Australians 'will accept nuclear power'

It is being predicted that Australians will soon accept that nuclear power is the answer to many climate change problems.

The president of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Ziggy Switkowski, says there has already been a shift in perception on the issue, with about half of the population now open to the idea.

"Community opinion now is reasonably evenly split between for and against and that's a positive move from the nuclear power point of view in the last couple of years," he told ABC2's News Breakfast.

"I think in the next several years we'll get an alignment between communities being supportive of nuclear power and politicians realising that it's really a large part of the climate change solution."

Dr Switkowski says while he respects the Government's opposition to nuclear power, he says it is not consistent with the view of most countries around the world.

"Progressively I think we're going to have every state line up in support of uranium mining and export," he said.

"The more uranium we export and the more nuclear power is produced around the world, the less the challenge becomes in terms of the evolution away from fossil fuel."

Dr Switkowski says the WA Government's decision to lift a ban on uranium mining is another step in the right direction.

He has dismissed concern about finding a storage site for waste from future nuclear reactors.

"To find one location in central Australia presumably that will progressively store the spent fuel from Australia's reactors at the end of this century, we're talking 80 years out, strikes me as a very straight forward technical problem," he said.

Dr Switkowski says there is nothing to suggest Australia will be forced to accept waste from countries buying its uranium.

"Most countries have laws on their books that say 'if we are going to go nuclear we are responsible for our own waste, we will store it within our boundaries, we will not accept anybody else's waste'," he said.

"I think you would struggle to find nuclear waste that people wanted to send to Australia."

(Source: ABC News)

New nuclear commission set to meet in Sydney

India and Pakistan will attend an international nuclear disarmament conference for the first time in Sydney next month, Australia's government said Friday, even though the nuclear-armed foes have consistently shunned a nonproliferation treaty.

The 15-member International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament will meet Oct. 19-21 to "shape a global consensus" on improving the 28-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty before it is reviewed in 2010, the government said in a statement.

"The commission's two-year mandate is to reinvigorate the global debate on the need to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons and for nuclear disarmament," Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was quoted as saying.

Australia's former foreign minister, Gareth Evans, will co-chair the event with Yoriko Kawaguchi, an ex-foreign minister in Japan, the government said. Senior Indian diplomat Brajesh Mishra and Pakistan's ex-army chief Jehangir Karamat are to be among the delegates.

Evans has recently said all nuclear powers — including those who have refused to join the nonproliferation treaty such as India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — must be included in the new process if the world is to ever achieve disarmament.

Commissioners from five nuclear powers — United States, China, Russia, Britain and France — will attend, as well as representatives from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Germany, Norway, South Africa and Mexico, the statement said.

Ron Huisken, a nuclear proliferation expert from the Australian National University's Strategic and Defense Studies Center, said the inclusion of India and Pakistan was significant because neither country had been directly involved in such negotiations since the treaty came into force in 1970.

"Somehow you have to bring them into a regime of restraint," said Huisken, who described India and Pakistan's inclusion as "very sensible."

"If they're going to reverse a pretty serious erosion of the whole nonproliferation drive, they do need to get all the players, both incipient and actual, into the exercise," he added.

The 190-nation nonproliferation treaty was established to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology and to further the goal of nuclear disarmament. It is reviewed every five years.

Under the treaty, only countries that tested nuclear weapons before 1967 are allowed to remain nuclear powers. India and Pakistan would have to disarm if they were to join.

(Source: AP)

Nuclear compromise puts India in the big league

INDIA'S emergence as a great power has been cemented by the decision of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to grant it access to nuclear fuel and technology, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, says.

Mr Smith and India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, met in New Delhi yesterday.

Even though Australia bans uranium exports to India because it has not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the Rudd Government supported India's bid to gain access to global nuclear commerce.

Mr Singh "warmly thanked" Australia for supporting India's campaign to achieve a waiver that allows India to join the elite group of nations that have nuclear weapons and can trade nuclear fuel and technology.

"As time unfolds I think it will be regarded as a decision which crystallised the emergence of a great power this century," Mr Smith said.

Some members of India's foreign policy establishment have questioned the logic of Australia's ban on uranium exports to India following the decision by the suppliers' group.

But Mr Singh did not ask Australia to drop its ban when he met Mr Smith yesterday, saying he understood the sensitivity of uranium policy in Australia.

Last year the Howard government decided Australia would sell uranium to India if it was granted a waiver by the group, but the Rudd Government overturned the decision. The ban on exporting uranium to non-signatories of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is backed by many in the ALP, especially in the party's Left.

During his first visit to India, Mr Smith has steadfastly defended the policy.

The waiver was a key step in a landmark nuclear co-operation deal between India and the United States that was sent to US Congress for final approval this week

However, a report in a US newspaper suggests Australia may not be alone in denying India supplies that could be used in India's nuclear industry.

The Washington Post said members of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group group was near consensus on a separate ban on the sale of sensitive technologies to countries that have not signed the non-proliferation treaty.

Mr Smith has been pushing the new International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, to be co-chaired by the former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, an ex-Japanese foreign minister.

(Source: The Sydney Morning Herald)

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rejects push for nuclear power

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has rejected a push by labour movement figures to consider nuclear energy as a stopgap until renewable technologies become established.

Australian Workers' Union (AWU) national secretary Paul Howes and former NSW premier Bob Carr have called on the federal government to rethink Labor's opposition to the nuclear power industry.

Australia is a major uranium producer and exporter but is a heavy user of greenhouse gas-producing coal sources for its electricity generation.

The former Howard government commissioned a study into the prospect of nuclear reactors but Labor has consistently ruled out the technology as an energy source.

"On the question of nuclear, we believe that we have a huge range of energy options available to Australia beyond nuclear with which and through which we can respond to the climate change challenge," Mr Rudd said in response to the challenge.

Mr Howes said most of the developed world was now seriously looking at nuclear as an alternative energy source.

"In the UK, there's going to be the expansion of nuclear facilities there," he told the Fairfax Radio Network.

"France now has 80 per cent of its power generated from nuclear, all as short solutions, that is 20- to 50-year solutions until other technologies, such as fusion and hot rock ... are developed and are widely available as baseload power."

Nuclear power would always be a sensitive issue, he said.

"But we have 40 per cent of the world's uranium in Australia.

"Labor has overturned the three-mines policy and I think it's now a time for another healthy, sensible and rational debate about this issue without falling back to alarmist sentiments."

Mr Carr said nuclear power was the critical bridge between the carbon and renewable energy eras.

"There is no other bridging technology to get us from this catastrophic burning of coal and oil into the era of cheap and infinite renewable power," he told The Australian newspaper.

The Australian Greens slammed Mr Carr's logic.

Greens senator Christine Milne said renewable energy was closer than nuclear energy.

"A bridging technology can only be useful if it can be brought on much faster than the final intended technology. That is patently not the case with nuclear and renewables," she said.

"We don't need a dirty, expensive and dangerous bridge when we can leap across to the other shore if we make the effort to do so."

On other energy issues, Mr Rudd said the cost of petrol and electricity would not be insulated from the operation of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

"If you act on climate change and the emissions trading system then obviously there's a flow-through consequence on the cost of petrol and the cost of energy," he said.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said families must be protected from higher petrol and electricity prices caused by an ETS.

"We know that our economy, and that's all of us, are going to pay a price for it (climate change)," he said.

"The one thing that Mr Rudd must guarantee is on petrol and on electricity costs, that he will guarantee that he will protect Australian families."

(Source: APP)

Australia must end uranium confusion

Australia's uranium industry has vented its frustration at state and federal governments, saying the "pathetic" political situation has to change.

Uranium ore concentrate

Speaking at the Paydirt 2008 Uranium Conference in Adelaide, Mike Angwin, executive director of the Australian Uranium Association, said Australia has an incomplete policy and incomplete regulatory regime for uranium mining and the industry has not broadened to become country-wide.

"Despite a welcome shift to bipartisan support, we have considerable ground to cover before Australia is seen as a political friendly uranium country. We have not yet consolidated our political role," said Angwin.

Uranium mining operations in Australia's various regions are licensed - or not - by local governments. Currently uranium mining activity is focused in South Australia and the Northern Territory where between them 82% of the country's uranium is produced. Australia itself accounts for about 19% of the world's supply.

The managing director of Toro Energy, Greg Hall, said, "there is a confusing mixed bag in peoples' minds about what is possible and what is not possible in Australia," and that "There needs to be a much higher appreciation that a modern uranium industry is a lot different than something Western Australia and Queensland's policy thinkers learnt in the 1970s."

Uranium analyst Warwick Grigor went further, saying the situation was "just as pathetic as it was a year ago." He added: "There has been no backing down of the anti-uranium stance in Western Australia, and the Queensland government continues with the pathetically parochial and anti-environmental view that it does not want to stand in the way of the development of its coal industry."

Hall connected Australian uranium exports with the global push for more nuclear power as an emissions-free alternative: "We as a country have to be able to start other uranium mines if there is international demand and an increasing reliance on these countries for nuclear energy to cut greenhouse emissions."

"As we stand, these markets are only getting access to 50% of potential Australian uranium production so the political impasse has to change."
(Source: World Nuclear News)