One November morning in 1976 I strolled down the leafy pathway from Ormond College, where I’d recently taken up residence as a first year medical student, to the Melbourne University Union Forecourt, where a boisterous crowd was gathering in the late spring sunshine.

Uranium mining was the focus of the mob’s anger.

1976 was a watershed year in Australia’s nuclear debate and, on reflection, in my own political awakening.

The Fox Commission report on uranium mining had just been released and both sides of the debate were busy representing its findings as affirmation of their own position.

I was a mere freshman and about as unworldly as you could imagine. I don’t know what stopped me passing the crowd by that morning, why I didn’t simply dismiss the gathering as so much rabble, why my public-school faith in authority wavered there on the forecourt for a moment, allowing the spirit of questioning to slyly snake into my soul. But in it snuck, and it wriggles away to this day. From initial concerns about atomic bombs, through serious doubts about nuclear reactor safety and onto the Promethean perils of radioactive waste management - the more I questioned, the deeper my distrust of the industry burrowed. And as my doubts grew, and my disbelief metamorphosed into resistance, a common theme alerted me: the health hazards of low-dose ionising radiation.

The Fox Report was commissioned by the Whitlam Government in 1975 to report on the mining proposals of Ranger Uranium Mines P/L, reflecting the grave concerns of the new Labour government about the uranium industry and its previous performance, most recently at the Mary Kathleen deposit in north Queensland.

Unfortunately the Report was not published until 12 months after the sudden demise of Gough.

It found, among other things, that
“There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods”

and

“It seems doubtful whether, as the number of nuclear facilities increases, it will be possible to provide sufficient defences to render every installation safe against attack by even small numbers of well-armed trained men.”

and

“There is a very real risk that the opportunity and the motive for nuclear blackmail will develop with time. The evidence indicates that the risks are presently real and will tend to increase with the further spread of nuclear technology.”

In summary they recommended that
“Policy respecting Australian uranium exports, for the time being at least, should be based on a full recognition of the hazards, dangers and problems of, and associated with, the production of nuclear energy, and should therefore seek to limit or restrict expansion of that production.”

You might well have concluded that the commissioners were applying the brakes, but only two weeks after the publication of the Fox Report, the by-then firmly entrenched Fraser Liberal government announced that existing contracts for uranium supply would be filled. This accounted for approximately 9,000 tonnes of uranium stockpiled mainly from the Mary Kathleen mine, which was duly exported (to Japan, West Germany and USA), and opened the door for future developments. Opponents at the time calculated that our uranium would produce enough plutonium in the course of its electricity generation process… enough to build between 750 and 3000 Nagasaki-type bombs.

The Ranger mine in the Northern Territory was the next to open, in 1981, and continues to produce uranium; with an estimated 50,000 tonnes remaining it will last for at least another five years. The deposit at Roxby Downs in South Australia is the world’s third largest; the mine began commercial production in 1984 and moves are afoot for another major expansion, which will among other things, more than double its underground water consumption to 42 megaL/day. In this the driest state of the driest continent. The only other commercial mine in Australia at present is a small ‘in situ leach’ mine at Beverley in, again northern, arid indigenous South Australia. Beverly is owned by Heathgate Resources, a wholly-owned subsidiary of General Atomics. The acid leaching process they are using is illegal in the US.

So after 27 years of to-ing and fro-ing, and in particular 8 years of pro-nuclear conservative Commonwealth government, Australia has only 3 commercial mines. By the end of this decade there could conceivably be only one … And yet, during the heady nineties, the business press and the nuclear industry were talking-up dozens of mines. This, coupled with the much-touted renaissance of nuclear energy as our salvation from global warming, prepared us for the possibility of major expansion.

The outcomes are somewhat different however.

Three mines and only one of them a long-term proposition.

Why is this?

Partly because of the tremendous indigenous resistance.

The name Jabiluka has been carved indelibly in the Australian conscience, beside Gurindji and Mabo. The Jabiluka deposit in the Kakadu wetlands remains un-mined because its custodians ­ the Mirrar  - resisted, and they were successful. The new owners, Rio Tinto have said they will not mine against wishes of the Mirrar … although they refuse to commit to permanent closure of the project.

The Mirrar were joined in their stand by a huge national and international campaign. And this phenomenon of indigenous resistance supported by mass civil protest has been a recurring theme throughout the history of nuclear Australia.

And of course that history ­ of nuclear activities and indigenous resistance - did not begin when Justice Fox put pen to paper in1976.

The first Australian yellowcake was extracted at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory and Radium Hill South Australia in the 1950’s - for the specific purpose of building British A-Bombs, which were then used in the desert of South Australia at Maralinga.

Australian Aboriginals were early victims of radiological warfare. The peoples of the central and western deserts were subjected to seven atomic bomb assaults and a series of major radiation dispersal experiments throughout the fifties and early sixties.

Their environment was contaminated with radiation, which will, despite our efforts to clean up, continue to irradiate that habitat for a period, not merely longer than our own adolescent culture, but longer even than the ancient culture of the desert Aboriginals.

And what of those ‘efforts to clean up’?

The Maralinga/Tjarutja people, after fifty years of radiation-refugee status are soon to be encouraged to reinhabit their homelands. This follows three separate ‘cleanup’ programs. Controversy surrounds the latest attempt, in particular the shallow disposal of some large amounts of plutonium-contaminated debris, which had been originally destined for in-situ vitrification and deep burial.

It is fifty years in October since the first nuclear test at Maralinga and, as if to rub salt into indigenous wounds, the Federal Government are now poised to force the residents of northern South Australia to accept a permanent underground repository for Australia’s low level radioactive waste. Despite the expressed opposition, once again, of the indigenous custodians, who have said, and I quote the Kungkas:

“The poison the government is talking about is from Sydney. We say send it back to Sydney. We don’t want it! Are they trying to kill us? We’re a human being. We’re not an animal. We’re not a dog. In the old days the white man used to put a poison in the meat, throw them to feed the dogs and they got poisoned, straight out and then they died. Now they want to put the poison in the ground. We want our life…

All of us were living when the Government used the country for the Bomb. Some were living at Twelve Mile, just out of Coober Pedy. The smoke was funny and everything looked hazy. Everybody got sick. Other people were at Mabel Creek and many people got sick. Some people were living at Wallatinna. Other people got moved away.

The government thought they knew what they were doing then. Now, again they are coming along and telling us poor blackfellas “Oh, there’s nothing that’s going to happen, nothing is going to kill you”. And that will still happen like that bomb over there. And we’re worrying for our kids. We’ve got a lot of kids growing up on the country and still coming more, grandchildren and great grandchildren. They have to have their life…”

Which emphasises the recurring theme of indigenous persecution by the nuclear industry. Aborigines have borne the worst the nuclear dinosaur can throw, from go to woe.

Simultaneously and hardly coincidentally, the hunt is on to secure a temporary location for so called intermediate level waste, which includes materials from a variety of sources, in particular from reprocessed spent fuel rod from the Lucas Heights research reactor. The timeline on identifying and developing the ILW store is being driven in part by the replacement research reactor project in Sydney whose licensing arrangements are dependent on a viable destination for its waste. The new reactor will produce the bulk of Australia’s nuclear waste over the next 50 years. Without a reactor, the requirements for the dump and the store alter.

Obviously we do need to manage the waste. My personal choice for a centralised temporary store for anything of such critical social import is deep but accessible and not soon to be forgotten underneath the Parliament House in Canberra, but I imagine the community opposition there might prove daunting.

Come along to the workshop following this plenary to engage in robust debate on the waste disposal issue.

But before I leave the waste issue let me just mention in passing an even more nightmarish scenario, referred to by the inimitable Kungkas in their statement:

“We really couldn’t believe it when we heard them talking about sending the rubbish from all other countries as well! They must really want to kill us! We can’t believe it! How can you live like that? They’re really aiming to wipe the country out, not just us but all the living things in the whole earth!”

Remember these people are the survivors of an undeclared nuclear war on their homelands.

They are referring here to yet another of those great entangling nuclear chains: the permanent disposal of international High Level Radioactive waste in Australia has recently been vigorously promoted by an international consortium called Pangea, fronted by Australia’s most distinguished medical scientist. But fierce resistance within the Australian community, and some nifty footwork on the part of Friends of the Earth has seen Pangea off ­ for now …  they have closed down their Australian operation - but they will return! Already a new consortium ­ called ARIUS ­ has risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of Pangea. Watch this space…

OK Australia is relatively geologically stable, and yes, High Level Radioactive Waste represents an enormous dilemma and a terrible legacy to bequeath to our childrens’ childrens’ children. We do need to act on it … but if you stumble across a flooded room, where the tap is on and flowing steadily - do you reach for a mop and bucket first or do you turn off the tap?

You turn off the tap!

I wonder why our most distinguished medical scientist isn’t calling for a halt to uranium mining. Offering the world a deep geological site in Western Australia to bury their High Level Waste without tightly linking it to the termination of the nuclear industry is simply to toss that industry a life raft.

And Boy! Does it need a life raft!

Those three Australian uranium mines are symbolic of the sorry state of nuclear enterprises worldwide. An audit of the global state of play reveals an industry that has not realised even the more modest predictions of growth. There was a rise in nuclear power generation in the eighties and nineties from reactors ordered in the sixties and seventies finally coming on-stream, but the current trends do not suggest the industry is undergoing significant expansion.

There hasn’t been an order for a new power reactor placed in the US since 1974. The UK government recently announced there will be no more reactors built in Britain. British Nuclear Fuels is technically bankrupt, surviving on a so-called ‘letter of comfort’ from the government after a multi billion pound bailout. The industry is stagnating in Europe where the Austrians and the Italians exited long ago, the Belgians and the Germans have committed to full phase-out and even the nuclear-nutty French seem to be getting cold feet. Like their cousins in the tobacco industry, the nuclear entrepreneurs have made a bee-line for Eastern Europe, an improbable nuclear salvage site. Meanwhile the much-vaunted Asian market probably consists of a handful of new reactors in the medium term, mostly in China. The Japanese industry in particular is undergoing major upheavals, especially since the fatal accident at the Tokaimura facility, and the exposure by Japanese activists of serious falsification of data by good old British Nuclear Fuels.

What of the long term global prospects? We must address the needs of a growing world population, as well as global warming. At the IPPNW congress in Washington last May, delegates heard Arjun Makhijani from the Institute for Economic and Environmental Research detail a global energy future which convincingly entailed the phasing out ­ rather than the expansion - of nuclear power generation. The alternative pathway described by Makhijani and others involves phasing out nuclear power over the next generation, reducing oil and coal dependency transitionally by using much cleaner natural gas, but relying in particular on massive efficiency savings, co-generation and moving to renewable energy resources.

The more nuclear fuel we burn the bigger the waste mountain and the larger the plutonium pool that trickles into the terrorist food chain.

Nuclear proponents will respond that ‘safeguards’ have maintained a real separation between the energy and the weapons projects but such propositions are premised on the dubious belief that there has been no diversion of uranium or its by-product plutonium-239 into weapon programs or into the hands of sub-national groups.

Let me reiterate: meeting global energy needs by expanding nuclear energy programs means growing waste mountains and burgeoning supplies of plutonium ­ surely not something we should abide.

It’s worth remembering that once upon a time, in the heady ‘too cheap to meter’ days of nuclear yore, Australia too had a vibrant and influential nuclear lobby - spearheaded by our nuclear knights, Sir Phillip Baxter and Sir Ernest Titterton - who advocated nuclear power and even nuclear weapons for Australia.

An integral part of the nuclear project was the construction in 1957 of a small research reactor at Lucas Heights ­ at that time a mammoth 20 kilometres from Sydney’s CBD.

But Sir Philip and Sir Ernest had bigger plans: they convinced a succession of Australian Prime Ministers - first Robert Menzies, then Harold Holt and later John Gorton - that nuclear power was a worthy pursuit.

And so the project for a nuclear power reactor began in earnest- only to be terminated in 1972 by that most unlikely of Aussie Anti-Nuke heroes, Sir William McMahon (with a whiff of encouragement from the NSW Coal Industry). You can (try and) visit the Jervis Bay reactor foundations ­ a great concrete slab in the bush south of Sydney … an ideal site for an environmentalists pilgrimage!

I mention the Jervis Bay story to emphasize that in this craziest of worlds: common sense can prevail, nuclear doesn’t always win and allies will be discovered in the most unlikely places!

McMahon’s mothballing of the Jervis Bay reactor certainly dealt the nuclear dinosaur a mortal blow: the domestic nuclear energy and weapons options were severely curtailed if not destroyed.

But though the dinosaur seemed dead, its tail still wags: you don’t easily inactivate hundreds of educated middle-class, well-connected scientists and bureaucrats. The current proposal to replace the old Lucas Heights research reactor with a new 20 megawatt reactor is driven at least in part by the irresistible inertia of the dinosaur’s wagging tail … what else could nuclear scientists and engineers do? Retrain?  Migrate?

And so we are told Australia must have a new nuclear reactor. Why? Because the government says we must. They justify it, primarily, on the grounds that a viable nuclear medicine capability depends on it.

They ignore the fact that many radioisotopes can be produced in non-reactor facilities.

They ignore the fact that many modern industrialised nations (including the US and Japan) import a large proportion of their medical isotopes via the extensive, well-established international isotope distribution network.

They ignore the fact that Australia has imported isotopes for decades and continues to do so. Take technetium-99 for example, the workhorse of nuclear medicine, which still requires a reactor for commercial production. Australia currently imports about 20% of its Tc-99 - in the form of molybdenum, its cascade-precursor, which has a half-life long enough to make importation straightforward. During shutdown periods at Lucas Heights ­ such as the three-month period {from Feb-May 2000 - JG] - we imported 100% of our T-99 requirement ... without any recorded adverse patient outcome.
But nuclear medicine is the Trojan Horse which conceals the real reason for the enthusiasm of our leaders for a new nuclear reactor: the so called “national interest”.

It’s all about walking tall on the international stage, punching above our weight in Vienna.

With our own reactor - no matter how puny - the world will listen to us on the subject of non-proliferation. Building a reactor to promote non-proliferation is like going to war to combat weapons of mass destruction. 

Or shagging for chastity.

And why would Australians engage in such perversity?

It’s Billy Hughes at Versailles. It’s the “Jeff Kennett and the Elgin Marbles” scenario.
For years commentators have berated Australians for our ‘cultural cringe’- our looking to international (read British and American) acknowledgement that our artists measure up.

Now we have the scientific cultural cringe: to be recognisable internationally we need nukes … real science! The hard edge, the sharp blade. Masculine endeavour.

The replacement reactor is the most expensive single Australian scientific endeavour ever. We could of course save the $500 million we will spend constructing the replacement research reactor for a host of other more appropriate research and development projects in medicine, science and industry. This could include pursuing the promising prospect of generating technetium locally in non-reactor facilities. Meanwhile, Australia’s radioisotope supplies can be reliably sourced via the well-established, extensive international market.

Which takes us back of course to the Kungka Tjuta at Coober Pedy: no new reactor would mean much less waste. 

When the Lucas Heights reactor was ordered in the 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin had only just identified the double helix structure of DNA. When my own suspicions about radiation began to surface in 1976, the science was still all in the numbers, the epidemiology. Nowadays biologists have identified specific damage at the molecular level to nucleotide sequences on chromosomal DNA, including double-strand breaks, large deletions and sister chromatid exchange. Mutational events at key points such as the proto-oncogene or suppressor gene loci provide a probable mechanism for radiation-induced malignant transformation, like that seen in the lung cancers caused by radon inhalation ­ an aetiological connection first glimpsed amongst pitchblende miners in Hungary and Czechoslovakia more than a century ago.

Our understanding and explication of the biological mechanisms of radiation-induced chromosome damage and its mutagenic nature has exploded over the last 2 decades.

Consider this autoradiograph of the lung of an ape. The red star shows the tracks made by alpha-particles emitted by a deposit of plutonium in the lung tissue of an ape. The tracks are about 35 microns … about 5 cell diameters. This set of alpha tracks occurred over a 48 hour period, and would go on irradiating the same tiny volume of tissue as long as the ape lived. These are high local doses but official risk estimates average the radiation dose from this particle as if it affected the whole lung.

Our vastly enhanced capacity to study DNA has coincided, unfortunately, with a surge in epidemiological data on radiation exposures, particularly from the Chernobyl catastrophe.

When researchers began to identify the dramatic and unexpected rise in thyroid cancers in people exposed as children to Chernobyl’s radioactive iodine fall-out, their findings were initially dismissed by nuclear proponents as “screening artefacts”.

An estimated 10,000 people will develop thyroid cancer as a consequence of Chernobyl. A number of these victims were exposed to very low doses of I-131 ­ 50 mSv in some cases, maybe as low as 10mSv. This has reinforced the plausibility of the linear no threshold hypothesis: there is no “safe dose” of ionising radiation. It has also given rise to some serious questioning of the radiation protection regimes around the world. A recent report from WHO has recommended dropping the exposure limit for intervention with stable iodine in children to 10mGy, which is one tenth of the current Australian intervention dose. And one hundredth of the old NH&MRC standard when I was in first year Med.

The global nuclear industry is struggling for very good reason. It is inherently unsafe, and inevitably expensive.
And now we find that the almost untraceable remnants of this nefarious entangling nuclear chain - depleted uranium - are an integral part of war-mongering once again. Depleted uranium contains about 0.2% uranium-235, in comparison to natural uranium, which contains about. 0.7% uranium-235). D.U. is tough stuff - amongst it favoured roles have been ships ballast and ­ believe it or not! - tooth fillings.

It amazing hardness also makes it ideal for armour penetration, so 300 tonnes of DU was incorporated into missile and bullet tips then spread across Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. Reports of increased levels of malignancy and congenital abnormalities abound but are as yet not scientifically authenticated. More than 70% of a DU penetrator can be aerosolised upon impact with a target resulting in rapid oxidation and burning of the uranium. The potential for human contamination by particles of uranium oxide as well as alterations of the biosphere, including decrease in functional diversity of micro-organisms in the soil, are all significant. Embedded fragments in wounds will solubilise and redistribute in brain, lymph nodes, gonads, liver, kidney, and spleen, with the highest concentrations in skeletal tissue. “DU internal contamination presents a potential neurotoxic, endocrine, reproductive, nephrotoxic, and mutagenic hazard.” (Military Medicine, Vol.167, Aug. 2002)
DU which has been heated and aerosolized will have been inhaled and deposited in alveolar tissue. Like the plutonium deposit in the ape’s lung, uranium-235 is an alpha-emitter. Children who inhale even minute amounts of uranium-235 are likely to bear that unknown burden all their lives ­ how ever long that might be …

So we Australians have contributed over the past half-century to the global pool of uranium for weapons-building, in addition to the plutonium that is generated from our uranium. But we also have done our bit for radiological warfare ­ the dirty bombs in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq.

How many more tonnes will the children of Iraq be exposed to should Blair and Bush and Howard get their big chance?

When I first saw this autoradiograph, I thought: fantastic, science has taken another great step towards understanding the mysteries of radiation and health.

Then, being something of a softy, I thought: poor ape!

And now I’m thinking: pity the future generations of Iraqis, Kosovars, Afghans. The descendants of the Maralinga Tjarutja, the Mirrar and the Kokatha…

Australians have fought hard to constrain the nuclear dinosaur, MAPWA taking an assertive and determined position in the struggle, with submissions, representations and policy development on all these themes over the past twelve months ­ on uranium mining, the research reactor, waste disposal and radiation emergency interventions.

Whilst we focus on war and its prevention, we need to maintain our vigilance and increase our pressure on the politicians, bureaucrats and scientists who continue to drip-feed the wagging tail of the nuclear dinosaur.