Natalie Wasley, Chain Reaction #116, November 2012, www.foe.org.au/chain-reaction

Earlier this year, in a break with a long-standing bipartisan ban, the NSW Government announced it would allow uranium exploration across the state. This reversal of a 26-year prohibition came without warning or consultation and against the backdrop of the global nuclear industry reeling from the continuing Fukushima disaster.

At the time, Premier O’Farrell cited the narrowly won ALP national conference vote allowing uranium sales to India as rationale for the policy change. Responses ranged from wariness to outright hostility. The decision is fiercely opposed by NSW Labor and the Greens. Speaking against the move in both state parliament and a recent public meeting, shadow environment minister Luke Foley captured the strength of this resistance: “As long as I am in public life I will argue against this dangerous industry”.

Civil society and community groups are increasing both the light and the heat on the Premier’s atomic ambitions including through the launch of a NSW Uranium Free Charter. The Charter highlights the dangers of the nuclear industry, calls on government to rule out uranium mining in NSW and has already gathered strong support from state and national trade unions, environment groups, public health and student organisations. The Charter signals the start of a new campaign to keep NSW free from uranium mining and promises to increasingly locate this controversial mineral on the state political radar. (uraniumfreensw.org.au/charter).

The state government’s claim that lifting the ban on exploration does not signal an intention to allow uranium mining lacks credibility. The nuclear industry will not invest in exploration without the expectation of future mining activities. It is crucial to consider the impacts of mining now, while uranium remains where it is safest: underground.

Uranium mining causes sustained damage at and around mine sites, especially through the production of large volumes of long-lived radioactive mine tailings. These toxic mine residues retain around 80% of the original radioactivity of the ore and pose a profound management challenge. Before mining, this material is confined in a geologically stable cocoon. After mining, it is mobile in wind and water and able to be exposed to workers, nearby communities and the environment.

The track record of the Australian uranium industry is a litany of leaks, spills, breaches and accidents. A detailed independent Senate examination in 2003 found that the industry was failing to comply with its environmental obligations and called for urgent changes.

The uncomfortable and indisputable fact is that uranium is a dual-use fuel − it can be used for nuclear reactors or for nuclear weapons. Those who claim that export agreements adequately safeguard Australia’s uranium ignore the deep deficiencies in the existing system and the obvious fact that, at the very least, our exports free up uranium from other countries to be used in military programs.

The glowing elephant in the room remains the growing and unresolved problem of managing the radioactive waste that is created at every stage of the nuclear chain.

The federal government has confirmed that uranium from Australia was in at least five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant when it entered meltdown last March. Following Fukushima the international uranium market remains depressed. Existing producers have seen reduced production and profit – the controversial Ranger mine in Kakadu has posted massive losses of $180 million in the past two years – while two advanced projects in Western Australia have recently been shelved.

The waste from any uranium mining in NSW would remain dangerous long after the O’Farrell government is gone. If the Premier truly has confidence in the case for uranium mining, he should have the political courage and respect to test these arguments via a dedicated public inquiry before approving any exploration or mining activities. Before allowing such a long lasting and toxic industry, it is prudent to examine the adequacy of NSW’s regulatory regimes, the experience of uranium mining in other jurisdictions and the views of all stakeholders. The government’s failure to do this at the last state election means they cannot now claim a mandate to mine.

Not only is uranium mining unwelcome – it is also unnecessary. Renewable energy is the world’s fastest growing energy sector. A recent report by the federal Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics has detailed how renewables are on track to become Australia’s energy source of choice as costs fall and community support blossoms. NSW is well placed to build on the state’s technical and manufacturing base to become a leading producer and supplier of renewable energy. These would be real, lasting and clean jobs − many based in regional areas. Rather than promoting the unsafe uranium sector the government should building an energy future that is renewable, not radioactive.

More information:

http://uraniumfreensw.org.au

http://beyondnuclearinitiative.com

Natalie Wasley is the national coordinator of the Beyond Nuclear Initiative. http://beyondnuclearinitiative.com

Since 2007, a saga has been unfolding regarding contamination accidents at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), ANSTO’s handling of those incidents, ANSTO’s treatment of whistleblowers, the handling of the matter by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), and the independence or otherwise of ARPANSA.

The saga has exposed inadequate safety practices at ANSTO and an inadequate performance by the regulator ARPANSA. The problems would not have been exposed and partially rectified if not for a number of ANSTO whistleblowers.

27 April 2007 − ANSTO states that a radiopharmaceutical worker at ARI (Australian Radioisotopes − ANSTO’s radiopharmaceutical division) received a radiation dose to his hands above the annual limit earlier in the month. The dose was above the yearly limit of 500 millisieverts (mSv) to each hand. The incident was the result of a failure in process during a production run of yttrium-90. The worker was using gloves that extended into a boxed working area when the exposure took place.

3 September 2007 − Two contamination incidents at ANSTO involving yttrium-90. See the 19 June 2012 entry below.

28 August 2008 − Incident at ANSTO involving a vial of molybdenum-99 being dislodged from manipulator grips in one of the hot cells and a delay in the reporting of the incident. An audit found that proper processes were not followed: evacuation of the area did not occur, timely communication and event reporting, thorough investigation and follow-up did not occur. The staff member in question had not completed occupational health and safety induction training or a radiation safety course. ANSTO said that processes had been upgraded to ensure that formal training is completed and validated before allowing admission to ARI (ANSTO’s radiopharmaceutical arm) for work purposes.

June 2009 − David Reid, an ANSTO employee and staff-elected health and safety officer, was suspended in June 2009 and sacked in June 2011. He raised concerns about contamination repeatedly and some of his concerns were later vindicated. ANSTO states that his suspension and dismissal were unrelated to his statements regarding safety problems at ANSTO.

12 February 2010 − ANSTO challenges a February 10 AAP media report concerning the 28 August 2008 incident:

• ANSTO states: “No staff member was exposed to significant radiation doses.”
• ANSTO states: “The independent nuclear safety regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) has reviewed the 2008 incident and there have been four independent internal investigations. ANSTO has welcomed a review report received from ARPANSA in late January 2010. ANSTO will respond to the ARPANSA recommendations by the end of February. The workplace regulator ComCare is also currently reviewing the matter.”

5 May 2010 − ANSTO employee David Reid raises numerous concerns on ABC TV’s Lateline program.

• Mr Reid states: “If you don’t follow the safety regulations and the procedures and you don’t investigate when you do have an accident, the accidents are gonna get worse and worse and someone’s really gonna pay the ultimate price one day.”
• ABC: “ARPANSA is Australia’s nuclear industry watchdog and Lateline has obtained a copy of its report into the accident. It largely supports David Reid’s concerns and raises further questions about safety at Lucas Heights.”
• ABC: “ARPANSA’s investigation found that radioactive vials are regularly dropped, something that’s been tolerated for years. There have been no apparent attempts to introduce improved handling systems. Supervision and training have not been effective in delivering the standard of safety required at the facility. And there’s been a lack of management awareness about difficulties and failures at the facility.”
• ABC: “ARI says it will implement all of ARPANSA’a recommendations, but the nuclear regulator has at least two more inquiries into Lucas Heights underway.”

6 May 2010 − ANSTO responds to the Lateline report:

• “Mr Reid’s first complaint occurred in April 2009. ARI management immediately initiated an investigation. Two weeks later Mr Reid raised the same complaint at an ANSTO safety meeting acknowledging the ARI investigation was underway. A subsequent investigation by ANSTO management followed.”
• “In July 2009, Mr Reid was not satisfied and again raised concerns. This led to a major internal investigation ordered by the CEO. The investigation was completed in September and concluded there were no abnormal radiation exposures to staff. However, legitimate concerns about training and procedures in the medical isotope production facility were raised and have since been addressed.
• “In October 2009, ARPANSA initiated an investigation following an approach from Mr Reid. This was completed in January 2010 and substantially agreed with ANSTO’s four internal investigations. ARPANSA concluded there was no cover up, and no significant radiological event.
• “All of ARPANSA’s recommendations have been implemented or are substantially complete. The reports reflect the importance of attending to management issues that were identified in the investigations.”

01 June 2010 – Senate Estimates with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and ANSTO’s Dr Paterson:

• Dr Paterson says the August 2008 incident has been discussed at Senate Estimates on 21 October 2009 and 10 February 2010 and has been the subject of two major investigations − one by ANSTO (concluded September 2009) and ARPANSA (began in October 2009, report submitted to ANSTO in January 2010).
• Dr Paterson: “What did these investigations find? The first finding is that management arrangements in place at the time were deficient in a number of respects. Firstly, the significance of the dropped vial was not understood by the worker. This meant that his colleagues working in the same environment as the event were not informed, although they were not directly exposed to the radiation from the vial. Secondly, the process of informing supervisors did not lead to immediate actions. Thirdly, the initial attempts to locate the source of the radioactivity did not immediately involve specialised health staff. The investigation also revealed that one of the workers had not completed his full in-depth training on working in a radiation environment. These management issues have all been addressed with completed and current actions. Importantly in this regard, ANSTO has a new management team in place at various levels in the organisation relating to the production of radiopharmaceuticals.”
• Dr Paterson: “In addition, two other claims have been made by Mr Reid. One is that there was a massive dose to a worker who was exposed to radiation from the dropped vial. Both the ARPANSA report and ANSTO’s internal investigation based on actual records have shown that this is not the case. This has been confirmed by calculations made independently by three specialists in the field. A second claim is that there has been a coverup. The investigations show that while there were management deficiencies at the time, there were no attempts to cover up this incident or not report it at any time.”
• Dr Paterson: “The ongoing development is ensuring that the changes we have made in our training system are indeed embedded. It is no longer possible to work in the radiation facility without completing all of the radiation training. We are just ensuring that all of those procedures are indeed followed and that they are embedded in the practices of the organisation. Secondly, we are still evaluating a number of engineering controls that would further strengthen the protection of workers so that they would not have to rely on management controls, because engineering controls tend to be more robust. These evaluations are ongoing in the case of the area immediately around the door and will be finalised within the next six months.”
• Senator Ludlam: “Going back to the original incident, have you identified the person or persons who were directly involved in not being able to retrieve the vial? My understanding is that when it eventually came out it was brought out with a device, some kind of a mirror stuck to a tool with a bit of sticky tape, which sounds like something you would have wanted to look at. You acknowledged in your new opening comments that were people on the work floor who had not been trained to a suitable level. Were there any suspensions or any consequences to those operators? Have they been retrained since then?”
• Dr Paterson: “Yes. I think we have now identified all people who were involved in that incident, and there is ongoing operator training. In addition, based on our incident reporting and our management procedures, wherever there is a radiological incident or a failure to comply with a management arrangement, retraining is essential, and we undertake that before the workers return to the cell face.”
• Senator Ludlam: “Would you say that the disclosures were validated by ARPANSA’s report? You have referred to them before as allegations, but would you say that they have been more or less completely validated by the subsequent reporting and all the action that you describe as having occurred since then?”
• Dr Paterson: “I would say that it was valuable that Mr Reid, as a health and safety representative, re-raised these matters in April 2009, and I said that to him when I met with him. I feel that that was a very useful action on his part, and the fact that the investigation chain, which has subsequently followed, was initiated by that action I regard as very positive. I think that it was helpful both to management and to the workforce as a whole in the radiopharmaceuticals production area to go through a process of internalising what had happened,
  working through it in some detail and coming to a solid set of conclusions about how we could improve management and how we could improve the interaction with the workforce in order to mitigate these effects. So I would say it was good.”
• Senator Ludlam: “It would appear to me, obviously not having been at any of these meetings and not having visited the radiopharmaceuticals plant, to be in pretty good example of the benefit of a whistleblower. This fellow has taken some risks, and you would hope, on the basis of all the reviews and all the changes that you are making, that conditions for the workforce in there are improving as a result of what he has done.”
• Dr Paterson: “I think he was absolutely correct in his position of an HSR to raise it internally, which he did. I applaud that. I applaud the fact that he and a colleague also raised it at the central committee, which we use for all of the union representatives, in May 2009. I certainly believe that those actions were very solid. Where I have a concern is that, as the information came out of the investigation, he has not changed his view about the dose to his fellow worker. We had a very fruitful discussion of that when I met with him, and I think
  we have achieved a difference of view but a respect for one another’s views.”

January 2011 − A Comcare investigation found that ANSTO had acted prejudicially towards David Reid. ANSTO says that Comcare has decided to have its report independently reviewed. ANSTO says there have already been seven investigations into the August 2008 incident, including two by ARPANSA, and that “there was no significant radiological event, nor was there an attempt to cover anything up.”

8 February 2011 − ABC TV Lateline report:

• “The nuclear industry regulator ARPANSA backed up Mr Reid’s concerns, finding serious problems in safety standards and a lack of management awareness about the difficulties and failures of the facility.”
• “Australia’s workplace health and safety regulator, Comcare, has been called in to investigate the incidents. Lateline’s obtained a copy of its report. It goes even further, finding that ANSTO has breached health and safety laws. It says ANSTO did not take all reasonable steps to provide and maintain a safe working environment. It didn’t take all reasonable steps to inform, instruct, train and supervise ANSTO Health employees. It failed to comprehensively risk assess its radiopharmaceutical production process and it failed to notify Comcare of safety incidents.”
• “The Comcare report also expresses grave concern about ANSTO’s treatment of Mr Reid, who’s been suspended for nearly two years now after bullying allegations were made against him. It says Mr Reid’s suspension was somewhat extreme and Mr Reid was substantially denied procedural fairness.”
• “Science Minister Kim Carr says the [Comcare] report has now been independently reviewed and he can’t comment until that process is complete.”
• “ANSTO is facing more accusations that it’s singling out workers who raise safety concerns, with another two employees suspended for reporting a contamination scare in September last year. ANSTO denies that they’ve been suspended for reporting the incident, but rather for unduly creating safety concerns.”
• Tim Ayres from the AMWU states: “I look forward to having a constructive engagement with ANSTO about these issues this week. It’s gone on for far too long.”
• “Late this afternoon, the ABC learned of another incident just before Christmas, when an employee picked up a vile of highly radioactive material by hand. The risks of a spill makes it a serious safety breach. ANSTO says the newly-appointed supervisor was only slightly contaminated and has been advised of the correct handling procedures.”

Comcare recommended that ANSTO:

• engage a qualified person to conduct systematic monitoring of all workplaces that undertake radiopharmaceutical operations;
• direct a person with demonstrated competency in managing risks associated with hazardous substances to oversee an ongoing system of auditing to ensure radiopharmaceutical operations maintain appropriate systems of work to protect health and safety;
• provide ongoing documented evidence to Comcare that systematic monitoring is occurring; regularly audit its consultative protocols with persons involved in radiopharmaceutical operations to ensure its policies and procedures are effectively carried out;
• audit its record-keeping procedures to ensure appropriate information is recorded and retained in relation to the health and safety of employees engaged in radiopharmaceutical operations and;
• ensure that notifiable incidents are reported to Comcare.

9 February 2011 − Science Minister Kim Carr states: “I have asked my Department to examine the operation of the ANSTO radiopharmaceutical production facility and the OH&S practices in place at present at the facility.”

28 February 2011 − The Australian reports that at least six ANSTO employees claim they were bullied by management and, in some cases, suspended from work after expressing concern about the safety of the plant’s operations. “I find it disgraceful that ANSTO has so little concern for its employees,” said a worker exposed to radiation after a colleague dropped a vial of radioactive molybdenum-99. “It’s even more disgraceful the way they treat staff when they try to raise serious issues such as this. If you get on their bad books you’re out, regardless of your performance.”

The same report in The Australian states that Comcare confirmed that investigations were underway into claims that three ANSTO employees were stepped down after raising safety concerns against ANSTO.

3 March 2011 − The Australian reports that:

• “Two employees of Australia’s only nuclear reactor facility who were suspended after raising safety concerns will return to work in what amounts to a tacit admission by the plant’s administrators that the accusations against them were overstated.”
• an AMWU report states: “We have ANSTO, a nuclear facility, threatening to dismiss employees for alleged misconduct arising from a contamination incident in which they had no part, yet ANSTO is unable to provide empirical evidence confirming the source of the contamination, or the level of contamination, after a seven-week investigation.”
• “The [AMWU] reports claim ANSTO failed to investigate suggestions by safety officer David Lee that contamination levels on Mr Semrani’s clothing after the September spill could have been up to a hundred times higher than were eventually reported. They further claim ANSTO lost data that could have clarified the issue.”

30 March 2011 − the ABC reports: “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.”

31 May 2011 − The Australian reports that:

• “[ANSTO] has been cleared of safety breaches and a culture of cover-ups in a report tabled in Canberra yesterday but the Government-appointed panel that authored the report said the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney’s south was ageing, staff were worried that maintenance occurred only for the most urgent matters, and an even more open approach to reporting health and safety problems should be adopted.”
• “… But the report also said staff were concerned that their managers lacked a good grasp of the plant’s production processes and that there was not enough long term or strategic maintenance work done at the facility. Despite the existence of maintenance plans, “staff argue that maintenance is only undertaken for the most urgent matters,” it said.”
• “The report also recommended the organisation allow staff to report safety problems directly to the radiation safety watchdog and Comcare if managers failed to respond to their concerns. In 2009-10, ANSTO Health had one breach of its licence and 56 radiology “events or near misses.””
• “The facility is also the subject of other, ongoing review, including one by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.”

30 May 2011 − The ABC reports:

• “The independent panel did not investigate individual incidents. While it didn’t find management has breached workplace safety laws, it said some staff members could be more open about reporting safety problems.”
• “David Reid says the review’s narrow terms of reference have meant that serious problems have been glossed over.”
• David Reid: “If you do not take safety seriously and do a root cause analysis of each accident, the accidents, they won’t learn from them and they’ll keep repeating the same accidents, which has happened over and over again. You have the same few people having the same accidents and the same people under-reporting or not reporting them.”

30 May 2011 − Senate Estimates − Greens Senator Scott Ludlam with ANSTO’s Dr Paterson.

• Senator Ludlam corrects a previous assertion by Senator Carr that the Comcare report was leaked − it was released under freedom of information.
• Senator Ludlam: “Dr Paterson, have the two union reps, Messrs Howe and Bourke, who were suspended around an incident in September last year, been vindicated of charges in relation to bringing up safety issues? Are they back at work on normal duties?”
• Dr Paterson: “In our agreement that we reached with the union for their return to work we agreed that we would continue our investigation, but on a no-blame basis. That investigation is still in train. ANSTO management still retains the view that they were suspended in relation to inappropriate behaviour in respect of escalating an incident and potentially intimidating some of their colleagues in the workforce. We retain that position. We also recognised, in discussion with the union, that with proper assurances from staff members it was more appropriate to return them to work to give them the opportunity to be in the workplace. We have been encouraged in that process that we were able to find a resolution that returned them to work while we continued a no-blame investigation in order to discover the types of behaviours and the types of approaches that we might take in the future to these sorts of incidents.”

June 2011 − Federal Department of Health and Ageing statement regarding its ‘Review into ARPANSA’s Handling of Certain Safety Matters at ANSTO’:

• The Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing advised the ARPANSA CEO on 25 March 2011 of assistance which would be provided by the Department to undertake an initial investigation into ARPANSA’s handling of investigations into Yttrium 90 and Molybdenum 99 incidents at ANSTO with specific regards to matters relating to impartiality.
• In June 2009, an ANSTO employee advised ARPANSA of contamination incidents relating to Yttrium 90 and Molybdenum 99. The investigation of the contamination incidents within Building 23A raised questions concerning the appropriateness of ARPANSA’s handling. ARPANSA commenced a series of inspections with the Molybdenum report being finalised in March 2010 and the Yttrium 90 report in September 2010. With regards to the ARPANSA Yttrium 90 finalised report this incorporated extensive input from ANSTO as to timelines and did not include a reference to contamination of two employees during the morning of 3 September 2007.

7 July 2011 − The ABC reports: “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.”

7 July 2011 − Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing Catherine King said in a media release that the Department of Health and Ageing will review the regulatory powers of ARPANSA. This review follows the receipt of an independent audit by the Audit and Fraud Control Branch of the Department of Health and Ageing into ARPANSA’s handing of two safety incidents at ANSTO in September 2007 and August 2008. The audit, requested by the new CEO of ARPANSA, found that while the incidents were investigated and concluded at the time, there was a lack of consistency in evidence and transparency in the handling of one of the incidents.

7 July 2011 − An initial review conducted by the  Department of Health and Ageing into ARPANSA’s handling of safety incidents at ANSTO in September 2007 and August 2008 finds that: perceived doubts about ARPANSA’s impartiality have been resolved by a recent management reorganisation; the actions of ARPANSA in relation to the Molybdenum 99 incident of August 2008 were performed in an impartial manner; and ARPANSA’s investigations into the September 2007 Yttrium 90 contamination events in Building in 23A at ANSTO should be subject to further investigation. As a result of the report ARPANSA will be reopening an investigation into its handling of the Yttrium 90 safety incident of September 2007. An independent investigator will be appointed to assist with this investigation. ARPANSA will also be undertaking a number of actions to improve its regulatory functions including strengthening ARPANSA’s oversight of ANSTO and improving transparency within the agency.

8 July 2011 − the ABC reports that the review of ARPANSA found an improper relationship with ANSTO. 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 ANSTO. The whistleblowers claimed that safety reports were being compromised. The Health Department review also questioned ARPANSA’s impartiality. The Federal Government is now reviewing ARPANSA’s regulatory powers, with Thursday’s report recommending they be strengthened if necessary.

19 October 2011 − Senate Estimates (Economics Committee) with Greeens Senator Scott Ludlam and ANSTO’s Dr Paterson:

• Dr Paterson tables the Review of Current Health and Safety Arrangements at ANSTO Health: ANSTO’s Response October 2011.
• Senator Ludlam refused access through FoI process to the June 2011 report arising from the Department of Health and Ageing’s review into ARPANSA’s handling of certain safety matters at ANSTO. ANSTO has only been given the Executive Summary − Dr Paterson says that “it was not an investigation of ANSTO but a department of health internal audit review of ARPANSA, which is their instrument.”
• Senator Ludlam: “How many reports of radiological contamination do you get in an average month?”
• Dr Paterson: “In a typical month we would be talking about between three and perhaps 10, if there had been a significant number in relation to particular production activities. For example, if there is contamination in one area it may affect more than one worker at different times. We can provide the summary you request.”

15 November 2011 − Nuclear and radiation safety experts assembled by the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded an eight-day mission to review ARPANSA. This follow-up mission examined ARPANSA’s progress in acting upon the recommendations and suggestions made during the 2007 mission and reviewed the areas of significant regulatory changes since that review. The review team found that ARPANSA has made significant progress toward improving its regulatory activities, as most of the findings identified in the 2007 report have been effectively addressed and therefore can be considered closed. The team also made recommendations and suggestions to further strengthen ARPANSA’s regulatory system. The team identified areas where the Australian Government should take actions to enhance the national regulatory infrastructure for nuclear safety and security, including revising the ARPANS Act to take full account of international principles, recommendations and IAEA safety standards and guides; and enhancing the national framework for nuclear and radiation emergency preparedness by clearly identifying and assigning responsibilities to ARPANSA and other appropriate organizations.

20 February 2012 − Senate Estimates with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and ANSTO’s Dr Paterson:

• Senator Ludlam: Dr Paterson, welcome back. I note that a Department of Health and Aging review was undertaken into ARPANSA’s handling of certain safety matters in ANSTO, that there was a report issued last year and that, as a result of that report being produced, an investigation, I believe, has been reopened within ANSTO into an incident that happened five years ago with yttrium-90. Can you tell us why that is?
• Dr Paterson: ANSTO has not reopened an investigation into that matter, but we have received notification from ARPANSA that an independent person appointed by ARPANSA is going to undertake a review of whether an incident with yttrium-90 took place on the morning of 3 September 2007. …
• Senator LUDLAM: Are there particular recommendations that have fallen out of that [Comcare report] that you are taking up?
• Dr Paterson: Yes, there is a set of recommendations that were made in the report. We have reviewed those recommendations. We have accepted all of those recommendations and we have met with Comcare to brief them on the actions we are taking to meet those recommendations. …
• Dr Paterson: “Over time, certainly over the last two years there has been an improvement in incident reporting and the effectiveness of that incident reporting and in the total number of reports, and I think that that has been a really good benefit.”
• Dr Paterson: I think it is very clear that the original Comcare review found that Mr Reid had not been sanctioned for any health-and-safety related matter. The second Comcare review in relation to suspension of employees found that there was no breach in respect of the suspension process and that the suspension process was not in any way associated with health or safety concerns.

February 2012 − Senate Estimates – Greens Senator Scott Ludlam with ARPANSA’s Dr Larsson:

• Senator Ludlam: I would like to acknowledge your decision to ask the department of health to review some of the investigations into practices at ANSTO. We heard their side of the story a little earlier in the day. I am informed of a vastly improved safety culture at ANSTO. That shows, I suppose, that there was enormous room for improvement from when we started this a couple of years ago. I asked ANSTO this morning about an investigation that was being reopened as an outcome of that department of health investigation held five years ago into an incident involving Yttrium-90. They said that that is being reopened because what has been revealed is the possibility that a relationship between ANSTO staff and someone at ARPANSA might have influenced a report. We had some of the story described very briefly from ANSTO this morning, but they have handballed it to your desk. So can you just tell us what is occurring there?
• Dr Larsson: I will recap. You might remember that I actually called for a review of two of the previous inspections that we had done at ANSTO—one that related to an incident in 2008 and the other that related to an incident in 2007; the one that you mention about the protection of Yttrium-90. I asked for assistance from the department of health and I got a report from the department of health which said that the incident in 2008 relating to the production of molybdenum could be a closed case. There was still a possibility of questions that needed to be asked in relation to the Yttrium-90 incident, which was back in 2007, 4½ years ago. As a result of that review that I got from the audit and fraud unit of the department of health, I contracted KPMG to look further into this. The report is likely to be delivered to me by the end of March. Before that, I do not have any more information to provide to you.

16 March 2012 − The Australian reports that:

• “[ANSTO] used findings of an inaccurate, biased and partially fabricated in-house report as the pretext to suspend − and recommend the dismissal of − two employees who raised health and safety concerns over the mishandling of radioactive materials. The conclusion comes from an investigation by the national workplace regulator, Comcare, into events surrounding an incident in September 2010 in which a third employee was contaminated with radioactive yttrium-90 at the radioisotope production facility (ARI).”
• “The Comcare investigation report, completed last December and obtained by The Australian, confirms long-running claims of bullying and cover-ups at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s Lucas Heights facility in Sydney’s south.”
• “Comcare found the ANSTO investigator’s report “was not impartial or reliable”. He noted as well, that the investigator included fabricated statements and “relied on hearsay and opinion from personnel . . . in the form of emails, conversations and handwritten notes”.”
• “Comcare concluded that the men had been denied procedural justice, and that the ANSTO investigation’s findings “cannot be accepted as factual evidence”.”

22 March 2012 − The Australian reports that ANSTO is facing legal action brought by David Reid, a former technician and staff-elected health and safety officer. Mr Reid is seeking compensation for harm he claims he suffered after raising concerns about contamination incidents in the radioisotope production facility between 2007 and 2008.

28 May 2012 − Budget Estimates – Economics Committee, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and ANSTO’s Dr Paterson:

• Senator LUDLAM: Yes, if you want to make nuclear weapons and stuff, but let us not go there. Mr Paterson, I do not think you addressed this in your opening statement. On 16 March, 2012 a piece that ran in the Australian reported that ANSTO had used findings of an inaccurate, biased and partially fabricated in-house report as the pretext to suspend a number of workers, and ANSTO still appears to be a rather unhappy workplace. An investigation by a regulator into activities at ANSTO finds room for improvement in some fairly basic and fundamental areas, and nine recommendations were made by Comcare. Could you please tell the committee how ANSTO is making the multiple additional improvements identified by Comcare in its report? Do you want to just give us an update on what ANSTO is doing in response to that report?
• Dr Paterson: The media report or the report of Comcare?
• Senator LUDLAM: No, the report of Comcare.
• Dr Paterson: In respect of the that report, the first point that I wish to make is that ANSTO and I, as the leader of ANSTO, do not tolerate any kind of workplace bullying. The employees concerned continue to work at ANSTO in positions mutually agreed by ANSTO, the unions and the employees concerned. ANSTO continues to have a good relationship with those employees and their union representatives. They are performing a valuable role. In respect to the Comcare report, Comcare made no findings of any breach. Comcare proposed a series of recommendations that ANSTO has accepted and has developed into an action plan agreed with both Comcare and the relevant union. The report made recommendations about ANSTO improving investigations, which have been accepted. ANSTO has now adopted the Australian government investigation standard as the basis for all of our investigations, and is rolling out appropriate training to those staff who are involved in such investigations to ensure that they meet the relevant standard.
• Senator LUDLAM: Who were not appropriately trained.
• Dr Paterson: They were trained in investigative processes, but we were not aware that there was an Australian government investigation standard. Our investigators have always been trained, but this is a higher bar and we are very happy to complete with that higher bar. We urge all other institutions that conduct human resource investigations to meet the same standard.
• Senator LUDLAM: Could you table for the committee the action plan that you mentioned?
• Dr Paterson: I would be prepared to take that on notice, but we can table it.
• Senator LUDLAM: I do not know whether there would be privacy implications.
• Dr Paterson: There may well be some privacy implications, but those will not be extensive. I think we would be very happy to share that action plan.
• Senator LUDLAM: Take names out if you will, but that would be much appreciated.

19 June 2012 − A KPMG report commissioned by ARPANSA finds that:

• on 3 September 2007, two personal contamination events were reported
• it is likely that one or more ANSTO employee received radiation exposure during the 3 September 2007 incidents
• “The recollection of events by existing and former ANSTO employees is imprecise at best.”
• “In summary, we find that it is possible that the version of events in Mr Reid’s allegations did occur.”
• a 28 May 2010 report by ARPANSA notes that ARPANSA “investigators were not able to piece together the full events of the day.”
• the incidents were “most likely caused by escape of materials through the service port of the “glove box” used to manufacture Y-90, not through a pinhole in the glove as the internal ANSTO review had found.”
• ARPANSA supplied ANSTO with transcripts of interviews with ANSTO staff.
• on 18 May 2010 ARPANSA provided ANSTO with a preliminary inspection report, and the final inspection report was supplied to ANSTO on 10 September 2010.
• on 23 February 2011, the CEO of ARPANSA sought assistance from the Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) to undertake an investigation to incidents in September 2007 (Y-90) and August 2008 (Mo-99)
• on 10 June 2011 the DoHA investigation concluded that Mr Reid’s allegations regarding 3 September 2007 incidents had not been adequately tested. DoHA recommended that an independent reviewer be engaged to reinvestigate the allegations − hence this ARPANSA-commissioned review by KPMG.
• neither the interim report nor the final report by ARPANSA “sufficiently examined Mr Reid’s allegations that a contamination incident … occurred during the morning of 3 September 2007.”

More information on inadequate safety practices at ANSTO and inadequate regulation:

• Friends of the Earth website
• Lucas Heights whistleblower sparks nuclear safety fears, ABC, 5 May 2010
• 1 June 2010 – Senate Estimates with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and ANSTO’s Dr Paterson
• Report slams Australian nuclear reactor, ABC Lateline, 8 Feb 2011
• Safety breaches at reactor The Australian, 8 Feb 2011
• Nuclear whistleblower treated unfairly The Australian, 8 Feb 2011
• Video: Report slams Australian nuclear reactor (ABC Lateline), 9 Feb 2011
• Report scathing of nuclear reactor safety ABC, 9 Feb 2011
• Nuclear reactor under investigation The Australian, 9 Feb 2011
• Nuclear safety breaches concern Opposition, ABC, 9 Feb 2011
• Reactor staff ‘bullied over safety concerns’, The Australian, 28 Feb 2011
• Backdown at Lucas Heights over safety claims, The Australian, 3 March 2011
• Nuclear agency safety ‘stuck in 70s’ The Australian, 24 May 2011
• 30 May 2011 − Senate Estimates − ANSTO
• 19 October 2011 − Senate Estimates − ANSTO
• 20 February 2012 − Senate Estimates − ANSTO
• February 2012 − Senate Estimates – ARPANSA
• Lucas Heights nuclear reactor bullying exposed, The Australian, 16 March 2012
• Third nuclear worker in bullying claim, The Australian, 22 March 2012
• KPMG report commissioned by ARPANSA
• 28 May 2012 − Budget Estimates – ANSTO

Updates

• Nuclear agency boss emotional as whistleblower taunts, 18 October 2012, Bianca Hall, The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/national/nuclear-agency-boss-emotional-as-whistleblower-taunts-20121017-27riz.html

“KPMG conducted the most recent investigation into the incident, reporting in June that many current and former ANSTO employees had ”imprecise at best” recollections of the incident. But it found the regulator – the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency – failed to properly investigate the matter and neither its interim, nor final inspection reports, ”sufficiently examined allegations that a contamination incident … occurred”.”

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Fukushima “under control”?

Jim Green, 28 March 2015, The Ecologist

www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2810545/after_fukushima_japans_nuclear_village_is_back_in_charge.html

Public opposition to nuclear power in Japan remains strong, writes Jim Green, but piece by piece, Shinzo Abe’s right-wing government has been putting the country’s infamous ‘nuclear village’ back in control − boosted by draconian press censorship laws, massive interest-free loans, and a determination to forget all the ‘lessons’ of Fukushima. Is another big accident inevitable?

Public opposition to reactor restarts (and the nuclear industry more generally) continues to exert some influence in Japan. Five to seven of the oldest of Japan’s 48 ‘operable’ reactors are likely to be sacrificed to dampen opposition to the restart of other reactors, and local opposition may result in the permanent shut down of some other reactors. Currently, all 48 of Japan’s ‘operable’ reactors are shut down − and the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi have been written off.

However, slowly but surely, the corrupt and collusive practices that led to the Fukushima disaster are re-emerging. The ‘nuclear village’ is back in control.

Energy policy

After the Fukushima accident, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government commenced a review of energy policy. After deliberations in a committee that included more or less equal numbers of nuclear critics, proponents and neutral people, three scenarios were put forward in June 2012 − based on 0%, 15% and 20-25% of electricity generation from nuclear reactors.

These scenarios were put to a broad national debate, the outcome of which was that a clear majority of the public supported a nuclear phase-out. The national debate played a crucial role in pushing the DPJ government to support a nuclear phase-out.

After the December 2012 national election, the incoming Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government repudiated the DPJ’s goal of phasing out nuclear power. The LDP government also revamped the policy-drafting committee, drastically reducing the number of nuclear critics. And the committee itself was sidelined in the development of a draft Basic Energy Plan.

“From a process perspective, this represents a step back about 20 years”, said Dr Philip White, an expert on Japan’s energy policy formation process.

“A major step toward greater public participation and disclosure of information occurred after the December 1995 sodium leak and fire at the Monju fast breeder reactor.” Dr White wrote. “Although public participation was not conducted in good faith, at least lip service was paid. It seems that the current government has decided that it doesn’t even need to pay lip service.”

The Basic Energy Plan approved by Cabinet in April 2014 contains nothing more than a meaningless nod to widespread public anti-nuclear sentiment, stating that dependence on nuclear energy will be reduced ‘to the extent possible’.

Junko Edahiro, chief executive of Japan for Sustainability and one of the people removed from the energy policy advisory committee, noted in November 2014: “Now what we have is a situation where government officials and committees are back to doing their jobs as if the March 2011 disasters had never occurred. They have resumed what they had been doing for 30 or 40 years, focusing on nuclear power … In Japan we have what some people refer to as a ‘nuclear village’: a group of government officials, industries, and academia notorious for being strongly pro-nuclear. There has been little change in this group, and the regulatory committee to oversee nuclear policies and operations is currently headed by a well-known nuclear proponent.”

‘An accident will surely happen again’

Yotaro Hatamura, who previously chaired the ‘Cabinet Office Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations of TEPCO’, recently told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that pre-Fukushima complacency is returning.

“Sufficient investigations have not been conducted” into the causes of the Fukushima disaster, said Hatamura, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo.

The Cabinet Office Investigation Committee report called on the government to continue efforts to determine the cause of the nuclear disaster, but “almost none” of its proposals have been reflected in recent government actions, Hatamura said.

He further noted that tougher nuclear safety standards were introduced after the Fukushima disaster, but with the exception of this “regulatory hurdle … the situation seems unchanged from before the accident.”

“It does not appear that organizations to watch [government actions] are working properly”, Hatamura said. “There could always be lapses in oversight in safety assessments, and an accident will surely happen again.”

Hatamura questioned the adequacy of evacuation plans, saying they have been compiled without fully reflecting on the Fukushima accident: “The restarts of reactors should be declared only after sufficient preparations are made, such as conducting evacuation drills covering all residents living within 30 kilometers of each plant based on developed evacuation plans.”

Japan Atomic Energy Commission

In September 2012, the DPJ government promised that a review of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) would be conducted ‘with its abolition and reorganization in mind’. The government established a review committee, which published a report in December 2012. After taking office, the incoming LDP government shelved the report and commenced a new review.

The second review recommended that the JAEC no longer produce an overarching Framework for Nuclear Energy Policy. But an LDP committee has reportedly decided that the JAEC will be tasked with putting together a nuclear energy policy that would effectively have equivalent status to the Framework for Nuclear Energy Policy.

Two reviews, very little change − and far from being abolished, the JAEC retains a role in framing nuclear policy. Moreover, the government has proposed that the JAEC, a promoter of nuclear power, could acts as a ‘third party’ in the choice of a final disposal site for nuclear waste. Some experts who attended a ministry panel meeting in February questioned the JAEC’s independence.

Government’s massive financial support for TEPCO

Many have called for TEPCO to be nationalised, or broken up into separate companies, but the LDP government has protected and supported the company. The government has also greatly increased financial support for TEPCO.

For example in January 2014 the government approved an increase in the ceiling for interest-free loans the Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund is allowed to give TEPCO, from 5 trillion yen to 9 trillion yen (€39.0-70.2 billion)

The government will also cover some of the costs for dealing with the Fukushima accident which TEPCO was previously required to pay, such as an estimated 1.1 trillion yen (€8.6 billion) for interim storage facilities for waste from clean-up activities outside the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The government has also amended the Electricity Business Act to extend the period for collecting decommissioning funds from electricity rates by up to 10 years after nuclear plants are shut down. The amendments also allow TEPCO to include in electricity rates depreciation costs for additional equipment purchased for the decommissioning of the Fukushima plant.

Special Committee for Investigation of Nuclear Power Issues

An early example of the LDP government’s reconstitution of the nuclear village was the Special Committee for Investigation of Nuclear Power Issues, established by the LDP government in 2013 to monitor nuclear power administration.

A majority of the Committee members double as members of the LDP. “We avoided anti-nuclear lawmakers”, said a senior official of the LDP’s Diet Affairs Committee.

LDP parliamentarian Taro Kono, a member of a multi-party group of anti-nuclear parliamentarians, wanted to join the committee but was snubbed.

Ironically, the Special Committee was formed as a result of a recommendation from the Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, which was scathing about the sort of cynical cronyism that its recommendation led to.

Media censorship and intimidation

Japan has steadily slipped down Reporters Without Borders global ranking for press freedom since the Fukushima disaster, from 11th in 2010 to 61st in the latest ranking.

Journalists have been threatened with ‘criminal contempt’ and defamation suits, and Japan’s ‘state secrets’ law makes investigative journalism about Japan’s nuclear industry a perilous undertaking. Under the law, which took effect in December 2014, the government can sentence those who divulge government secrets − which are broadly defined − to a decade in jail.

Benjamin Ismaïl from Reporters Without Borders wrote in March 2014: “As we feared in 2012, the freedom to inform and be informed continues to be restricted by the ‘nuclear village’ and government, which are trying to control coverage of their handling of the aftermath of this disaster. Its long-term consequences are only now beginning to emerge and coverage of the health risks and public health issues is more important than ever.”

Reporters Without Borders said in March 2014: “Both Japanese and foreign reporters have described to Reporters Without Borders the various methods used by the authorities to prevent independent coverage of the [Fukushima] disaster and its consequences. They have been prevented from covering anti-nuclear demonstrations and have been threatened with criminal proceedings for entering the ‘red zone’ declared around the plant. And they have even been interrogated and subjected to intimidation by the intelligence services.”

Lessons learned … and quickly forgotten

The corruption and collusion of Japan’s nuclear village led to numerous accidents before the Fukushima disaster.

And the corruption and collusion of Japan’s nuclear village was a root cause of the Fukushima disaster itself. On that point the Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission could not have been blunter: “The accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties.”

A big part of the post-Fukushima spin is that lessons were learned from the nuclear disaster and improvements made. But the real lesson from this saga is that the nuclear industry − in Japan at least − has learned nothing from its catastrophic mistakes.

As Yotaro Hatamura says, an accident will surely happen again.

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where this article was originally published (March 19, 2015 | No. 800). Nuclear Monitor is published 20 times a year. It has been publishing deeply researched, often strongly critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

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Spinning Fukushima’s Second Anniversary

Gavin Mudd and Jim Green, 30/1/13, New Matilda

http://newmatilda.com/2013/01/30/spinning-fukushimas-second-anniversary

With the second anniversary of the Fukushima disaster approaching, nuclear supporters around the world are promoting a set of disingenuous arguments. With a full-frontal assault on science and logic they contrive to blame the profound impacts of the disaster not on the nuclear industry but on nuclear critics and independent scientists.

The industry-funded Australian Uranium Association (AUA) sets out these arguments in its first media release for the year. The AUA objects to estimates of the long-term cancer death toll from the Fukushima disaster based on estimates of population-wide (collective) radiation exposure. These estimates include a “very preliminary order-of-magnitude guesstimate” of “around 1000″  fatal cancers, another scientific study suggesting “~100s cases” of fatal cancers, and a Stanford University study that estimates “an additional 130 (15-1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24-1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposure-dose and dose-response models used in the study.”

So, what’s wrong with using collective radiation exposure figures to estimate long-term cancer deaths? Before talking about the real limitations of that approach, let’s pause and admire the AUA’s explanation: “This method is akin to saying that small rocks thrown at a lot of people will kill some of them because the combined weight of the small rocks is large enough to do so. … In other words, science confirms common sense: small additional radiation exposures for a lot of people will not kill some of them just because the combined radiation exposure is large.”

The rock analogy doesn’t square with the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion, which holds that there is no threshold below which ionising radiation is without risk. For example:

• The 2005 report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation of the US National Academy of Sciences states that: “The Committee judges that the balance of evidence from epidemiologic, animal and mechanistic studies tend to favor a simple proportionate relationship at low doses between radiation dose and cancer risk.”
• A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 concluded that “the most reasonable assumption is that the cancer risks from low doses … decrease linearly with decreasing dose.”
• And to give one other example (there are many), a 2010 report by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) states that “the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates.”

So the AUA’s analogy with throwing rocks is silly — yet it is being trotted out ad nauseum by nuclear advocates. The US Health Physics Society uses the rock analogy and adds this gem of an explanation: “… if the most highly exposed person receives a trivial dose, then everyone’s dose will be trivial and we can’t expect anyone to get cancer.” Thus the problem of low-level radiation exposure risk is redefined as a non-problem of “trivial” doses which are, by definition, harmless. It would be too kind to describe that as circular logic — it is asinine (and a reminder that scientists themselves are sometimes guilty of great crimes against science and logic).

While the weight of scientific opinion holds that there is no threshold below which radiation exposure is harmless, there is less scientific confidence about how to quantify the risks. Risk estimates for low-level radiation exposure are typically based on a linear extrapolation of better-understood risks from higher levels of exposure.

This “Linear No Threshold” model has some heavy-hitting scientific support. The above-mentioned study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.” Likewise, the above-mentioned US National Academy of Sciences report states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.”

Nonetheless, there is certainly uncertainty with the LNT model — the true risks could be higher or lower. And, as the AUA trumpets, UNSCEAR and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) recommend against using collective dose figures and LNT risk estimates to estimate total deaths (even though UNSCEAR itself uses that approach to estimate up to 4000 long-term cancer deaths among the people who received the highest radiation doses from Chernobyl).

The problem with the recommendation from UNSCEAR and the ICRP is that there is simply no other way to arrive at an estimate of the death toll from Fukushima (or from Chernobyl, routine emissions across the nuclear fuel cycle, or anything else). Public health (epidemiological) studies of varying quality will be carried out in Japan, but all face great obstacles. Cancers are common diseases and isolating the contribution of one factor becomes a futile exercise, like trying to find a needle in a hay-stack. Another difficulty is that most cancers are multi-causal. The upshot is that cancer incidence and mortality statistics are being pushed up and down by a myriad of factors at any point in time and it becomes impossible or near-impossible to isolate any one factor.

Given the severe limitations of public health studies, we’d best return to collective dose estimates and the LNT model. By all means we should acknowledge the uncertainties. As the report from the US National Academy of Sciences states, “combined analyses are compatible with a range of possibilities, from a reduction of risk at low doses to risks twice those upon which current radiation protection recommendations are based.”

The National Academy of Sciences makes the important point that the true risks may be lower or higher than predicted by LNT — a point that needs emphasis and constant repetition because nuclear apologists routinely conflate uncertainty with zero risk.

The AUA states: “We need to know if people die as a result of the releases.” But the AUA rejects the only method of arriving at an estimate of the death toll from Fukushima and fails to suggest any alternatives.

The AUA goes further with this attack: “Those who use collective dose estimates of a Fukushima death toll should bear in mind the negative emotional effect of their advocacy, especially now that the world’s premier radiation protection organisations have made clear the absence of a scientific basis for the estimates of the alarmists.”

Uranium industry consultant (and self-described “pro-nuclear environmentalist”) Ben Heard ratchets up the rhetoric: “Building outrage through tried and true techniques is a known, understood and practiced part of activism. It needs to be called out, named and denounced loudly, clearly and often. They are doing harm. It is, in a word, outrageous.”

Rather than untangling that tortured logic, let’s finish with a few simple truths about Fukushima. The most authoritative and detailed report to date was carried out by the Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), which was established by an Act of the Japanese Parliament.

The NAIIC report lifts the lid on the widespread corruption and collusion that led to the Fukushima disaster, stating that the accident was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented” if not for “a multitude of errors and wilful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11”. The accident was the result of “collusion between the government, the regulators and [plant operator] TEPCO”.

The report is equally scathing about the response to the disaster. It notes that most of the 150,000 evacuees from the nuclear disaster are still dislocated and they “continue to face grave concerns, including the health effects of radiation exposure, displacement, the dissolution of families, disruption of their lives and lifestyles and the contamination of vast areas of the environment.”

Regardless of the long-term death toll, the Fukushima disaster has caused immense suffering and it will be decades before we’ve heard the last of it. For uranium industry spivs to blame that suffering on “alarmists” using collective dose figures and LNT risk estimates is disingenuous. They ought instead to be asking themselves some hard questions about why they turned a blind eye to the endemic corruption and collusion in Japan’s “nuclear village” — corruption and collusion that was responsible for the Fukushima disaster and countless other accidents and “incidents”. There was a mountain of evidence  on the public record long before the Fukushima disaster.

Gavin Mudd is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering at Monash University. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth.

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The fallout from Fukushima

ABC Opinion, 2 August 2012, Jim Green, www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4171344.html

Two important reports have been released in recent weeks – one analysing the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and another on the impact of the disaster on the nuclear ‘renaissance’.

The report of the 10-member Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAAIC) – established by Japan’s national parliament – states that the Fukushima disaster was “a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented”.

The report “catalogues a multitude of errors and wilful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11.” The accident was the result of “collusion between the government, the regulators and [Fukushima plant operator] TEPCO”, the report states, and these parties “betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents.”

TEPCO “manipulated its cosy relationship with regulators to take the teeth out of regulations.” The independence of the regulators “was a mockery”.

Those conclusions, based on 900 hours of hearings and 1,167 interviews, contrast sharply with the spin from nuclear apologists that the disaster was caused by the ‘unforeseeable’ scale of the earthquake and tsunami.

The NAIIC report is equally scathing about the response to the disaster: “Insufficient evacuation planning led to many residents receiving unnecessary radiation exposure. Others were forced to move multiple times, resulting in increased stress and health risks – including deaths among seriously ill patients.”

In some cases people were moved to areas with higher radiation levels than the place they started from. Iitate village, north-west of Fukushima, was not evacuated for over a month despite earlier evidence of radiation levels in excess of the evacuation criteria.

A bungled evacuation of 340 patients from a hospital near the nuclear plant was one of many problems that arose because of seriously inadequate emergency planning (which, in turn, was due to hubris, cost-cutting and collusion). Eight patients died after spending almost 12 hours on a bus while about 35 were mistakenly left at the hospital for two additional days. Nearly 600 deaths were caused by fatigue or by medical conditions worsened by evacuation from areas affected by the tsunami and/or the nuclear disaster.

TEPCO failed to give most workers dosimeters to measure radiation exposure in the days after the crisis. A construction company forced workers at the Fukushima plant to cover their dosimeters with lead plates in a bid to stay under the exposure threshold and to prolong their work at the stricken plant. An executive explained: “We judged mistakenly that we could bring peace of mind to the workers if we could somehow delay their dosimeters’ alarms going off.”

Most of the 150,000 evacuees from the nuclear disaster are still dislocated and the NAIIC report notes that they “continue to face grave concerns, including the health effects of radiation exposure, displacement, the dissolution of families, disruption of their lives and lifestyles and the contamination of vast areas of the environment.”

The report states that “the government and the regulators are not fully committed to protecting public health and safety; that they have not acted to protect the health of the residents and to restore their welfare.” Add that to the “wilful negligence” that caused the disaster in the first place and it is no wonder that there are regular, large anti-nuclear protests in Japan. A July 16 protest in Tokyo, for example, was attended by 100,000 to 170,000 citizens. Most Japanese opposed the construction of new reactors even before Fukushima.

What a shame that Prime Minister Gillard pronounced last year that Fukushima “doesn’t have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports”. The disaster and its aftermath provide plenty of food for thought about the wisdom of turning a blind eye for many years to the gross mismanagement of nuclear power in one of Australia’s uranium customer countries. Apart from anything else, that blinkered approach isn’t good for business. Japan’s previous plan to increase nuclear to 50 per cent of electricity generation is in tatters; a cold peace may be achieved at a figure of around 15 per cent.

The 2012 World Nuclear Industry Status Report details the impact of the Fukushima disaster on the global nuclear ‘renaissance’. Global nuclear power capacity has been stagnant for the past 20 years – the renaissance has been more rhetoric than reality.

In 2011, seven new reactors started up while 19 were shut down. Four countries have announced that they will phase out nuclear power within a given timeframe: Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Taiwan. At least five countries have decided not to engage or re-engage in nuclear power programs – Egypt, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, and Thailand. Some countries – such as China and India – will continue with nuclear expansion plans but at a slower pace.

Of the 59 power reactors under construction around the world, at least 18 are experiencing multi-year delays and the others are in the early phase of construction with no certainty of reaching completion. Construction costs are rapidly rising. Most of the world’s power reactors are edging towards old-age so even if modest short-term growth is achieved, significant new build will be required in coming decades just to replace permanent reactor shut downs.

Last year Iran became the first country to start commercial operation of a new nuclear power plant since Romania in 1996. However Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons points to the long history of ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs providing political cover and technical support for WMD programs. More food for thought for our Prime Minister.

Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth and author of a detailed briefing paper on the events leading up to the Fukushima disaster.

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More articles …

One year on, Fukushima is still spinning, 15 Feb 2012

Experts protect a nuclear interest, 16 March 2011

Why Fukushima Was A Man-Made Disaster, 8 March 2012

Jim Green

Chain Reaction #115, August 2012, www.foe.org.au/chain-reaction

Interesting times in the uranium sector. The mining companies have had a few wins since the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, but they’ve had more to commiserate.

Bill Repard, organiser of the Paydirt Uranium Conference held in Adelaide in February, put on a brave face with his claim that: “The sector’s hiccups in the wake of Fukushima are now over with, the global development of new nuclear power stations continues unabated and the Australian sector has literally commenced a U-turn in every sense,” Mr Repard said.

Yet for all the hype, uranium accounts for a lousy 0.03 percent of Australian export revenue and a negligible 0.02 percent of Australian jobs. The industry’s future depends on the nuclear power ‘renaissance’, but global nuclear power capacity has been stagnant for the past 20 years and if there is any growth at all in the next 20 years, it will be modest.

The uranium price tanked after the Fukushima disaster and so far there is no sign of a bounce. Current prices are too low to allow the smaller uranium wannabes to proceed with any confidence.

In South Australia, BHP Billiton’s plan for a massive expansion of the Olympic Dam copper/uranium mine has yet to be approved by the company board, with recent rumblings that the project may be put on the slow-track. Japanese company Mitsui recently pulled out the Honeymoon uranium mine as it “could not foresee sufficient economic return from the project”. Marathon Resources’ plan to mine uranium has been terminated by a state government decision to protect the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary − a decision made all the easier by the company’s licence breaches during exploration.

The industry also has problems in the Northern Territory. A Traditional Owner veto has put an end to plans to mine Koongarra, and plans are in train to incorporate the mining lease into Kakadu National Park. Energy Resources of Australia has abandoned plans to use heap leach mining at the Ranger mine, though an exploratory drilling program has recently commenced. Water management problems continue to plague the mining and milling of uranium at Ranger. At various times in recent years, both the NT Country Liberal Party and the Labor Party have opposed plans to build a mine at Angela Pamela, a short distance from Alice Springs and an even shorter distance from the town’s water supply.

In Queensland, the new Liberal National Party government has so far stuck to its pre-election promise to prohibit uranium mining. That may change, but in any case Queensland is home to no more than around three percent of Australia’s uranium reserves. The NSW Liberal Party government has recently passed legislation to permit uranium exploration − but exploration in earlier decades yielded little of interest.

Western Australia

Western Australia is now the key uranium battleground. The Liberal Party state government supports uranium mining. State Labor policy is to oppose uranium mining but party leader Mark McGowan says that any mines that have received state government approvals would not be stopped by an incoming Labor government.

As elsewhere, it has been a miserable year for the uranium mining wannabes in WA. At least two projects have been put on hold. The only company with any chance of receiving government approvals before the 2013 state election is Toro Energy, which is pursuing plans to mine about 12,000 tonnes of uranium at Wiluna in the Goldfields.

You’d think that Toro Energy might keep a low profile given the political sensitivities. Not so. The company has been loudly defending TEPCO, the notorious operator of the crippled Fukushima plant − even in the face of overwhelming evidence of TEPCO’s record of safety breaches and cover-ups.

Still more controversially, Toro Energy has paid for a number of speaking tours by fringe scientists who claim that exposure to low-level radiation is harmless or even beneficial to human health. Fourty-five Australian medical doctors recently signed a statement calling on Toro Energy to stop promoting junk science and noting that recent scientific research has heightened concern about exposure to radon, the main source of radiation exposure to uranium miners.

The WA Conservation Council is leading the battle to stop Toro Energy opening up the state’s first uranium mining, and has established a website to challenge the company’s claims. The Conservation Council has also produced a detailed ‘Alternative Annual Report’ raising a host of concerns about Toro Energy and its plan to mine at Wiluna. A ‘Toro Watch’ website has been established to hold the company to account for its jiggery pokery and shenanigans (www.toro.org.au).

The history of uranium exploration in the Goldfields is one of the obstacles facing Toro Energy. Uranium exploration in the 1980s left a legacy of pollution and contamination. Radiation levels more than 100 times normal background readings have been recorded despite the area being ‘cleaned’ a decade ago. Even after the ‘clean up’, the Wiluna exploration site was left with rusting drums containing uranium ore, and a sign reading ‘Danger − low level radiation ore exposed’ was found lying face down in bushes.

In August 2000, Steve Syred, coordinator of the Wiluna-based Marruwayura Aboriginal Corporation, said that until about 1993, 100−150 people were living at an old mission three kilometres from the spot where high radiation levels were recorded. Mr. Syred told the Kalgoorlie Miner that the Aboriginal community had unsuccessfully resisted uranium exploration in the area in the early 1980s. Since then many people had lived in the area while the Ngangganawili Aboriginal Corporation was based near the site. Elders still hunted in the area.

More than 5,000 tonnes of radioactive tailings from the Yeelirrie uranium deposit, near Wiluna, were buried just north of Kalgoorlie after BHP stopped processing ore there in the 1980s. Earlier this year, damage to a security gate allowed children to enter the site on dirt bikes. BHP Billiton said it would improve security.

There is also concern in Kalgoorlie about plans to establish a uranium transport hob in the suburb of Parkeston, a few hundred metres from the Ninga Mia Aboriginal Community. That concern may be premature − it remains to be seen  if there will be any uranium to transport.

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

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EPA approval of Wiluna mine appealed

In June, nine appeals were lodged against the WA EPA’s approval of the Wiluna uranium mine proposal the previous month. The appeals will be heard by an appeals committee and considered by WA environment minister Bill Marmion.

Notwithstanding the EPA decision, further state government approvals are required before mining can proceed as well as Commonwealth approvals.

The Environmental Defenders Office lodged a detailed appeal on behalf of the Conservation Council of WA. CCWA director Piers Verstegen said: “We do not believe that the EPA assessment adequately deals with critical environmental risks including the management of radioactive mine tailings, contamination of groundwater and the transport of radioactive material through WA communities.”

Aboriginal elder and Wiluna resident Glen Cooke lodged a separate challenge. Mr Cooke’s video appeal is posted at wanfa.org.au and at youtube.com/user/BUMPcollective. Mr Cooke said: “Toro Energy they only talk to a few people, always the same people. It’s not right, the people from Bondini sometimes they don’t know about meetings, or their not invited to meetings or they can’t get to meetings. This is not right.” (Bondini is the community closest to the proposed mine.)

“Marmion and [federal environment minister] Burke they will be making a big decision that will affect our community our dreaming and our health. Before they make a decision on what happens in our community, before signing away our country from many thousands of kilometres away they should come and look us in the eyes.”

You can help Mr Cooke and his community stand up and say no to uranium mining by signing the online petition at ccwa.org.au/saynototoro

Jessie Boylan

Chain Reaction #115, August 2012, www.foe.org.au/chain-reaction/

Travelling to Maralinga for the first time after hearing so much about the effects the British nuclear blasts had on Indigenous people and Australian and British personnel, I didn’t know what to expect. I think I expected some sort of overwhelming physical evidence of the blasts, but what appeared was a space full of much remnant history and memory.

I travelled with Australian nuclear veteran, Avon Hudson and Dr. Mick Broderick from Murdoch University. Avon’s name is synonymous with Maralinga − he worked there during the bomb tests and, from the 1970s onwards, has done more than anyone to lift the lid on the scandals that took place. His reward has been 40 years of abuse. Mick is an academic whose research interests include ‘nuclearism and apocalypse as a cultural phenomenon’.

We’d waited for six months to get permission to enter Maralinga-Tjarutja lands, in particular the Maralinga village and testing sites. The village and surrounding sites were handed back to the Maralinga-Tjarutja people in 2009, though many areas remain radioactive. The ‘clean up’ in the late 1990s − the fourth but probably not the last − was sharply criticised by scientists-turned-whistleblowers.

Upon arrival we were let in by one of the two caretakers, Robin Matthews, who with his partner Della manages the Maralinga Village and surrounding areas, looks after tour groups and visitors.

The next day we set about exploring the village area and Avon took us to the airfield, next to which is one of the many waste pits where plutonium and cobalt-60 are still buried. We had to wait another day to visit the Forward Area where the nuclear blasts took place.

Veterans were organising a reunion for Remembrance Day 11/11/11 in the village and they had invited Avon, who then invited me.  The veterans came from all over the country to catch up and share stories. Most veterans have long since died. How many died as a result of their work on the nuclear blasts is the subject of endless controversy. A scientific study found clear evidence of increased cancer rates among veterans; but for governments and nuclear apologists, science is overrated.

I chatted with some vets who told me they weren’t impacted physically or psychologically from their time at Maralinga, and that they had a simple job of going to Watson (the closest rail-stop) and collecting supplies to bring back to the village.  These veterans remember the benefits of living out at Maralinga, the cricket pitch, the football field, the swimming pool, cinema, bar and mess hall.

Later we were privileged to sit down with some of the old ladies from Oak Valley Community, Margaret May and Aida Hart, and also Leena Taylor from Ceduna. They talk about their memories of being removed from Ooldea soak during the nuclear blasts and taken to Yalata Mission.

“We heard the sounds: one, two, three …” they say, referring to the first bombs at Emu Field, including the blast that blinded Yami Lester at the age of 10 at Walatinna Station, where he still lives today. “People could feel it as far away as Yalata.”

They say they knew that something bad was happening because of all the whitefellas and trucks around.

Leena questions whether it’s really that safe for communities to live around here and go hunting; she prompts the government to explain. All around the forward area sites, as we see later, there are signs up that say “kuka palya, ngura wiya” –”the food is ok [to hunt/eat], no camping”.

Even after the hand-back of land to the Maralinga Tjarutja people, the area still isn’t being used − people think the land is poisoned and don’t want to be there. The land is still poisoned − that much we know from the scientists-turned-whistleblowers, and from Avon’s first-hand knowledge of the place. The Howard government claimed the latest ‘clean up’ was ‘world’s best practice’. The Menzies government claimed the bomb tests posed no risk to man nor beast. Governments lie. Then and now, paid hack scientists and so-called regulators parrot government lies; it’s just easier that way.

Avon reminisces: “The countdown was on … and then it went bang, and they had to have the wind blowing the right way, blowin’ it away from where we were working, they didn’t want to contaminate all the area, they’d have to abandon it otherwise.

“The area became highly toxic as well as highly radioactive, but no-one ever told us, the scientists knew, but no-one told us Australians, and some of the English personnel that worked along side us.”

Ground Zero

On day three we visit the Forward Area, to see ground zero of some of the seven Maralinga nuclear explosions − named One Tree, Marcoo, Kite, Breakaway, Tadje, Biak, and Taranaki.

Avon speaks alot about Taranaki; he was ordered to work here not long after a blast had taken place. Some military personnel were ordered to roll around in ground zero dust shortly after nuclear blasts; the British later claimed they were testing the effects of radiation on clothing. This place was also used for so-called ‘minor trials’ or ‘safety tests ‘ which left a greater legacy of local contamination than the atomic tests which spread their pollution across Australia and beyond.

A plinth sits in every space where a bomb was exploded:

WARNING

RADIATION HAZARD

RADIATION LEVELS FOR A FEW HUNDRED METRES AROUND THIS POINT MAY BE ABOVE THOSE CONSIDERED SAFE FOR PERMANENT OCCUPATION

And on the other side (depending on the bomb):

TEST SITE

TARANAKI

A BRITISH ATOMIC WEAPON WAS TEST EXPLODED HERE ON 9 OCT 1957

Lunch is prepared for the veterans in the shelter of a large shed. The shed was the site for trucks to get washed down after the latest clean up attempt at Maralinga. It isn’t the place to be preparing and eating food.

Avon talks as we walk down and around the plinth. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking, to look back 50 years and see yourself as a young man, participating in a dark episode of Empire history. He feels betrayed. He was betrayed. Talking is cathartic for Avon; it releases a little anger and frustration, if only momentarily. His anger is infectious.

The last day at Maralinga. The evening is purple and pink after a big rain that helps wash away the dust. I wander around the empty concrete slabs where buildings used to be. I listen to birds chirping madly. Radioactive birds, perhaps; just this week, swallow droppings around the Sellafield nuclear site in northern England have been found to be radioactive − apparently their mistake is to eat radioactive mosquitoes. Closer to home, birds drop dead after drinking from tailings ponds at the Olympic Dam uranium mine − oases in the desert.

It gets dark and I head back. Avon is there chatting away to Mick. I make a cup of tea on our camp stove and toast to getting the hell out of here.

www.jessieboylan.wordpress.com, www.jessieboylan.com

TORO ENERGY PROMOTES RADIATION JUNK SCIENCE

Toro Energy is an Australian company involved in uranium exploration in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, South Australia and in Namibia, Africa. The company’s most advanced project is the proposed Wiluna uranium mine in the WA Goldfields.

Toro Energy has consistently promoted the fringe scientific view that exposure to low-level radiation is harmless. Toro Energy has sponsored at least three speaking visits to Australia by Canadian scientist Dr Doug Boreham, who argues that low-level radiation is actually beneficial to human health.

Those views are at odds with mainstream scientific evidence and expert assessment. For example:

• A 2010 report by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation states that “the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates.”
• The 2006 report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (BEIR) of the US National Academy of Sciences states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” The report also concludes that claims that low-level radiation exposure may be beneficial to human health are “unwarrranted”.
• A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) in 2003 concluded that: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.”

It is irresponsible for Toro Energy to consistently promote fringe scientific views and to ignore mainstream scientific evidence and expert assessment.

Even more alarming is that Toro Energy has sponsored “employee radiation training” by Dr Boreham. Recent scientific research has heightened concern about exposure to radon, the main source of radiation doses to uranium industry workers. In 2009, the International Commission on Radiological Protection concluded that radon gas delivers almost twice the radiation dose to humans as originally thought and the Commission is in the process of reassessing permissible levels. Previous dose estimates to miners need to be approximately doubled to accurately reflect the lung cancer hazard.

We call on Toro Energy to stop promoting fringe scientific views to uranium industry workers and to the public at large.

Signatories (all medical doctors working in Australia, or retired from working in Australia):

1. Margaret Beavis MBBS FRACGP
2. Peter Karamoskos MBBS, FRANZCR
3. Hilary Tyler MBChB, FACEM
4. Tilman Ruff MBBS (Hons), FRACP
5. Jenny Grounds MBBS, DRANZCOG, Grad Dip Med Acup.
6. Bill Williams MBBS
7. Rosalie Schultz MBBS, FAFPHM
8. James Rossiter AM, DU Deakin Honoris Causa, FRACP, FRCP Ed, MRCS, LRCP, MMSA, DCH, DObstRCOG
9. Rachel Darken MBBS, DPM
10. Michael Fonda MBBS, B.Med.Sci, FRACGP
11. Sue Wareham OAM, MBBS
12. Peter Shannon, MBBS, DPM, FRANZCP
13. Jason Garrood MBBS, FACRRM
14. Simon Leslie MBBS
15. Ben Bartlett MBBS, MPH, FAFOEM, FAFPHM, MRACGP
16. Fiona Russell BMBS, FRACP, MPHTM, Grad Dip(Clin Epi), PhD
17. Megan Passey B.Med (Hons), MPH, MSc, DipFP
18. Ken Harvey MBBS, FRCPA
19. Sandra Thompson BSc(Med), MBBS, MPH, PhD, Grad Dipl Management
20. Marion Carey MBBS (Hons.), MPH, FAFPHM, FRSPH
21. George Crisp MBBS, MRCGP
22. Harry Cohen AM, MBBS, FRACOG
23. Heath Kelly MBBS, Bsc, MPH, FAFPHM
24. Catherine Silsbury MBBS, MHSc, FAChAM
25. Colin D. Butler BMedSci(Hons), BMed, DTM&H, MSc(epi), PhD
26. Peter Tait MBBS, DipRACOG, FRACGP, MClimChng, MPHAA
27. Stephen Connor MBBS, MPH, BPharm (Hons), MRPharmS, Dip.Clin. Pharm
28. Chris Wright MBBS, FRACP, FCICM
29. Bobby Sundaralingam MBBS, FRANZCR, ANZSPNM, BSc
30. Frederick Mendelsohn AO, MD, PhD, FRACP, FAA,
31. Sally Attrill MBBS, B.Med.Sci., FRACGP, DRANZCOG
32. Elizabeth Moore MBBS
33. Ruth A. Mitchell BMBS, BA, BSc
34. Janet Bodycomb BSc, MBBS, FRACGP
35. Adam Badenoch BSc BMBS
36. Kristen Pearson MBBS, FRACP
37. Jane Ralls MBBS MRCGP (UK)
38. Tom Keaney MBBS
39. Peter Markey BMBS, DA, DRCOG, DTM&H, MPH, FAFPHM
40. Alison Creagh MBBS, DRANZCOG
41. Linda Selvey MBBS(Hon), PhD
42. Lucy Owen MBBS
43. Kate Jackson MBBS, DTM+H, FRCA, FAChPM (RACP), FFPMANZCA
44. Lisa Bohlscheid MBBS, FRACGP
45. Miriam Brooks MBBS, FRACGP
46. Chris Say MBBS FACRRM
47. Raymun Ghumman MBBS, BSc, BA
48. Ray Mylius MBBS, DPH, FRACMA, FAFPHM

On March 11, 2012, the anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam released the fourth edition of Let the Facts Speak: An Indictment of the Industry.

The publication − online at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/wp-content/uploads/LTFS-full-report-published-2012.pdf − includes a 150-page catalogue of nuclear accidents and incidents since the 1940s.

The publication also includes − in a separate paper online at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/wp-content/uploads/LTFS-DD-published.pdf − an analysis of nuclear risks covering issues such as reactor ageing, the uncomfortable intersection between economics and nuclear safety, regulation, ‘Generation IV’ reactors, and the debate over the risks of exposure to low-level ionising radiation.

The publication also includes a ‘Dirty Dozen’ list of some of the most dangerous and infamous moments in the history of the nuclear industry. It includes some major reactor accidents − Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Windscale. Three entries address non-reactor accidents − the Chelyabinsk liquid nuclear waste explosion in the Soviet Union, the theft of a radiotherapy source in Brazil and subsequent fatalities, and the fatal accident at a fuel fabrication plant at Tokaimura, Japan.

One entry concerns the failure to account for 160 kgs of plutonium for a period of at least eight months at the Sellafield plant in the UK. That was just one of many incidents at the same site, including a 1957 reactor fire, a data falsification scandal and a serious sabotage incident in the late 1990s, and international controversy over the routine emissions from nuclear fuel reprocessing operations.

The Superphenix fast breeder reactor in France is included in the Dirty Dozen list as an example of a nuclear ‘white elephant’ − a plant that failed spectacularly to meet its promised performance levels with billions of dollars wasted in the process (other such examples include reprocessing and fuel fabrication plants at Sellafield). Superphenix also provides a reminder that some of the ‘next generation’ nuclear power technologies that are now being promoted as ‘new’ and ‘safe’ are in fact old and unsafe.

Several entries − including Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Tokaimura − demonstrate the industry’s failure to learn from past accidents.

The Dirty Dozen list includes an example of strikes on a nuclear plant directed by a national government (Israel’s destruction of the Osiraq research reactor in Iraq) and strikes against a nuclear power plant by a sub-national group (Basque ETA terrorists). Those two entries are reproduced here.

Bombing and destruction of reactor in Iraq

On 7 June 1981, Israeli fighter planes destroyed the French-supplied ‘Osiraq’ (or ‘Osirak’ or ‘Tammuz 1’) 40 MW research reactor located at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre, 17 kms from Baghdad.

Ten Iraqi soldiers and one French civilian were killed in the attack, and three Israeli army personnel died during training for the mission. Other than those deaths, the attack was of little public health or environmental consequence as the reactor had not begun operating and had not been loaded with nuclear fuel.

The significance of the attack (and surrounding events) was that it so starkly demonstrated the realpolitik of nuclear weapons proliferation − Iraq’s pursuit of weapons under cover of a ‘peaceful’ nuclear program and Israel’s willingness to respond with a ‘pre-emptive’ military strike.

The safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency was put to the test and was found wanting. IAEA inspections failed to uncover Iraq’s weapons program and other research reactors were later found to have been used in various ways to advance Iraq’s weapons program. Israel clearly had no faith in the IAEA safeguards system as demonstrated by its attack on Osiraq (and more recently with its attack on a suspected reactor site in Syria in 2007).

In April 1979, Israeli agents in France allegedly planted a bomb that damaged the partially-built Osiraq reactor while it was awaiting shipment to Iraq. Israel is also alleged to have murdered a scientist working on Iraq’s nuclear program in June 1980 and to have bombed several of the French and Italian companies it suspected of working on the project.

The Iranian military also attacked and damaged the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre with air strikes on September 30, 1980, shortly after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and both Iran and Iraq attempted military strikes on nuclear plants on other occasions during the 1980-88 war. Al Tuwaitha was bombed during the 1991 Gulf war and yet again during the 2003 Gulf war. More recently, Israel destroyed a suspected reactor site in Syria in 2007.

The above examples have been motivated by attempts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear plants might also be targeted with the aim of widely dispersing radioactive material or, in the case of power reactors, disrupting electricity supply.

Reprocessing plants and stores for spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste typically contain enormous quantities of highly radioactive materials in readily dispersible forms, and are more vulnerable to attacks than reactors as they are generally less well protected.

Terrorist attacks on Spanish power reactor

On 18 December 1977, Basque ETA separatists set off bombs damaging the reactor vessel and a steam generator at the Lemoniz nuclear power plant under construction in Spain. Two workers died and one of the terrorists sustained fatal injuries.

On 17 March 1978, ETA planted another bomb in the plant, again causing the death of two workers and inflicting substantial damage to the plant. The explosives were smuggled into the plant by site workers.

On 3 June 1979, an anti-nuclear activist was killed by police during a peaceful protest (the peaceful public movement against Lemoniz attracted as many as 150,000 people to protest rallies).

On 13 June 1979, ETA planted another bomb inside the plant and the explosion caused the death of one worker.

On 11 November 1979, ETA kidnapped guards and exploded bombs at another nuclear plant, causing extensive damage.

On 29 January 1981, ETA kidnapped the chief engineer of the Lemoniz nuclear plant and later killed him.

ETA also destroyed hundreds of electricity pylons connected to the site.

In 1983, the Spanish nuclear power expansion program was cancelled following a change of government and construction of the Lemoniz plant was never completed.

Dozens of incidents of nuclear terrorism have taken place around the world, with a bewildering variety of perpetrators and motives. To date there has not been an incident resulting in mass casualties. However then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned in 2005:

“Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But, unfortunately, we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties. Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty.”

There are frequent reports of inadequate security at nuclear plants. In November 2005, for example, a reporter and photographer were able to park a one-tonne van for more than 30 minutes outside the back gate of the Lucas Heights nuclear site without being challenged. The gate, 800 metres from the research reactor, was protected by a simple padlock. The Australian reported: “The back door to one of the nation’s prime terrorist targets is protected by a cheap padlock and a stern warning against trespassing or blocking the driveway.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uranium’s long and shameful journey to Fukushima

Dave Sweeney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australian uranium fuelled Fukushima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Australia’s role in the Fukushima disaster

Jim Green / Friends of the Earth Australia

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

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

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

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

Come in, spinner

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

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

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

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

Evacuees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia’s role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scandals and accidents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Table of Contents (with links)

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

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

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More SMR spin and misinformation from Ben Heard

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

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

Heard:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More misinformation from Ben Heard re SMR costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Small modular reactor rhetoric hits a hurdle

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

Small modular reactor rhetoric hits a hurdle

Jim Green, 23 June 2020, RenewEconomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A$8,600 per kW for China’s HTGR

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

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

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

BNW’s imaginary reactor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost overruns

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

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

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

* The cost of Russia’s floating SMR quadrupled.

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

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

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

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

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

Timelines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning rates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality bats last

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the comments censored by Heard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information:

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

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

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

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New nuclear push digs deep into vault of alternative facts

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

New nuclear push digs deep into vault of alternative facts

Jim Green, 31 May 2017, RenewEconomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pyroprocessing flops

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

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

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

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

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

Pyroprocessing: the integral fast reactor waste fiasco

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

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

Lyman writes:¹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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#followthemoney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Heard’s friends on the far right

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

Not everyone likes the grand bargain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good riddance to Bright New World. #epicfail

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

Minerals Council of Australia makes global top 10 climate policy opponents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See elsewhere in this webpage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Royal Commission

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

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

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

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

Enter the ecomodernists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National nuclear waste dump

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

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

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

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

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

Uranium mining

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

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

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

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

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

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Would you do consulting work for General Atomics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is an extract from an article posted at:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Pro-nuclear environmentalists’ in denial about power/weapons connections

Jim Green, Nuclear Monitor #858, 1 March 2018,

It takes a moment to tell a lie but it can take much longer to deconstruct one. So it is with this deconstruction of claims by pro-nuclear propagandists that “nuclear energy prevents the spread of nuclear weapons” and that “peace is furthered when a nation embraces nuclear power”.

As discussed in Nuclear Monitor #850, nuclear industry bodies (such as the US Nuclear Energy Institute) and supporters (such as former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz) are openly acknowledging the connections between nuclear power and weapons ‒ connections they have denied for decades.¹ Those connections are evident in almost all of the weapons states, in numerous countries that have pursued but not built weapons, and in potential future weapons states such as Saudi Arabia.²

Ideally, acknowledgement of power/weapons connections would lead to redoubled efforts to build a firewall between civilian and military nuclear programs ‒ strengthened safeguards, curbs on enrichment and reprocessing, and so on. But that’s not how this debate in playing out. Industry insiders and supporters drawing attention to the connections are quite comfortable about them ‒ they just want increased subsidies and support for their domestic civilian nuclear industry lest ‘national security’ and ‘national defense’ be undermined.

Some continue to deny the power/weapons connections even though the connections are plain for all to see and are now being acknowledged by a growing number of nuclear insiders and supporters. The silliest of the deniers are those who self-describe as ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’. One such person is Ben Heard ‒ a paid nuclear lobbyist in Australia whose so-called environment group ‘Bright New World’ accepts secret corporate donations.^3,4

An article by Heard attacks the Australian Conservation Foundation for its failure to acknowledge the “obvious distinction” between nuclear power and weapons and for “co-opting disarmament … toward their ideological campaigns against peaceful science and technology”.⁵

The Australian Conservation Foundation has actively supported the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons since ICAN was formed in Australia in 2007. ACF’s nuclear-free campaigner Dave Sweeney was involved in the foundation of ICAN and has been on the ICAN Australia Board from 2007 to the present.

Heard’s response is to note that the Nobel Committee “is well aware of the role of technology in driving peace” and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. But the Nobel Committee’s 2005 citation says nothing about nuclear power “driving peace” ‒ whatever that means ‒ and it doesn’t endorse or criticize nuclear power.⁶

The citation singled out then IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei ‒ the Peace Prize was awarded “in two equal parts” to the IAEA and ElBaradei. The citation noted that ElBaradei “has stood out as an unafraid advocate of new measures to strengthen” the non-proliferation regime. During his tenure as IAEA Director General, ElBaradei was strikingly honest about the limitations of the so-called safeguards system. He noted that the IAEA’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and “clearly needs reinforcement”, that efforts to improve the system have been “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department “.⁷

In his Nobel Lecture, ElBaradei said: “We must … strengthen the verification system. IAEA inspections are the heart and soul of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. To be effective, it is essential that we are provided with the necessary authority, information, advanced technology, and resources. And our inspections must be backed by the UN Security Council, to be called on in cases of non-compliance.”⁶

There’s nothing about the limitations of safeguards in Heard’s article. He has never said anything about the limitations let alone made the slightest contribution towards resolving them.

Far from endorsing Heard’s claim about the “obvious” distinctions between nuclear power and weapons, ElBaradei noted in his Nobel Lecture that under the current system, any country has the right to develop operations for producing nuclear materials for civilian uses “but in doing so, it also masters the most difficult steps in making a nuclear bomb.”⁸

Consumption and production of fissile material

Heard says the anti-nuclear movement “simply ignore that the US nuclear power sector was integral in the destruction of no less than 16,000 former Soviet nuclear warheads under a program known as ‘Megatons to Megawatts’.”⁵ That’s another lie ‒ the anti-nuclear movement hasn’t ignored the program.

Heard ignores the production of fissile material in civilian nuclear programs:

• The amount of civilian plutonium (almost all of it produced in power reactors) grows at a rate of about 70 tonnes per year.⁹ That amount of reactor-grade, weapons-usable plutonium¹⁰ would suffice to build about 7,000 weapons.
• As of January 2017, the global stockpile of separated civilian plutonium (i.e. separated from spent fuel by reprocessing) was about 290 tonnes (enough for about 29,000 weapons).¹¹
• A May 2015 report written for the International Panel on Fissile Materials found that as of the end of 2013, civilian stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium amounted to over 50,000 weapons-equivalents.¹² The weapons-equivalents figure jumps dramatically (to several hundred thousand) if plutonium in spent fuel is included.¹³

Nuclear power promotes peace?

Heard claims that nuclear power promotes peace and uses the two Koreas to illustrate his argument: “The South is a user and exporter of nuclear power, signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, and possesses zero nuclear warheads. The North has zero nuclear power reactors, is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, and is developing and testing nuclear weapons.”⁵

Likewise, Michael Shellenberger from the pro-nuclear lobby group ‘Environmental Progress’ claims that: “One of FOE-Greenpeace’s biggest lies about nuclear energy is that it leads to weapons. Korea demonstrates that the opposite is true: North Korea has a nuclear bomb and no nuclear energy, while South Korea has nuclear energy and no bomb.”¹⁴

Heard and Shellenberger ignore the fact that North Korea uses what is calls an ‘experimental power reactor’ (based on the UK Magnox power reactor design) to produce plutonium for weapons.¹⁵ They ignore the fact that North Korea acquired enrichment technology from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan network, who stole the blueprints from URENCO, the consortium that provides enrichment services for the nuclear power industry.¹⁵ They ignore the fact that North Korea’s reprocessing plant is based on the design of the Eurochemic plant in Belgium, which provided reprocessing services for the nuclear power industry.¹⁵

Heard and Shellenberger also ignore South Korea’s history of covertly pursuing nuclear weapons, a history entwined with the country’s development of nuclear power. For example, the nuclear power program provided (and still provides) a rationale for South Korea’s pursuit of reprocessing technology.¹⁶

[For the rest of this article pls see here.]

References:

1. Nuclear Monitor #850, 7 Sept 2017, ‘Nuclear power, weapons and ‘national security”, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/850/nuclear-power-weapons-and-national-security
2. Nuclear Monitor #854, 4 Dec 2017, ‘Is Saudi Arabia going nuclear?’, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/854/saudi-arabia-going-nuclear
3. Friends of the Earth, ‘Ben Heard and the fake environment group ‘Bright New World’ that accepts secret corporate donations’, https://nuclear.foe.org.au/ben-heard-secret-corporate-donations/
4. www.brightnewworld.org/how-to-give-our-donations-policy/
5. Ben Heard, 12 Dec 2017, ‘Australian Conservation Foundation leverages peace prize against peaceful technology’, www.brightnewworld.org/media/2017/12/12/acfnot4peace
6. IAEA, 2005, ‘2005 Nobel Peace Prize’, www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/nobel2005.pdf
7. The relevant articles and transcripts are no longer posted on the IAEA website but are available from monitor@wiseinternational.org
8. Mohamed ElBaradei, 10 Dec 2005, ‘Nobel Lecture’, https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/nobel2005.pdf
9. David Albright and Kimberly Kramer, 2005, ‘Plutonium Watch: Tracking Plutonium Inventories’, http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/plutonium_watch2005.pdf
10. https://nuclear.foe.org.au/plutonium-grades-and-nuclear-weapons-2/
11. International Panel on Fissile Materials, ‘Fissile material stocks’, http://fissilematerials.org/
12. Zia Mian and Alexander Glaser, 2015, ‘Global Fissile Material Report 2015: Nuclear Weapon and Fissile Material Stockpiles and Production’, International Panel on Fissile Materials, http://fissilematerials.org/library/ipfm15.pdf
13. Institute for Science and International Security, 1 Jan 2005, ‘Global Stocks of Nuclear Explosive Material – End 2003 (Updated 2005)’, Chapters I and II, http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/global-stocks-of-nuclear-explosive-materials/17
14. Michael Shellenberger, 16 Oct 2017, ‘Enemies of the Earth: Unmasking the Dirty War Against Clean Energy in South Korea by Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace’, http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/10/16/enemies-of-the-earth-unmasking-dirty-war-friends-of-earth-greenpeace-south-korea-nuclear-energy
15. David Lowry, 26 July 2016, ‘What Theresa May forgot: North Korea used British technology to build its nuclear bombs’, www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987935/what_theresa_may_forgot_north_korea_used_british_technology_to_build_its_nuclear_bombs.html
16. Nuclear Threat Initiative, ‘South Korea’, http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/south-korea/

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Ben Heard in the Australian Financial Review

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

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

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

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

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

“I have been called corrupt.”

‒ Not by FoE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I receive thinly veiled death threats.”

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

“This is my life.”

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

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Ben Heard’s fake ‘debates’

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

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

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

Feb. 3, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New article gathers the evidence to address the sceptics

Public release ‒ 17 May 2018

Lappeenranta University of Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The research papers for further information:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Heard’s dishonesty regarding nuclear power/weapons connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information:

Power / weapons connections

Links to literature on power / weapons connections

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Dear Electric Energy Society of Australia 

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

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A new low from Ben Heard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ben Heard campaigns against renewables and then denies doing so!

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

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

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

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

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Ben Heard’s misinformation about the Fukushima death toll

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

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

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

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

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Ben Heard’s misinformation about the Chernobyl death toll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the Chernobyl death toll:

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

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

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

Some useful discussions on the Chernobyl death toll:

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

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Nuclear Waste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Heard platforms self-confessed liar Michael Shellenberger

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

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

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

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

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

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