Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Fruitloops such as the International Atomic Energy Agency. I would like to note that this was the position of the Australian Greens from the outset. The Greens alone opposed this deal signed by Mr Howard and Mr Putin at the APEC summit, when Senator Milne presented a pretty clear case and numerous arguments on nuclear safety, human rights, and international peace and security grounds against this deal.

Russia maintains a stockpile of 15,000 nuclear weapons, and Russia is actively modernising its nuclear weapons stockpile at this time. It is transferring nuclear fuel and reactor technology to Iran, and in January this year the Russian chief of the armed forces claimed the right to use these weapons of mass destruction ‘preventatively’. The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties report notes that a significant meeting on the NPT is coming up in 2010 and that we should see some action from the nuclear weapons states at this meeting on their legal obligations to disarm and eliminate their nuclear stockpiles.

Nuclear safety in Russia is patently inadequate, and Russia has an unfortunate habit of ‘losing’ nuclear material. According to the detailed database of the Institute for International Studies, around 40 kilograms of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium had been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union in the decade to 2002. The Stanford Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft and Orphan Radiation Sources has also recorded at least 370 incidents involving former Soviet countries—56 per cent of the global total, more than half. The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties report notes these concerns.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has not conducted inspections in Russia for at least six years. ASNO, the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, continues to state that all of Australia’s uranium exports are subject to strict safeguard conditions given legally binding effect through bilateral safeguards agreements, which senators on the other side have gone on about at some length. But the safeguards regime itself is inadequate, and lack of inspections for the last six years can hardly be described as strict adherence to world’s best practice. Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, in his speech on 11 June 2007 to the IAEA Board of Governors, stated:

I should also underline that, even with the proposed budget, the Agency’s financial situation remains vulnerable, and we still fall short of what is needed to carry out our mission in an effective manner. Significant additional resources are still sorely needed. Our laboratories are full of equipment that is outdated, although vital to carry out essential verification, safety and development functions. Our nuclear security programme remains 90% funded through unpredictable and heavily conditioned voluntary contributions. Our safety department continues to rely heavily on extra-budgetary staff.

And these are the people who we rely on as a nation to track what happens to Australian uranium when it is shipped overseas. The standing committee report recommends that Australia work with other countries to support the increased resources to this underfunded and understaffed agency, and the Australian Greens welcome this recommendation.

I would also like to note that the human rights situation in Russia is appalling. Russia’s inadequate protections for protesters, trade unions and whistleblowers, as well as media censorship, make the credibility of Russian democracy or the rule of law there highly suspect. Russia is an erratic, unreliable and essentially undemocratic state, a state that uses military invasion and suppression of people in neighbouring countries. This is not a regime we should be sending uranium to.

It is a matter of note that the Australian Greens oppose all uranium mining and export. This is the first step in the nuclear fuel chain that leads to nuclear weapons. Nuclear power stations today—and there are more than 400 of them in the world—are essentially plutonium factories. Uranium mining is an ecologically damaging link in the nuclear chain because for every tonne of uranium oxide that we produce and export hundreds of thousands of tonnes of radioactive wastes, or tailings, are left behind at the mine sites. Often these tailings are just dumped in huge dams near the mine sites and left to the effects of the elements. These tailings, or wastes, contain about 80 per cent of the radioactivity that was contained in the original ore. One of the major isotopes from uranium mine tailings is thorium-230 with a half-life of 75,000 years. Uranium-238, the most prevalent isotope in uranium ore, has a half-life of about 4½ billion years—that is approximately the age of our planet—and only half the atoms will decay in that amount of time.

Uranium mining is hazardous to human health. The wind carries radon gas and radioactive dust from these tailings for many miles. Uranium miners are exposed to the gas and to other process chemicals and so on that are associated with uranium mining and they suffer increased rates of lung cancer, according to the physicians of the Medical Association for Prevention of War.

Uranium mining also requires an enormous amount of water. BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, the driest state in the world’s driest continent, uses around 33 million litres of water every single day. A proposed expansion of this mine would increase this to up to 162 million litres per day. This water essentially becomes radioactive waste after it has been through the process and it is placed in evaporation ponds that are not always adequately secured from the elements. Historically, Indigenous people’s lands have also been used to mine uranium—this is happening in the present day—to dump radioactive wastes and detonate atomic bombs both above ground and below ground, resulting in huge radioactive contamination.

The Howard-Putin Australia-Russia Nuclear Cooperation Agreement is a 30-year proposed agreement. It is an extremely poor and ineffective instrument for dealing with substances that remain radiotoxic to humans for half-lives of millions of years. The Rudd government should strongly take the advice of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and not proceed with ratification. The Greens strongly support the recommendations as printed in this report.