An activist's report into the Lucas Heights reactor received scant examination, writes Imre Salusinszky.

Since 1958, the nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights, in Sutherland Shire, has made an enormous contribution to the lives of Australians. It is the sole source of isotopes for Australian nuclear medicine (employed in more than 400,000 diagnostic tests and treatments each year) as well as for the instruments that gauge the standard of myriad industrial products, including those used in applications such as bridge construction.

The proposal for a modernised reactor at Lucas Heights got the all-clear from an  Environmental Impact Statement in 1998. At that time, Sutherland Shire Council, which wants to get rid of the reactor, imported a consultant from the United States, Dan Hirsch, who claimed that the draft EIS was flawed, and that an accident at the new reactor could give tens of thousands of people cancer.

Alarmed, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights, referred Hirsch's claims to P.R. Parkman and Co, a British safety management consultancy, which found numerous basic misunderstandings in Hirsch's submission, and concluded that "the arguments presented by Hirsch are flawed".

Undaunted, and again courtesy of the ratepayers of Sutherland Shire, Hirsch was back in Canberra last month presenting the identical submission to a Senate committee. The biographical note to Hirsch's submission describes him as the former director of the Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and as "president of CBG, a California-based organisation that provides technical assistance to communities near current or proposed nuclear facilities". A few minutes of research on the Internet reveals: that CBG stands for "Committee to Bridge the Gap"; that it is one more minuscule outpost of the rainbow coalition; and that Hirsch is an anti-nuclear activist.

In a report last April on the demise of a proposed nuclear waste dump at Ward Valley, in California, the Environment News Service quoted a "jubilant" Hirsch, and described CBG as "a non-profit group that has fought the project for a decade". An article by Associated Press in September 1999, described Hirsch's outfit as "a California-based anti-nuclear watchdog". Five months ago, the Los Angeles Times called CBG "an organisation of nuclear critics".

Now, how do you suppose the middlebrow media would have treated Hirsch's appearance three weeks ago in Canberra? "Well, Imre, they probably gave his views a reasonable hearing, while placing his claims strictly within the context of a history of zealous opposition to ..."

Come on. You know it wouldn't be like that, not in Wetworld, where anti-nuclear propaganda is the equivalent of muzak. And so, on that evening's ABC TV news, Richard Morecroft read the following item to camera: "An international consultant on nuclear reactors has told a Senate committee the proposed new reactor for Lucas Heights in Sydney could cause thousands of cases of cancer. Dan Hirsch, who advises the US Government on nuclear safety, says the Environmental Impact Statement for the reactor is extraordinarily unrealistic."

That's it. No mention of any shire council. No mention of any history of anti-nuclear lobbying. No mention of any detailed rebuttal of the same claims two years ago. It's a mystery what made Hirsch's views news at all, but they got the same uncritical treatment on the ABC Web site: "A United States nuclear expert says ...", and in a soft interview on PM ("US nuclear expert Daniel Hirsch talking to Mark Willesee").

I cannot tell you the precise sense in which Hirsch "advises the US Government on nuclear safety", only that the phrase itself is lifted straight from a Sutherland Shire Council media release. Possibly it is the same sense in which Phillip Adams "advises" the Australian Government on its moral inferiority to himself. According to Change Links, a "progressive newspaper" on the Internet, one advisory committee CBG is represented on is the Los Angeles Ad Hoc Committee on Nuclear Dangers, which brings together "activists concerned about justice, peace and a clean environment". When I spoke to Hirsch in Los Angeles last week, he told me that he currently sits on a panel under the aegis of the California Environment Protection Agency.

With a compliant media backing them, those out to kill the reactor at Lucas Heights are in a win-win situation. If the reactor is banished, property prices in Sutherland Shire will receive a handy fillip. But if it goes ahead, and continues to save thousands of lives without demonstrably endangering any, do you suppose that the activists will slip into the sorry pyjamas?

Hardly. They need only glance at the sparkling white, pavilion-free sands of Bondi beach to be reminded of one of the profound truths of life in Wetworld: NIMBYism means never having to say you're sorry.

Two weeks ago I launched an apparently extraordinary defence of a nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights that has been a good neighbour to the people of Sutherland Shire for 42 years, and has provided significant
benefits to the entire Australian community during that time.

Now, I'm a sensitive man, and a good deal of the response has been hurtful. For example, I got a call from one anti-reactor activist, who could not speak freely because his phone is bugged, but who accused me of professional dereliction, given that thousands of undergraduate students live in Sutherland Shire. Hey - there's your environment hazard, right there!

Some supportive correspondents were able to point to such factors as the necessity of a local producer of isotopes, for use in nuclear medicine, and to the fact that the Lucas Heights reactor was there before all the houses came along.

That kind of retrospective NIMBYism is, as far as I know, a Sydney special. We saw it in the war of attrition against Luna Park, which broke the hearts of thousands of Sydney kids (many of them disabled). My worst fear now is that Judy Davis will buy a shack in Dural, then insist that we tear up the F3.

Yet, in all the responses to my article, nobody has challenged my account of the outrageous attempt by Sutherland Shire Council to confound the Senate, the media, and the public by importing a well-known Californian anti-nuclear activist and parading him around as if he were an objective technical expert.

You will recall that, according to reputable sources like Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, Mr Daniel Hirsch is a prominent anti-nuke campaigner. Yet, taking their cue directly from a Sutherland Shire press-release headed "High-Profile US Nuclear Expert Flies in to Appear before Senate's Nuclear Reactor Committee", media outlets here described him simply as a "nuclear expert" who "advises the US Government on nuclear safety".

In his own contribution to this great organ 10 days ago, Mr Hirsch was finally able to clarify what content, if any, should be given to these descriptions. He told us that he has been "an expert witness in several licensing proceedings before the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission", and that he currently co-chairs "an advisory panel overseeing health studies of workers and the nearby community potentially exposed to radioactivity from a Department of Energy nuclear site". Niels Bohr, watch your back!

Mr Hirsch repeated his claims against the remodelled reactor, but did not respond to the view formed on those claims by an independent British safety management consultant three years ago. Here's an example of the basic misunderstandings identified in the Hirsch report, by P.R. Parkman and Co. Because, like Lucas Heights, the Windscale reactor in Britain does not produce power, Hirsch used the accident there as an example of what could happen in Sydney. But while the proposed new Lucas Heights reactor is a pool reactor, Windscale is an air-cooled reactor using natural uranium fuel for plutonium production: "No sensible conclusion can be drawn ... for a pool reactor which has none of those features".

One stinging response to my column came from the Mayor of Sutherland Shire, Councillor Tracie Sonda. Apparently I have "fallen for the propaganda from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation that residents
of Sutherland Shire have been too smart to swallow".

We all know that the real gullibility at issue here is that of the Australian media, a gullibility that Sutherland Shire Council counted on, and duly received - until they were comprehensively sprung on this page a fortnight ago.

It's easy to see why they thought their strategy might work. In a journalistic culture that, politically, often sounds like the student press circa 1977, anything involving the "n" word is bound to bring out the worst. In her crusading on-line Web Diary, Herald Canberra reporter Margo Kingston was free-associating last week about a proposal "to build a nuclear power station at Lucas Heights".

Close, except that a power reactor would be more than 25 times the size of the research reactor, and require more than 14,000 times as much uranium. But one suggestion I liked from Mr Hirsch was an adjudicatory hearing in which experts for all sides would testify under oath, and be subject to cross-examination. And I wonder who would have most to lose in such a hearing: the scientists from ANSTO, with their facts and their safety record; or Sutherland Shire Council, whose "high-profile US nuclear expert" turns out to have no scientific qualifications whatsoever? Come on, Your Worship: crank up the mayoral letterhead again and give us a view on that, won't you?

November 21, 2000

Dear Assoc. Prof. Salusinszky,

I am writing in the hope that you can write or phone to answer a few questions in relation to your 20-11-00 SMH article.

1. My copy of the Parkman review of Hirsch does not contain the words "the arguments presented by Hirsch are flawed". Can you advise where these words appear?

2 (a) Who supplied you with the false information that ANSTO is the "sole source of isotopes for Australian nuclear medicine"? (I know of half a dozen sources; there may be more.)
(b) Did you not consider it prudent to check that information?
(c) Do you intend to correct that error in a future SMH column?

3. What is the basis for your assertion that a new reactor would produce isotopes "saving thousands of lives"? (You may be interested to know that a past President of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine has publicly stated that it would "probably not" be life-threatening if Australia did not produce isotopes locally, while the current President of the Association did not know that the existing Lucas Heights reactor was closed from February to May until told about the closure by a journalist in July. The rhetoric aboiut "saving lives" has become so implausible that two recent government documents have stated that "national interest" considerations are the primary reasons for a new reactor.)

4. Did you not consider it important to note that the EIS was written by ANSTO itself?

5. On what basis did you arrive at the conclusion that "If the reactor is banished, property prices in Sutherland Shire will receive a handy fillip"?

6. What evidence do you have to substantiate your comment about NIMBYism? (From my knowledge, I would say the overwhelming attitude is bemusement that the Government is proceeding with the reactor plan in the absence of any form of independent or rigorous assessment of the need for a reactor - anywhere in Australia).

7. Why did your column not even mention the substantive issues raised by Hirsch, e.g. loss-of-coolant accident risk, release fractions etc.)?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Jim Green

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November 21, 2000

Dr Green,

Many thanks for your response. I stand by my article, which was less about the reactor itself than about the bad faith of parading a partisan commentator from overseas in front of the media and the Senate as if he were an impartial expert - a point that you do not contest. The sentence I quoted from Parkman occurs on p.1 of my copy. If you have further issues with the piece, please write direct to the SMH.

- Imre

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November 21, 2000

Dear Assoc. Prof. Salusinszky,

Thank you for your prompt response.

I have no knowledge of Hirsch's background. Your attempt to discredit him was, in my opinion, less than convincing.

Anyway, perhaps you could attempt an answer at these four short questions:

1. Do you stand by your false assertion that ANSTO is the "sole source of isotopes for Australian nuclear medicine"?

2. Do you stand by your assertion that a new reactor would produce isotopes "saving thousands of lives" even though not even ANSTO would make such an absurd claim?

3. Do you stand by your failure to acknowledge that the EIS was written by ANSTO?

4. Do you stand by your assertion that "If the reactor is banished, property prices in Sutherland Shire will receive a handy fillip" even though there is no evidence I am aware of to sustain such an assertion?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Jim Green

(No response received.)

Sydney Morning Herald, December 11, 2000.
Nuclear attack

As an American physician visiting your country, I was surprised and shocked to see an article denigrating a person with whom I have worked closely (Herald, December 4).

I have known Mr Daniel Hirsch for about 30 years since he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University.
Despite his lack of an advanced academic degree, he has attained a proficiency in the legal, scientific and political aspects of nuclear energy, enabling him to successfully argue cases before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other legal bodies where his testimony has been highly regarded and respected.

Indeed, the attack on Mr Hirsch's credentials would undoubtedly also shock the University of California where he held the prestigious post of director of the Adlai Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at the University of California Santa Cruz. The people of Australia were fortunate to have had the testimony of an incorruptible expert witness at your recent Senate hearings on the Lucas Heights reactor.

The tired argument that medical isotopes will not be available without a reactor has been used in the United States ad nauseam.

The fact is they can be readily imported or made in a non-contaminating cyclotron. The reason the proponents of the facility at Lucas Heights are attacking Mr Hirsch so vociferously is because they fear that the Australian people will hear the truth.

The problem of nuclear waste has never been solved despite the promises of scientists 50 years ago that a solution would be found.

Nuclear waste is an evil legacy to bequeath to our children and grandchildren.

Dr Richard G. Saxon, California (US), December 7.

When Imre Salusinszky praises the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and lambastes its environmental opponents he most certainly exposes the hypocrisy of his position (Herald, November 20).

Love it or hate it, you'd have to admit that Lucas Heights is a gratuitous example of "nation building" - a heavily subsidised government operation designed to keep a small nation in the nuclear game.

Salusinszky should decide whether he loves market fundamentalism more than he hates greens, wets, the ABC, "cultural elites" and the other straw men he beats to a pulp every Monday morning. If he were consistent, he would argue for the privatisation of Lucas Heights.

Then the purchasers could close it down, disperse its expensive array of scientists and technicians and import medical isotopes cheaply from bigger and more efficient overseas suppliers.

Gavin Gatenby, Turrella, November 20.

In his denigration of the Hirsch report and the vast number of people objecting to the building of a new nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, Imre Salusinszky, who also does not declare his interest, ignores the one unarguable fact which was proved at Chernobyl and at other nuclear accident sites, namely that a suburb of a city of four million people is no place for a nuclear reactor.

Walter Bass, Turramurra, November 20.

Imre Salusinszky appears to have fallen for the propaganda from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) that residents of the Sutherland Shire have been too smart to swallow (Herald, November 20).

He argues that the proposed new nuclear reactor in suburban Lucas Heights is the "sole source of isotopes for Australian nuclear medicine".

For the record, most countries, including the United States, make some of their medical isotopes in cyclotrons and import the rest. Australia could do the same. Canada exports about 85 per cent of the world's isotopes.

Did anyone notice any disruption to isotope supply when the reactor was shut for 12 weeks earlier this year? Did thousands of people die because the isotopes weren't being produced? No.

Your writer also attempted to belittle the credibility and credentials of Daniel Hirsch, who appeared before the Senate select committee inquiry into the new reactor.

Hirsch is a highly respected nuclear issues expert. He offered to meet ANSTO and its critics but received no takers.
Again, contrary to Salusinszky's claims, the proposed new nuclear reactor did not get the all-clear from a 1998 environment impact statement. Rather it received an approval conditional upon certain requirements and safety issues being addressed in its design - a design the public is still waiting to see.

Tracie Sonda, Sutherland Shire Mayor, Sutherland, November 20.

It is Imre Salusinszky who has his facts wrong (Herald, December 4). The nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights has not been a good neighbour.

There have been accidents, which ANSTO has tried very hard to keep quiet over many years.
The health of people in the area has been affected and, in fact, Sydney has become the nuclear waste store for Australia by default.

Australia does not need a reactor to produce medical isotopes, as even now these isotopes are regularly imported. Even the United States doesn't produce these isotopes themselves!

The area affected by the proposed new nuclear reactor is not just the small exclusion zone around it, but all of Sydney, Wollongong and the Blue Mountains if an accident occurs.

The size of the planned new reactor is very large for a research reactor and about 200 times larger than one needed to produce medical isotopes.

I guess Mr Salusinszky thinks it is easy to discredit concerned Australians by calling them names.

This is just more propaganda by the minority supporting a reactor.

He criticises the media, when, in fact, the media has been conspicuously quiet about an issue that would be regular front-page news in Europe.

F. Klieber, Kirrawee, December 6.

The amazing thing about Imre Salusinszky's attack on American nuclear expert/activist Daniel Hirsch ("The emperor's clothes have gone unnoticed", SMH, 20/11/00) is that his polemic contains not a single word on the substantive safety issues surrounding the proposal to build another nuclear reactor in the southern Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights.

I don't know whether Daniel Hirsch is an expert or an activist or both (a possibility Salusinszky ignores), but for the sake of argument let's ignore Hirsch and consider evidence from sources Salusinszky would gladly acknowledge as impeccable - nuclear engineers formerly employed by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

To further accommodate Salusinszky, let's only consider nuclear engineers who either support, or at least don't object to, the plan for a new reactor.

Let's also pass over a couple of glaring problems in Salusinszky's article - his gratuitous and inaccurate insults about NIMBYism, his factual errors about medical isotope supply (ANSTO is not the only supplier - just check the phone book, Imre), his willingness to accept unsubstantiated ANSTO assertions as gospel truth, his failure to mention the fact that ANSTO itself wrote the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) which concluded that a new reactor is a super idea and poses no safety risks ...

Let's also pass over Salusinszky's assertion that a new reactor will produce isotopes "saving thousands of lives", even though a past President of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine has publicly stated that it would "probably not" be life-threatening if Australia did not produce isotopes locally, while the current President of the Association of Physicians in Nuclear Medicine did not know that the existing Lucas Heights reactor was closed from February to May until told about the closure by a journalist in July!

And no-one mention the "w...." word. There's still nowhere to store the w...., let alone dispose of it, but ANSTO promises us that any day now they'll have it all worked out; indeed the Executive Director of ANSTO, Helen Garnett, told a Senate Estimates hearing, straight-faced, that ANSTO is proceeding with its waste management plans according to a "wouldn't-it-be-nice" timetable.

So, what do nuclear engineers who support the reactor project have to say about the safety implications? First, there's no doubt that the proposed new reactor would contain sufficient radioactivity to cause major off-site contamination in the event of a major accident and the failure of containment systems. Former ANSTO nuclear engineer Tony Wood noted in evidence to a current Senate Inquiry that the proposed reactor "when operating at full power will contain sufficient fission products to cause great damage off site if a large fraction were to escape."

Another concern is that ANSTO trivialises the risk of sabotage - a genuine concern given previous incidents such as the 1983 discovery of significant quantities of gelignite and ammonium nitrate, and three detonators, inside ANSTO’s boundary fence. Tony Wood told the Senate Inquiry that a sabotage event “has the potential to have much worse consequences [than ANSTO’s selected "reference" accident] and the EIS admits there is no way of assessing its likelihood.”

In the event of a serious reactor accident at Lucas Heights, Sydney residents would discover that they are not protected by absolute legal liability and accordingly would find it extremely difficult or impossible to gain compensation. Wood says that both ANSTO and the Howard Government have “misled” the public in relation to legal liability and that ANSTO’s EIS was "genuinely confused, or ... had set out deliberately to confuse."

"It looks as if the Commonwealth lacks confidence in the low level of public risk claimed for the new reactor in the EIS. If it is so low what is to be lost by offering the guarantee" of absolute liability, Wood told the Senate Inquiry.

Publicly, ANSTO and the federal Government insist that a new reactor would pose no risks, but behind the scenes they know full well that operating a 20,000 kilowatt reactor in a city of four million people poses risks, and they know that several fatal research reactor accidents have occurred. A Department of Industry, Science and Tourism briefing paper, written in April 1998 and obtained by Sutherland Shire Council under Freedom of Information legislation, says, "Be careful in terms of health impacts - don't really want a detailed study done of the health of Sutherland residents.”

The briefing paper then ponders the best euphemism to describe the health risks of the proposed new reactor: “Don’t say no extra risk - acceptable risk?? ... There are risks associated with everything.”

Former ANSTO nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson says that unless the "independent" nuclear regulator (hand-picked by Helen Garnett) improves its performance, "the new reactor project will be a trail of compromises as is the case on the Maralinga project."

Among others, former ANSTO Chief Scientist Professor Barry Allen disputes the argument that a new reactor is required for isotope production.

Among others, former ANSTO scientist Murray Scott disputes the scientific research rationale.

Among others, former ANSTO scientist Jim Fredsall is concerned about the likely cost blow-out.

Among others, former ANSTO Chief Scientist and current President of the Australian Nuclear Association Dr. Clarence Hardy has complained about the "culture of secrecy" at ANSTO.

And on and on it goes. But this one takes the cake: I know an ANSTO scientist who has, under management instructions, written a paper supporting the case for a new reactor. Problem. The author of the paper does not support a new reactor! He told me he wrote the paper in such a way that it contains no factual errors, but nevertheless misrepresents his own views. We have a word for this of course: nukespeak.