in the department, which put a person in charge who knew nothing of radiation and had no program management experience. Parkinson, the specialist scientist who wanted to do a proper job, clashed with the bureaucrat out to wind up the job and save money.

In secret meetings, the department arranged an extension to the existing clean-up project management contract with Gutteridge, Haskins & Davey (GHD) to take over the management part of the ISV project from the ISV engineering experts Geosafe. GHD, which had originally tendered for the job but not made the shortlist, had bought the successful tenderer, the government’s Australian Construction Services, during a post-election festival of privatisation.

So, a failed tenderer was now in charge of a process for which they had no expertise. GHD, in turn, reported to a similarly ignorant department, while MARTAC was partially blinded by the failure of cooperation and information flow between the direct market competitors, GHD (managing the ISV project) and Geosafe (conducting it). This, says Parkinson, “doomed” the project.

As Parkinson feared, cost-cutting undid the project. An unexplained explosion of something flammable in vitrification Pit No. 17 in March 1999 — a legacy of the undocumented British pit stocktake two decades ago — gave the department and MARTAC the excuse to scrap the costly but effective ISV, blaming the process not the pit contents. With ISV red-lined, the next best option, which was to encase the debris in a concrete-lined facility (the minimum requirement for such disposal in the US and Britain), was also scratched and shallow trench burial under just one to two metres of soil was adopted.

The clean-up, by simply burying long-lived radioactive debris in a hole in the ground with no treatment or lining, had thus been “botched”, says Parkinson, but the Coalition’s then science minister, Nick Minchin, declared the site safe in March 2000. Parkinson exposed the disgraceful outcome through the ABC, provoking the government into a furious rebuttal composed of scientific distortion and personal abuse.

When the new minister, McGauran, then waved the subsequent MARTAC report as a true and proper record sanctifying the clean-up, Parkinson unpicked this alleged seal of approval at its shonky seams. Written by a part-time advisory committee that did not have day-to-day contact with, or full information on, the project, the report was riddled with mistakes and errors. That six “eminent” scientists signed it, is, to Parkinson, evidence that MARTAC had become “a puppet advisory committee”. Also failing the scientific test was ARPANSA (Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority), the government’s “independent” nuclear regulator, which also gave the “clean-up” the all-clear.The government claims that the “clean-up” has exceeded world’s best practice. Parkinson argues that the higher standards proposed for the national low-level nuclear waste depository (containment drums stored in a deep-engineered facility, with a concrete base and covered by impervious layers), make the government’s statements about Maralinga’s hole-in-the-ground approach being world’s best practice utterly “frivolous”.

Equally disturbing for Parkinson is the fact that the nuclear waste depository project itself has the same client (the renamed Department of Employment, Science and Training), the same contractor (GHD) and the same regulator (ARPANSA) that so dismally mismanaged the Maralinga clean-up to save a dollar.

If the government’s claims of a safe site at Maralinga are true then why, asks Parkinson, is not the government agreeing to total indemnity? Perhaps because it doesn’t want the financial liability for people (traditional owners, souvenir hunters, site maintainers) contaminated from the hundreds of square kilometres of soil known still to be contaminated (often well-above the clean-up criteria) but which were not involved in the partial clean-up; from the “hundreds and possibly thousands of tonnes of contaminated soil” that blew away as radioactive dust during the scraping and dumping process by the earthworks machinery; from the radioactive material and pits that have not yet been found; from the 20kgs (84% of the original amount) of plutonium still out there.

It is no disrespect to say that, as a writer, Parkinson makes a very good nuclear engineer, or that the big picture sometimes goes a little out of focus because of his intense gaze at the personal level of his intimate involvement with the project and its personalities. What Parkinson has delivered, however, is an invaluable service in blowing the lid on the “cheap and nasty scheme” of an incompetent and lying government, and its tame and leashed scientists and senior bureaucrats. Parkinson has more integrity than the lot of them. Maralinga has not been cleaned up. The government’s assurances on anything nuclear should be taken with a grain of contaminated Maralinga soil.

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Maralinga – Australia’s nuclear waste cover-up

Ockham’s Razor – ABC Radio National

September 2, 2007

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/2019647.htm#transcript

Robyn Williams: Isn’t it fascinating to contemplate how the world changes. Twenty-five years ago we saw the first CDs replace those large vinyl discs we used to call LPs. Fifty years ago the space age really began with the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, followed by Laika the dog. And at about the same time, out in the desert in South Australia, the British were exploding bombs, atomic bombs, something that may come as a surprise to younger listeners.

Alan Parkinson has written a book about all this and about what happened next. It’s called ‘Maralinga, Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up’.

Alan Parkinson:

Most people living in Australia today probably do not know that twelve atomic bombs have been exploded on Australian territory.

Seven of those bombs were exploded at Maralinga, in South Australia, in the 1950s. Following those explosions, Britain conducted a series of experiments in which they exploded another 15 bombs in a manner which precluded an atomic explosion. Those experiments spread plutonium and uranium over hundreds of square kilometres of the South Australian landscape.

Before they abandoned the site, the British conducted a final clean-up in 1967, and the Australian government accepted their assurance that Maralinga was clean. In the mid 1980s, scientists from the Australian Radiation Laboratory surveyed the site and found it was far from satisfactory.

In 1989, I prepared estimates for some 30 options for cleaning the site, ranging from simply fencing the contaminated area to scraping over 100 square kilometres of land and burying the contaminated soil. The Federal government agreed with the South Australian government and the Maralinga Tjarutja to implement a partial clean-up.

This partial clean-up was to be in two parts: the first was to scrape up and buy the most contaminated soil. The second part was to treat 21 pits containing thousands of tonnes of plutonium-contaminated debris by a process of vitrification, which would immobilise the plutonium for perhaps a million years.

In 1993, I was appointed a member of the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee whose purpose was to advise the Minister on progress of the project, and a few months later, I was appointed the government’s representative to oversee the whole project.

By the end of 1997, the collection and burial of contaminated soil was nearing an end. However, as that soil was scraped up, we found the state of the 21 debris pits was not at all what we had been led to believe from the British reports.

The pits were very much larger than the British reports told us, with about three times as much debris as we had expected, and therefore treatment by vitrification would clearly cost a lot more.

By then we had completed a three-year program to match the vitrification technology to the Maralinga geology, and a company called Geosafe had built the equipment ready to use it to treat the pits. Unfortunately, when the department signed the contract with Geosafe, they failed to include that most basic feature of any contract: a statement of what had to be achieved.

The equipment was tested in Adelaide before being taken to site, and those tests, which I witnessed, showed that the technology was going to be just as successful as we had hoped.

It was at this time that the department held three meetings with a company that had no knowledge at all of the vitrification technology; they had not been involved in the three-year development program, and nobody from that company had even seen the full-size equipment. Similarly, the two attendees from the department had no knowledge of the technology, or any project management experience. Add to that, nobody in those meetings had any nuclear expertise or experience in the disposal of nuclear waste.

Even though I was the government’s representative overseeing the whole project, I was excluded, as was Geosafe.

The department then proposed to appoint this company as project manager and project authority over the vitrification part of the project. I resisted this and advised them not to proceed along this path. Geosafe also objected, telling the department several times in writing and face-to-face that the company was not qualified to take over the project, having no knowledge at all of what was involved. The department persisted and against all advice, appointed the company. For my pains I was removed from the project and the advisory committee. I was sacked.

So the world’s experts in the vitrification technology found themselves contracted to the department but reporting to a company that knew nothing about the technology. In turn, that company reported to people in the department who were similarly ignorant of the technology, had no nuclear expertise and no project management experience. From that point on, the project was almost certainly likely to fail.

Within a few weeks of being appointed, the new project managers put forward a proposal that some of the pits should be exhumed and their contents buried, claiming this would be cheaper. The department accepted the suggestion and introduced what they called the hybrid system, a mixture of dubious practice and the best available technology. And I maintain they did this merely to save money, in fact later when Mr Peter McGauran inherited the project, he tried to defend the saving of over $5-million.

Vitrification of some pits continued until, as treatment was nearing completion on one pit, there was a huge explosion within the pit. The steel hood over the pit was extensively damaged, and molten glass was spewed some 50 metres from the pit. Fortunately, nobody was injured in the incident, but it gave the government an excuse to cancel vitrification altogether.

They then exhumed all the pits, including those that had been vitrified, and placed the whole lot in a shallow grave and covered it.

In March 2000, Senator Minchin visited Maralinga and declared the site was safe, and could be returned to the Aborigines. He was accompanied on that visit by Dr John Loy, the Head of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, ARPANSA.

Dr Loy went on to claim that the shallow burial of plutonium contaminated debris was world’s best practice. Three years later, on 25th March, 2003, Mr McGauran tabled the government’s final report of the project in parliament. In his speech, he said, ‘The project achieved its goals and a world best practice result’, oblivious to the fact that a partial clean-up cannot, by definition, be world’s best practice.

It would be a pity if the only record of the project was that published by the government. That final report contains so many incorrect statements that it cannot be said to describe what really happened on the project.

And now, seven years after the government claimed the project a success and four years after Mr McGauran’s declaration, it is time to put a few things into perspective and look back on how the project was managed and what it bodes for the future.

In this I am mindful of the Prime Minister’s push towards nuclear power. Dr Switkowski’s inquiry drew attention to three things that are relevant to the Maralinga project.

The first is for there to be an independent nuclear regulator. The Maralinga project was half way through its final phase when ARPANSA was born.

The second is the need to recruit scientists and engineers with experience in the nuclear industry. The last phase of the Maralinga project was managed by a company with no nuclear expertise, reporting to a client similarly devoid of nuclear experiences, and in some cases, no technical knowledge.

And the third is the problem of nuclear waste disposal. The Minister and the Chief Nuclear Regulator claim the shallow burial of plutonium to be world’s best practice. So why does the rest of the world not follow suit? Why do they insist that long-lived nuclear waste, such as that at Maralinga, should be disposed of in a deep geological facility?

In August 2003, I visited Sellafield in Northern England; that is where the plutonium now spread over a huge area of South Australia originated. There, people with far more experience in dealing with plutonium place plutonium-contaminated material in stainless steel drums and store those drums in an airconditioned building on a guarded site, awaiting permanent deep geological disposal.

It is the same story in America where trials similar to those at Maralinga were conducted, except on a much smaller scale. In their clean-up, the Americans bagged the contaminated soil and debris and transported the whole lot over 300 kilometres to a nuclear waste storage facility on a guarded site.

Those countries clearly do not agree that burial of plutonium in a shallow grave with no packaging and in totally unsuitable geology is world’s best practice.

In July 2001, the government published a document called ‘Safe Storage of Radioactive Waste’ which says that long-lived low and intermediate level waste is not suitable for shallow burial. And yet that is what has been done at Maralinga and claimed to be world’s best practice.

And the government puts similar spin on other features of the project.

In his speech to Parliament Mr McGauran said the clean-up would ‘permit unrestricted access to about 90% of the 3,200 square kilometre Maralinga site’. But there was unrestricted access to 90% of the site before the project started. The only additional area in which there is unrestricted access is half a square kilometre. Admittedly another 1.6 square kilometres have been cleaned, but that is within the area to which access is restricted. And one part of that restricted area is 300 times more contaminated than the clean-up criteria.

In truth, after spending $108-million, less than 2% of the land contaminated above the clean-up criteria has been cleaned. I am not criticising that, it was what was planned, but let us keep it in perspective.

Anybody listening to the government’s statements might be under the impression that the whole site is now clean and all the plutonium used in those British trials has been buried. In fact, almost 85% of the original 24,000 grams of plutonium remains on the surface.

In 24,000 years time, half of that plutonium will still be there, but in about 400 years from now, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to detect it.

On my last visit to Maralinga in September 1999, I was farewelled with, ‘Well, see you in February for the handover’. I have heard many times that the site will be returned ‘later in the year’, or ‘in the next few months’, and seven years later I am still waiting for that event.

Will the Aborigines accept return of their land?

If they do, then for thousands of years, they will have to rely on the Federal government to honour any agreements they might enter, in full knowledge that only a few years ago, the government unilaterally broke their agreement to clean the site using the best available technology and then failed to do so.

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Double Standards with Radioactive Waste

Australasian Science, September 2002

Alan Parkinson says the government is cutting corners.

Australia’s disposal of its radioactive waste is ill-considered and irresponsible. Whether it is short-lived waste from Commonwealth facilities, long-lived plutonium waste from an atomic bomb test site on Aboriginal land, or reactor waste from Lucas Heights, the government applies double standards to suit its own agenda. There is no consistency, and little evidence of logic.

Most of Australia’s current inventory of stored radioactive waste is at Woomera. This includes 2000 m3 of lightly contaminated soil from a CSIRO site at Fishermens Bend in Melbourne – said to be naturally occurring uranium from research into processing radioactive ores. It also includes 60 m3 of waste from Defence facilities such as St Mary’s on Sydney’s outskirts, being old radium-painted dial gauges, watches and compasses.

The removal of radioactive waste from both sites was an “intervention”, which is defined by National Health and Medical Research Council Health Series No 39 as: “Action taken to decrease exposures to radiation which arise from existing situations”; taken to mean improving an already-contaminated site.

The government will dispose of low-level waste from Fishermens Bend and government laboratories in its national waste repository, which is in the early stages of construction in South Australia. It will be packaged in drums, placed on a solid foundation in a trench up to 20 metres deep, and covered by several layers of impervious materials.

An undefined “appropriate authority” will impose an “institutional control period” of 200-300 years, after which the waste will have decayed to safe levels and no further control will be necessary.

The controversial clean-up of the atomic bomb test site at Maralinga was also an “intervention”, but there are significant differences between the treatment of Maralinga debris and that from other sites.

The radioactive contaminant at Maralinga is plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. It will not decay to “safe” levels in 200-300 years. Since the government intends to return the land to the Maralinga Tjarutja people, there will be no institutional control.

Surprisingly, there was no study to find a proper site for disposal of the Maralinga debris, and no call for a site with suitable geology. The disposal trenches at Maralinga are only 15 metres deep in limestone and dolomite strata exhibiting many cracks and fissures. This geology is totally unsuitable.

The plutonium-contaminated debris at Maralinga was not packaged; it was simply dropped into a bare hole in the ground and covered. It is not on a compacted base, and is not covered by several impervious layers.

On 20 June Trish Worth, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health, admitted in a letter to me: “While both uranium and plutonium are radiotoxic, gram for gram plutonium is far more hazardous”. But she maintains it is correct to package the uranium from the CSIRO site, while burial in a bare hole in the ground is appropriate for plutonium debris.

In a statement issued in April 2000, Dr John Loy, head of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency within the Department of Health, supported the shallow disposal of long-lived plutonium debris at Maralinga as “world’s best practice”. This is inconsistent with a government paper of July 2001 stating that low or intermediate level long-lived waste is not suitable for near-surface disposal.

Surely if short-lived waste needs to be packaged for disposal at a carefully selected site, so too does the long-lived Maralinga debris.

The government’s actions don’t lend confidence to how they will dispose of waste from the replacement reactor being constructed Lucas Heights. This is the same reactor that Dr Loy said in July 2000 should not go ahead until the method of handling the spent fuel is “written in blood”. Yet Loy has licensed its construction while the process for handling spent fuel is not resolved.

The government’s double standards between pushing its agenda for the reactor or cleaning up Commonwealth sites, and the treatment of far greater contamination on Aboriginal land are all too apparent.

It is high time that clear and firm guidelines for the disposal of radioactive waste are published, and adherence to these guidelines made mandatory. The government also must accept long-term responsibility for sites that were contaminated with their approval.

Alan Parkinson is a nuclear engineer with more than 40 years’ experience. He was previously the Commonwealth’s representative overseeing the Maralinga rehabilitation project.

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ConScientious Fallout on Radioactive Waste

Peter Pockley, Australasian Science, September 2002

The reaction to nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson’s criticisms of the Federal government’s handling of radioactive waste (conScience, AS, August 2002, p.14) showed that the issue has not been swept under the dry soil of South Australia.

Like July’s conScience column on CSIRO by Dr Max Whitten, Parkinson’s forthright views attracted considerable attention in the media, with ABC TV and Radio National carrying items prominently, as did The Canberra Times, The Age, The Daily Telegraph and The Adelaide Advertiser.

The Australian Conservation Foundation and the SA Labor government supported Parkinson’s contention that the Federal government’s handling of the clean-up of plutonium contamination at Maralinga and its unrealised plans for disposal of low and medium level radioactive waste from the existing and future reactors at Lucas Heights are “irresponsible”, apply “double standards” and are far removed from assertions of “world’s best practice”.

But Dr John Loy, CEO of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), maintains that Parkinson’s views are “sheer rubbish” (see pp.18-19).

Meanwhile, all states and territories have rejected the search by Science Minister, Peter McGauran, for a site for a national repository. South Australian Environment Minister, John Hill, confirmed on Radio National that his government was opposed to a site anywhere in SA.

Parkinson says that Loy’s response is “deliberately misleading” and “sheer government propaganda”. He disputes government claims that ARPANSA is “the independent regulator”, saying ARPANSA is an integral arm of government that is responsible to the Minister of Health. Yet Loy – who exercises the legal power of ARPANSA, which has no governing Board – approves or licenses the actions of another ministry (Science). “He provides answers that suit the government’s prior decisions,” Parkinson claims.

Parkinson agrees that packaging of contaminated soil at Maralinga was never an option, but he has never claimed that it should have been. He says Loy has confirmed double standards since none of the soil from Fishermens Bend is as hazardous as highly radioactive debris – such as steel plates, concrete slabs and lead bricks – left from trials at Maralinga that the government merely shovelled into a trench.

Regarding approval for the new reactor, Parkinson asserts: “Loy wanted firm plans for reprocessing and waste disposal before he would grant a construction licence for the new reactor, but after he granted that licence without firm plans, he switched to wanting that evidence before granting an operating licence. And he says he is independent.”

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Flawed ‘clean-up’ of Maralinga

Jim Green

2003

What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn’t be adopted on white-fellas land.” — Nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, ABC Radio National, ‘Breakfast’, August 5, 2002.

In the 1990s the Australian Government carried out what was supposed to be a final clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site in South Australia. The clean-up stemmed from recommendations in the 1985 report of the Royal Commission.

A large majority of the contamination resulted not from the nuclear tests per se but from so-called minor trials which were discontinued in 1963. The stated purpose of the trials was to physically test the safety and security of British nuclear weapons in case of accident, and some experiments were designed to improve the trigger mechanisms. The trigger mechanisms of the weapons were subjected to chemical explosions, heat and other tests. The resultant destruction produced plumes of radioactive material in the form of fine particles. These particles fell to earth over a wide area of the test range and in some cases, beyond it. The ‘minor trials’ contaminated Maralinga with approximately 8,000 kg of uranium, 24 kg of plutonium, and 100 kg of beryllium.

In March 2000 the then Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Senator Nick Minchin, declared Maralinga safe after $108 million had been spent on the clean-up. However, the clean-up generated a great deal of controversy, much of it generated by criticisms expressed by scientists who worked on the project, namely:
* Mr. Alan Parkinson. In 1989, Mr. Parkinson, a nuclear engineer, developed some 30 options for rehabilitation of the Maralinga atomic bomb test site. In August 1994, he was appointed the Government’s Representative to oversee the whole of the clean-up project and was also a member of the government’s advisory committee (MARTAC). In December 1997, he was removed from both appointments for questioning the management of the project.
* Mr. Dale Timmons, a geochemist involved in the in-situ vitrification (ISV) of contaminated debris at Maralinga.
* Professor Peter Johnston, adviser to the traditional owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja, and Professor of Applied Nuclear Physics at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Mr. Parkinson’s view is that the clean-up was significantly flawed, especially the shallow burial of plutonium-contaminated debris. Prof. Johnston’s view is that the clean-up was successful overall despite poor project management by the Australian Government. Mr. Timmons has not commented on the overall status of the clean-up, restricting his comments to the ISV component in which he was heavily involved.

DEST clearly failed to properly manage the Maralinga clean-up. Professor Johnston wrote in his submission to ARPANSA:

“In the Maralinga Rehabilitation Project, DEST had no in-house capacity for engineering or scientific assessment of its contractors for a substantial part of the project. It had internal engineering support for the early part of the project but that individual was removed. As a consequence, DEST contracted for services in extremely deficient ways, e.g. the Geosafe contract contained no performance criteria.” (The Geosafe contract was for vitrification of contaminated debris.)

“In the case of Maralinga, there were mitigating circumstances that kept the project going forward but in a sub-optimal way. These were the MARTAC [Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee] advisory group, the Maralinga Consultative Group as well as ad-hoc advice sought from ARPANSA at various times. While these groups greatly aided in the successful completion of the project, there were still very large expenditures and significant hazards resulting from the deficient management of the project by DEST.”

Inevitably the poor project management had adverse consequences for the clean-up. Professor Johnston’s presentation for an ARPANSA forum listed some examples:

“DEST concluded a contract with Geosafe Australia for technical services that contained no performance criteria. Draft documents prepared by DEST have often been technically wrong due to a lack of technical input. Non-technical public servants made decisions where technical expertise was needed. Technical advice often not sought except from a contractor.”

Mr. Parkinson illustrates DEST’s inadequate project management capabilities in his submission to ARPANSA (cited above):

“A glaring example of the lack of expertise in project management is provided by the appointment by the department of GHD to manage the ISV phase of the Maralinga project. In spite of the fact that several aspects of GHD’s performance on the earlier phases of the project were less than satisfactory, and the fact that they had absolutely no knowledge or experience of the complex process and equipment of ISV, the department appointed them Project Manager and Project Authority. And those responsible cannot claim they were not aware of GHD’s ignorance in the ISV technology; it was spelled out in writing to them. It is almost a fundamental requirement for the project manager to have a good knowledge and some experience of the project – in this case GHD had none. To emphasise the department’s lack of project management skills, they also appointed GHD Project Authority, in which position they should have had a detailed knowledge of the process and equipment. No wonder the Maralinga project became such a failure.”

Consultation with the Maralinga Tjarutja was inadequate. Prof. Johnston et al note in the conference paper (cited above):

“The Australian Government responded to these [Royal Commission] recommendations by forming in February 1986, a Technical Assessment Group (TAG) to address the technical conclusions stemming from the Royal Commission and a Consultative Group was formed as a forum for discussion of the program. TAG’s task was to provide the Australian Government with options for rehabilitation rather than a recommendation. Membership of the Consultative Group was as envisaged by the Royal Commission for the Maralinga Commission but with additional representatives of the West Australian Government. Notably this structure which formed the basis for the entire rehabilitation project left the traditional owners and the South Australian Government out of direct decision making. It ensured that real authority remained with bureaucrats within the Department of Primary Industries and Energy which obtained advice from TAG and later the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC).”

The roles of these groups is explained in the same paper:

“The Maralinga Consultative Group met on an ad hoc basis during the TAG investigations in order to provide information on the progress of scientific studies, planning the rehabilitation work, during the rehabilitation work and in the preparation of the final reports. The consultative group was established to discuss and monitor the TAG studies was re-established in 1993 involving South Australian Government and Maralinga Tjarutja to discuss the MRP. It first met in March 1994. During 1997 and 1998, while a great deal of the rehabilitation work was done, there were few meetings of either MARTAC or the consultative group.”

The most problematic aspect of the project was the decision to abandon ISV in favour of shallow burial of plutonium contaminated debris in totally unsuitable geology. The Australian Government claims that ISV was abandoned because of safety concerns following an explosion on March 21, 1999. However, the use of ISV was curtailed even before the explosion and the decisions to curtail and then abandon ISV were clearly motivated by cost-cutting objectives. This is revealed by numerous statements in the project documentation. To give some examples:
* an October 1998 paper by MARTAC said: “The recent consideration of alternative treatments for ISV for these outer pits has arisen as a result of the revised estimate for ISV being considerably above the project budget.”
* a July 17, 1998 paper written by the chair of MARTAC gives the following criteria for considering options for the Taranaki pits: time savings; cost savings; nature of waste form; potential for exposure of waste; and efficiency of operation.
* at an April 13, 1999 meeting, Garth Chamberlain from GHD, the construction company which was appointed as project manager (despite having little knowledge about ISV and no experience with the technology), said it was a much easier, quicker and cheaper option to exhume and bury debris rather than using ISV.

As Prof. Johnston et al. note in their conference paper (cited above), the decision to abandon ISV: “… was announced to the Maralinga Consultative Group in the middle of a meeting in July 1999 without the consent of the other members of the Consultative Group, particularly Maralinga Tjarutja and South Australia. … The Consultative Group has continued to meet through 2000 and 2001, but there was diminished confidence in the consultative process as a result of the Commonwealth unilateral decision to abandon ISV.”

The unilateral decision to abandon ISV was taken despite previous agreement that no changes to the clean-up methodology would be taken without discussing the proposed changes with the Maralinga Tjarutja.

Senator Minchin said in a May 1, 2000 media release that: “As the primary risk from plutonium is inhalation, all these groups have agreed that deep burial of plutonium is a safe way of handling this waste.” By “these groups” the Minister meant ARPANSA, the Maralinga Tjarutja and South Australian Government. The Minister’s statement is false on two counts. Firstly, the burial of plutonium-contaminated debris is not ‘deep’ no matter how loose the definition – the soil cover is just 5 metres. Secondly, the Maralinga Tjarutja certainly did not agree to the decision to abandon ISV in favour of burial – in fact they wrote to the Minister disassociating themselves from the decision (Senate Estimates, May 3, 2000).

The Australian Senate passed a resolution on August 21, 2002, which reads as follows:

That the Senate-
(a) notes:
(i) that the clean up of the Maralinga atomic test site resulted in highly plutonium-contaminated debris being buried in shallow earth trenches and covered with just one to two metres of soil,
(ii) that large quantities of radioactive soil were blown away during the removal and relocation of that soil into the Taranaki burial trenches, so much so that the contaminated airborne dust caused the work to be stopped on many occasions and forward area facilities to be evacuated on at least one occasion, and
(iii) that americium and uranium waste products are proposed to be stored in an intermediate waste repository and that both these contaminants are buried in the Maralinga trenches;
(b) rejects the assertion by the Minister for Science (Mr McGauran) on 14 August 2002 that this solution to dealing with radioactive material exceeds world’s best practice;
(c) contrasts the Maralinga method of disposal of long-lived, highly radioactive material with the Government’s proposals to store low-level waste in purpose-built lined trenches 20 metres deep and to store intermediate waste in a deep geological facility;
(d) calls on the Government to acknowledge that long-lived radioactive material is not suitable for near surface disposal; and
(e) urges the Government to exhume the debris at Maralinga, sort it and use a safer, more long-lasting method of storing this material.

The Australian Senate passed another resolution on October 15, 2003, which inter alia condemned the Maralinga clean-up. The resolution was as follows:

That the Senate:
(a) notes:
(i) that 15 October 2003 marks the 50th anniversary of the first atomic test conducted by the British government in northern South Australia;
(ii) that on this day “Totem 1”, a 10 kilotonne atomic bomb, was detonated at Emu Junction, some 240 kilometres west of Coober Pedy;
(iii) that the Anangu community received no forewarning of the test;
(iv) that the 1984 Royal Commission report concluded that Totem 1 was detonated in wind conditions that would produce unacceptable levels of fallout, and that the decision to detonate failed to take into account the existence of people at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill;
(b) expresses its concern for those indigenous peoples whose lands and health over generations have been detrimentally affected by this and subsequent atomic tests conducted in northern South Australia;
(c) congratulates the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – the Senior Aboriginal Women of Coober Pedy – for their ongoing efforts to highlight the experience of their peoples affected by these tests;
(d) condemns the Government for its failure to properly dispose of radioactive waste from atomic tests conducted in the Maralinga precinct; and
(e) expresses its continued opposition to the siting of a low-level radioactive waste repository in South Australia.

The problems with the Maralinga clean-up raises an important issue with respect to the proposed national radioactive waste dump – many of the same organisations and individuals involved in the flawed Maralinga clean-up are now involved in the radioactive waste dump project, namely DEST, ARPANSA, and at least one private contractor.

Prof. Johnston argued in his written submission to ARPANSA that DEST had failed to demonstrate an ability to properly manage the dump project:

“The applicant for a licence [DEST] does not have the technical competence required to manage the contracts of a proposed operator. The operator who may have the necessary technical competence is not a co-applicant. I am not convinced the applicant will have effective control of the project. I believe the application has not demonstrated that the applicant has the capacity to ensure that it can abide by the licence conditions that could be imposed under Section 35 of the ARPANS Act because of a lack of technical competence in managing its contractors.”

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Statements by nuclear physicist Prof. Peter Johnston

Verbal submission to ARPANSA dump inquiry, Adelaide, 2004.

Prof. Johnston was unable to attend so what follows is from someone reading his PowerPoint presentation into the record.

Prof of Nuclear Physics at RMIT

DEST was an ineffective manager of the Maralinga Cleanup in a number of key ways. The pattern of contracting required services for the Repository project is similar to the Maralinga cleanup.

Effectiveness of DEST during the Maralinga Cleanup:

DEST follows the philosophy of contracting all requirements to a Repository Operator, who is a contractor. Safety is in the hands of the operator. The equivalent organisation to the Repository Operator at Maralinga could bid for other work that would be under its operational management. The primary source of advice came from this contractor. At times the project was not fully in DEST’s control.

Failures:

DEST concluded a contract with Geosafe Australia for technical services that contained no performance criteria. Draft documents prepared by DEST have often been technically wrong due to a lack of technical input. Non-technical public servants made decisions where technical expertise

was needed. Technical advice often not sought except from a contractor.

Accountabilities:

The Project Director is non-technical. The Repository Manager is a contractor. The Radiation Safety Officer is a contractor employed by the Repository Operator.

So where does the effective control and the risk lie?

Effective Control and Risk:

Effective control lies with the contractor not DEST, because it lacks the technical skills to supervise its contractor. The risk associated with the release from the repository lies with the community and the Government of Australia.

Inability to manage:

The applicant has not demonstrated effective control. There is a note – see Regulatory Guidelines on Performance Standards for Licence Applicants & Licence Holders. Effective control is normally required by the licence conditions imposed under section 35 of the ARPANS Act.

Mitigating of Control Problems at Maralinga:

Oversight by the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee. Maralinga Consultative Group. ARPANSA was the supporting contractor, not a regulator until 2000 – when the work was essentially complete.

Some quotes from written submission #256 to ARPANSA dump inquiry.

Prof Peter Johnston, Acting Head and Professor of Applied Nuclear Physics, Dept of Applied Physics, RMIT University, 22-10-03.

(Writing in personal capacity but also works as adviser to Maralinga Tjarutja re ‘suboptimal’ clean-up of Maralinga nuclear test-site.)

“I believe the application has not demonstrated that the applicant will have effective control of the project or has the capacity to ensure that it can abide by the licence conditions that could be imposed under Section 35 of the ARPANSA Act because of a lack of technical competence in managing its contractors.”

“In the Maralinga Rehabilitation Project, DEST had no in-house capacity for engineering or scientific assessment of its contractors for a substantial part of the project. It had internal engineering support for the early part   \ of the project but that individual was removed. As a consequence, DEST contracte3d for services in extremely deficient ways, e.g. the Geosafe contract contained no performance criteria.”

“The underlying philosophy of not having expertise relies on the concept that the risk can be contracted out. I reject this as the risk is to the Australian community not the contractor.”

“In the case of Maralinga, there were mitigating circumstances that kept the project going forward but in a sub-optimal way. These were the MARTAC advisory group, the Maralinga Consultative Group as well as ad-hoc advice sought from ARPANSA at various times. While these groups greatly aided in the successful completion of the project, there were still very large expenditures and significant hazards resulting from the deficient management of the project by DEST.”

“The applicant for a licence does not have the technical competence required to manage the contracts of a proposed operator. The operator who may have the necessary technical competence is not a co-applicant. I am not convinced the applicant will have effective control of the project. I believe the application has not demonstrated that the applicant has the capacity to ensure that it can abide by the licence conditions that could be imposed under Section 35 of the ARPANS Act because of a lack of technical competence in managing its contractors.”

Quote from: Peter Johnston et al, “Aboriginal participation and concerns throughout the rehabilitation of Maralinga”, presented at the Third International Symposium on the Protection of the Environment from Ionising Radiation, Darwin, 22-26 July 2002, IAEA-CSP-17, IAEA, Vienna, 2003, p.349-356, http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/CSP-17_web.pdf

“A considerable problem throughout the MRP was a lack of technical skills within the Department managing the project. Until 1997, engineering skills were provided by Alan Parkinson, but there was no Radiation Protecion expertise. Technical advice had to come from contractors, MARTAC or ARL and on important occasions it was not sought.”

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Cleanup and effects

From Wiikipedia, accessed 16 Jan 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

The initial cleanup operation was codenamed Operation Brumby, and was conducted in 1967.^[1] Attempts were made to dilute the concentration of radioactive material by turning over and mixing the surface soil.^[23] Additionally, the remains of the firings, including plutonium-contaminated fragments, were buried in 22 concrete-capped pits.^[23]

By the 1980s some Australian servicemen and traditional Aboriginal owners of the land were suffering blindness, sores and illnesses such as cancer. They “started to piece things together, linking their afflictions with their exposure to nuclear testing”. Groups including the Atomic Veterans Association and the Pitjantjatjara Council pressured the government, until in 1985 it agreed to hold a royal commission to investigate the damage that had been caused.^[20]

The McClelland Royal Commission into the tests delivered its report in late 1985, and found that significant radiation hazards still existed at many of the Maralinga test sites, particularly at Taranaki,^[19] where the Vixen B trials into the effects of burning plutonium had been carried out. A Technical Assessment Group was set up to advise on rehabilitation options, and a much more extensive cleanup program was initiated at the site.^[23]

The TAG Report plan was approved in 1991 and work commenced on site in 1996 and was completed in 2000 at a cost of $108 million dollars.^[19][24] In the worst-contaminated areas, 350,000 cubic metres of soil and debris were removed from an area of more than 2 square kilometers, and buried in trenches. Eleven debris pits were also treated with in-situ vitrification. Most of the site (approximately 3,200 square kilometres) is now safe for unrestricted access and approximately 120 square kilometres is considered safe for access but not permanent occupancy.^[19] Alan Parkinson has observed that “an Aboriginal living a semi-traditional lifestyle would receive an effective dose of 5 mSv/a (five times that allowed for a member of the public). Within the 120 km², the effective dose would be up to 13 times greater.”^[25]

A Department of Veterans’ Affairs study concluded that “Overall, the doses received by Australian participants were small. … Only 2% of participants received more than the current Australian annual dose limit for occupationally exposed persons (20 mSv).”^[26] However, such findings are contested. A 1999 study for the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association found that 30 per cent of involved veterans had died, mostly in their fifties, from cancers.^[27]

Successive Australian governments failed to compensate servicemen who contracted cancers following exposure to radiation at Maralinga. However, after a British decision in 1988 to compensate its own servicemen, the Australian Government negotiated compensation for several Australian servicemen suffering from two specific conditions, leukemia (except lymphatic leukemia) and the rare blood disorder multiple myeloma.^[28]

One author suggests that the resettlement and denial of aboriginal access to their homelands “contributed significantly to the social disintegration which characterises the community to this day. Petrol sniffing, juvenile crime, alcoholism and chronic friction between residents and the South Australian police have become facts of life.”^[5] In 1994, the Australian Government reached a compensation settlement with Maralinga Tjarutja, which resulted in the payment of $13.5 million in settlement of all claims in relation to the nuclear testing.^[19]

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Maralinga: The Fall Out Continues

Australian Broadcasting Corporation – Radio National’s Background Briefing
Produced by Gregg Borschmann
April 16, 2000
www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s120383.htm

Summary

Maralinga. The fall out’s not over yet.  Experts say the plutonium clean up isn’t good enough and they question the validity of the code of practice used by authorities. There’s evidence of shenanigans and expediency at Maralinga. Then there’s the man who wore a contaminated T-shirt all the way from Adelaide to Melbourne. Background Briefing spoke to some key insiders who went on the record for the first time.

Full Transcript

Gregg Borschmann: Moving the goal posts, milking the cow, short-cuts, cover-ups and the shit really hitting the fan. It doesn’t sound like world’s best practice, but it all happened during the clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site. These vivid descriptions are not our words; rather, they come straight from the experts who took on the toughest job in the world: making plutonium safe, forever. Hello, I’m Gregg Borschmann and today Background Briefing raises serious questions about the $108-million clean-up of the former British A-bomb test site in outback South Australia. It’s claimed that this has been a world first, the biggest and most successful clean-up ever, of an old nuclear weapons testing range. Sixteen years since planning for the clean-up began, contractors are due to leave the site this month. But leaked documents show that behind the scenes, the project has been increasingly troubled. Some key insiders, including the government’s own advisers, say that the job has not been finished properly.

Alan Parkinson: I don’t believe it is international best practice. I don’t believe that the code that they quote selectively was written considering burial of plutonium 239. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, which means that there’s something like quarter-of-a-million years before it can be considered safe.

Gregg Borschmann: Engineer, Alan Parkinson has worked in the nuclear industry for over 40 years. For much of the past decade, he has been an official adviser on the project to either the government or the Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal people. He compares the Maralinga clean-up unfavourably with what the Americans did at their Nevada nuclear testing site.

Alan Parkinson: At the site that I visited, it was a project called “Double-tracks”, the Americans removed 53 grams of plutonium from about, I think it was 1500 cubic metres of soil. They bagged that soil, that contaminated soil, and they ten transported it 80 miles on public highways to be placed in a nuclear waste repository on a site that is guarded by the US Army. I compared that with burial of 2-1/2 kilograms of plutonium in 250,000 cubic metres of soil, and 2-1/2 kilograms of plutonium mixed in the debris in what is nothing more than a hole in the ground, on a site which is not guarded and which at some date in the future, might be returned to the Maralinga Tjarutja to live their semi-traditional lifestyle. I think there is a huge discrepancy in the way that Maralinga has been treated and overseas treatment of similar sites.

Gregg Borschmann: In other words, the Americans bagged around 50 grams of plutonium contaminated soil and put it into a military repository under lock, key and guard. Australia, by comparison, has put 100 times that amount of plutonium into several large unlined, unguarded holes in the ground.

Alan Parkinson is talking publicly about Maralinga for the first time today on Background Briefing. It’s two years since his contract with the government was terminated in tense and unusual circumstances. He says what has been done at Maralinga since would not be acceptable anywhere else in Australia, or indeed anywhere else in the world.

Alan Parkinson: Whatever is done at Maralinga should be made public, and the Department and ARPANSA should be able to defend the actions. Some of the stuff that’s gone on and some of the stuff that I’ve heard about does not make good reading, and I don’t think they can defend some of the things that they have done, like this burial of debris. They’ve no idea what’s buried there so they can’t defend it, can they?

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing has also confirmed that the official code being used to sign off on the clean-up was never intended by the majority of its authors to apply to Maralinga. In addition, Alan Parkinson lifts the lid on how a key Maralinga job was won by the large Australian engineering firm Gutteridge Haskins and Davey, or GHD. The deal was done without competitive tender, and before the government knew how much it was going to cost.

Alan Parkinson: That was a meeting I had with the Department on the 18th November, ’97, and it was at that meeting that I was told by a senior officer, Rob Rawson, that the decision had already been made to appoint GHD as Project Manager. I found out later that this was the day before the Department sent out a short letter inviting GHD to submit a proposal, and before they’d even been told how much this new arrangement would cost. I told Rawson that he might as well tear up another letter that he’d just signed, because he’d just changed the ground rules. But really, I shouldn’t have been surprised, because for some time, GHD had been acting as though they already had the job.

Gregg Borschmann: This arrangement and the story of GHD’s subsequent project management was to become critical as the Maralinga clean-up ended in acrimony and uncertainty.

Gregg Borschmann: Maralinga is now a ghost town. Most of the buildings have been removed or looted. You can’t see the debris from the nuclear test days. If it wasn’t taken back or sold by the British, it was buried. There were holes in the ground everywhere, for everything, from empty fuel drums and household garbage to plutonium contaminated firing pads. Despite this, a major part of the problem remained literally on the surface: plutonium contamination scattered over thousands of hectares at three main test sites called Taranaki, TM and Wewak. What was agreed at the beginning of this project was already a compromise. A perfect job would have been too expensive and the health risks didn’t warrant it. Instead, it was agreed that there were two jobs to be done. The first would remove and bury only the worst of the plutonium contaminated topsoil, spread over more than several hundred hectares. The second job had to do with several kilograms of plutonium contaminated debris buried in pits at Taranaki. This was the most heavily contaminated of the three clean-up sites.

Alan Parkinson: There were 21 of these pits. What happened during the set of trials known as Vixen B trials, was that the Brits detonated an atomic bomb in a manner which would not allow it to explode as an atomic bomb. It was what we call one-point trial. These trials would melt the plutonium, shoot it up into the air and be spread all over the place, but it also damaged the structure on which these devices were placed. So at the end of each one of these trials, (and there were 15 of them) the equipment had to be thrown out and the best way to do that was to dig a pit alongside where the firing pad had been and bury the stuff.  So although we had a report from the British to tell us what was in these pits, it was in very general terms, like steel joists, cables, lead bricks, concrete and soil, and that was about the sum total of our knowledge of those pits.

Gregg Borschmann: Engineer, Alan Parkinson. That’s the sound of leading-edge waste clean-up technology. It’s called in situ vitrification, or ISV, and it’s cost Australia more than $30-million. In 1996, the scientists, government and the dispossessed Maralinga Aboriginal community agreed it was the best, final solution for the Taranaki pits. But last year, it was dumped in favour of simply burying the remaining plutonium in yet another big hole in the ground. This switch troubled some of the government’s own experts. The project was guided by a scientific committee called MARTAC, the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee. Background Briefing has a copy of leaked official notes from a MARTAC meeting in August last year. The meeting was with the South Australian Government and the Maralinga Tjarutja. The notes quote a member of the committee, Dr Mike Costello, who is an international authority on plutonium. Here is an edited reading from the official notes of Dr Costello’s comments.

Reader: I don’t believe that shallow burial is 1) Within the spirit of the UK National Radiation Protection Board Code. I accept it is within the letter; or 2) That it’s accepted practice. However I’m out-voted by my colleagues. I have experienced with plutonium at Sellafield in the UK, there are much smaller quantities of plutonium there. The amounts varied, yet whilst minuscule, it had to be enclosed in concrete. I don’t believe this shallow burial is the best that we can do, as it could be encapsulated in concrete.

Gregg Borschmann: Dr Costello would not be interviewed for Background Briefing. In 1954, the British Government asked Australian Prime Minister, Bob Menzies, for a permanent site to test nuclear weapons. The arid lands between the Great Victoria Desert and the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia seemed to be ideal. Isolated in the outback, the Maralinga Range became home to a secret city of more than 2,000 people. As well as it’s bomb factories and test sites, it boasted its own Post Office, Bank, tennis courts, swimming pool, cinema, international airport, two churches, sewer system and a gymnasium.

Voice-over: The mighty power of the atom is unleashed. The Maralinga blast is caused by a low yield bomb. This scientifically, is a small explosion.

Gregg Borschmann: The British detonated seven A-bombs at Maralinga in the late 1950s and then over the next six years, conducted several hundred smaller, sometimes clandestine experiments, using plutonium, uranium and other radioactive materials. Ironically, it was mainly these so-called minor trials, and not the A-bombs, which left the legacy of plutonium contamination at Maralinga. The Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal people were prevented from entering their lands once the tests started in the 1950s. Barrister Andrew Collett has been working to help get that country restored and returned to the Tjarutja since the 1985 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia. Andrew Collett.

Andrew Collett: You have to bear in mind and keep firmly in mind, that what the community has is the legacy of probably the most environmentally irresponsible act ever committed in Australia, when British scientists exploded plutonium and got it up in the air just for the sake of seeing where it went. It went all over Aboriginal land, and the government is now trying to stabilise and clean that up. But the clean-up, which is coming to a close now, is at least the fourth clean-up since 1962. The community would be mad to assume that this clean-up got all of that plutonium and took away all of the risk. We’re dealing with contamination irresponsibly put there by a foreign power who then has not told the Australian government precisely what was there, or where it was. The community has to assume that there’ll be problems in the future, particularly when plutonium will be a contaminant and a danger for the next quarter-of-a-million years, a time scale that is impossible for us to contemplate, longer ago than an Ice Age.

Gregg Borschmann: As much as the Tjarutja want their land back, uncertainty over the long-term safety of the clean-up remains a stumbling block which will be discussed this week in talks between the Tjarutja and the South Australian Premier, John Olsen. Andrew Collett again.

Andrew Collett: There’s a very, very heavy burden on the community to weigh up how effective this clean-up will be, so the issues include how good is the clean-up, what does that mean in the future, will there be problems in the future, will the proposed burial of plutonium in a deep burial trench last quarter-of-a-million years, what happens if it doesn’t, who’s going to meet the cost if it doesn’t.

Gregg Borschmann: Lawyer for the Tjarutja, Andrew Collett. Early last month, there was a carefully controlled set-piece of modern day media management at Maralinga that was meant to set the stage for the eventual hand-back of the Maralinga lands to the Tjarutja. The specially invited TV networks and a handful of newspaper and radio reporters flew to the site to witness the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Senator Nick Minchin, declare that the clean-up had been successful, coming in on time and within budget.

Nick Minchin: We can shut the book on it, but in a way that is very positive for the future in the way that we have worked together with the Aboriginal people to clean up this area and rehabilitate it, not just to say sorry, but you know, sorry it happened but we’ll walk away. We’ve actually as a people, and this is Labor and Liberal together, have worked with the Aboriginal people to rehabilitate this area.

Gregg Borschmann: Part of the theatre on that day was the handing over, to the Minister, of a letter from ARPANSA. That’s the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, Australia’s independent nuclear regulator. The letter, signed by the Head of ARPANSA, Dr John Loy, refers in part to a radioactive waste safety code published in 1992. Here is an edited reading of the key paragraph.

Reader: ARPANSA certifies that the burial trenches at Taranaki have been constructed consistent with the National Code of Practice for the near surface disposal of radioactive waste.

Gregg Borschmann: But that code was never intended to be used for large amounts of long lived radioactive waste like that found at Maralinga. Background Briefing has spoken to all of the scientists who wrote the Code. One refused to comment, and another didn’t return our calls. But the remaining three all confirmed that the Code was for low level, short lived wastes only. One of the scientists who wrote it is from Canada’s Radiation Protection Bureau. Here he is on the phone from Ottowa. Bliss Tracy.

Bliss Tracy: The understanding that I had of the task at that time was that we were to look at various industrial ways, perhaps incidental wastes, that might be generated by hospitals or research laboratories, that kind of problem, that was what we had to deal with.

Gregg Borschmann: So it was never your understanding that that 1992 Code of Practice would apply in Maralinga-type situations?

Bliss Tracy: No. Our discussions at that time, we never mentioned Maralinga as part of this, and since I have worked on both problems I think I would have been aware of that if they had intended to apply it to Maralinga. It never came up for the discussion when I attended the meetings, anyway.

Gregg Borschmann: Does it surprise you to hear now that the Australian Government is using this code as its benchmark for the disposal of plutonium at Maralinga in a burial pit?

Bliss Tracy: Yes, it’s surprising, although probably not appropriate for me as a Canadian to comment on policies of another government.

Gregg Borschmann: Scientist, Bliss Tracy in Ottowa. This week, the Chair of the committee that drafted the Code, Neville Hargreave, confirmed that it was written for low level industrial and medical wastes. It was not meant for the radioactive waste that would come from nuclear power or weapons testing programs such as at Maralinga. This was confirmed again for Background Briefing by another scientist who helped write the code, Dr Loel Munslow-Davies, from Western Australia. Despite this overwhelmingly important question about the validity of the Code in these circumstances, the Department in charge of Maralinga was still using it last week to claim the clean-up had been a success. Jeff Harris:

Jeff Harris: Some of the key guidelines that we followed, included the International Atomic Energy Agency’s guidelines for disposal and rehabilitation of contaminated sites, and we’ve also followed our own National Code of Conduct for burial of radioactive materials. So indeed the procedures that have been followed here have been perfectly safe and have been well suited to the site.

Gregg Borschmann: Jeff Harris, a senior officer of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources. Senator Minchin has also used the Code repeatedly recently to reassure Australians about the quality of the clean-up. And yet according to leaked minutes of a meeting of the Maralinga scientific advisers last year, the Minister has already been given an out. The official minutes record a senior officer from the nuclear regulator ARPANSA saying it was not necessary to meet the letter of the Code, since what was being done at Maralinga was an ‘intervention’. The minutes do not explain what this means. The ARPANSA officer involved did not return our calls this week.

Gregg Borschmann: A lot of plutonium-contaminated soil was buried at Maralinga. Almost 400,000 tonnes of it. It was buried in three massive holes. The largest at Taranaki was bigger than four football fields, and as deep as a five-storey building. It’s widely acknowledged that a good job was done with this first soil removal phase of the Maralinga clean-up. It won two National Case Earth Awards for environmental best practice. As the soil removal operations wound down in late 1997, it was time to move to the final and most difficult part of the project: cleaning up the 21 highly contaminated pits at Taranaki. That was the job for ISV, signed off on by the experts as the best, final solution.

Gregg Borschmann: So just what is this ISV, or in situ vitrification? Developed in America over the past decade, it is designed to safely immobilise all manner of nasty wastes, from toxic chemicals to long-lived plutonium. While the process is complex, the concept is simple. After five years of research and testing in Australia specifically for the conditions at Maralinga, four large electrodes were inserted into each pit at Taranaki. The electric current then effectively ‘cooked’ the contaminated debris soil at temperatures over 1500 degrees. This molten mass, looking not unlike the lava from a volcano, cooled and solidified into a large glass-like or vitreous block. It was designed to permanently encase the plutonium. But after only five months on site, things didn’t seem to be going well. There was dispute about just what ISV was meant to be doing. Background Briefing has a copy of a leaked email written in October, 1998 by the head of the company contracted to do the ISV work. His name is Leo Thompson, from Geosafe Australia. He refused to be interviewed for this program but he did give us a written statement in which he stood behind the safety and effectiveness of ISV technology. The leaked email we had received earlier, shows that in late 1998, he was under intense pressure to prove it on site. Here is a reading from that email.

Reader: The shit has really hit the fan in the past couple of weeks. GHD have been critical of everything they can to cast doubt on Geosafe and ISV. They’re saying the process is not living up to expectations and Geosafe is unable to manage the project. I must be losing my mind, because a lot of people, including MARTAC members, are remembering things I don’t recall.

Gregg Borschmann: The email goes on to refer to trouble over whether or not his contract stipulated any requirement to melt all the steel buried in the pit. Some members of the scientific committee MARTAC were worried about a piece of unmelted steel which had been found inside an ISV block. Again, a reading from Leo Thompson’s same October email.

Reader: It really should not be a big deal. From a risk standpoint, the fact that unmelted plates are embedded in the central core of the block, should be considered an acceptable solution in my view. Seems like GHD and others are moving the goalposts so they can discredit me personally, Geosafe as a company, and the ISV process in general.

Gregg Borschmann: Five months later, a large explosion occurred at Taranaki in Pit 17, as it was being melted. To this day, there is no officially agreed explanation for what happened. But Background Briefing has uncovered startling new evidence. That evidence comes first hand from Avon Hudson, a former leading aircraftsman in the Royal Australian Air Force, who worked at Taranaki during the Vixen B nuclear trials. In late 1960, he saw a box of explosives which were dumped by a British Royal Army soldier into a pit at Taranaki. Several months later, he came across an equally dubious and dangerous burial: a 3,000 lb pressurised hydrogen gas cylinder.

Avon Hudson: This was a separate hole to where I seen the box of explosives put; it wasn’t too far away, it might have been less than 100 metres, it might have been about that distance. There was a hole there, probably 10 to 12 foot deep, a round hole, and it would have been probably maybe 10 or 12 feet in diameter, something of that order. And there was a cylinder dumped there, it was a hydrogen cylinder, a red hydrogen cylinder about 7-feet long. That was thrown there by the hole, with other debris. It wasn’t the debris from these actual explosions, these Vixen explosions, and when I went back there some time later, that cylinder was partly in the hole, it had been put into the hole but it was still not completely down, it was sticking out. So I assumed that that was buried there.

Gregg Borschmann: Nuclear veteran Avon Hudson. Last year, in the months after the explosion, he tried to go public with this key information and his concerns about the Taranaki pits. He range the media and a host of politicians, including Senator Minchin. He says the Minister’s office never phoned him back.

Avon Hudson: The way Maralinga operated, if you could picture back in that era, not too many people cared about very much at all, and if they had to get rid of anything, well it just was chucked into a pit. They didn’t distinguish between a nuclear debris and say a barrel or a cylinder or any other debris, it all was chucked in together. They didn’t really separate those into categories, because nobody really give two hoots. They had one interest, and that was getting out of Maralinga; most people hated the joint.

Gregg Borschmann: When the explosion occurred on site in March last year, you were obviously very concerned about the possibility of future explosions. Why were you so concerned about say, something like a hydrogen cylinder?

Avon Hudson: Well when I heard about the explosion, I was concerned that if they were to strike this cylinder by the melting process, the vitrification, and it exploded, somebody would possibly be killed. That was my immediate concern. And I tried to draw this to the attention of relevant people I thought; I thought they were relevant, but I’m not so sure now. But I couldn’t get anywhere.

Gregg Borschmann: It was a time of crisis for the project, when everyone was looking for the most credible reason for the explosion. Avon Hudson, and his potentially critical evidence, was ignored. The precise contents of the pits at Taranaki had long been a mystery and the subject of considerable debate. Last year, following the explosion, the Australian Government wrote to Britain seeking clarification yet again of what was in the 21 pits. The British doubted there would be anything explosive in them, but they weren’t prepared to give Australia any guarantees. Another key piece of evidence also went missing last year. A drum was dug up by contractors excavating one of the other pits at Taranaki. Remarkably, instead of being set aside for examination, it was simply re-buried. Alan Parkinson and the Tjarutja knew about the incident, but other people who should have, didn’t, at a meeting in May last year.

Alan Parkinson: The cause of the explosion had not yet been identified. We thought it could have been a closed acetylene bottle, a closed drum of bitumen, or some other closed vessel. So that was why we asked had a drum been uncovered; we knew that one had during exhumation of another pit. When the question was put forward, it was immediately denied, No, there’s not been any drum recovered, so the question was put again. And it was only after putting it a second time that it was acknowledged that a drum had been uncovered, and we said, Well, what happened to it? Oh, we buried it again. What disturbed me about that was the Department and members of MARTAC who were at the meeting, didn’t know that a drum had been uncovered, neither did ARPANSA.

Gregg Borschmann: Engineer, Alan Parkinson. After the explosion in Pit 17, the game changed. Work and planning on the site was thrown into chaos, combining with pressure to keep the project rolling to this year’s deadline. But despite the gravity of the situation on such a high profile Commonwealth job on Commonwealth land, Jeff Harris from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, says there was no need for any formal government inquiry.

Jeff Harris: The ISV contractor undertook an investigation and we received their final report in October. You might recall that the explosion took place in March, so that took a considerable length of time. The ISV contractor had a view of what the cause of the explosion was. We then commissioned an independent review of that by experts based in Britain and Australia, and they reviewed that, they didn’t comer to the same conclusion, and indeed it left the cause of the accident up in the air. Once that had occurred of course, we were then in a very critical point of having to decide whether to proceed with the technology after the explosion when the cause was not known, and what risks would that entail for worker safety. We elected to go for worker safety and also for burial option that we knew worked, that the levels of contamination were much less than we’d anticipated, and that we had very good experience in a number of sites at Maralinga, including Taranaki.

Gregg Borschmann: The Geosafe report that Jeff Harris speaks about said that the most likely cause of the explosion was due to the detonation of buried explosive materials. This is a conclusion that would be strongly supported by nuclear veteran Avon Hudson’s first hand account. So why was Mr Hudson ignored and the Geosafe report dismissed? Could it be that the explosion provided the final excuse to dump ISV, that there were other concerns not related to its technical performance? Background Briefing has confirmed that there was constant pressure over the last two years of the project to modify or abandon the ISV process, as the job of melting the Taranaki pits became bigger and more complicated than originally anticipated. But why dump leading-edge technology when already more than $30-million had been spent on it? It’s the Big Question for which no convincing answer has been provided. Jeff Harris from the Department says the decision was based on safety considerations, not price.

Jeff Harris: Price didn’t come into the calculations at all. What came into the calculations was the safety to our workers on site. The explosion that occurred on 21 March caused very substantial damage to the ISV equipment and risked fatalities. In the end, there were no injuries and there was no radiation uptake by any workers, but that was cause for us to do a thorough risk assessment of whether we should proceed with that procedure or whether we should review the experience that we had in burying the material under a cover of 5 metres of soil at depths of up to 10-15 metres. At the end of the day that was the process that we chose, and I think it was a very good decision.

Gregg Borschmann: The concern about worker safety is understandable, but the timing is curious. If you remember, Jeff Harris told Background Briefing that the Geosafe report on the explosion was delivered to the Department in October last year. But the decision to abandon ISV was announced by the Commonwealth three months earlier to the South Australian Government and the Maralinga Tjarutja. So why dump the process before you’ve even got your report? The Maralinga Tjarutja Aboriginal people were so concerned about losing ISV that they wrote back to Senator Minchin disassociating themselves from the decision. They also asked for Mr Harris to be removed as Chair of the consultative group meetings.

Gregg Borschmann: There was always going to be intense scientific scrutiny of ISV at Maralinga. This was its largest commercial application treating a plutonium contaminated site in the world, and everyone wanted to get it right. Minister Minchin acknowledged this point last month on the Radio National Breakfast program.

Nick Minchin: At all times we were operating under the strict guidance and on the basis of the advice of an expert technical advisory group, and the Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, we didn’t make a move without that expert advice and the subsequent approval of the independent agency that regulates this matter, so at no stage have we done anything other than according to the best scientific advice.

Gregg Borschmann: But what is the best scientific advice? The scientists were not in agreement. For example, the ISV process had some strong supporters on the MARTAC advisory committee. One committee member says in a leaked email that ISV had not been given ‘a fair go’. Background Briefing has evidence that personal and political, as well as scientific judgements, were being made. For example, in late 1998, the Chair of MARTAC, Des Davy, sent out a rather strange email to his fellow committee members. He more or less said he had asked Jeff Harris if the Department wanted a negative finding about ISV. Here is a reading of part of that email from Des Davy.

Reader: I asked Jeff Harris on Monday would he welcome advice to terminate Geosafe’s contract, and go for excavation trench disposal at some nominal depth, say 10 metres of cover.

Gregg Borschmann: The spokesman for the department, Jeff Harris, says the Department got the best possible advice and that disagreement among experts is not unusual.

Jeff Harris: They are a group of scientists and at times I’ve likened it to herding cats when you see them out on site, they want to go off and investigate where a particular bit of wire leads, or what a particular trench might contain. But they’re an excellent group that have worked together, they have differences of views, and generally speaking, they come to common decisions, which of course is what we need. It’s no good if you have a committee that it has 20 different opinions. They can have those different opinions, but they need to come together and say, Well what’s the best advice we can provide to the Minister and the Department on each of these technical issues as they arise.

Gregg Borschmann: It’s significant that the Government’s independent nuclear umpire, ARPANSA, was also feeling uncomfortable with the way things were panning out at Maralinga. Geoff Williams, a senior officer at ARPANSA, was responsible for ensuring that the site was cleaned to agreed standards. He became upset when he unofficially received a copy of an audit of the occupational health and safety at the site. He felt the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ISR, or the project managers, should have let him know about the report and provided him with an official copy earlier. Here is a reading of an email he sent in August last year.

Reader: To date, no-one from ISR or GHD has thought fit to provide us with a copy of the audit report, even though it mentions, and has implications, for ARPANSA operations and independence. As the regulator, this is unacceptable to us, to my way of thinking at least. Also I am very concerned, putting it mildly, at the host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups that have been whispered to me but which have never been officially advised. Nor have the inquiries been fruitful when I’ve asked direct questions.

Gregg Borschmann: A reading from an email sent by Geoff Williams, from nuclear regulator, ARPANSA. This personal comment, while never officially recorded, does not paint a pretty picture of relations between Australia’s independent nuclear umpire and the company that was by then managing the entire project, GHD. So if ARPANSA wasn’t always happy with this relationship, what about the department; how did it get on with GHD? The answer to this question may help explain both the way in which Alan Parkinson was sacked and why ISV was dumped. The appointment of GHD as project managers for the final ISV phase of the project was consummated on Christmas Eve, 1997. It had been a whirlwind, and often clandestine courtship. From the Department, Jeff Harris says it was a simple affair.

Jeff Harris: The tender for project management was won by GHD prior to the commencement of this project. The contract was extended; it was not a case of a new contract, their contract was simply extended to cover another element of the project, and it’s been a very successful outcome.

Gregg Borschmann: The tender for project management that Jeff Harris refers to, was not won by GHD. It had been awarded to a Commonwealth Government owned company in 1994. GHD didn’t make the shortlist of six, and were not invited to tender. But GHD became involved in the Maralinga project by buying this Commonwealth company when it was privatised in mid-1997. At that stage, GHD had no involvement with, or authority over the ISV process. So how did this crucial change come about?

Gregg Borschmann: There is no doubt that the high tech ISV melting process was a big job, with high stakes and potential risks. Jeff Harris says this is precisely why the Commonwealth needed a strong, reputable project manager like GHD to look after the job. But this doesn’t explain how GHD came to get the job without even having to tender for it. The three-page agreement that was signed between GHD and the Department on 24th December, 1997, describes the new arrangement to take over that project management of ISV as a ‘contract variation.’ This was a convenient piece of housekeeping for both the Department and GHD, sidestepping the Department’s tendering and purchase guidelines. These guidelines require any new contract over $100,000 to be subject to scrutiny and approval by a three-person assessment panel. This assessment never occurred, because the deal was a described as a ‘variation’ rather than a new contract. GHD would not speak to Background Briefing. All matters were referred back to the Department. Jeff Harris again.

Jeff Harris: When we commenced the ISV operations on site, we reviewed our project management arrangements, and we determined that it would make sense and be very sound management for us to extend the project management arrangements for Gutteridge, Haskins & Davey to include the ISV process.

Gregg Borschmann: On the 21st November, 1997, the company responded to an invitation by the Department to put a proposal for management of the ISV contract. Background Briefing has a copy of this letter. In it, GHD estimated their additional services would cost in ‘the order of a quarter-of-a-million-dollars.’ Background Briefing also has copies of GHD monthly reports to the Department. These provide details of project expenditure. Not all of the money that GHD has earned since is related to ISV. But the monthly reports indicate that over the past two years or so, the company has been paid, in staff costs alone, more than $2.5-million. This is ten times the cost of the original estimate. I put these figures to Jeff Harris.

Jeff Harris: We have a fee structure with GHD, and within the overall budget, we’ve maintained those fees; we’ve got very good value for money for the public, for the taxpayer in terms of this is an excellent outcome in terms of the clean-up criteria that have been met, the safety of the site for handover back to the Maralinga Tjarutja, the consultations that we’ve had with the traditional owners and with other stakeholders, and overall this project has worked out very well indeed, and it’s been extremely good value for money for the taxpayer.

Gregg Borschmann: Background Briefing has documents which show that some people connected with the project disagreed, and thought there wasn’t enough supervision of GHD by the Department. Alan Parkinson is one of them. He has important background detail on the origins of the ISV deal between GHD and the Department. Between 7th November and the 2nd December, 1997, there were three secret meetings between GHD and the Department. Background Briefing has a copy of the official ‘talking points’ for two of these meetings which confirm that the main topic of discussion was the project management of the ISV contract with Geosafe. Neither Geosafe nor Alan Parkinson, as the Department’s representative with GHD and Geosafe, were told about or invited to these meetings. Alan Parkinson.

Alan Parkinson: I found it astonishing that since I was the Department’s representative on both contracts, I should have been excluded from a meeting which was to discuss the future of both of those contracts. I found that quite astonishing. The people from the Department who attended the meeting had no project experience, little knowledge of the project, none at all of ISV. They had no experience in conducting these negotiations and no experience dealing with contractors. I found out about the meeting quite by accident, and I did ask why was I excluded, and the response was, You’re only an adviser, we don’t need to seek your advice if we don’t wish to.

Gregg Borschmann: If Alan Parkinson was astonished, Leo Thompson from Geosafe was equally amazed and upset when he was officially informed of the proposal on 19th November. This was the day the Department’s letter of invitation went to GHD. Thompson faxed a reply to the Department the next day. Here is a reading from that letter.

Reader: It is very surprising and disturbing that you would consider taking such action without first consulting with me. If you have concerns about how the ISV project is progressing, or being managed, I expect you to bring these concerns to my attention so that I can work to resolve them. Your proposal raises for Geosafe some very serious legal and commercial issues.

Gregg Borschmann: Why didn’t the Department discuss such a major change to arrangements with Geosafe before inviting GHD, and only GHD, to submit the proposal to project manage the ISV contract? From the time of that crucial meeting on 7th November, between GHD and the Department, it was clear that the deal was heading for conclusion. This was 12 days before GHD were officially invited to submit their proposal. This is confirmed by a hand-written note penned by a senior departmental officer on the official ‘talking points’ for that meeting. The officer notes, ‘I am inclined to support GHD assuming project management of the Geosafe contract.’ Out at Maralinga a few weeks later, in November, 1997, Alan Parkinson was left in no doubt which way things were going to go. There had been another discreet meeting between the Department of Primary Industry and Energy, or DPIE as it was then known, and GHD. Here is a reading from an email written by Alan Parkinson to the MARTAC advisory committee to explain his version of events.

Reader: A few days later, on the 26th November, there was another secret meeting held at site between DPIE and GHD, attended by Messrs Rawson and Perkins from DPIE, and Rosenbauer, Chamberlain and Ryan from GHD. Again I was excluded, even though I was on site and available to attend. As I drove Messrs Rawson, Perkins and Rosenbauer to the airport next morning, 27th November, I asked how the meeting went. There was a very strained silence. But when we were standing in the airport apron, (CENSORED) came over to me, stood very close and in a threatening voice said, ‘It will come about’, meaning that GHD would take over.

Gregg Borschmann: Perhaps none of this would matter if the Maralinga clean[up was not ending under such a cloud. How good was the clean-up? How safe is Maralinga now? There are many insiders who say we will never know because of the way the job was finished. These are questions which weigh heavily on the Maralinga Tjarutja people. Barrister, Andrew Collett.

Andrew Collett: The community want the land back, but not to the extent of compromising their safety in the future. Obviously the community will be negotiating with the Commonwealth the basis of the hand-back of the land, and the community no doubt will want to be satisfied that any future problems will be remediated, not at a cost to Aboriginal people, before they are likely to take the land back.

Gregg Borschmann: As much as they want their land back, they must now make a tough choice about whether or not to accept it with all the uncertainties. It remains to be seen whether the Commonwealth and South Australian Governments will be prepared to give them the guarantees they will seek. Administrator for the Maralinga Tjarutja, Dr Archie Barton, the community itself and especially its elders, want to make sure that future generations don’t suffer the way the old people did.

Archie Barton: And I think they want to be pretty sure of getting the land back and they depend on good instruction from their advisers and that puts us in a very difficult decision because we have to be pretty sure of ourselves of accepting something and pass it on to those people. So we’re becoming the meat in the sandwich as advisers.

Gregg Borschmann: Making the choice very more difficult for the Tjarutja, just before we went to air, we hard about another significant and unexpected find of plutonium at Maralinga. There’s been no official announcement, but it begs the question, how many more hot spots are there? Background Briefing has evidence of several incidents that have been hushed up. We confirmed that in early 1998, a man who had worked on the project flew to Melbourne from Adelaide wearing a plutonium contaminated shirt. This was only discovered accidentally when the man was given his final routine lung monitor test in Melbourne. The authorities at the time admitted the event was of concern because control of safety procedures at Maralinga was, in their phrase, ‘lost’. But was the airline which flew the man to Melbourne notified? Were radiation control procedures at Maralinga revised or changed? No. One of the people we spoke to for this program said that is such an incident had occurred in America, there would have been a major investigation. That didn’t happen at Maralinga. After working on the project off and on for more than a decade, nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson says there’s key elements of the clean-up story which are yet to be unravelled, and important lessons to be learned for the future.

Alan Parkinson: It’s not up to me to say should there be any inquiry. It is funny that the people in the Senate seem to press for inquiries into all sorts of things, but something such as this, a nuclear waste repository in what is nothing more than a hole in the ground, certainly should have some assessment by politicians. When you consider that people who are in charge of this project are the same people who are responsible for a national nuclear waste repository, which will be used to dispose of far less hazardous waste than this, that they’re the people who could easily just say, ‘Well, just put a hole in the ground, throw it in’. That’s what we’ve done with the plutonium at Maralinga. And if the politicians have accepted that without any demurring, then why should we bother?

Gregg Borschmann: He remembers a comment in the early days of the project from one of the tenderers.

Alan Parkinson: One company, they had an American in their team, and he just said out of the blue, Of course, this won’t be the final clean-up at Maralinga. Now I agree with him, I don’t think it will be. I went out to Nevada test site in 1995, and the person who replaced me on MARTAC, Terry Vaith, was then the head of the test site, and on my return to Australia, he sent me an aerial photograph of the Nevada test site, and at the bottom was a little caption which said Old Test Sites Never Die.

Gregg Borschmann: Coordinating Producer, Linda McGinness; Research, Julie Browning; Technical operator, Anne Marie de Bettencor; Additional reporting, research and Japanese green tea, provided by Chris Bullock. Background Briefing’s Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett. I’m Gregg Borschmann.

Further information:

Senator Nick Minchin, Federal Minister for Industry, Science and Resources (Australia) responds to this Background Briefing program
http://www.isr.gov.au/media/2000/april/cmr153%2D00.doc

Background on the Maralinga clean-up courtesy of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (Australia)
http://www.isr.gov.au/media/2000/march/maralinga%5Fquestions.doc

Details of the Maralinga cleanup thus far from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (Australia)
http://www.isr.gov.au/media/2000/march/maralinga%5Fbooklet.doc

Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA)
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/

Relevant information and web links courtesy of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA)
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/sites.htm

Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (Australia)
http://www.dpie.gov.au

Australian Conservation Foundation
http://www.acfonline.org.au

Gutteridge Haskins & Davey Pty Ltd (GHD) (the company contracted to design and manage site rehabilitation at Maralinga)
http://www.ghd.com.au

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Exchange of letters in the Australian Financial Review

Australian Financial Review, letters, 16/8/02
I almost choked on my cereal hearing Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran describe the ‘clean-up’ of the Maralinga nuclear test site as ‘world’s best practice’ on ABC radio recently.
Thanks to nuclear engineer and Maralinga whistle-blower Alan Parkinson, we have a wealth of internal project information which clearly contradicts the minister’s claim. For example, a senior official in the regulatory agency, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, complained about ‘a host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups’ at the Maralinga clean-up site.
Likewise, project documents clearly and unequivocally demonstrate that vitrification of plutonium-contaminated debris was abandoned in favour of shallow burial as a cost-cutting measure. Vitrification was described as world’s best practice, then when that was abandoned as a cost-cutting measure, shallow burial was described as world’s best practice. Both cannot be true.
Sadly, this sort of Orwellian double-speak is also in evidence in relation to the federal government’s plan for a national nuclear dump at Woomera, South Australia.
Jim Green
Sydney, NSW

Australian Financial Review, letters, 19/8/02
Maralinga Clean-up Meets All Standards
The Maralinga project is one we can be proud of. This is the first time that a clean-up of a former test site on this scale has been completed anywhere in the world (“Double-speak on Maralinga clean-up”, AFR Letters, August 16). The program of remediation was developed and monitored by leading technical specialists and was consistent with guidelines produced by the International Atomic Energy Agency on the rehabilitation of contaminated sites. The clean-up of the main test sites at Maralinga was successfully completed in 2000 and the independent regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, has confirmed that the clean-up met the standards agreed to by the Commonwealth, South Australia and the traditional owners (Maralinga Tjarutja) at the start of the project.
Claims that the Government cut corners at Maralinga and abandoned the in situ vitrification process because of cost concerns are completely wrong. More than $108million was spent on site remediation and the Government at all times acted on expert scientific advice, achieving a world’s best-practice result.
The Government is adopting a similarly responsible approach to the establishment of a national repository for Australia’s low-level waste. The national repository represents the best long-term solution to the management of this material.
Peter McGauran, Federal Minister for Science
Canberra, ACT.

Australian Financial Review, letters, 20/8/02
Maralinga claims a fiction
The Minister for Science, Peter McGauran, continues the fiction that the treatment of plutonium-contaminated debris at Maralinga was not a cost cutting exercise. (“Maralinga clean-up meets all standards”, AFR Letters, August 9).
As the Commonwealth’s Representative from 1993 until January 1998, I oversaw the whole project. When the contaminated soil was removed in 1997 from around 21 pits, we found huge quantities of plutonium-contaminated debris only a few centimetres beneath the surface. There was some three times more debris than Britain had reported, so it would cost more to treat the pits by in situ vitrification (ISV). Towards the end of 1997, the department started to seek ways to reduce this cost.
At this time I was removed from the project for voicing my opposition to the way that the department proposed to manage the final phase. On my removal from the project I became an adviser to the Maralinga Tjarutja until I collaborated in the ABC Radio program Background Briefing in April 2000 exposing the shortcomings of the project.
Long before the ISV treatment started at site in May 1998, the department had asked their recently appointed project manager, GHD, a company which had no knowledge at all of the ISV process or equipment, to look at various options, which all included some simple burial of the debris. The project documents of the time show a distinct relationship between the options and cost. For example, one document states: “The recent consideration of alternative treatments for ISV for these outer pits has arisen as a result of the revised estimate for ISV being considerably above the project budget.” And this is not an isolated statement.
The Minister also echoes the so-called independent chief nuclear regulator with the ridiculous claim that the shallow burial of this plutonium-contaminated debris is “world’s best practice.” A discussion paper issued by McGauran’s own department says that such long-lived waste is not suitable for near-surface disposal, but that is exactly what has been done.
Alan Parkinson
Weetangera ACT

Australian Financial Review, letters, 20/8/02
Time for government to come clean on Maralinga
Science minister Peter McGauran makes some odd claims about the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ (AFR letters, August 19). He says the government relied on the advice of the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) – but that committee unanimously recommended vitrification of plutonium-contaminated debris, not shallow burial.
Worse still, the shallow burial took place in unlined trenches in totally unsuitable geology. MARTAC member Dr. Mike Costello said at a MARTAC meeting in August 1999: “I have experience with plutonium at Sellafield in the UK, there are much smaller quantities of plutonium there. The amounts varied, yet whilst minuscule, it had to be enclosed in concrete.”
The minister denies that vitrification was abandoned as a cost-cutting measure, but a written statement from MARTAC openly acknowledged that alternative treatments were considered because the debris pits were larger than expected and the cost of vitrification would therefore increase.
Shallow burial was not a superior option, or even an acceptable one, but it was cheaper.
As nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson said recently on ABC radio, “What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn’t be adopted on white-fellas land.”
The minister should stop revising history and organise another clean-up of Maralinga instead. His dissembling is an insult to all South Australians.
Jim Green
Sydney NSW

Australian Financial Review, letters, 21/8/02
Nuclear reaction
No doubt nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson’s critique of the ‘independent’ regulator’s role in the Maralinga debacle will draw a response from the ‘independent’ regulator himself, namely the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency’s John Loy (Marlainga claims a fiction, AFR Letters, August 20).
It is a matter of public record that Helen Garnett, head of the Lucas Heights nuclear agency, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), sat on the panel which interviewed applicants for the top job at ARPANSA. Moreover, six ex-ANSTO staff now work for the ‘independent’ regulator.
ARPANSA is also too close to government. For example, Loy said a new reactor would not be approved until “progress” was made on establishing a store for intermediate-level waste. The government’s one and only plan for this waste – co-location with a planned waste dump at Woomera – was abandoned in the face of public opposition, but Loy still approved a new reactor.
Bruce Thompson
Fitzroy Vic

Australian Financial Review, letters, 22/8/02
Maralinga clean-up exceeded the standards required
Nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson was the Commonwealth’s representative on the Maralinga project until January 1998 and has limited knowledge of the later stages of the project (“Maralinga claims a fiction”, AFR Letters, August 20).
His insistence that he oversaw the whole project and was thus privy to current views and opinions of the expert advisory committee is inaccurate.
It is outrageous to suggest that the in-situ vitrification (ISV) was dropped due to cost considerations, as Parkinson repeatedly insists. More than $108 million was spent on the remediation work and the technique was abandoned because of safety concerns.
The Government considered every option to ensure the safety of the Australian public and followed the advice of scientific experts who, unlike Parkinson, were monitoring the progress of the rehabilitation work and were involved with the project from start to finish.
The independent authority, ARPANSA, has confirmed that the clean-up met the standards agreed to at the start of the project by the Commonwealth, South Australia and the traditional owners.
Moreover, in 2000 they further advised the Government that the amount of plutonium buried at Maralinga was less than what was allowed for by the National Health and Medical Research Council’s “code of practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992)”.
The facts are that not only has the Government achieved all the objectives of the remediation work but that the end result exceeded the standards required.”
Peter McGauran, Federal Minister for Science
Canberra, ACT.

Australian Financial Review, letters, 23/8/02
Personal attacks unfair, Mr McGauran.
Science minister Peter McGauran resorts to ad hominem attacks regarding the clean-up of the Maralinga nuclear test site (“Maralinga clean-up exceeded the standards required”, AFR Letters, August 22). He falsely accuses nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson of misrepresenting his involvement in the project, but Parkinson accurately stated in his August 20 letter that: “As the Commonwealth’s Representative from 1993 until January 1998, I oversaw the whole project.”
A retraction and apology from the minister is in order.
The minister says it is “outrageous” to suggest that vitrification of plutonium-contaminated debris was abandoned in favour of shallow burial due to cost considerations. But project documentation repeatedly states otherwise, and both Parkinson and myself cited specific examples from the documentation in letters published in the Financial Review on August 20.
The minister’s claim that vitrification was abandoned because of safety concerns is a furphy – demonstrably so. See for example Parkinson’s article in the February edition of the journal Medicine and Global Survival.
The minister says the government followed expert advice. But who was following and who leading? ABC radio’s Background Briefing exposé (16/4/00) revealed that the head of the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee e-mailed a senior government official in late 1998 asking if the latter would “welcome” advice to abandon vitrification in favour of shallow burial. That is inconsistent with the role usually ascribed to independent expert committees – namely issuing advice on scientific criteria.
The minister refers to the 1992 NH&MRC Code of Practice, but this Code was of no relevance to Maralinga as its authors have indicated. Indeed McGauran’s predecessor Nick Minchin said in a 17/4/00 media release that: “The Government has always made clear that the Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992) does not formally apply to this clean up.”
Jim Green
Sydney NSW

Australian Financial Review, letters, 26/8/02
The Science Minister, Peter McGauran is again quite wrong in his statements concerning the decisions to abandon in situ vitrification (ISV) of debris pits at Maralinga (Maralinga clean-up exceeded the standards required, AFR 22 August 2002). He asserts that I was not privy to views and opinions concerning the later stages of the project.
I was fully involved in the project until January 1998, and by then the government was seeking ways to minimise the cost of treating the debris pits. From then until April 2000 I was an adviser to the Maralinga Tjarutja and so received all of the information provided to the South Australian government and the traditional owners. When I severed my connection with the project, the decisions first of all to limit the application of the ISV technology and then to abandon it had already been made.
So if I did not have all of the information which led to these awful decisions, then neither did the South Australian government nor the Maralinga Tjarutja.
The latter part of the Minister’s letter is so ridiculous that it beggars belief. When will the government stop referring to the “independent” regulator? When will they stop hiding behind a code that even they admit was not applicable? And when will they stop claiming that the project exceeded the standards, when they know that the regulator granted concessions because some parts of the clean-up did not meet the criteria?
Alan Parkinson
Weetangera ACT

Nuclear regulator ‘too close’ to ANSTO

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/07/07/3264086.htm
8 July 2011

A review of Australia’s nuclear industry regulator, ARPANSA, has found an improper relationship with the main agency it monitors.
The Health Department’s audit and fraud control branch has been investigating how ARPANSA handled allegations of safety breaches and bullying at the nation’s only nuclear reactor in Sydney. Whistleblowers had alleged ARPANSA was too close to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), which runs the Lucas Heights research facility.
The whistleblowers claimed that safety reports were being compromised.
The Health Department review also questioned ARPANSA’s impartiality.
Greens Senator Scott Ludlam told ABC1′s Lateline the review vindicates the whistleblowers.”The whistleblowers were right and the people who have been raising concerns about practices with these hazardous materials were right to raise their concerns,” he said. “It also tells us the regulator and the regulated were too close.”
The Federal Government is now reviewing ARPANSA’s regulatory powers, with Thursday’s report recommending they be strengthened if necessary.

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Nuclear regulator investigated over safety review

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/30/3178186.htm”>http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/30/3178186.htm
March 30, 2011

Australia’s nuclear industry regulator, ARPANSA, is under review over its handling of safety breaches at the nation’s only nuclear reactor.

Last year, ABC 1′s Lateline revealed allegations of serious safety and operational breaches at the Lucas Height’s reactor in Sydney, which were later backed up by Australia’s workplace regulator, COMCARE. A departmental investigation was launched by Science Minister Kim Carr last month, but now a party to that investigation – ARPANSA – is itself under review.
The Chief Auditor is investigating how ARPANSA handled the original allegations of safety breaches and bullying at the nuclear site.
ARPANSA last year released two conflicting reports on the claims at the Lucas Heights facility.

Read the full story here.

ARPANSA being investigated for “improper relationship” with nuclear agency

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Australian National Audit Office report

Click here to download this critical 2005 Australian National Audit Office report.

Australian National Audit Office, March 2, 2005, “Regulation of Commonwealth Radiation and Nuclear Activities: Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency”, Audit Report No.30 2004–05.

Some quotes from the ANAO report:

The Regulatory Branch’s operational objectives and activities are numerous, vary considerably in scope, are not prioritised, and are insufficiently specific to be clear or assessable.

ARPANSA has a risk management framework. Its risk profile focuses on risks to ARPANSA as an entity. It does not identify risks to key regulatory processes, such as unlicensed activity, or non-compliance by licence holders.

ARPANSA’s Chief Executive Instructions (CEIs) address management of the potential for conflict of interest between the regulatory function and other functions. However, overall management of conflict of interest is not sufficient to meet the requirements of the ARPANS Act and Regulations. … Potential areas of conflict of interest are not explicitly addressed or transparently managed.

ARPANSA has a documented process for recording and actioning complaints. However, the Regulatory Branch does not maintain a complaints register, as required.

The bulk of license assessments—some 75 per cent— were made without the support of robust, documented procedures. Assessments of applications were supported by draft procedures only, which staff were not required to follow.

ARPANSA advised that the effort spent on compliance monitoring is roughly proportional to the level of hazard. However, it does not have an overarching framework to articulate the role, or emphasis, for the various approaches to managing compliance. Nor does it have a strategy for identifying prohibited activity by nonlicensed entities.

ARPANSA does not monitor or assess the extent to which licensees meet reporting requirements. The ANAO found that there had been under-reporting by licence holders. For example, incidents or changes to inventories had sometimes not been reported within the time required, or not reported at all. As well, ARPANSA had not regularly received all annual reports required of licence holders.

ARPANSA has reported only one designated breach to Parliament. This is notwithstanding that there have been a number of instances where ARPANSA has detected non-compliance by licensees. For example, ARPANSA issued a direction to a licence holder to cease use of radiation equipment following a serious injury. The direction was later revoked. The incident was not classified as a breach, notwithstanding that it was acknowledged that safety management had been inadequate.

Overall audit conclusion

The ANAO concluded that improvements are required in the management of ARPANSA’s regulatory function. While initial under-resourcing impacted adversely on regulatory performance, ARPANSA’s systems and procedures are still not sufficiently mature to adequately support the cost-effective delivery of regulatory responsibilities.

In particular, deficiencies in planning, risk management and performance management limit ARPANSA’s ability to align its regulatory operations with risks, and to assess its regulatory effectiveness.

As well, procedures for licensing and monitoring of compliance have not been sufficient, particularly as a licence continues in force until it is cancelled or surrendered. Current arrangements do not adequately support the setting of fees in a user-pays environment, nor ARPANSA’s responsibilities for transparently managing the potential for conflict of interest.

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Nuke agency hit

Luke McIlveen, 4 March 2005, Herald Sun

AUSTRALIA’S nuclear facilities are poorly regulated and could pose a serious risk to public safety, an audit has found.

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency is supposed to protect the public from radiation produced by Government facilities — ranging from the Lucas Heights nuclear reactors to X-ray machines.

But the Commonwealth Auditor-General yesterday found the agency was in disarray, failing to keep track of safety breaches and handing out nuclear licences almost at will.

The blistering report surfaced as ARPANSA this week announced a team of international nuclear safety experts had begun reviewing Australia’s application for a licence to operate its new reactor at Lucas Heights.

The report found that on one occasion two workers at an unnamed Government facility were injured after being exposed to radiation.

An almost identical accident occurred at the same place six months earlier, prompting the agency to warn the facility.

Even then, the warning was withdrawn without explanation two days later and no official breach recorded.

Despite several nuclear threats to public safety, the Auditor-General found the agency had reported a problem to Parliament on only one occasion, breaching its own code of conduct.

“This is notwithstanding that there have been a number of instances where ARPANSA has detected non-compliance by licensees,” the report finds.

Agency inspectors often failed to report whether the facilities were in working order. “Some reports did not clearly state whether a licensee was, overall, in compliance with conditions of the licence,” the report says.

While safety measures on the front line were found to be well below standard, the report also found the agency was unable to keep track of nuclear licences.

Government departments are supposed to undergo a gruelling process before being allowed to work with radioactive material. But the report says: “The bulk of licence assessments — some 75 per cent — were made without the support of robust, documented procedures.”

The report also says “deficiencies in planning, risk management and performance management limit ARPANSA’s ability to align its regulatory operations with risks, and to assess its regulatory effectiveness”.

While departments were supposed to pay hefty licence fees, the report found fees were not charged in 60 per cent of cases.

The Auditor-General made 19 recommendations for improvements, which the agency promised to introduce.

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ARPANSA: our independent nuclear regulator … or ANSTO’s puppet?

Written c2002 – a summary of the formation of ARPANSA

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) was established in 1999 under the provisions of the ARPANS Act.

Ostensibly ARPANSA is meant to regulate Commonwealth nuclear activities. In reality, the establishment of ARPANSA was fast-tracked by the federal Coalition Government in order to facilitate the expansion of the nuclear industry. A partner in the Freehill Hollingdale and Page legal firm told Business Review Weekly (March 15, 1999) that establishing ARPANSA was a ‘critical aspect’ of the Government’s desire to ‘enliven activity and debate in the area of atomic energy and nuclear waste’.

Most importantly, ARPANSA was established to massage through the construction of a new reactor at Lucas Heights, following the scathing comments made by the 1993 Research Reactor Review (McKinnon report) on the nature of the ‘regulation’ of ANSTO.

Reflecting the importance of the debate over a new reactor, and the fear that a genuine independent regulator would stop the project, the Government allowed Helen Garnett, then Executive Director of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), to sit on the three-member panel which interviewed applicants for the position of CEO of ARPANSA. Helen Garnett agreed to involve herself in this scandalous process for selecting the ‘independent’ regulator. Interestingly, when asked to justify this cosy arrangement at a public meeting in March, 1999, ANSTO’s then Communications Manager could only say that he thought it was indefensible.

It will come as no surprise that the successful applicant for the position of CEO of ARPANSA, John Loy, has expressed no concern at the circumstances of his appointment. Who will protect the independent regulator’s independence if the independent regulator does not? Worse still, Dr. Loy was appointed even before the ARPANS legislation was enacted.

It is understood that the original ARPANS Bill had ARPANSA headed by a Board, which would have included a representative of the public. However, That model was scrapped in favour of a single person answerable to the Minister and appointed on Helen Garnettπs advice.

ARPANSA’s independence is further undermined by the employment of six former ANSTO staff in ARPANSA’s Regulatory Branch. The Government has ignored a hard-won provision in the ARPANSA Act for a representative of the general public to be appointed to the ARPANSA Council. The position remains vacant. The federal government, without explanation has rejected several candidates. ARPANSA has done little if anything to speed this process.

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Submission to Australian National Audit Office

Jim Green, Friends of the Earth, Australia, April 2004

Introduction

The following acts of Parliament were proclaimed on 5th February 1999 and are now in operation:

* Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act No. 133, 1998 (the Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament on 10th December 1998).

* Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (Licence Charges) Act No. 134, 1998.

* Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (Consequential Amendments) Act No. 135, 1998.

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) also operates under the provisions of the ARPANS Regulations 1999.

The object of the ARPANS Act is “to protect the health and safety of people, and to protect the environment, from the harmful effects of radiation”. The Act provides a framework for the regulation of radiation sources and nuclear and other facilities controlled or operated by Commonwealth agencies. The Act is administered and enforced by a statutory office holder – the Chief Executive Officer of ARPANSA – as part of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care.

In addition to regulating facilities and sources of radiation owned or operated by Australian Commonwealth departments and bodies, ARPANSA is expected to:

* promote uniformity of radiation protection and nuclear safety policy and practices across the Commonwealth, States and Territories;

* provide advice on radiation protection, nuclear safety and related issues;

* undertake research in relation to radiation protection, nuclear safety and medical exposures to radiation; and

* provide services in relation to radiation protection, nuclear safety and medical exposures to radiation.

The ARPANS Act applies to “controlled persons” (generally Commonwealth agencies or contractors) who undertake activities in relation to nuclear installations or prescribed radiation facilities and dealings with controlled material or controlled apparatus. (Non-Commonwealth agencies are regulated by applicable State or Territory radiation protection and environment legislation.)

The ARPANS Act 1998 requires the CEO to take the following matters into account when assessing licence applications:

a) Whether the application includes the information asked for by the CEO.

b) Whether the information establishes that the controlled apparatus, material or the conduct can be dealt with without undue risk to the health and safety of people, and the environment.

c) Whether the Applicant has shown that there is a net benefit from dealing with the controlled apparatus, controlled material or controlled facility.

d) Whether the Applicant has shown that the magnitude of individual doses, the number of people exposed and the likelihood that potential exposures will actually occur is as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA), having regard to economic and social factors;

e) Whether the Applicant has shown a capacity for complying with these Regulations and the licence conditions that would be imposed under Section 35 of the Act. Please refer to the Source Licence Application Pack and the facility Licence Application Pack for more detail regarding how to apply for a licence.

f) Whether the application has been signed by the applicant.

Flaws in the ARPANS Legislation

A number of criticisms of the ARPANS Bill were made in a June 1998 paper by lawyer Tim Robertson (from Frederick Jordan Chambers) prepared for the Sutherland Shire Council, e.g.:

* the Bill did not answer site-specific questions concerning the immunity of the ANSTO site from State environment, health and safety laws.

* the regulatory framework which the Bill established was not accountable, transparent, or fully independent.

* all regulatory functions are vested in the CEO not the Agency.

* the Bill provided wide exemptions for anything done for national security or defence purposes in relation to nuclear material or installations. Amorphous concepts such as reasonable likelihood of prejudice to national security or defence are the basis for refusing to abide by the CEO’s direction or licence:

“… ANSTO can simply refuse to obey any directive of the CEO and any condition of a facility licence because it holds to the belief that to obey may be prejudicial to national security and defence.”

The ARPANS Act contains all the flaws identified in the ARPANS Bill by Mr. Robertson.

There are a number of other flaws in the ARPANSA Act, e.g.:

* only the applicant can challenge a licence decision. Applicants can challenge decisions from the CEO of ARPANSA to reject a licence application, to impose conditions on a licence, to suspend, cancel or amend a licence, or to refuse to approve the surrender of a licence. Appeals are lodged with the Minister who is empowered by the ARPANS Act to override decisions made by the CEO of ARPANSA. Applications may be made to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for review of a decision of the Minister to confirm vary or set aside the licence decision.

* there is provision in the legislation for a representative of a licensed agency to play a role in the selection of the CEO of ARPANSA (hence Helen Garnett’s inclusion on the panel which interviewed applicants for the ARPANSA CEO job).

* provisions for meaningful public consultation are lacking in the legislation.

* Section 83 of the ARPANS Act allows for a law of a State or Territory to be prescribed such that it does not apply to the activities of controlled persons under the Act. In other words, the ARPANS Act can be used to override state/territory legislation prohibiting legislation, such as the South Australian Parliament’s legislated prohibitions on the establishment of a national radioactive waste repository, or a national long-lived intermediate-level waste store, being sited in SA.

Senate Select Committee Recommendations

The 2001 Report of the Senate Select Committee for an Inquiry into the Contract for a New Reactor stated:

10.1 The Committee finds that the provisions for public consultation in the ARPANS Act leave many questions unanswered. Although the present CEO, Dr John Loy, has indicated that he intends to follow a comprehensive process of public consultation, the Committee is uneasy that this is left to the judgement of the CEO rather than being legislatively guaranteed. The Committee would like to see the requirement for public consultation strengthened and made explicit in legislation and the process clearly defined.

10.2 The Committee notes that there is currently a review of the ARPANS legislation being conducted as part of the National Competition Policy. This will deal with a number of matters outside the scope of this inquiry, including the continuing problems of variations between the states on nuclear regulatory matters. However this review could raise significant issues of relevance to the current inquiry and there is a need to ensure the ARPANS legislation review is completed before any further commitments are made about the proposed new reactor at Lucas Heights.

10.3 In relation to the new research reactor project, the Committee understands that the licensing process will probably be well under way before any such changes to the legislation could be put in place. Further, it notes Dr Loy’s commitment to extensive public consultation.

Recommendation

Nonetheless, the Committee recommends that, if the new research reactor project is to go ahead, the Government put in place a number of mechanisms to ensure that full and thorough public scrutiny of the proposal takes place during the licensing process. This is to ensure, to the greatest extent practicable, that the construction and operation of the proposed reactor would not adversely affect the health of the community or damage the environment. At a minimum, these mechanisms must include: publication of all submissions made to ARPANSA; publication of ARPANSA’s responses to concerns raised in these submissions, detailing in what way those concerns have affected the CEO’s decision; release of the full details of the design and the construction contract except for those items which are determined as truly commercial-in-confidence.

10.4 The Committee is of the opinion that the licence applications for the new reactor should be subject to a similar process of judicial public hearings as occurs in the United States. This will ensure world’s best practice and allow for greater public involvement.

Recommendation

Given that there are doubts about privilege and the powers of such an inquiry to obtain documents because the ARPANS Act is silent on these issues, the Committee recommends that the Government appoint a panel including the CEO of ARPANSA under other legislative powers to conduct the inquiry.

Recommendation

The Committee further recommends that, in the longer term, the Government undertake a public review of the kinds of public consultation process required in other jurisdictions and in relation to other proposals with public health and environmental implications. The object of such a review should be to determine best practice and to amend the ARPANS Act accordingly.

Non-independence of ARPANSA

A draft ARPANS Bill had ARPANSA headed by a Board. That model was scrapped in favour of a single person – the CEO of ARPANSA – answerable to the Minister. The current CEO, John Loy, accepted the position of Acting CEO before ARPANSA was even established by law – the original notion of having a Board had been dismissed by the government prior to parliamentary discussion on the proposed legislation.

The federal government undermined ARPANSA’s independence by allowing the then Chief Executive of ANSTO, Helen Garnett, to sit on panel which interviewed applicants for the position of CEO of ARPANSA. Asked to comment on Garnett’s role in the appointment of the CEO of ARPANSA during the Senate Select Committee’s Inquiry into the Contract for a New Reactor, ANSTO’s response was: “ANSTO does not see what relevance this question has to the Committee’s terms of reference.” (ANSTO, submission to the Senate Select Committee, 2000.) However, when asked to comment on that process at a public meeting in March 1999, ANSTO’s then Communications Manager John Mulcair said he thought Garnett’s involvement was indefensible.

ARPANSA’s independence is also compromised by the employment of approximately six ex-ANSTO staff members in ARPANSA’s Regulatory Branch.

Council & Committees

The legislation provides that that the Radiation Health and Safety Advisory Council, the Nuclear Safety Committee, and the Radiation Health Committee include a person to represent the interests of the general public. However, the Government ignored a hard-won provision in the ARPANS Act for a representative of the general public to be appointed to the Radiation Health and Safety Advisory Council by leaving the position unfilled for a lengthy period of time.

The Nuclear Safety Committee must include a person to represent the local government or the local administration of an area affected by a matter related to the safety of a controlled facility. Was that provision scrapped??

Maralinga ‘clean-up’

ARPANSA’s 29/2/00 letter to Senator Minchin, the Minister for Industry, Science and Resources regarding the Maralinga rehabilitation, said, “ARPANSA also certifies that the burial trenches at Taranaki, TM 100/101 and Wewak have been constructed consistent with the national Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste.” It was well known to ARPANSA that the 1992 NH&MRC Code of Practice did not apply to the Maralinga rehabilitation – in the jargon the rehabilitation was an ‘intervention’ not a ‘practice’. The authors of the NH&MRC Code stated that the Code was not applicable to a situation such as that which prevailed at Maralinga. Yet the irrelevance of the NH&MRC Code has never once been acknowledged by ARPANSA. By contrast, Senator Minchin belatedly acknowledged in a 17/4/00 media release that “… the Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992) does not formally apply to this clean up.” Leaked minutes from a Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee meeting quoted a senior officer from ARPANSA saying it was not necessary to meet the letter of the NH&MRC Code since it was not meant to apply to situations such as the Maralinga rehabilitation (ABC Radio National, Background Briefing, April 16, 2000, <www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s120383.htm>)

Dr Loy said in an April 17, 2000 media release that the Maralinga clean-up was “world best practice” although it was clearly short of “world best practice”; for example shallow burial of plutonium in unlined trenches certainly would not be tolerated in the UK. ARPANSA officials made suggestions about options for managing contaminated debris – such as encasement with concrete – which were simply dropped when the Department and its consultants proposed cheaper, inferior options. The contaminated debris has been buried just a few metres below grade in an unlined trench. (Alan Parkinson, DEST National Radioactive Waste Repository – A Second Round Submission to ARPANSA, 25/2/04; see also Alan Parkinson, “Maralinga: The Clean-Up of a Nuclear Test Site”, Medicine and Global Survival, Volume 7, Number 2, February 2002, <www.ippnw.org/MGS>.)

In the 1990s the Australian Radiation Laboratory was contracted to provide services to the Department of Primary Industries and Energy for the Maralinga clean-up. That contract was taken over by the Environmental and Radiation Health Branch of ARPANSA when ARL was merged into the newly-formed ARPANSA in the late-1990s. Yet ARPANSA also had regulatory responsibilities. (Issue of a Facility Licence for the Maralinga Rehabilitation Program, Statement by the CEO of ARPANSA, 30/10/2000, <www.health.gov.au:80/arpansa/mar_stmt.htm>.)

ARPANSA rarely had personnel on-site at Maralinga and thus its first-hand knowledge of the rehabilitation project was limited as was its capacity to regulate the project.

Nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson wrote in his submission to the Senate Select Committee for an Inquiry into the Contract for a New Reactor at Lucas Heights (September 2000) that “The newly formed Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) also has not performed particularly well in its first major assignment – the Maralinga project. Unless their performance as regulators improves, then the new reactor project will be a trail of compromises as is the case on the Maralinga project.”

ANSTO Licensing

ARPANSA originally intended to licence all of ANSTO’s nuclear facilities simultaneously. The process was so problematic that eventually it was abandoned in favour of a staged licensing process. Jean McSorley, then representing the interests of the public on ARPANSA’s Nuclear Safety Committee, argued:

The credibility of ARPANSA, particularly in relation to its regulation of ANSTO, has been further strained since early 1999 because of the way in which ARPANSA had handled the licensing process. In early 1999, ANSTO was keen to start the licensing process for the new reactor. A major issue for the public, however, was that the existing facilities had not yet been licensed. In April 1999, however, ANSTO submitted its first licence application – to prepare a site for the new reactor. Under the terms of the licensing process the licence for the new reactor had to establish the suitability of the site for where it would be built. How could ARPANSA and the public assess the suitability of the site for the new reactor, if the current facilities and arrangements had not been fully assessed?

When the above point was put to ARPANSA the reply was that it has accepted the licence application from ANSTO, as it was the first application it (ANSTO) had submitted. So much for ARPANSA being a regulatory agency. Surely it should have directed ANSTO to put the licence to prepare a site in context – that context would have meant delaying the licence application until the existing facilities had been thoroughly examined.

This is one example of where ARPANSA appears to the working to ANSTO’s timetable, rather than setting the agenda itself. Moreover, despite the best intentions of some parts of the Agency, it is basing its decisions on what it knows of ANSTO, of its “understanding” of what happens on site. This ‘understanding’ comes from people who were members of the Nuclear Safety Bureau, as well as former ANSTO staff who now work for ARPANSA. This is not quite as sinister as it might appear, but it this close relationship inevitably means that there is a lack of transparency because ARPANSA and ANSTO are working on an unwritten ‘understanding’ rather than due and open processes in which all salient points are raised for examination.

(Jean McSorley, Supplementary submission to the Senate Select Committee for an Inquiry into the Contract for a New Reactor at Lucas Heights: Comments on the role of Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) and the new reactor, 7/10/00.)

ARPANSA’s handling of ANSTO’s application for a licence to prepare a site for a new reactor was also problematic, e.g.:

* ARPANSA’s advertising of ANSTO’s application was extremely limited;

* the time allowed for public comment was insufficient;

* many were excluded from the process because they could not access a hard copy of the ANSTO application (and related documents) nor could they access the information via the Internet;

* ARPANSA failed to address some issues raised in public submissions, while other issues were dealt with in a cursory manner. ARPANSA allowed ANSTO to apply for a licence to prepare a site for a new reactor even though existing facilities had not been licensed.

Those and other problems have been evident in relation to ARPANSA’s handling of other licence applications.

ARPANSA has unnecessarily and unjustifiably limited the scope of its licence application assessments. For example ARPANSA sidestepped the crucial issue of liability and insurance arrangements (or the lack of them) when assessing ANSTO’s application for a licence to prepare a site for a new reactor at Lucas Heights. ARPANSA simply asserted in its Safety Evaluation Report that liability and insurance arrangements fell outside the scope of its assessment.

Waste/Reactor Linkages

Dr Loy repeatedly stated that a reactor construction licence would not be granted unless progress was made towards the establishment of a store for long-lived intermediate-level waste (LLILW):

* Dr. Loy is quoted in the 3/8/00 St George and Sutherland Shire Leader saying: “… by the time a licence to construct is applied for … the store would need to be pretty well on track so we would have confidence that it would be located and built by that time. … Just kind of saying, ‘we are going to have a store but we do not know where or when, but don’t you worry about that’, would not be good enough.”

* “I have said … that at the construction stage I would want to see progress towards a store. … Should it proceed and go to a commissioning time, I would want to be very much assured that there would be a store.” (Dr. Loy in evidence to the Senate Select Committee for an Inquiry into the Contract for a New Reactor, Canberra, 9/2/01, p.553 of transcripts.)

The government’s one and only plan for an above-ground store for LLILW was co-location of the store adjacent to the planned underground dump for lower-level wastes near Woomera in South Australia. Co-location was the “first siting option” identified by the Consultative Committee of Commonwealth and State Officials in 1997.

The intention to co-locate the store with the dump influenced Dr. Loy’s decision to grant a licence to prepare a site for a new reactor: “It is true that the waste repository proposal is still in the development stage, that the long-lived intermediate level waste storage facility is yet to be definitely planned and no decisions have been taken on final disposal of long-lived intermediate level waste. There are significant environmental, social and political issues that will need to be dealt with for these plans to come to fruition. The question for me in this application is whether, at least in principle, I could see that there was sufficient commitment to the current plan and the general availability of alternative approaches so as to be confident that a way through would be found in a reasonable timescale. I took into account that there is clear progress on the siting of a low level waste repository and a Government commitment to examine co-locating a store for long-lived intermediate level waste in association with the repository.” (CEO of ARPANSA, 22/9/99, Issue of a Licence to ANSTO to Prepare a Site for Replacement Research Reactor Facility.)

However, by the time Dr. Loy came to consider ANSTO’s application for a licence to construct a new reactor, the co-location plan had been abandoned by the federal government, and no alternative plan had been put in place. In a February 8, 2001 media release, then Minister for Industry, Science and Resources Senator Nick Minchin said:

* co-location of the LLILW store with the planned dump for lower-level wastes had been ruled out.

* the federal government would initiate a search on Commonwealth land for a site for a LLILW store and a National Store Advisory Committee had been established to identify potential sites.

The National Store Advisory Committee provided a report containing short-listed sites to the current science minister, Peter McGauran, in mid-2003 but the minister refuses to release either the report or the short-list of sites.

Dr. Loy breached his previous commitment by granting a reactor construction licence even though no progress had been made towards establishing a LLILW store.

Strangely, having cited co-location in support of his decision to grant a licence to prepare a site for a new reactor, Dr. Loy now has a very different view. For example at the February 26, 2004 forum regarding the planned dump, Dr. Loy said: “Co-location of the store I suspect ultimately might have been a political solution. The siting criteria, some of them are the same but many of them are very different in my view, and co-location was not necessarily ever a good idea.”

Dr. Loy has said that he will need to see progress on the establishment of a LLILW store before granting a licence to operate the new reactor (the application is expected to be lodged by ANSTO in late 2004):

* Dr. Loy said he would need to see “really clear progress” towards a LLILW store before issuing a reactor operating licence, “… my view is now that I wouldn’t issue such a licence if there weren’t substantial progress toward the store”. (ABC Radio National, Breakfast, 8/8/02).

* “I certainly don’t want to leave it until 2015 before a store exists, and I think it’s important as far as my licensing of the replacement reactor is concerned, that at the time we come to considering the license for its operation, I can be convinced that there will be a store. Not that it’s in existence, but the processes are sufficiently proceeding, and are leading to a result that will convince me that there will be a store at the time it’s needed.” (ABC Radio National, PM, 13/9/02).

* “You don’t necessarily have to have every loose end tied at the time of the operation license, but I have to be convinced that there will be a store.” (ABC Radio National, PM, 13/9/02).

* “The issue of the long term storage of the intermediate level waste arising from the processing of spent fuel is also debated. The Government is proceeding with the planning for a national intermediate level waste store – there is political controversy about this as illustrated by the passage of legislation in South Australia to prevent the store being sited in that State. I expect that political controversy to continue, but with careful discussion and consultation with potential communities that may host the store I have no reason to believe that one will not be established within the time scale required for management of the returning waste from the RRR, noting that the first waste would not be expected to be returned to Australia until the mid 2020s. Nonetheless, I am expecting that the matter will be pursued vigorously and that there will be significant progress by the time any licence to operate the RRR is sought. I will be writing to the Minister for Science advising him of this expectation.” (Statement by the CEO of ARPANSA, Dr John Loy – Licence to construct the Replacement Research Reactor, 5/4/02).

However Dr Loy has a track-record of breaching or revisiting and weakening similar commitments. Moreover Dr Loy has refused to specify what he means by progress – his statements have been so vague as to leave open the possibility of granting a reactor operating licence even if the government has yet to identify a site for a LLILW store let alone complete environmental approvals and complete other processes such as overriding state/territory legislation (all state governments are opposed to hosting a LLILW store, and SA and WA have legislated to ban it).

More on the reactor/waste issues:

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

ARPANSA CEO Ignores ARPANSA’s Nuclear Safety Committee

Dr. Loy ignored a number of recommendations contained in a February 2002 report by ARPANSA’s Nuclear Safety Committee (<www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/rrrp/nsc150302.pdf>). In particular, Dr. Loy ignored the recommendations that contingency plans for the management of radioactive waste generated at Lucas Heights be prepared by ANSTO and submitted to ARPANSA prior to the granting of a reactor construction licence. No such contingency plans were prepared either before or after the granting of the licence. Specifically, Dr. Loy ignored these recommendations from the Nuclear Safety Committee:

* “A contingency plan for additional spent fuel storage arrangements and/or spent fuel conditioning in Australia should be submitted to ARPANSA by ANSTO as part of its conditions of licence to construct the RRR [Replacement Research Reactor]. The Applicant should demonstrate a ‘fall-back’ position which is feasible, practical and socially and politically acceptable in case the international options are not available.”

* “That ANSTO submit a workable contingency plan for the management of Lucas Heights-generated wastes, before a licence is issued to construct the RRR. The nature of such plans should inform the conditions of the construction licence. This contingency plan should contain provisional information about alternate arrangements to the proposals for a national repository and national store currently under discussion.”

Final disposal of LLILW

The September 1999 Safety Evaluation Report of ARPANSA’s Regulatory Branch said: “A licence to operate the reactor would not be issued by ARPANSA without there being clear and definite means available for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.”

However, there remain many obstacles to the interim storage of long-lived intermediate-level waste and no progress whatsoever has been made in relation to final disposal of LLILW.

Senate Community Affairs Committee – Minority Report

The following minority report by Senator Dee Margetts (The Greens (WA)) and Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja (Australian Democrats) was included in the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Report on the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Bill 1998 and Related Legislation, tabled in December 1998 and available at: <www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/clac_ctte/radiation/report/index.htm>

Preface

The introduction of legislation providing for the protection of the Australian community from the adverse effects of radiation and for the safety of Australians who deal with radioactive materials is extremely important. Too important to be allowed to go through Parliament without the opportunity for the Australian community to register its concerns about the regulatory regime which we will have to rely onto protect us from hazards which have the potential to remain with us for an indefinite period of time.

For that reason, this committee was called at Senator Margetts’ instigation and, as predicted, heard a range of concerns expressed. Many of those concerns have the potential to be addressed by way of amendment to the legislation and the hearing has clarified the issues, providing a way forward to strengthen the protection provided by the Bill.

A number of community groups expressed concern about how much of the framework of nuclear regulation is to be contained in regulation rather than in the legislation itself.

The Government, however, is to be commended for going some way towards meeting those concerns and particularly for allowing a period of open public consultation on the Regulations which are so important to the effective functioning of ARPANSA as a regulatory body.

It does not, however go far enough and concerns remain which are outlined in this report.

The Issues

One of the key concerns raised by several parties to the hearing and others who made written submissions is the fundamental issue of whether there is such a thing as a safe level of exposure to radiation.

It is the view of the minority report that there is no safe level of exposure and to legislate to allow any increase in the radiation to which any Australians are exposed is fundamentally flawed. Even following the presentations by ARPANSA and ANSTO, concern remains about the allowable exposure to radiation. A particular concern is the power of the CEO to grant exemptions which could see workers exposed to higher doses of radiation than otherwise allowed. The aim should be to have exposure as close to zero as is technically possible and there should not be power to grant exemptions.

The standard in the legislation, purports to be ‘World’s Best Practice’. Whilst this should mean ‘As low as technically achievable’ (ALATA), the standard in this legislation is set ‘As low as reasonably achievable’. If this is ‘world’s best practice’, it is not good enough, especially when we know that better standards ARE achievable elsewhere. World’s best practice does not equate to IAEA acceptable levels. Standards are constantly under review and technological developments are taking place, but ‘best practice’ in the nuclear industry is constrained by economic forces which should not be the primary concern in a Bill to protect Australians from radiation and provide for nuclear safety.

The precautionary principle MUST be the most important consideration where nuclear health and safety issues are concerned. For this reason, we will seek to delete the threat of imprisonment for ARPANSA inspectors making a false or misleading statement in a warrant. Criminal law should quite adequately deal with criminal fraud, should that be a problem. Including threats of imprisonment in this way in this legislation could be seen as intimidatory – and not necessarily in the best interests of the community.

Despite our stated problems with the use of the term ‘world’s best practice’, the inclusion of a requirement for the CEO to have regard to ‘world’s best practice’ when issuing licences is an improvement on the original Bill.

For the regulatory authority set up under this legislation to have the confidence of the Australian community, it must clearly be independent of the Government of the day and be responsible to Parliament. The regulatory authority (the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency) falls some way short of this standard because it is not an independent statutory authority. We are pleased, however, to see that the Government has now agreed that the CEO have direct power over the staffing of ARPANSA.

The recommendation to exclude nuclear power reactors from the legislation is an improvement in accountability. The Greens and Australian Democrats, however, are concerned that licenses for ‘a nuclear fuel fabrication plant’, ‘an enrichment facility’ ‘a fuel storage facility’ and ‘a reprocessing facility’ remain possible under this legislation, albeit with the approval of the CEO. These activities should either be specifically prohibited under this legislation, or at the least, should not be able to take place without full and separate Parliamentary scrutiny.

Separate approval should also be obtained for ANY other new facilities, such as a spent fuel conditioning plant, a nuclear waste disposal facility, a waste storage facility or an isotope production facility. It should be noted however that any proposal for such a facility would itself be of great concern to The Greens.

If our concerns regarding scrutiny of any proposal for any new nuclear facility are not satisfactorily addressed, we will seek to amend the definition of ‘nuclear installation’ to delete reference to any nuclear installation which does not currently exist.

Major nuclear installations require much greater prior scrutiny than is envisaged in the Bill. In particular there must be a comprehensive public inquiry into and Parliamentary scrutiny of the question of whether there is a need for the installation before the process even gets to the stage of an impact statement or an inquiry into the proposal itself.

No licence proposal should be considered until a public, open inquiry into the need for the installation and an impact assessment process have been completed. An amendment to achieve that end will be moved in the Committee stage of the Bill.

The proposed government amendment to give public notice of the licensing of a nuclear installation is grossly inadequate. The whole process must be open to public participation and this should be reflected in the Regulations.

There is no reference in the Bill to the regulation of, or setting of standards in the uranium mining industry, yet codes of practice in the industry were covered by the Environment Protection (Nuclear Codes) Act which is repealed by a Consequential Amendments Bill. It is desirable for the Commonwealth to have oversight of such standards and for there to be an open public process for the ongoing development and improvement of the Codes. The Bill is silent on this question.

We commend the Government on clarifying the situation regarding existing codes and development of improved codes by agreeing to have the current requirements of the Environment Protection (Nuclear Codes) Act included in the Regulations.

The only role for the community in this Bill is a purely advisory one and even there it is a role severely constrained by the legislation. A further amendment is required for protection from prosecution for Committee or Council members who make public any information or concerns they may have about radiation protection or nuclear safety.

We commend the introduction of conflict of interest provisions for Committee and Council members in the Regulations and would like to see that extended to include a register of financial interests.

There is clearly a need for the strengthening of reporting requirements throughout the Bill. We are particularly concerned that the CEO’s functions include the monitoring and reporting on the operations of the Agency and it’s advisory bodies, and it is pleasing to see that the Government will be moving appropriate amendments in this regard.

In summary, whilst the Greens (WA) and Australian Democrats are pleased that the Government has made some concessions to acknowledge community concerns about this Bill, we feel that further amendments are required to ensure adequate protection for the community from the dangers of radiation and nuclear activities.

Senator Dee Margetts, The Greens (WA)

Senator Natasha Stott Despoja , Australian Democrats, South Australia

Once you’ve selected a site and wind direction, click on the place marker for information on resettlement and radiological control zones.

This interactive map is designed to illustrate two key points about nuclear power plant accidents.

1. Nuclear accidents can spread radioactive fallout over a very large area.
2. The radioactive fallout pattern can be very random − it depends on prevailing weather patterns and topology. You might be reasonably close to a nuclear accident and be largely unaffected … or you might live a long way away but suffer much greater impacts because of local weather patterns.

The sites listed in the map are potential nuclear power sites in Australia, as discussed in a 2007 report by The Australia Institute: Andrew Macintosh, 2007, “Siting Nuclear Power Plants in Australia Where would they go?”, Web Paper No. 40.

The map makes no allowance for local weather conditions, topology etc. at the Australian sites. The fallout map is taken directly from the Chernobyl disaster. We would like to be able to produce an interactive map which takes account of local weather conditions and topology, but do not have the resources to carry out that work.

For modern reactors, the likelihood of an accident resulting in radioactive fallout dispersion as widespread as Chernobyl is small. However, risk assessment needs to consider both the frequency and the impacts of accidents – and for nuclear power plants, the frequency of catastrophic accidents is low but the impacts of accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima is extremely high. A 2003 MIT study, The Future of Nuclear Power, assessed the probability of serious reactor accidents in a scenario where the number of nuclear power reactors worldwide tripled by 2055. The MIT report found that “both the historical and the [risk assessment] data show an unacceptable accident frequency.”

In addition to accidents, we need to consider the potential for attacks on nuclear plants. A 2004 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that a major terrorist attack on the Indian Point reactor in the US could result in as many as 44,000 near-term deaths from acute radiation syndrome and as many as 518,000 long-term deaths from cancer among individuals within 50 miles of the plant.

There is a long history of conventional military strikes on ostensibly peaceful nuclear plants in the Middle East, driven by proliferation fears. Examples include the destruction of reactors in Iraq by Israel and the US and Israel’s bombing of a suspected nuclear reactor site in Syria in 2007. If we extend that line of thought, what happens when two nuclear-powered nations go to war? Will they shut down their power reactors and go without electricity, or take the risk of a catastrophe initiated by missile strikes?

In addition to the accidents at Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, there have been partial core meltdowns in the reactors powering a number of Soviet/Russian submarines and at the following experimental / research reactors:

• NRX (military), Ontario, Canada, in 1952
• EBR-I (military), Idaho, USA, in 1955
• Windscale (military), Sellafield, England, in 1957
• Santa Susana Field Laboratory (military), Simi Hills, California, in 1959
• SL-1, Idaho, USA in 1961. (US military)
• Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station (civil), Newport, Michigan, USA, in 1966
• Chapelcross, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, in 1967
• Lucens reactor, Switzerland, in 1969
• A1 plant at Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia in 1977. 25% of the fuel elements in a heavy water moderated carbon dioxide cooled 100 MW power reactor were damaged due to operator error.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown)

Thanks to Carlos Mali for his work on the interactive map. www.carloslabs.com

Monbiot goes nuclear: too much too soon

Jim Green, 25 March 2011, www.abc.net.au/unleashed/45612.html

Prominent British columnist George Monbiot announced in the UK Guardian on Monday that he now supports nuclear power. That isn’t a huge surprise. Having previously opposed nuclear power, he announced himself ‘nuclear-neutral’ in 2009.

As recently as last week, Monbiot declared himself neutral while saying that he would not oppose nuclear power if four conditions are met:

“1. Its total emissions – from mine to dump – are taken into account, and demonstrate that it is a genuinely low-carbon option.
2. We know exactly how and where the waste is to be buried.
3. We know how much this will cost and who will pay.
4. There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.”

Along with renewables, nuclear meets the first condition – it is a low-carbon energy source. The other three conditions have not been met. No country has established a burial site for high-level nuclear waste. There is no clarity as to how much waste disposal programs will cost nor who will pay. We do know that monitoring and management will be required for millenia. If the Roman Empire was fuelled by atomic energy, we’d still be looking after their waste.

Monbiot’s fourth condition has not been met – there is no meaningful legal guarantee against diversion of materials for weapons programs. Unless, that is, you count the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which actually enshrines the “inalienable right” of all signatory countries to the full suite of nuclear fuel cycle facilities including those that are most useful for weapons production.

So Monbiot’s position hasn’t changed as a result of his four conditions being met. Indeed there is no mention of them in his column on Monday. Instead, Monbiot has become a nuclear supporter as a result of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

He writes: “A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. … Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”

Monbiot is understating the radiological impacts of Fukushima and ignoring other serious impacts. Many, many thousands of people have received very small radiation doses as a result of Fukushima. For a tiny, unlucky percentage, that radiation exposure will prove to be fatal. Thus Monbiot’s claim that “no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation” does not stand up to scrutiny. We can be confident that the death toll from Fukushima will be far smaller than Chernobyl. Beyond that generalisation, it’s best not to speculate until data is available on collective human radiation exposure as a result of the crisis.

Monbiot ignores the impacts of Fukushima other than direct radiation exposure. These include restrictions on the consumption of food, water and milk; the expense and trauma of relocating 200,000 people; the very serious impacts of the nuclear crisis on the emergency response to the earthquake and tsunami; and big economic hits to the tourism industry and to agricultural industries.

Monbiot understates the impacts of nuclear power more generally. In terms of radiation releases and exposures, long-term exposure from uranium tailings dumps is estimated to be a much more significant source of exposure than routine reactor operations or reactor accidents. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plants have been another major source of radioactive pollution.

It is no small irony that nuclear power’s worldwide reputation has taken a huge battering from the Fukushima emergency while vastly greater radiological impacts from routine operations receive virtually no public attention.

Monbiot takes offence at ill-informed, moralistic objections to nuclear power. Fair enough. Yet two of the greatest objections to nuclear power both have a moral dimension − one because of its particularity, the other because of its generality.

The particular moral problem concerns the disproportionate impacts of the nuclear industry on indigenous peoples. The nuclear industry’s racism is grotesque. Regardless of all the other debates surrounding energy options, it’s difficult to see how this pervasive racism can be reduced to being just another input into a complex equation, and tolerated as a price that must be paid to keep the lights on.

The other major moral concern with nuclear power is its repeatedly-demonstrated connection to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As former US vice president Al Gore says: “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.”

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, indiscriminate and immoral of all weapons, and nuclear warfare has the capacity to directly cause catastrophic climate change by lifting thousands of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere. Thus nuclear weapons pose an an existential threat to humanity. This proliferation problem must weigh very heavily against nuclear power in comparative assessments of energy options.

Much of Monbiot’s March 21 column concerns the limitations of renewables. He’s right to point to the limitations and costs of renewables, not least because they are poorly understood. But instead of addressing serious clean energy proposals, Monbiot simply demolishes one particular branch of thinking – the argument that current electricity supply systems can be replaced with off-grid, small-scale distributed energy.

There is certainly a role for local energy production but no serious analysts argue that it can completely displace centralised production. Thus Monbiot is demolishing a straw man argument.

In Australia, a growing body of literature demonstrates how the systematic deployment of renewable energy sources, along with energy efficiency policies and technologies, can generate very large reductions in greenhouse emissions without recourse to nuclear power. These include reports produced by academics such as Hugh Saddler, Richard Denniss and Mark Diesendorf, and important contributions by the Australia Institute, engineer Peter Seligman, CSIRO scientist John Wright, Siemens Ltd., and the ‘Beyond Zero Emissions’ group among others.

Like it or not, the Fukushima disaster will put a significant dent in nuclear power expansion plans around the world. Fukushima will prove to be an even greater disaster if that energy gap is filled with fossil fuels. It is more important than ever to fight for the systematic, rapid deployment of existing, affordable clean energy solutions. And to insist on major R&D programs to expand the capabilities of renewables and to reduce the costs. And last but not least, to aggressively pursue the energy efficiency and conservation measures that can deliver the largest, cheapest, quickest cuts to greenhouse emissions.

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

 

US-led Global Nuclear Energy Partnership

Jim Green
National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia
jim.green@foe.org.au

2007

A lightly edited version of this paper is one of the EnergyScience Coalition fact sheets www.energyscience.org.au

INTRODUCTION

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is a set of proposals first advanced by United States’ President George W. Bush in February 2006. It envisages:
* the expansion of nuclear power in the US and globally;
* changes to international civil nuclear arrangements such that a limited number of ‘supplier’ nations would provide fuel services — supplying fresh fuel and recovering spent nuclear fuel for treatment and disposal — to ‘user’ nations; and
* a set of proposals with a domestic US focus, including reprocessing and the development of fast neutron reactors, aimed primarily at helping to resolve intractable waste management problems.

The domestic aspects of the GNEP have dominated the ongoing debate in the US and they are the focus of this paper.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) lists the following benefits of the GNEP <www.gnep.energy.gov>:
* providing energy “without generating carbon emissions or greenhouse gases”;
* recycling used nuclear fuel to minimise waste and reduce proliferation concerns;
* assuring maximum energy recovery from still-valuable used nuclear fuel.
* safely and securely allow developing nations to deploy nuclear power to meet energy needs; and
* reducing the number of required US geologic waste repositories to one for the remainder of this century.

The US proposes to recommence commercial processing, and to develop and build fast neutron reactors which would produce electricity and also convert long-lived radioactive wastes into relatively short-lived wastes (a process called transmutation).

A May 2006 report by the US House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Committee points to the lack of detail in GNEP proposals: “[T]he Committee has serious reservations about GNEP as proposed by the Administration. The overriding concern is simply that the Department of Energy has failed to provide sufficient detailed information to enable Congress to understand fully all aspects of this initiative, including the cost, schedule, technology development plan, and waste streams from GNEP.” (US House Committee, 2006.)

RADIOACTIVE WASTE

Establishing interim storage and permanent disposal facilities for nuclear waste has been a protracted and controversial issue in the US and it is a long way from resolution.

The waste management problems could jeopardise plans to build new reactors. The US House Committee (2006) questions whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would licence new reactors in the absence of a clear disposal path for spent fuel, and notes that DOE’s response is to seek legislation eliminating the availability of disposal space in a permanent repository as a consideration for the NRC in licensing new reactors. The Committee argues that attempting to “legislate away” the waste problem is not a responsible course of action.

The estimated opening date for the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada has been pushed back to 2017 — initially it was planned to be in operation in 1998. The US House Committee (2006) notes that DOE’s latest plan for Yucca Mountain envisages a license application for construction being filed in fiscal year 2008, construction starting three to four years later and disposal of commercial spent fuel sometime near the end of the next decade. This is a seven-year delay from the schedule just two years ago, the Committee notes. In other words, Yucca Mountain is not drawing closer but receding into the future!

Even if the Yucca Mountain repository is eventually opened, the current legal limit for the repository is insufficient for the total projected waste output of the current cohort of reactors operating in the US, although the GNEP reprocessing and transmutation plans aim to partly address this problem.

Steve Kidd (2006) from the World Nuclear Association states: “The difficulties encountered with establishing Yucca as an operating repository have undoubtedly influenced the move towards GNEP. The likelihood of having to establish several Yuccas in the USA alone, if there is a significant boom in nuclear power in the 21st century, has obviously concentrated a lot of official thinking.”

REPROCESSING

Aspects of the GNEP may partially and temporarily alleviate the waste management problems, according to its proponents. In particular, the recommencement of commercial reprocessing in the US will reduce the volume of high-level nuclear waste to be disposed of. (Spent nuclear fuel from conventional reactors typically comprises, by mass, 3% high-level waste, 1% plutonium and 96% unused uranium.

Oelrich (2006), a member of the Federation of American Scientists, summarised the problem in the Nuclear Engineering International magazine: “Few are willing to argue that Yucca Mountain is the ideal long-term geologic waste repository. It was picked, in part – and there can be much debate about how large a part – because of political expediency. At the time of the decision, Nevada had a much smaller population and was politically weak. Since then, the population of Las Vegas has exploded and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is the Minority Leader in Congress. Whatever the fate of Yucca Mountain, it continues to be an ugly political battle that no-one wants to repeat. Thus, a few look to recycling as an alternative to Yucca while most supporters of recycling look at it as a way to substantially increase the loading of Yucca while avoiding having to decide on a second repository site during any current politician’s lifetime.”

The GNEP envisages the development of novel reprocessing technologies, with particular emphasis on ‘UREX+’. The DOE says UREX+ would accomplish the following:
* Separate uranium from the spent fuel at a high level of purification that would allow it to be recycled for re-enrichment, stored in an unshielded facility or simply buried as low-level waste.
* Separate and immobilise long-lived fission products, technetium and iodine, for disposal in Yucca Mountain.
* Extract short-lived fission products, cesium and strontium, and prepare them for storage until they meet the requirements for disposal as low-level waste.
* Separate transuranic elements (plutonium, neptunium, americium and curium) from the remaining fission products so they can be fabricated into fuel for fast neutron reactors. <www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepProliferationResistantRecycling.html>

The main potential advantages of UREX+ over conventional ‘PUREX’ reprocessing are as follows:
* Plutonium mixed with other transuranic elements is more difficult and dangerous to use in nuclear weapons compared to the plutonium extracted from spent fuel during conventional reprocessing.
* The transuranic elements can be irradiated in fast neutron reactors, converting them to nuclides with shorter half-lives, thus facilitating storage and disposal.

The development of new reprocessing technology promises to be protracted and expensive. The US House Committee (2006) states that “advanced recycling on any significant scale is at least a decade or more in the future”.

FAST NEUTRON REACTORS

Fast neutron reactors use plutonium as their basic fuel and have no moderator. The intention is to fission long-lived wastes to transmute them to nuclides with shorter half-lives, thus simplifying disposal. Fast neutron reactors would be required because complete destruction of transuranics is not feasible in conventional light-water power reactors.

As with the development of new reprocessing methods, the development of fast neutron reactors also promises to be expensive and protracted (as has been the historical experience with fast breeder reactors). The US House Committee (2006) states that the plan to use fast reactors “adds significant cost, time, and risk” to previous, less ambitious plans to recommence commercial reprocessing in the US and to use the separated plutonium in mixed plutonium/uranium oxide (MOX) fuel.

Transmutation — using neutrons from reactors or spallation sources, or charged particles from particle accelerators — has been studied for decades but progress has not been promising and there is no reason to believe that the use of fast neutron reactors will dramatically improve the balance of benefits to costs and risks.

A report from the UK government’s Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (2003) concluded that partitioning (separation of different nuclides) followed by transmutation could deal with only a small fraction of the UK’s higher-activity wastes, it would be costly, and would require new nuclear reactors and reprocessing plants.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Interdisciplinary Study concludes that: “Decisions about partitioning and transmutation must … consider the incremental economic costs and safety, environmental, and proliferation risks of introducing the additional fuel cycle stages and facilities necessary for the task. These activities will be a source of additional risk to those working in the plants, as well as the general public, and will also generate considerable volumes of non-high-level waste contaminated with significant quantities of transuranics. Much of this waste, because of its long toxic lifetime, will ultimately need to be disposed of in high-level waste repositories. Moreover, even the most economical partitioning and transmutation schemes are likely to add significantly to the cost of the once-through fuel cycle.” (Ansolabehere et al., 2003.)

The GNEP proposals are promoted for their purported non-proliferation benefits, but it appears that a primary objective is simply to lessen the political controversy surrounding nuclear waste management issues. However, the GNEP is at best a partial, temporary and problematic solution to the waste controversies. The US House Committee (2006) states: “Resolution of the spent fuel problem cannot wait for the many years required for the GNEP to proceed through comprehensive planning, engineering demonstration, NRC licensing of the recycling plant, any new reactor types such as fast reactors, and each new recycled fuel type, and ultimate operations. The credibility of the Administration’s support for the future of the nuclear power industry rests on its resolution of the issues associated with taking custody of spent fuel and opening a permanent geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste (Yucca Mountain), as required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. GNEP will not be ready to begin large-scale recycling of commercial spent fuel until the end of the next decade, and the Yucca Mountain repository will not open until roughly the same time. Such delays are acceptable only if accompanied by interim storage beginning this decade.”

Richard Lester, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also doubts whether the GNEP plans will lessen the controversy surrounding waste management issues: “Energy Secretary Sam Bodman recently suggested that GNEP has the potential to postpone a second U.S. waste repository indefinitely, even if nuclear power growth does resume. This appeals to politicians, who are almost desperately eager to avoid another politically painful repository-siting process. But offsetting this promise is the requirement, also implicit in GNEP, to find sites for new reprocessing plants, fuel and target fabrication facilities, and fast-spectrum burner reactors. Each of these may be easier to site than a second waste repository, though perhaps only marginally so. But GNEP is likely to increase the quantity of required nuclear sites, possibly by a large number.” (Lester, 2006.)

Lester’s (2006) conclusion is pessimistic: “The Bush administration claims that this scheme could eliminate the need for repositories other than Yucca Mountain, cut the duration of the waste disposal problem from hundreds of thousands of years to something much shorter, and use almost all the energy in uranium fuel. This is an appealing vision, but the reality is that GNEP is unlikely to achieve these goals and will also make nuclear power less competitive.”

According to Steve Kidd (2006), the US nuclear power industry has greeted the GNEP “politely, but coolly”.

The GNEP envisages that reprocessing plants could double as interim storage sites. However, there are no commercial reprocessing plants in the US, and one can easily imagine heightened opposition to the development of reprocessing plants if they are also to serve as interim storage sites.

Oelrich (2006) states: “To an extent, reprocessing is an attempt to escape the political pain of finding a site for a second geologic repository. But this simply trades the well-know political problems of Yucca Mountain for the thus far hypothetical, but most likely equally intense, local political resistance that can be expected from trying to site more than a dozen fast neutron reactors, a couple of reprocessing centres, and the transportation of spent fuel.”

Given the problems with management of domestic wastes, it is almost inconceivable that the US would receive spent fuel or high-level waste from power reactors in other countries for disposal. (A program has been operating for many years under which the US accepts some spent fuel from research reactors, but a program dealing with wastes from power reactors would involve vastly greater amounts.)

One last potential advantage of the GNEP proposals is that by using plutonium as the primary nuclear fuel in some reactors, uranium reserves will be greatly extended. However, Kidd (2006) states that “the nuclear industry is convinced that there are more than adequate uranium reserves and resources to fuel any conceivable growth path of nuclear energy this century.”

WEAPONS PROLIFERATION

UREX+ is preferable to conventional reprocessing, but keeping plutonium mixed with other, more radioactive isotopes might not create much of a radiation barrier to would-be proliferators (Oelrich, 2006). Spent nuclear fuel provides a vastly greater radiation barrier — by as much as several orders of magnitude. Indeed from the mid-1970s until recently, US governments have implemented a policy of opposition to reprocessing because of proliferation concerns.

Lester (2006) questions the non-proliferation claims made in support of the UREX: “[A]doption of UREX+ reprocessing of light-water reactor fuel combined with reprocessing of advanced burner reactor fuel would introduce sizeable new flows and stocks of contaminated plutonium that might be only marginally better protected from would-be proliferators than pure plutonium, and much less protected than if the plutonium simply remained in the spent fuel. For countries that are not now reprocessing, including the United States, this would not be a positive development. In the case of GNEP, the goal of ensuring that no plutonium would be available to nuclear felons centuries from now is achieved at the price of an elevated proliferation risk during the several-decade period between waste generation and disposal, as well as the additional economic costs, plus health, safety, and environmental risks, incurred during that time.”

While the emphasis has been on the development of fast neutron reactors to ‘burn’ plutonium and other actinides, these reactors can also be used to ‘breed’ plutonium, which sits uncomfortably with the stated non-proliferation objective.

Fast neutron reactors could initially be fuelled with existing plutonium stockpiles but in the longer term the system relies on the ongoing production of plutonium and on reprocessing.

The history of conventional reprocessing is not reassuring. For many years plutonium has been separated from spent fuel at considerably greater rates than its use in MOX or breeder reactors, such that the global stockpile of separated plutonium has been steadily increasing. The stockpile of ‘unirradiated’ plutonium (separated or contained in MOX) has grown to over 270 tonnes, with about 15-20 tonnes of plutonium separated from spent fuel each year but only 10-15 tonnes fabricated into MOX fuel (and a very small amount into fuel for the few existing fast neutron reactors). (Albright and Kramer, 2004; Greenpeace 2005.)

The GNEP’s vision of regional reprocessing centres could come into conflict with the fundamental GNEP goal of limiting the spread of reprocessing. It is argued that existing plants could be used, but in the longer term new reprocessing plants would be required. Moreover, since a new reprocessing method is envisaged, the argument about the potential use of existing plants does not hold.

It is difficult to see how the non-proliferation goals of the complex GNEP concept could be realised when the vastly simpler problem of reducing existing stockpiles of unirradiated plutonium — by slowing or suspending reprocessing — remains unresolved.

FURTHER READING

US Department of Energy’s GNEP website: <www.gnep.energy.gov>

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation:
<www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/proliferation/fuel-cycle/index.htm>

International Atomic Energy: <www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/FuelCycle/index.shtml>

REFERENCES

Albright, David, and Kimberly Kramer, November/December 2004, “Fissile material: Stockpiles still growing”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.60, No.6, pp.14-16, <www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd04albright_016>.

Ansolabehere, Stephen, et al., 2003, “The Future of Nuclear Power: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study”, <web.mit.edu/nuclearpower>.

Greenpeace, 2005, “The Real Face of the IAEA’s Multilateral Nuclear Approaches”, <www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/IAEAmultilateralnuclearapproachreport>.

Kidd, Steve, 2006, “GNEP: the right way forward?”, Nuclear Engineering International magazine, June 1, <www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2036516>

Lester, Richard, 2006, “New Nukes”, Issues in Science and Technology, Summer, <www.issues.org/22.4/lester.html>.

Oelrich, Ivan, 2006, “GNEP: not quite ripe”, Nuclear Engineering International magazine, August 7, <www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=76&storyCode=2038013>.

Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (UK), December 2003, “Advice to Ministers on the Application of Partitioning and Transmutation in the UK”, <www.defra.gov.uk/rwmac/reports/part-trans/index.htm>.

US House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Committee, May 2006, “Global nuclear energy partnership (GNEP)”, House Report 109-474.
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/T?&report=hr474&dbname=109&>

We Still Can’t Manage Nuclear Waste

Jim Green, 16 Feb 2011

http://newmatilda.com/2011/02/16/we-still-cant-manage-nuclear-waste

If Lucas Heights can’t maintain health and safety standards, what reason is there to believe Martin Ferguson’s planned nuclear waste dump at Muckaty Station will be safe, asks Jim Green

It’s a sad truth that whistleblowers have provided the public with more information about accidents at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor site on Sydney’s outskirts than the site’s operator — the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) — ever has.

After a report on ABC’s Lateline last week, it’s clear that this pattern has been repeated. A secret report by Comcare, the federal government’s workplace safety watchdog, finds that ANSTO has under-reported accidents, breached safety standards, and breached health and safety laws.

The Comcare report was produced in response to revelations last year by ANSTO whistleblower David Reid. The report finds that ANSTO did not take all reasonable steps to maintain a safe working environment; failed to take all reasonable steps to train and supervise ANSTO Health employees; failed to comprehensively risk assess its radiopharmaceutical production process; failed to notify Comcare of safety incidents; and that ANSTO’s suspension of David Reid was “somewhat extreme” and that he was denied procedural fairness.

You’d hope that the Federal Government would step in to redress the problems at Lucas Heights and to do so with some urgency.

No such luck. The government has asked for a “review” of the Comcare report. And if that review finds its way into the public arena it will most likely be thanks to a whistleblower. If the review doesn’t produce the answers the government wants to hear, further reviews will likely be commissioned until the government gets the whitewash it wants.

These problems have obvious relevance for ANSTO workers and for the residents of surrounding suburbs, all the more so in light of ANSTO’s approach to emergency planning. Nuclear engineer Tony Wood, former head of ANSTO’s Division of Reactors and Engineering, said (pdf) way back in 2001:

“Another document called the Sutherland Shire Local Disaster Plan is needed to cater for the public. This plan is a most remarkable document. … In the whole document there is no mention of the words ‘iodine’ or ‘nuclear’ or ‘reactor’ and only one mention of ‘ANSTO’. No one would guess from reading this plan that there was a nuclear reactor in the area. … Here is a document presented as a reactor emergency plan that doesn’t mention the words ‘reactor’ or ‘radioactivity” because it doesn’t want to upset people.”

In the event of an accident with off-site consequences, local residents would have to sue ANSTO to achieve redress. On this issue Wood was even more scathing:

“I believe that it is very important that the public be told the truth even if the truth is unpalatable. I have cringed at some of ANSTO’s public statements. Surely there is someone at ANSTO with a practical reactor background and the courage to flag when ANSTO is yet again, about to mislead the public. For example, the claim ANSTO makes for nuclear indemnity is indefensible.”

The problems at ANSTO also have national significance. ANSTO is actively promoting the development of nuclear power in Australia — although the organisation has demonstrably failed to competently and safely run a much smaller nuclear research facility.

More immediately, ANSTO is up to its neck in the plan to establish a national nuclear waste repository in the Northern Territory, both as the main source of the waste and as the operator of the repository (if it proceeds).

Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson plans to put the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill before Parliament this month. Mussolini would blush. The Bill gives Ferguson the power to override all state and territory laws that could in any way impede his dump plan — and the power to override almost all Commonwealth laws. Public health laws, occupational heath and safety regulations, road safety laws — all subject to ministerial whim.

Ferguson claims that the Traditional Owners for the proposed dump site at Muckaty Station, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, support the proposal. In truth, some do, but many do not. Letters of protest and petitions from Muckaty Traditional Owners have been ignored. Muckaty Traditional Owners have initiated legal action in the Federal Court challenging the nomination of the site, yet Mr Ferguson persists with the fiction that Traditional Owners support the dump.

Ferguson has refused repeated requests from concerned Traditional Owners to meet with them. His latest excuse for ignoring them is that the matter is subject to legal action. He has also said that he will consult Traditional Owners after a decision has been made on the proposed Muckaty dump — a thorough reworking of the traditional of consultation.

Ferguson says he will “respect” the Federal Court’s decision but in fact he is pre-empting it by pushing forward with legislation which entrenches Muckaty as the only site under active consideration for a national repository. Interestingly, Ferguson’s Bill is very similar to Howard-era legislation (pdf) which Labor slammed as being “sordid” and “draconian”.

Ziggy Switkowski, who was until recently the Chair of the ANSTO Board, has been promoting the construction of 50 power reactors in Australia. Over a 50 year lifespan, 50 reactors would be responsible for 1.8 billion tonnes of radioactive tailings waste at uranium mines. The reactors would be responsible for a further 430,000 tonnes of depleted uranium waste, a by-product of the uranium enrichment process (which would most likely take place overseas). The reactors would directly produce 75,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste and 750,000 cubic metres of low-level and intermediate-level waste.

The Labor Party promised to address radioactive waste management issues in a manner which is “scientific, transparent, accountable, fair and allows access to appeal mechanisms” and to “ensure full community consultation in radioactive waste decision-making processes”. Every one of those promises has been broken by Martin Ferguson and his Waste Management Bill.

It’s very clear that nuclear power reactors produce vastly more waste than ANSTO’s research reactor. The government needs to demonstrate a capacity to safely and responsibly manage the Lucas Heights research reactor and the waste it produces before trying to sell us on the idea of a nuclear power industry.

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Rudd Government dumping election commitments

Jim Green, Online Opinion, 23 December 2008
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8330&page=0

With a Senate Committee report on Thursday calling for the repeal of draconian laws allowing the imposition of a radioactive waste dump in the absence of any consultation with or consent from Aboriginal Traditional Owners, it is time for resources and energy minister Martin Ferguson to come clean on his plans for managing this contentious issue.

Labor voted against the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act in 2005/06 with senior Labor MPs describing it as ‘extreme’, ‘arrogant’, ‘draconian’, ‘sorry’, ‘sordid’, and ‘profoundly shameful’. At its 2007 national conference, the ALP voted unanimously to repeal the legislation. Over a year later and Martin Ferguson has not budged while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – for all his boasting about keeping election promises – has conspicuously failed to ensure that this commitment is kept.

The Labor Government will most likely repeal the Radioactive Waste Management Act in the new year but the controversy over radioactive waste management will continue. The waste in question ranges from the relatively innocuous – such as lightly-contaminated lab-coats – to the far more hazardous and long-lived wastes arising from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods from reactors at Lucas Heights.

If the Labor Government intends to pursue the Howard Government’s plan to establish a dump in the Northern Territory, it will need to override NT laws – and thereby break its pre-election pledge to respect state/territory laws which outlaw the imposition of radioactive waste dumps.

Four sites in the NT are under consideration. None of the four sites was short-listed when a national site selection study was undertaken in the 1990s, informed by scientific, environmental and social criteria. The NT sites were short-listed under the Howard government simply because the NT was seen as a soft political target. Thus Labor’s commitment to handle the issue in a scientific manner will go out the window if the NT sites are pursued.

Early in the new year, Mr Ferguson is expected to wave around a consultant’s report purporting to demonstrate that his favoured site is ideal for a radioactive dump – just as his predecessor, Senator Peter McGauran, paraded a consultant’s report in 2002 purporting to demonstrate that a site immediately adjacent to a missile and rocket testing range in South Australia was the safest place in the nation for a radioactive waste dump. Controversy forced the Howard government to abandon that location, then to abandon the SA dump plan altogether, and Mr McGauran was demoted to a junior ministry for his heavy-handed and clumsy mismanagement of the issue.

Labor’s election commitment to handle the issue transparently went out the window long ago. In April, Mr Ferguson refused to provide substantive answers to questions on his radioactive waste plans, simply asserting that all matters raised were “under consideration”. The secrecy was such that even a question about what specific matters were under consideration was also said to be under consideration!

Mr Ferguson is likely to try to impose a radioactive waste dump in an area in the Muckaty Land Trust, 120 kms north of Tennant Creek. This site was nominated by the Northern Land Council despite vocal opposition from a number of Traditional Owners whose country will be affected by the proposal.

Traditional Owner’s are divided. Dianne Stokes, a Muckaty Traditional Owner who has been leading the campaign against the dump, said at the Senate Committee hearing in Alice Springs; “We want to keep talking about it and continue to fight it until we are listened to. The big capital N-O. The Ngapa clan and the rest of the other totems in that land trust are all connected. We have connections to each other and are related to each other. We are the same tribe, the one ancestral cultural group of people who are the strong voice, and one voice, in that country”.

Muckaty Traditional Owner Marlene Bennett told the Committee hearing in Alice Springs: “I would just like to question why Martin Ferguson is sitting on this issue like a hen trying to hatch an egg. The people of the Northern Territory elected the Labor Party. We were led to believe that the nuclear waste thing would be all overturned and overruled, and at this moment we are extremely disappointed. How many times do we have to say no? No means no.”.

The opposition of numerous Muckaty Traditional Owners was expressed during the Senate inquiry and has also been acknowledged by the ALP at federal and territory levels. Among others, Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin has acknowledged the opposition and distress of Muckaty Traditional Owners, while in 2001 she publicly acknowledged that Australia has no need for the nuclear reactors which are the greatest source of the problem.

In April, the NT Labor conference unanimously adopted a resolution acknowledging that the nomination of Muckaty was not made with the full and informed consent of all Traditional Owners, that it did not comply with the Aboriginal Land Rights Act and that the Muckaty nomination should be repealed.

One wonders if the fate that befell Peter McGauran will be visited on Martin Ferguson – demotion for clumsy, heavy-handed mismanagement of a contentious issue that demands a more considered, intelligent approach.

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NUCLEAR WASTE AND INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

Jim Green, national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth:

ABC Radio National – ‘Perspective’, Feb 7 2008

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/perspective/stories/2008/2153906.htm

Given that it was a clear point of policy difference between the major parties, it was surprising that the Coalition government’s efforts to impose a nuclear waste repository on unwilling communities received so little media interest during the election campaign.

This issue provides a window into relations between the Coalition government and Indigenous people over the past decade and a test of the former government’s policy of practical reconciliation.

In February 1998, the Coalition government announced its intention to build a national nuclear waste repository near Woomera in South Australia. Leading the battle against the repository were the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a council of senior Aboriginal women. Many of the Kungka Tjuta witnessed first-hand the impacts of the British nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga in the 1950s. They were sceptical about the Coalition government’s claim that nuclear waste destined for the Woomera repository was ‘safe’. After all, the waste would be kept at the Lucas Heights reactor site in Sydney if it was perfectly safe, or simply dumped in landfill.

The Maralinga legacy continued to resonate in another way. A clean-up of Maralinga in the late 1990s generated controversy when nuclear engineer and whistleblower Alan Parkinson revealed that it had been compromised by cost-cutting. This was disconcerting for South Australians since the same government department responsible for the Maralinga clean-up was also responsible for the Woomera repository. Alan Parkinson’s book on the Maralinga clean-up, Maralinga: Australia’s Nuclear Waste Cover-up, was published by ABC Books last year. Mr Parkinson said: “What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn’t be adopted on white-fellas land.”

The proposed repository generated such controversy in South Australia that the Coalition government secured the services of a public relations company. Correspondence between the company and the federal government was released under Freedom of Information laws. In one exchange, a government official asks the PR company to remove sand-dunes from a photo selected to adorn a brochure. The explanation provided by the government official was that: “Dunes are a sensitive area with respect to Aboriginal Heritage.” The sand-dunes were removed from the photo, only for the government official to ask if the horizon could be straightened up as well.

The federal government used compulsory land acquisition powers to take control of land for a repository in SA, extinguishing all Native Title rights and interests. The Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta continued to implore the federal government to get their ears out of the pockets, and after six long years the government did just that. In the lead-up to the 2004 federal election, with the repository issue biting politically, the government decided to cut its losses and abandon its plans for a repository in SA.

The ears went straight back into the pockets, however. Unequivocal promises not to impose a repository in the Northern Territory were broken by the Coalition government after the 2004 election. Traditional Owners were not consulted before three sites in the Territory were short-listed for a repository.

Government ministers asserted that the three sites are “some distance from any form of civilisation” or, more bluntly, that they are “in the middle of nowhere”. This is offensive to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people living and running successful pastoral and tourist enterprises three, five and 18 kilometres from the sites.

And then in 2005, the Coalition government rail-roaded the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act through parliament. This legislation provides wide-ranging exemptions from Aboriginal heritage protection laws. Then in 2006, the government rail-roaded amendments to the Waste Management Act through parliament. The amendments state that a nuclear dump site nomination is legally valid even without consultation with, or consent from, Traditional Owners.

The former Coalition government prided itself on its approach of ‘practical reconciliation’. However, its handling of the nuclear waste issue suggests that practical reconciliation was nothing more than rhetoric. Let’s hope that the Rudd Labor government avoids the temptation to impose a nuclear waste repository on an unwilling Indigenous community.