Expansionary Institute

Michael Zey
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The Australian government remains officially opposed to nuclear power…
a decision that has left Australia as the second biggest per capita air polluter in the world, reliant on coal-fired electricity plants and struggling to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets of the troubled Kyoto climate change protocol.


By Andrea Hopkins

 
JERVIS BAY, Australia, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Deep within Booderee National Park, almost jutting into the blue waters of Jervis Bay, a quiet asphalt road weaves to a halt beside a stretch of sand.

Half of the clearing has been claimed as a parking lot for tourists who come to swim and snorkle in the pristine bay, while weeds have spent 30 years creeping across the remainder of the clearing where the nation's first reactor was to have stood.

The abandoned plans for that stretch of sand are as close as Australia came to generating nuclear power.

"That is exactly how close we came, the road was there, the excavation had occurred, the footings were just about to be poured. And then...the decision was made, no, we're not going to go nuclear," said park manager Martin Fortescue.

The reactor, approved in 1969, was killed two years later when pro-nuclear Prime Minister John Gorton was ousted by his own government in favour of long-time political foe, ex-treasurer and foreign minister William McMahon.

Instead, the site, about 200 km (120 miles) south of Sydney on Australia's east coast, was declared a nature reserve and park rangers moved into the handful of homes built to house the scientists who would have ushered Australia into the atomic age.

Thirty years later, the Australian government remains officially opposed to nuclear power, although the country exports uranium to fuel overseas reactors.

The decision has left Australia as the second biggest per capita air polluter in the world, reliant on coal-fired electricity plants and struggling to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets of the troubled Kyoto climate change protocol.

START-UP COSTS

Keith Alder, who eagerly watched the Jervis Bay reactor begin to take shape as commissioner of the then Australian Atomic Energy Commission, remembers the cancellation bitterly.

"I and my assistant were called to Canberra for an interview with the prime minister to tell us that he was deferring it for a year," Alder told Reuters.

The prime minister said the start-up costs for the steam-generating heavy water reactor, to be built by a British conglomerate, were simply too great.

"I said: 'Well of course the tenders will all be invalid in a year because they're only valid for three months.' And he said: 'Well, so be it.' And that was the end of that," Alder said.

By the mid-1980s, in the wake of a near meltdown at the U.S. Three Mile Island power station in 1979 and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, all talk of nuclear power in Australia was abandoned.

Environmentalists say Jervis Bay was as close as Australia will ever get to nuclear power generation, with anti-nuke activism boosted by a raging debate over how -- and where -- to dispose of waste from a 43-year-old research reactor in Sydney.

"Australians are relatively savvy about nuclear waste, we've had absolute clamour in South Australia over the proposal to dump intermediate level nuclear waste down there (from the Sydney reactor)," said Greenpeace Australia campaigner Stephen Campbell.

Loud opposition to the proposed replacement of an aging, purely research reactor in Sydney is only a fraction of the outrage that would greet proposals for a power plant, he added.

"There would be vigorous, robust opposition to any proposed plan to build a nuclear plant anywhere in Australia."

Still resentful of British atomic tests and radiation experiments in outback Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, Australia has never built nuclear weapons and strongly opposes further testing anywhere in the world.

Australia led a worldwide outcry against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific in the 1990s, with a nationwide Australian consumer boycott of French goods.

KYOTO FALL-OUT

But Alder, now 80, remains convinced the decision not to go nuclear is to blame for the environmental dilemma played out by Australia at the recent Kyoto climate talks in Bonn.

"I think it was a tragic mistake," Alder said.

Australia, along with Canada, Russia and Japan, this week pushed the Kyoto accord on cutting emissions to the brink of failure before agreeing to a last-minute compromise to water down reduction targets by offsetting them through carbon-absorbing forests, and taking the teeth out of enforcement measures.

Alder believes Australia will eventually -- in another 20 years or so -- turn to nuclear power to keep up with the nation's growing 19 million population and burgeoning appetite for energy.

"It's inevitable. Down the track, if we don't go nuclear we die in the cold and the dark. It is as simple as that -- ask California at the moment what they think," he said with a laugh.

The U.S. state, which gets 18 percent of its energy from two nuclear plants but has prohibited further reactors on environmental fears, suffered six days of blackouts this year.

NUKE RUMOURS PERSIST

But Greenpeace scoffs at suggestions, put forward in the occasional editorial, that Australia reconsider nuclear power.

"Arguing that nuclear is the solution to climate change is like arguing that you should take up crack to give up smoking," Campbell said. "One 'solution' just transfers the cost to the environment from one waste form to another."

Still, Campbell said he does not doubt that Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government, despite its official opposition, would like to re-explore the nuclear age -- although the issue has barely been mentioned in years.

"I think the current government has a very pro-nuclear ideology, and I don't think that you could rule out members of this government pursuing nuclear power at some stage," he said.

To the horror of green groups, the Australian government has allowed uranium destined for overseas reactors to be mined in land adjacent to World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

Booderee National Park manager Fortescue admits development rumours continue to circulate about the 6,313-hectare (15,600-acre) Jervis Bay park, but he doesn't believe a nuclear reactor would be seriously considered.

"But then again, there are uranium mines in Kakadu," he said.

21:46 08-04-01

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