Greenwash Political Action Party and Urban Grassroots Movement for the Green Party

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

How Australia has already been helping to enrich uranium

An edited version of this post was first published by crikey.

The great unspoken in the nuclear debate is not the danger posed to residents by reactors in backyards, but the dangers to all of us from enriching uranium and its inseparable link to nuclear weapons.

When it comes to Iran it is accepted that there is an inherent connection between nuclear power and weapons. However in Australia, where we propose exporting uranium to rogue nuclear powers and where we are already developing weapons capable enrichment technology, it seems the topic can not be discussed. Witness Alexander Downer’s dismissal of the topic on when it was raised by Stephen Crittenden on Radio National on Monday morning.

Even leaving aside the great dangers of adding to nuclear weapons proliferation by selling uranium to India and China, we need look no further than current activities at the ANSTO research reactor at Lucas Heights to know what is at stake.

Silex Systems Ltd has been developing cutting edge laser uranium enrichment technology for years (see Greenpeace report) and just last month it sold the technology to the US energy giant GE (media release here).

This cheap form of enriching uranium, which could be used for nuclear power and weapons, is small scale which makes it much harder to detect and monitor in rogue states. No US spy satellite pictures like those we see from Iran would do the job.

Laser enrichment has been tried by a range of risky states: South Korea, Iran, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, South Africa, and Yugoslavia for 30 years but only now, as a result of the GE- Silex deal, do we know that its potential is really on the horizon.

The current edition (out yesterday) of the normally reliable The Monthly has short very one sided article about Silex. It reads more like a public relations piece with seemingly no attempt to acknowledge the real proliferation dangers of the technology.

In a post 9/11 world where terrorist weapons, including nuclear ones, can get smaller and more concealable, any chance that more nuclear material and technology can proliferate is a nightmare just waiting to happen.

We need a full nuclear debate that covers not just climate change, economics and nibyism. All the risks, particularly those associated with uranium enrichment, nuclear proliferation, foreign policy and regional security need to be on the table.

posted by Ben Oquist # 6:01 PM 1 comments