Trivial masks the big uranium question

TWO nuclear powers – India and Pakistan — face each other in the Asian sub-continent. Millions of lives are at stake. Neither country is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Australia – the country with second largest amount of uranium on earth — is a potential supplier of uranium to one of those states, India.

India needs uranium to supply its nuclear power stations to generate the electricity which has the potential to lift millions of people out of grinding poverty into some sort of reasonable life,

But India and Pakistan have fought several pre-nuclear wars in the past 50 years. Now they are both nuclear-armed, another conflict would be catastrophic – not just for them, but for the whole world. The nuclear fall-out could block out the sun for months causing a nuclear winter. The radiation would spread throughout the world causing a huge rise in cancer cases and other illness.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which provides inspection regimes to ensure uranium or uranium ore (yellowcake) delivered for peaceful purposes does not get diverted to military uses.

Moreover, India shares a border and has fought a war with China, which is also nuclear-armed and happens to be Australia’s largest trading partner.

Furthermore, if India does not pursue a policy of increased nuclear energy, it will be forced to use more coal-fired power stations with vastly greater emissions of greenhouse gases. This will add to global warming and nasty consequences for the global climate and the world’s capacity to produce enough food for the world’s population.

Australia is a rich country with huge mineral wealth, but the mining boom is slowing. We have large uranium reserves and a big demand from the world’s second-most populous country.

Also, Australia has been slowly mending its relationship with India after a surge of racial attacks against Indian students in Australia.

The questions are profound, of global importance, with a potential of huge impact on the world’s population, especially Australia.

As it happens, Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister of Australia, is in India and these great questions are at stake: the potential for nuclear war; the potential to use nuclear power to lift millions out of poverty; the potential to use nuclear power to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of one of the worst emitters in the world; the potential to extend the mining boom.

Big stuff.

Then the Prime Minister’s shoe gets stuck in the grass and she falls over. The footage (pardon the pun) goes viral. Every news outlet runs it and the stills are all over the print media.

Twitter tweets, Facebook goes off its face and the commercial nightly bulletins are full of it.

But the event is of no consequence whatever — ziltch. Yet it has seemingly crowded out the precious airways at the expense of more important things.

We should despair.

We should be voting according to how our leaders and their political parties face the big questions, not whether they fall on their face in the grass or even whether they engage in a spirited exchange on misogyny.

But how can that happen if the mass media is full of the latter and does a poor job of explaining the former, and the mass of voters consume that media and form their political opinions and their answers to opinion poll questions upon that consumption?

In that environment we get what we deserve – the politics of the hard hat and fluoro jacket. Mantras and one-liners. The glib and simplistic.

Maybe it was ever thus, and it is only just more pronounced these days. It is more pronounced because of the 24-hour news cycle and the capacity for the whole audience to join in with 140-character tweets or short Facebook comments. This, combined with “most hit” buttons, drives the media to emphasise the simple and the senasational. Yet, at the same time, the questions at stake are getting more complex.

Selling uranium to India is a classic issue of political complexity – combining moral and practical questions in a quest to do the right thing. You could respect an opinion either way.

In more than half a century of nuclear power, accidents, deaths and injuries have been rare. Coal mining deaths continue to abound.

But nuclear presents the possibility of catastrophe in a way that coal does not. Nuclear presents long-term problems of environmental contamination. But that is increasingly being outweighed by the more recently discovered long-term catastrophic environmental consequences of the continued use of coal, in the form of climate change.

We export uranium now for peaceful purposes only to treaty signatories. But that is increasingly shaky ground. The main aim of the treaty – to eliminate nuclear weapons from earth – has never been taken seriously.

And its safeguard regimes are morally susptect because they deal in quantities. Provided an amount of uranium ore equivalent to the amount exported by Australia is used by the importer, the treaty is satisfied, even if some of our actual uranium goes to military purposes and an equivalent amount ear-marked for military use returns to peaceful use.

The treaty is morally and practically dead.

Further, once a country has nuclear weapons, imports of uranium from places like Australia will not do anything their military program. The ability of a nation to get nuclear weapons is not constrained by the supply of uranium, but rather in getting the technology to build the weapon.

And they could get the stuff from somewhere else anyway.

Morally, we have to ask whether we should withhold part of the capacity to lift millions of Indians out of poverty, and we have to ask should we be a party to driving them towards coal-fired power, thereby increasing the dangers of climate change.

And practically, we have to ask what use is the non-proliferation treaty.

A lesser question is why shouldn’t we improve the position of our own people by enriching ourselves through uranium exports. We might also ask why doesn’t Australia move to peaceful nuclear power given our abundance of uranium and appalling record on greenhouse gas emissions.

The questions are enough to trip anyone up.
CRISPIN HULL