Parliament takes first steps to nuclear submarines. Examiner, By Andrew Brown, May 10 2023
The first step to Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines as part of the AUKUS security pact has been introduced to federal parliament.
Laws brought in to the House of Representatives on Wednesday will update rules banning civil nuclear power to allow for work to be done on the submarines……………….
In leading the delivery of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines, the ASA will be responsible for cradle-to-grave management, including:
Disposal
New agency and new regulator to deliver nuclear submarine program
The government will establish a new agency and a new regulator as part of its commitment to delivering Australia’s conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines.
The Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) will be established by Executive Order and be responsible and accountable for the management and oversight of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine program.
Work to deliver the pathway is already underway and remains a key priority for the government, in line with the recommendations of the Defence Strategic Review.
In leading the delivery of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines, the ASA will be responsible for cradle-to-grave management, including:
acquisition
delivery
construction
technical governance
sustainment, and
disposal
ASA will also enable the necessary policy, legal, non-proliferation, workforce, security and safety arrangements.
Royal Australian Navy, led by the Chief of Navy, will continue to be responsible for training submariners and operating Australia’s submarines.
The Nuclear-Powered Submarine Taskforce, which currently operates as part of Defence, will transition to the ASA on 1 July 2023.
t will be headed by a Director General, the appointment of whom will be announced by the government at the appropriate time.
The government will also establish a new independent statutory regulator, the Australian Nuclear-Powered Submarine Safety Regulator.
The new regulator will have the functions and powers necessary to regulate the unique circumstances associated with nuclear safety and radiological protection across the lifecycle of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine enterprise.
This includes associated infrastructure and facilities.
The regulator will be independent of the Australian Defence Force’s chain of command and directions from the Department of Defence.
This will be a fundamental part of a system of regulation, which will work with existing Australian regulators to support the safety of our submariners, Australian and international communities, and the environment.
Both the ASA and the Australian Nuclear-Powered Submarine Safety Regulator will be non-corporate Commonwealth entities within the Defence portfolio and report directly to the Minister for Defence.
Minister for Defence Richard Marles said the government was delivering on its commitment to the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, which is the single biggest investment in our defence capability in our history.
“The establishment of the Australian Submarine Agency and the Australian Nuclear-Powered Submarine Safety Regulator are critical elements of delivering this game-changing capability and will ensure the safe and successful implementation of the pathway for Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines,” Mr Marles said.
“The ASA will be responsible and accountable for delivering the ambitious program to acquire Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines.
“A specialised and dedicated regulator – which will be independent of Defence and the Australian Defence Force – will ensure we have the highest standards of nuclear safety and radiological protection across the lifecycle of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines.”
While no threat from China exists, media propagandists are trying to ignite a war the likes of which we’ve never seen. John Pilger reminds us that we need to raise our voices before it’s too late.
“IN 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war………………………………………………
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power”. ………………………….
On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia – The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of experts” presented no credible evidence; one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan, and the West’s war industry.
There is no threat to Australia. None. The faraway “lucky” country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained “experts”. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
How did it come to this? Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. Where on Earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers and George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans “foreign interference” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity”. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian taxpayer for “advice”. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra-low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
retired U.S. military figure” generally means someone who used to be paid by the U.S. government to advance the interests of the U.S. empire, and is now paid by corporations and/or foreign governments to advance the interests of the U.S. empire.
Among the American swamp monsters hired by Canberra is the Obama administration’s spy chief, who has an established track record of lying and manipulating to advance the interests of the U.S. empire.
Australia has been paying insiders of the U.S. war machine for consultation on how to run the nation’s military, a massive conflict of interest given that Washington has been grooming Australia for a role in its war agendas against China.
For those who don’t speak imperialist, “retired U.S. military figure” generally means someone who used to be paid by the U.S. government to advance the interests of the U.S. empire, and is now paid by corporations and/or foreign governments to advance the interests of the U.S. empire.
These corrupt warmongers rotate in and out of the revolving door of the D.C. swamp, from government to war-industry jobs to punditry gigs to influential think tanks and then back again into government, advancing the interests of the U.S. empire the entire time and growing wealthy in the process.
This dynamic allows a permanent constellation of reliable empire managers to continually exert influence around the world in support of the U.S. empire, regardless of who gets voted into or out of office in the performative display of electoral politics. It’s a big part of why U.S. foreign policy remains the same regardless of who’s officially running the elected government in Washington, and it’s a big part of why the media and arms industry which support the U.S. war machine keep playing the same tune as well.
Among the American swamp monsters Australia paid for consulting work is the Obama administration’s spy chief James Clapper, who has an established track record of lying and manipulating to advance the interests of the U.S. empire:
In 2013 Clapper committed perjury by telling the U.S. Senate under oath that the NSA does not knowingly collect data on millions of Americans, only to have that lie exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks a few months later.
In 2016 Clapper played a foundational role in fomenting public hysteria about Russia with the flimsy ODNI report on alleged Russian election interference, which remainsriddled with massiveplot holes. He would later go on to repeatedly voice the opinion that Russians are “almost genetically driven” toward nefarious and subversive behavior.
In 2020 Clapper signed the infamous and now fully discredited letter from former intelligence insiders saying the Hunter Biden laptop story was likely a Russian disinfo op, falsely telling CNN that the story was “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work” and that the emails on the laptop had “no metadata” on them.
Also among the American military consultants paid by Australia is a man we just discussed the other day, William Hilarides, who will be telling Australia how to reconfigure its navy because apparently no Australians are available for that job. We now know that according to the released Pentagon documents Canberra has already paid Hilarides almost $2.5 million since 2016 for his consulting work.
This information was originally reported by The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones, who last year also broke the remarkable story that a former U.S. navy admiral named Stephen Johnson had actually served as Australia’s deputy navy secretary, a position which needless to say is not normally open to foreigners.
……………………………………… Australia has always seemed like a fairly irrelevant player on the world stage because of its impotent subservience to Washington. But it’s becoming clear it is exactly because of Australia’s blind subservience to Washington that Australia is worth paying attention to, since that relationship may well end up giving the nation a front-row seat to World War Three.
Australians are going to have to wake up to what’s being done and the abominable agendas the nation is being exploited to advance. Australians are being groomed for a military confrontation of unimaginable horror, one which absolutely does not need to take place, all in the name of something as trivial as securing U.S. planetary hegemony. Australians have got to start saying no to this, starting right now.
So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped “for decades to come” by an “independent” strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.
The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted.
Here are the first few paragraphs to give you a sense of the squealing glee these swamp monsters are experiencing right now:
Angus Houston and Stephen Smith have delivered a blaring wake-up call to any Australians who think they still live in a sanctuary of safety at the southern edge of the Earth: you’re living in the past.
To those inside and outside the Australian Defence Force who think business-as-usual will cut it in the future: you’re delusional.
Their message to anyone confused about the biggest threat to Australia’s national security is similarly blunt: it is our largest trading partner, China.
Like a pair of doctors delivering confronting news to an ill patient, the two men tasked with reshaping Australia’s military for the 21st century have opted for admirable candour in their defence strategic review.
Rejecting vague language about rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the former defence chief and defence minister call out just one nation – China – for threatening Australia’s core interests.
“Like a pair of doctors.” That’s the kind of third-rate propaganda we get in the nation with the most consolidated media ownership in the western world.
The “defence” review focuses not on defending the shores of the continent of Australia, but instead over and over again makes mention of the need to protect the “rules-based order” in Australia’s “region” — the so-called “Indo-Pacific” — which includes China. It is for the most part 110 pages of mental contortions explaining why “defending” the nation of Australia is going to have to look a whole lot like preparing to pick a fight with an Asian nation thousands of kilometers away.
The public DSR actually only mentions China by name eight times, though by Knott’s ecstatic revelry you’d assume that was the only word it contains. In contrast, the document mentions the United States no fewer than 38 times, with the United Kingdom getting two mentions, New Zealand getting only one, and Australia’s neighbors like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia not mentioned by name at all.
“Our Alliance with the United States will remain central to Australia’s security and strategy,” the review reads. “The United States will become even more important in the coming decades. Defence should pursue greater advanced scientific, technological and industrial cooperation in the Alliance, as well as increased United States rotational force posture in Australia, including with submarines.”
The overshadowing presence of the United States in a document that is ostensibly about Australian security interests would be confusing to you if you did not know that Australia has for generations served as a US military and intelligence asset, where our nation’s interests are so subordinated to Washington’s that we’re not even allowed to know if the US is bringing nuclear weapons into our country.
In a foreshadowing of the DSR’s pledge to pursue even greater cooperation with the US, last year Australia’s Secretary of Defence Richard Marles said that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military so they can “operate seamlessly together, at speed.” Which is a fancy way of saying that any meaningful separation between the Australian military and the American military has been effectively dissolved.
Marles, who is currently facing scrutiny in Australia for being illicitly secretive about the nature of a free golf trip he went on in his last visit to the United States, has said that the DSR “will underpin our Defence policy for decades to come.”
Even some of the implementation of the DSR’s findings will be overseen by an American, not an Australian. ABC reports that “a major component to determine the future shape of Australia’s naval fleet will be decided later this year in a ‘short, sharp’ review to be led by US Navy Vice Admiral William H Hilarides.”
The review itself has been tainted with severe conflicts of interest with regard to US influence. As Mack Williams noted in Pearls And Irritations earlier this month, the senior advisor and principal author behind the review is a man named Peter Dean, a professor and Director of Foreign Policy and Defence at the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at the University of Sydney. The USSC receives funding from the US government, and Dean’s own CV boasts that he “currently leads two US State Department-funded public diplomacy programs on the US-Australia Alliance.”
So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped “for decades to come” by an “independent” strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.
It is hilarious, then, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the release of the DSR by proclaiming that “At its core, all of this is making Australia more self-reliant, more prepared and more secure in the years ahead.” It is funnier still that he concluded that same speech with an Anzac Day acknowledgement of Australian troops who who have died in wars “to defend our sovereignty and our freedom.”
It doesn’t get any less self-reliant and sovereign than just handing over your nation’s military to a more powerful nation with a “There ya go mate, use it however you reckon’s fair.” You really could not come up with a more egregious abdication of national sovereignty if you tried. And yet our prime minister babbles about sovereignty and self-reliance while doing exactly that.
Just annex us and make us the 51st state already. At least that way we’d get a pretend vote in America’s fake elections.
“Our Alliance with the United States will remain central to Australia’s security and strategy,” the review reads. “The United States will become even more important in the coming decades. Defence should pursue greater advanced scientific, technological and industrial cooperation in the Alliance, as well as increased United States rotational force posture in Australia, including with submarines.”
The overshadowing presence of the United States in a document that is ostensibly about Australian security interests would be confusing to you if you did not know that Australia has for generations served as a US military and intelligence asset, where our nation’s interests are so subordinated to Washington’s that we’re not even allowed to know if the US is bringing nuclear weapons into our country.
In a foreshadowing of the DSR’s pledge to pursue even greater cooperation with the US, last year Australia’s Secretary of Defence Richard Marles said that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military so they can “operate seamlessly together, at speed.” Which is a fancy way of saying that any meaningful separation between the Australian military and the American military has been effectively dissolved.
Marles, who is currently facing scrutiny in Australia for being illicitly secretive about the nature of a free golf trip he went on in his last visit to the United States, has said that the DSR “will underpin our Defence policy for decades to come.”
Even some of the implementation of the DSR’s findings will be overseen by an American, not an Australian. ABC reports that “a major component to determine the future shape of Australia’s naval fleet will be decided later this year in a ‘short, sharp’ review to be led by US Navy Vice Admiral William H Hilarides.”
The review itself has been tainted with severe conflicts of interest with regard to US influence. As Mack Williams noted in Pearls And Irritations earlier this month, the senior advisor and principal author behind the review is a man named Peter Dean, a professor and Director of Foreign Policy and Defence at the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at the University of Sydney. The USSC receives funding from the US government, and Dean’s own CV boasts that he “currently leads two US State Department-funded public diplomacy programs on the US-Australia Alliance.”
So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped “for decades to come” by an “independent” strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.
It is hilarious, then, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the release of the DSR by proclaiming that “At its core, all of this is making Australia more self-reliant, more prepared and more secure in the years ahead.” It is funnier still that he concluded that same speech with an Anzac Day acknowledgement of Australian troops who who have died in wars “to defend our sovereignty and our freedom.”
It doesn’t get any less self-reliant and sovereign than just handing over your nation’s military to a more powerful nation with a “There ya go mate, use it however you reckon’s fair.” You really could not come up with a more egregious abdication of national sovereignty if you tried. And yet our prime minister babbles about sovereignty and self-reliance while doing exactly that.
Just annex us and make us the 51st state already. At least that way we’d get a pretend vote in America’s fake elections.
Despite ASPI telling Media Watch it only has four defence industry sponsors, page 143 of its latest annual report clearly lists five. Since its establishment, ASPI has enjoyed the financial largesse of a dozen weapons makers, which collectively picked up $51 billion in Defence contracts between 2011 and 2021.
ASPI conveniently classifies sponsors who make billions of dollars supplying mainly high-tech services to the military as “private sector” companies.
ABC’s Media Watch backs down, following complaint from Australian Strategic Policy Institute, after it aired a segment of Channel Nine political reporter Chris O’Keefe berating both ASPI and Nine Newspaper over the Red Alert series.
Two weeks ago, ABC’s Media Watch carried the banner “Hysterical reporting stokes fears of war with China” aimed at Nine Newspapers’ three-part Red Alert series in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Host, Paul Barry took them to task for gathering a one-sided China hawk panel upon which to base its report. The program included comments from a host of experts who strongly disagree with the proposition that China is poised for war.
It also quoted from mainstream media, including a clip from Nine’s Today Show in which political correspondent Chris O’Keefe had this to say, “The reporting this morning is hysterical, now if you’ve got the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI] who are saying ‘Oh well, we are the ones who could be going off to war in three years’, well they’re funded by the Australian Defence Force, Lockheed Martin, Thales and Boeing.”
Barry later brought up one of Nine’s China experts, former ASPI boss Peter Jennings, making it clear he was no longer the think tank’s executive director.
This week, Media Watch again picked up the China threat and nuclear submarine debate, following former prime minister Paul Keating’s National Press Club appearance. In summary, Barry argued instead of mainstream journalists just launching into Keating for opposing AUKUS, they should have been doing their actual jobs. That job is not being cheerleaders for our massively hawkish foreign and defence policies, it’s asking questions about the government’s rationale to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to nuclear submarines.
However, at the end of the episode, it was Barry himself coming up with explanations, saying this, “And finally, a clarification about last week’s show. When discussing Nine’s Red Alert series on China we played a short clip of Chris O’Keefe linking Peter Jennings to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. ASPI says Jennings no longer plays an active role with the institute and it was not involved in the framing of The Age and Herald’s report. ASPI also says it receives funding from only four defence manufacturers and it’s two percent of its budget.”
Even though the hot war may not have yet started the fog created by ASPI abounds.
Jennings is synonymous with ASPI, outside of Canberra he was a little-known Liberal ministerial adviser and a Defence Department policy wonk. It wasn’t until he took up the role at ASPI that he became the go to China hawk for mainstream media.
He might have vacated the executive director’s office but the views he expressed in the Nine Newspapers series are entirely consistent with his views at ASPI, and indeed the views of his successor Justin Bassi.
Despite ASPI’s constant claim of independence, Bassi walked right out of the office of Liberal Cabinet Minister Marise Payne into ASPI’s office, just a few blocks from Parliament House. He was a ‘captain’s pick’ with it widely reported then Defence Minister Peter Dutton intervened to veto the ASPI board’s preferred candidate, instead installing China hawk Bassi. The appointment of the ASPI executive director has to be ratified by the Cabinet, indeed a very broad interpretation of the term “independent”.
What constitutes no active role?
Jennings might have vacated his corner office but, the simple fact is, immediately upon the completion of his tenure, he assumed the position of “ASPI Senior Fellow”. His profile is on the ASPI website, his phone number is included, and that number is the ASPI direct line.
As ASPI complained, it might not have framed the Nine Newspapers report, but it absolutely framed the narrative. No single group has done more to portray China as a military threat than ASPI. There is an argument, had ASPI not spent years laying the China threat groundwork, this Nine Newspapers series would not have hit the front pages.
While Bassi had nothing to do with the Red Alert series, one could hardly argue he didn’t support it, after all he Tweeted a link to the SMH story the day of publication.
Far more egregious than this and the nature of Jennings’ ongoing connections with ASPI are those of Nine Newspapers’ gang of five experts. One in particular is Lavina Lee, who Nine described as a “geopolitics guru” and “senior lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University”.
What both Nine in its publications, and presumably ASPI in its demands to Media Watch, did not disclose is Lee’s position as a member of the ASPI Council. This is not an honorary role, as the ASPI Annual Report reveals, it is a paid position.
The issue with Lee is not so much the freedom to express her opinions outside of her role at ASPI. It’s the fact she was peddling a narrative indistinguishable from ASPI’s, under the guise of being an independent academic, and did so without disclosing her formal paid role with the think tank.
Breaching the defences
Despite ASPI telling Media Watch it only has four defence industry sponsors, page 143 of its latest annual report clearly lists five. Since its establishment, ASPI has enjoyed the financial largesse of a dozen weapons makers, which collectively picked up $51 billion in Defence contracts between 2011 and 2021.
ASPI conveniently classifies sponsors who make billions of dollars supplying mainly high-tech services to the military as “private sector” companies.
One of its, non-defence industry, backers is the multi-billion dollar US engineering and systems integration company Leidos which has a substantial defence division. According to figures published on the Department of Finance website, since July 2021, it has been awarded more than 140 contracts, with the Department of Defence and security agencies, worth over $1 billion. The classification of Leidos as a run of the mill private sector player seems to be a loose definition.
Other, non-defence, supporters include engineering company Jacobs (107 Defence contracts worth $154 million); cybersecurity company Quintessence Labs, which has been awarded one small Defence contract; Palo Alto Networks which supplies multi-billion dollar network security systems for the military; Splunk Technologies, yet another military supplier; Senatas, a maker of military encryption systems; and software company Oracle, one of the biggest ICT service suppliers to the US military.
That adds up to 12 current sponsors who either make weapons or provide services supporting military infrastructure. The lesson is you can’t take anything ASPI says at face value.
One year of operation of a single, large nuclear power plant, generates as much of longpersisting radioactive poisons as one thousand Hiroshima-types atomic bombs. There is no way the electric power can be generated in nuclear plants without generating the radioactive poisons.
France’s troubled nuclear fleet a bigger problem for Europe than Russia gas. France caps its consumer power bills – to maintain the myth of “cheap” nuclear and to protect French pride .
In 100,000 years’ time the planet would still not have recovered from Mayak, Chernobyl, Doenreagh, Hanford, Rocky flats, Marshall Islands, Montebello, Maralinga and Fukushima; to name a few.
Average life expectancy in Ukraine and Belarus has REDUCED 4 yrs to age 68. Each year 6000 babies are born with “Chernobyl Heart” Half of them die! Children born since 1986 are affected by a 200 percent increase in birth defects and a 250 percent increase in congenital birth deformities.• 85 percent of Belarusian children are deemed to be Chernobyl victims. UNICEF found increases in children’s disease rates, including 38 percent increase in malignant tumours, 43 percent in blood circulatory illnesses and 63 percent in disorders of the bone, muscle and connective tissue system.
Environment and Other Legislation Amendment (Removing Nuclear Energy Prohibitions) Bill 2022
Submission No 61 [This submission contains numerous links which are all visible on the original, but not all here]
A few words about myself on this issue. I have been studying the Uranium fuel cycle, nuclear energy and the biological and genetic effects of radiation for over 40 years. I have read a dozen or more books and hundreds of scientific and medical papers on the topics.
Re Environment and Other Legislation Amendment (Removing Nuclear Energy Prohibitions) Bill 2022 Submission 56
Senator Canavan and sponsors to the following bill: Environment and Other Legislation Amendment (Removing Nuclear Energy Prohibitions) Bill 2022
Firstly, I need to confirm this is a personal communication and not on behalf of any organisation.
On the one hand, I need to congratulate you for recognising that this current overwhelming push for renewables is ill-conceived, problematic, and will only hurt Australia’s future as well as worsen the situation for biodiversity losses
On the other hand, nuclear power is NOT a desirable alternative to head towards. I would like to address some of the components in the bill’s introductory speech by Senator Canavan. The statements in italics are taken from the Senator’s speech.
“Of the 20 richest nations in the world only three do not have nuclear power: Australia, Saudi Arabia and Italy. Saudi Arabia is building a nuclear power station and Italy gets much of its imported electricity from France, where three quarters of the electricity is produced by nuclear.”
Italy has a very good reason for not building nuclear power: they have a major fault line running up the center of the country (and the Saudi’s should be cautious as well since they are sitting on top of a subduction zone). Anyone who builds a nuclear facility close to an active fault line is negligent, reckless or at minimum ignorant. This will become very apparent in the US once their Cascadia, San Andreas and New Madrid fault zones next adjust (expected soon) as they have built dozens of plants in fault zones.
“Nuclear plants are generally characterised by large capacity and output, high capital cost, and long construction times, but relatively low operating costs and almost zero emissions to air from their operation.”
Unless there is an accident and then they pose a threat to all living things downwind for hundreds of years. ‘Accidents’ can be defined in many ways such as human error, seismic activity, tsunami’s (Fukushima), design flaws (Chernobyl), poor maintenance issues (Three Mile Island), the modern scourge of hackers – or the provocations of a hostile actor (such as what nearly happened in Ukraine at the Zaporizhzhia facility). In our current hostile world where we are very close to a full-blown third world war, any country with a nuclear power plant becomes an easy target for any aggressor who doesn’t even need to possess nuclear weapons of their own. All they need a is a simple device directed at a plant and a major disaster results. Perhaps nuclear might have been a reasonable option back in the 60’s but the current hostile and deceptive actors ‘running things’ now makes nuclear a huge liability. Australia has been smart to avoid this scenario thus far, regardless of the uranium resources we possess.
“Nuclear energy is used to produce electricity in 31 countries from some 450 nuclear reactors, providing around 10 per cent of global electricity. Many nations are building new nuclear power plants because they provide reliable, emission free power.”
There is a misguided focus on emissions but the focus is on the WRONG emissions. Carbon is not the enemy and is needed by all vegetation on the planet. So focusing on nuclear as way to reduce emissions is irrelevant. This fixation on carbon driven by deleterious wealthy influences overseas that Australia should NOT be paying attention to is only meant to transfer wealth – not save the planet (you can tax carbon but you can’t tax the cold or solar output). I recognise that at least some of you have come to acknowledge that the ‘health crisis’ thrust upon us the past two years was a planned deception. Rest assured this AGW is another distraction and will result not only in wealth transfer but the diminishing of Australia to that of a ‘banana republic’. Coal has its problems but the emissions that need to be controlled from coal are the dusts and heavy metals that are dispursed such as mercury and arsenic. Are you aware that bioaccumulative fish from around the supposedly ‘clean’ waters of Qld’s barrier reef are loaded with mercury which would have come from power plants further down the coast? Until the poor performance problems of renewables can be solved (if ever), we are safer sticking with coal and focusing our efforts into filtering out the heavy metals from their exhausts. At least if some foreign actor decides to target them, the plant will be damaged but it won’t be spreading clouds of radiation throughout the southern hemisphere. (Please note I have not argued about gas – this is not our saviour either with its high levels of methane leaching, explosive nature and induced seismicity – refer to current quake swarm in Texas.) While the demand for electricity just continues to skyrocket (insert electric cars here), we can’t be eliminating the only generators that will produce enough to satisfy an ever increasing demand.
“Nuclear power is safe.”
Only when all conditions with the facility are perfect and no outside factors interfere with its operation. It doesn’t take all that much to turn it from stable to meltdown. The more complicated the system, the easier it is to make it fail. The Three Mile Island meltdown was caused by a faulty relief valve. The explosion of the NASA Challenger mission was caused by a faulty O-ring (a little ring of rubber on a cylinder).
“Nuclear does less damage to the natural environment than other energy options. Wind energy takes up 250 times more land than nuclear power and solar takes up 150 times more land.”
I agree that renewables should NOT be rolled out until the problems they create are fixed. There seems to be no due diligence being included in the rush to deliberately de-energise our power generation. But incidents with nuclear radiation can be unfixable. We have not yet invented a means of removing radiation from the atmosphere.
Also, what you have left out of your speech is the disposal issue. Where is all this radioactive waste supposed to be disposed of and how is it to be contained so that unforseen factors (earthquakes, hostile attacks) don’t disturb it? You have focused on the operation only of a nuclear power plant but not the consequences of accidents and disposal of waste. These need to be part of the evaluation and due diligence.
“The ARPANS Act regulates activities undertaken by Commonwealth entities affecting radiation, to ensure that the health and safety of people, and the environment, are protected from the harmful effects of radiation.”
Australia does not need nuclear submarines. They’re suitable for the USA to make long distance attacks on China, but not suitable for Australia’s need – which is to monitor our coastline.
They will be obsolete before they’re able to be operational.
They are an absurd expense $171 billion and upwards, depriving Australia’s regular military of needed funds, and adding to Australia’s economic woes, and national debt
They are to be fuelled by Highly Enriched Uranium, meaning that regional and global nuclear proliferation norms are overturned, causing tensions and problems with Australia’s near neighbours . Not only New Zealand, but also several South East Asian and South Pacific States are members of nuclear-free zone treaties.
The decision on the nuclear submarines was made with no real debate in Parliament . On the only occasion when Australians were able to give their views on this issue to the parliament’s treaties committee, more than 100 submissions were made, even though only five days’ notice was given for these to be received. These submissions were overwhelmingly against the proposal.
There has been little or no discussion on the toxic wastes from the nuclear submarines, nor on the final disposal of the submarines themselves – there seems to be no plan for this, nor on other safety aspects.
It is clear, to the point of mirth, that the uK and UK are competing with each other to market the subs to Australia.
The process of deciding on the subs is full of conflicts of interest and corruption
The subs are now being “sold” to the Australian public on the premise of “jobs, jobs jobs” – when it’s likely that the bulk of jobs, especially high career ones, will go to USA or UK workers
The Australian public is being fed a media barrage of enthusiasm for the subs, with rare mention of any downsides.
I am utterly fed up with Australia’s political leaders – quite a nauseating spectacle on ABC TV news tonight, with Defence Minister Richard Marles fawning all over that dreadful previous PM Morrison, and the warmongering Liberal leader Peter Dutton.
As international tensions rise to a new level, with the Ukraine war passing its first anniversary and the Albanese Government set to announce its commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to new weaponry, nuclear propelled subs, Stealth bombers etc, The Road to War brings into sharp focus why it is not in Australia’s best interests to be dragged into an American-led war with China.]]
The Road to War is directed by one of Australia’s most respected political documentary filmmakers, David Bradbury. Bradbury has more than four decades of journalistic and filmmaking experience behind him having covered many of the world’s trouble spots since the end of the Vietnam war — SE Asia, Iraq, East Timor, revolutions and civil war in Central and South America, India, China, Nepal, West Papua.
“I was driven to make this film because of the urgency of the situation. I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover, were some of us to survive the first salvo of nuclear warheads,” says the twice Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from Climate Change,” says Bradbury.
There is general concern among the Defence analysts Bradbury interviews in the film that Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China. And that neither the Labor nor LNP governments have learnt anything from being dragged into America’s wars of folly since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, two disastrous wars in Iraq and America’s failed 20 year war in Afghanistan which ripped that country apart, only to see the Taliban warlords return the country and its female population to feudal times.
We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from Climate Change,” says Bradbury.
There is general concern among the Defence analysts Bradbury interviews in the film that Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China. And that neither the Labor nor LNP governments have learnt anything from being dragged into America’s wars of folly since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, two disastrous wars in Iraq and America’s failed 20 year war in Afghanistan which ripped that country apart, only to see the Taliban warlords return the country and its female population to feudal times.
“Basing US B52 and Stealth bombers in Australia is all part of preparing Australia to be the protagonist on behalf of the United States in a war against China. If the US can’t get Taiwan to be the proxy or its patsy, it will be Australia,” says former Australian ambassador to China and Iran, John Lander.
Military analyst, Dr Richard Tanter, fears the US military’s spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, will be the first target of any direct confrontation between the US and Russia or China.
“The US military base at Pine Gap is critical to the US military’s global strategy, especially nuclear missile threats in the region. The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear Hit List,” says Dr Tanter whose 40 years of ground-breaking research on Pine Gap with colleague, Dr Des Ball, has provided us with the clearest insight to the unique role Pine Gap plays for the US. Everything from programming US drone attacks to detecting the first critical seconds of nuclear ICBM’s lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia, to directing crippling nuclear retaliation on its enemy.
Military analyst, Dr Richard Tanter, fears the US military’s spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, will be the first target of any direct confrontation between the US and Russia or China.
“The US military base at Pine Gap is critical to the US military’s global strategy, especially nuclear missile threats in the region. The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear Hit List,” says Dr Tanter whose 40 years of ground-breaking research on Pine Gap with colleague, Dr Des Ball, has provided us with the clearest insight to the unique role Pine Gap plays for the US. Everything from programming US drone attacks to detecting the first critical seconds of nuclear ICBM’s lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia, to directing crippling nuclear retaliation on its enemy.
“Should Russia or China want to send a signal to Washington that it means business and ‘don’t push us any further’, a one-off nuclear strike on Pine Gap would do that very effectively, without triggering retaliation from the US since it doesn’t take out a US mainland installation or city,” says Dr Tanter.
“It’s horrible to talk about part of Australia in these terms but one has to be a realist with what comes to us by aligning ourselves with the US,” Tanter says.
“Studies show in the event of even a very limited nuclear exchange between any of the nuclear powers, up to two billion people would starve to death from nuclear winter,” says Dr Sue Wareham of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.
“The Australian Government, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defense Minister Richard Marles, have a serious responsibility to look after all Australians. Not just those living in cities. Were Pine Gap to be hit with even one nuclear missile, Health Minister Mark Butler would be hard pressed to find any volunteer nurses and doctors willing to risk their lives to help survivors in Alice Springs, Darwin and surrounding communities from even one nuclear missile hitting this critical US target,” says Dr Wareham.
The Road to War. Latest Film by David Bradbury
Premiere in Melbourne March 22 at the Carlton Nova cinema
Hobart screening State Cinema March 23 with special guest Bob Brown
Adelaide screening Capri cinema March 29
Further information or interviews with David Bradbury:
Nuclear Australia 