{"id":23248,"date":"2015-11-05T14:30:32","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T03:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=23248"},"modified":"2015-11-05T16:09:43","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T05:09:43","slug":"australia-and-the-enrichment-option","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/australia-and-the-enrichment-option\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia and the enrichment option"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kakadu<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has recently shown a more open-minded approach to Australia\u2019s nuclear future. In a radio interview<\/a> in South Australia in late October he speculated on the possibility of a nuclear industry in Australia:<\/p>\n

PRIME MINISTER:\u00a0On nuclear power I commend Jay Weatherill for having the Royal Commission I think it\u2019s good that he has done that.<\/p>\n

QUESTION:\u00a0I mean he\u2019s probably going to say yes, go ahead and create some kind of nuclear industry. What would you say?<\/p>\n

PRIME MINISTER:\u00a0I was just talking about this with the cook in the caf\u00e9 downstairs when I was having some coffee and breakfast with Steve Marshall. As Brett the chef was saying, his view, and I think a lot of South Australians feel like this, and it is a perfectly reasonable view, is we have got the uranium. We mine it. Why don\u2019t we process it, turn it into the fuel rods, lease it to people overseas? When they are done we bring them back and we have got stable, very stable geology in remote locations and a stable political environment. That is a business that you could well imagine here. Would we ever have a nuclear power station in Australia or like the French do, dozens of nuclear power stations? I would be a bit sceptical about that \u2026.But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This looks like a cautious testing of the waters by the prime minister. Brett the chef\u2019s left carrying the weight of the proposal, with the prime minister saying only that it\u2019s worth looking at closely. But if Australia\u2019s going to be working across the full nuclear fuel cycle, from the mining and milling of uranium ore\u2014which is what we do now\u2014to nuclear fuel fabrication, fuel leasing and the storage of spent nuclear-fuel waste, the country\u2019s going to have a nuclear industry and not just a mining operation. Such a capability would be both a commercial and a strategic asset. And it would mark a deep-level policy shift in Australia\u2019s nuclear identity, which since the days of Bob Hawke has consciously shunned the possibility that we might possess sensitive nuclear technologies such as uranium enrichment.<\/p>\n

It was the Hawke government, in the balmy anti-nuclear days of the early 1980s, which shut down Australia\u2019s research and development program into centrifuge-based uranium enrichment. That program had begun in 1965, so by the mid-1980s we were throwing away twenty years\u2019 worth of effort. (A small R and D program in laser enrichment was subsequently closed down in the early 1990s.) The program was a casualty of Labor\u2019s interest in a stronger position on non-proliferation and disarmament, not a victim of underperformance. Indeed, the publicly-available information<\/a> suggests Australian nuclear engineers had been successful in building an experimental cascade that delivered enrichment results comparable to those being achieved at the time by Urenco.<\/p>\n

But enrichment, of course, doesn\u2019t merely provide fuel for nuclear reactors; it\u2019s a critical pathway to fissile materials for nuclear weapons. Enriching the percentage of the U235 isotope in a given quantity of uranium\u2014it\u2019s only 0.7% in natural uranium\u2014is one means of building a nuclear bomb. That\u2019s why it\u2019s typically described as a \u2018sensitive\u2019 technology. Still, Australia has a strong case for an interest in uranium enrichment. We\u2019re not Iran\u2014we have the world\u2019s largest uranium reserves, and a program to provide low-enriched nuclear fuel to others and to manage the resulting wastes would be a positive one for the international community.<\/p>\n

If the new prime minister is serious about the possibility of building a cradle-to-grave nuclear industry in Australia (though without nuclear power stations), he should be interested in an early resuscitation of the enrichment research and development program at ANSTO. An enrichment R and D program doesn\u2019t mean Australia intends to build nuclear weapons. In our case, even an industrial enrichment capability wouldn\u2019t suggest that. A sound understanding of the enrichment process is important in its own right, not just for our own prospects but for understanding what other countries are doing in their nuclear programs.<\/p>\n

True, an Australian enrichment capability would also be a strategic signal. It would constitute a hedge against any sharp deterioration in the regional security environment\u2014a hedge similar to that enjoyed by a range of other countries around the world and in all likelihood one we\u2019ll never need, because we\u2019re already protected by US nuclear weapons under the ANZUS alliance. Still, the 21st century strategic order hasn\u2019t yet unfolded in Asia. Keeping options open is no bad thing.<\/p>\n

There have been other proposals over the years for Australia to think about the enrichment option (see here<\/a> for example). Time to put the topic back on the agenda. As for Brett the chef, perhaps he should be applying for a job at Prime Minister and Cabinet under the new open admission rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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