Government's Uranium Enrichment Agenda : Melbourne Indymedia

Many analysts have pointed out that nuclear power in Australia is uneconomical in the absence of a carbon tax. Given that the Government has seemingly ruled out such a tax it is to be expected that no matter what the Government’s committee of nuclear inquiry should recommend in its forthcoming report or what other legislative changes the Government should make in response the reality is that power utilities will not go nuclear if it should prove uneconomical to do so.

Leaks from the inquiry suggest that the nuclear option shall prove economical in the long term, say by 2015. So far, all this tells us is the nature of the inquiry. An impartial and sober inquiry would hardly allow itself to become a tool for political point scoring.

But there is more to the nuclear debate in Australia than simply building nuclear reactors. Getting relatively less attention is the debate on uranium enrichment. Government ministers, including the Prime Minister, have made public statements backing uranium enrichment.

BHP however has stated that, “we do not believe that conversion and enrichment would be commercially viable in Australia for the foreseeable future”. Furthermore, the company argues “that there is neither a commercial nor a non-proliferation case for it to become involved in front-end processing or the development of fuel leasing services in Australia." Rio Tinto has adopted a similar position.

However, the chairman of the Government’s Nuclear Task Force, Ziggy Switkowski, has, unusually for someone in the middle of an inquiry, waded into the debate by making positive statements about uranium enrichment precisely when it was widely interpreted that BHP and Rio Tinto seriously dented the Government’s case on enrichment.

Switkowski has argued that there is a long term economic case for enrichment, “if you project that several decades you can see environments where there'll need to be new enrichment capacity brought on stream and that may provide opportunities for new plants."

The price of enriched uranium would be greater on the international nuclear market than uranium mined and milled out of the ground. It is argued that in this way, as Asia slowly goes nuclear, the uranium industry stands to make greater profits, a point argued by independent stock analyst Peter Strachan.

It is unfortunate that this debate has taken a purely economic focus. There are a number of other important considerations that must also be considered and the debate needs to be re-jigged to reflect this.

Most of the world’s civil nuclear reactors are light water thermal reactors that typically use uranium enriched to some 3-4% of the isotope uranium (U)-235. Natural uranium (U-238), which is mined at places such as Olympic Dam and Ranger, contains about 0.7% U-235.

Enriched uranium can also be used as the fissile material for nuclear weapons. Because of this fact the debate on uranium enrichment must include more wider strategic considerations. The debate cannot be purely an economic one.

However, to use enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon one requires uranium enriched to 90% or more U-235. This is known as highly enriched or weapons grade uranium as opposed to the low enriched uranium used in power reactors.

Nuclear weapons based on highly enriched uranium are relatively easy to manufacture. The bomb used against Hiroshima was a uranium based gun assembly device that was not even tested prior to its use. Plutonium based bombs are much harder to make, as the North Korean fizzle yield “test” demonstrated, but the fissile material for the core is easier to come by. Recent advances in enrichment technology are lowering the gap.

Because isotopes of uranium are chemically the same enrichment requires industrial level physical techniques such as gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuges or laser isotopic separation that exploit the difference in mass between U-235 and U-238. Gaseous diffusion plants are some of the largest industrial structures ever built and were first made to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

Given their sheer size gaseous diffusion plants were difficult and expensive to construct and used up a great deal of energy. Moreover, they could not easily be hidden. These facts imposed a large barrier to any would be proliferator choosing to construct a bomb based on highly enriched uranium. Most concerns in relation to nuclear proliferation have traditionally focused on plutonium.

But the fact is that gas centrifuges, which have risen to prominence since the late 1970s, are much cheaper and much smaller than diffusion plants. The footprint of a centrifuge plant could amount to only 600 square meters. Laser isotopic separation promises to be even cheaper and smaller than gas centrifuge plants. It thereby follows that the barriers to proliferation via uranium enrichment have significantly fallen.

Since the 1990’s a private company, Silex Systems, has been exploring laser isotopic separation technology in Australia. Work on laser enrichment has been a significant proliferation concern, reflected in the US Department of Energy in 1996 classifying the Silex process as ‘Restricted Data’, the first known occasion on which privately held technology has been given this highest level of security classification by the US Department of Energy.

The International Atomic Energy Agency in its “safeguards” policy lists 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium as the “significant quantity” needed to fuel a nuclear weapon. This figure is too high. A proliferator could use 12kg of weapons-grade uranium by using a good neutron reflector. The IAEA significant quantity is more than double this amount.

In fact it is quite beside the point to base a safeguards policy around an arbitrary “significant quantity”. The fissile material needed for a bomb depends upon the yield and design of the explosive device. A medium technology state could construct a bomb with 5 kilotons of TNT explosive yield using only 6 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium.

This imposes severe burdens on any “safeguards” policy for as the fissile material needed to construct a bomb drops so the cost of IAEA safeguards must increase. The Director-General of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei at a recent international conference on safeguards, has stated that the IAEA is under resourced to meet its safeguards obligations. This is at a significant quantity of 25kg of highly enriched uranium. Moreover, the technical barriers to any system of material accounting and control also greatly increase as the significant quantity decreases.

It is argued by enrichment advocates that enriching uranium in Australia would have no proliferation consequences. This is false. If one were to have low enriched uranium it would not take much to clandestinely enrich this uranium to weapons-grade level. Low enriched uranium could be diverted to a clandestine gas centrifuge plant with a plant capacity some 5 times smaller than it would otherwise need to be.

In fact, the job would become much easier because low enriched uranium is already some 80% of the way to being enriched to a highly enriched level. This is because it takes little additional “separative work” to upgrade light enriched uranium into highly enriched uranium.

To prevent further enrichment of our enriched uranium Canberra would have to rely on the technically inadequate system of “safeguards” administered by the IAEA.

Given that concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme centre on uranium enrichment any move toward enrichment in Australia would set a poor example for others. There exist no barriers for any state to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

Another big complication is that rational strategic planners in our region, no matter how benign the local security environment, must factor in the potential for nuclear weapons “breakout” that an Australian enrichment capacity would represent.

A uranium enrichment plant would mean that Australia would posses a “virtual” nuclear deterrent. Indonesia has already made some noises about Australian enrichment plans and may feel compelled to follow suit. Dr Dewi Anwar, a former Indonesian Presidential Adviser, has stated to the ABC "Indonesia and the (Association of South East Asian Nations) ASEAN countries would probably be concerned about Australia doing uranium enrichment until we get more details of it."

Should we come to this pretty pass we would end up being in a relationship of existential nuclear deterrence with our nearest neighbour.

If BHP and Rio Tinto’s analysis is correct on the economics of enrichment then our regional neighbours, much as we speculate in relation to Iran, may well wonder about the long term thinking behind uranium enrichment in Australia. In fact, although Iran has breached its safeguards obligations, most claims about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme focus on intent. It is argued that Iran has no economic need for nuclear energy hence Tehran’s nuclear ambitions must be military ones.

We are not dealing here with merely a hypothetical scenario. Surely one of the factors that has been of concern for planners in North Korea is the large amount of plutonium stockpiling in Japan, which effectively gives Tokyo a “virtual” nuclear deterrent.

If Australia is to uphold its professed commitment to nuclear non proliferation then we must reject calls to enrich uranium. Nuclear non proliferation should outweigh economics especially if the economic argument for enrichment centres upon its purported “long term” benefits.