Last November, two-thirds of the 350 members of a South Australian-government initiated Citizens' Jury rejected "under any circumstances" the plan to import vast amounts of high-level nuclear waste from around the world as a money-making venture. The following week, South Australian Liberal Party Opposition leader Steven Marshall said that “[Premier] Jay Weatherill's dream of turning South Australia into a nuclear waste dump is now dead." Business SA chief Nigel McBride said: "Between the Liberals and the citizens' jury, the thing is dead." And after months of uncertainty, Premier Weatherill has said in the past fortnight that the plan is "dead", there is "no foreseeable opportunity for this", and it is "not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government".
So is the dump dead? The Premier left himself some
wriggle room, but the plan is as dead as it possibly can be. If there was
some life in the plan, it would be loudly proclaimed by SA's Murdoch tabloid, “The
Advertiser”. But the paper responded to the Premier's recent comments ‒ to the
death of the dump ‒ with a deafening, deathly silence.
It has been quite a ride to get to this point. The debate began in February
2015, when the Premier announced that a Royal Commission would be established
to investigate commercial options across the nuclear fuel cycle. He appointed a
nuclear advocate, former Navy man Kevin Scarce, as
Royal Commissioner.
Scarce said he would run a
"balanced" Royal Commission and appointed four nuclear advocates to
his advisory panel, balanced by one critic. Scarce appointed a small army of
nuclear advocates to his staff, balanced by no critics.
The final report of the
Royal Commission, released in May 2016, was surprisingly downbeat given
the multiple levels of
pro-nuclear bias.
It rejected ‒ on economic grounds ‒ almost all of the proposals it considered:
uranium conversion and enrichment, nuclear fuel fabrication, conventional and
Generation IV nuclear power
reactors, and spent fuel reprocessing.
The only thing left standing (apart from the small and shrinking uranium mining
industry) was the plan
to import nuclear waste as a commercial venture. Based on commissioned
research, the Royal Commission proposed importing 138,000 tonnes of high-level
nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel from power reactors) and 390,000 cubic metres
of intermediate-level waste.
The SA Labor government then established a 'Know Nuclear' statewide promotional
campaign under the guide of 'consultation'. The government also initiated the
Citizens' Jury.
The first sign that things weren't going to plan for the government was on 15
October 2016, when 3,000 people participated in a protest
against the nuclear dump at Parliament House in Adelaide.
A few weeks later, on November 6, the Citizens' Jury rejected
the nuclear dump plan. Journalist Daniel Wills wrote:
"Brutally, jurors cited a lack of trust even in what they had been asked to
do and their concerns that consent was being manufactured. Others skewered the
Government's basic competency to get things done, doubting that it could pursue
the industry safely and deliver the dump on-budget."
In the immediate aftermath of the Citizens' Jury, the SA Liberal Party and the
Nick Xenophon Team announced that they would actively campaign against the dump
in the lead-up to the March 2018 state election. The SA Greens were opposed
from the start.
Premier Weatherill previously
said that he established the Citizens' Jury because he could sense that
there is a "massive issue of trust in government". It was expected
that when he called a press conference on November 14, the Premier would accept
the Jury's verdict and dump the dump. But he announced that he wanted to hold a
referendum on the issue, as well as giving affected Aboriginal
communities a right of veto. Nuclear dumpsters went on an aggressive campaign
to demonise the Citizens' Jury though they surely knew that the bias
in the Jury process was all in the pro-nuclear
direction.
For the state government to initiate a referendum, enabling legislation would
be required and non-government parties said they would block such legislation.
The government didn't push the matter ‒ perhaps because of the near-certainty
that a referendum would be defeated. The statewide consultation process led by
the government randomly surveyed over 6,000 South Australians and found 53%
opposition to the proposal compared to 31% support. Likewise, a November 2016 poll
commissioned by the “Sunday Mail” found
35% support for the nuclear dump plan among 1,298
respondents.
Then the Labor
government announced on 15 November 2016 that it would not seek to repeal
or amend the SA Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000,
legislation which imposes major constraints on the ability of the government to
move forward with the nuclear waste import proposal.
Implausible claims about the potential economic benefits of importing nuclear
waste had been discredited
by this stage. The claims presented in the Royal Commission's report were scrutinised
by experts from the US-based
Nuclear Economics Consulting Group (NECG), commissioned by a Joint Select
Committee of the SA Parliament.
The NECG
report said the waste import project ‘could’ be profitable ‘under certain assumptions’
‒ but the report then raised serious questions about most of those assumptions.
The report noted that the Royal Commission's economic analysis failed to
consider important issues which "have significant serious potential to
adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes"; that
assumptions about price were "overly optimistic" in which case "project
profitability is seriously at risk"; that the 25% cost contingency for
delays and blowouts was likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the
assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had
"little support or justification".
The farcical and dishonest engineering of a positive economic case to proceed
with the nuclear waste plan
was ridiculed by ABC journalist Stephen Long on 8 November 2016:
"Would you believe me
if I told you the report that the commission has solely relied on was co-authored
by the president and vice president of an advocacy group for the development of
international nuclear waste facilities?"
The economics report was an inside job, with no second opinion and no peer
review ‒ no wonder the Citizens' Jury was unconvinced and unimpressed.
Prof.
Barbara Pocock, an economist at the University of South Australia, said: "All
the economists who have replied to the analysis in that report have been
critical of the fact that it is a 'one quote' situation. We haven't got a
critical analysis, we haven't got a peer review of the analysis".
Another South Australian economist, Prof.
Richard Blandy from Adelaide University, said:
"The forecast profitability of the proposed nuclear dump rests on highly optimistic
assumptions. Such a dump could easily lose money instead of being a
bonanza."
To make its economic case, the Royal Commission assumed that tens of thousands
of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste would be imported before work had even
begun building a deep underground repository. The state government hosed down concerns
about potential economic losses by raising the prospect of customer countries
paying for the construction of waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA.
But late last year, nuclear and energy utilities in Taiwan ‒ seen as one of the
most promising potential customer countries ‒ made it clear that
they would not pay one cent towards the establishment of storage and
disposal infrastructure in SA and they would not consider sending nuclear waste
overseas unless and until a repository was built and operational.
By the end of 2016, the nuclear dump plan was very nearly dead, and the Premier's
recent statement that it is "not something that will be progressed by the
Labor Party in Government" was the final nail in the coffin. The dump has
been dumped.
"Today's news has come as a relief and is very much welcomed," said Yankunytjatjara
Native Title Aboriginal Corporation Chair and No Dump Alliance spokesperson
Karina Lester. "We are glad that Jay has opened his ears and listened to
the community of South Australia who have worked hard to be heard on this
matter. We know nuclear is not the answer for our lands and people – we have always
said NO."
Narungga man and human rights activist Tauto Sansbury said: "We absolutely
welcome Jay Weatherill's courageous decision for looking after South Australia.
It's a great outcome for all involved."
Reflections
The idea of Citizens' Juries would seem, superficially, attractive. But bias is
inevitable if the government establishing and funding the Jury process is
strongly promoting (or opposing) the issue under question. In the case of the
Jury investigating the nuclear waste plan, it backfired
quite spectacularly on the government. Citizen Juries will be few and far
between for the foreseeable future in Australia. A key lesson for political and
corporate elites is that they shouldn't let any semblance of democracy intrude
on their plans.
The role of the Murdoch press needs comment, particularly in regions where the
only mass-circulation newspaper is a Murdoch tabloid. No-one would dispute that
the ‘NT News’ has a dumbing-down effect on political and intellectual life in
the Northern Territory. Few would doubt that the ‘Courier Mail’ does the same
in Queensland. South Australians need to grapple with the sad truth that its
Murdoch tabloids ‒ ‘The Advertiser’ and the ‘Sunday Mail’ ‒ are a blight on the
state. Their grossly imbalanced and wildly inaccurate coverage of the nuclear
dump debate was ‒ with
some honourable exceptions ‒
disgraceful. And that disgraceful history goes back decades; for example, a
significant plume of radiation dusted Adelaide after one of the British bombs
tests in the 1950s but ‘The Advertiser’ chose not to report it.
The main lesson from the dump debate is a positive one: people power can upset the
dopey, dangerous ideas driven by political and corporate elites and the Murdoch
press. Sometimes. It was particularly heartening that the voices of Aboriginal
Traditional Owners were loud and clear and were given great respect by the
Citizens' Jury and by many other South Australians. The Jury's
report said:
"There is a lack of Aboriginal consent. We believe that the government should
accept that the Elders have said NO and stop ignoring their opinions."
Conversely, the most sickening aspect of the debate was the willingness of the Murdoch
press and pro-nuclear
lobbyists to ignore or trash Aboriginal people opposed to the dump.
Another dump debate
Traditional Owners, environmentalists, church groups, trade unionists and
everyone else who contributed to dumping the dump can rest up and celebrate for
a moment. But only for a moment. Another dump proposal is very much alive: the
federal government's plan to establish a national
nuclear waste dump in SA, either in the Flinders Ranges or
on farming land near
Kimba, west of Port Augusta.
In May 2016, Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Regina McKenzie, who lives near
the Flinders Ranges site, wrote:
"Last year I was awarded the SA Premier's Natural Resource Management
Award in the category of 'Aboriginal Leadership − Female' for working to protect
land that is now being threatened with a nuclear waste dump. But Premier Jay
Weatherill has been silent since the announcement of six short-listed dump
sites last year, three of them in SA.
"Now the Flinders Ranges has been chosen as the preferred site and Mr Weatherill
must speak up. The Premier can either support us ‒ just as the SA government
supported the Kupa
Piti Kungka Tjuta when their land was targeted for a national nuclear waste dump from 1998-2004 ‒
or he can support the federal government's attack on us by maintaining his silence."
Perhaps the Premier will find his voice on the federal government's contentious
proposal for a national nuclear waste dump in SA, now that his position on that
debate is no longer complicated by the parallel debate about establishing a
dump for foreign high-level nuclear waste. He might argue, for example, that
affected Traditional Owners should have a right of veto over the establishment
of a national nuclear waste dump ‒ precisely the position he adopted in
relation to the international high-level waste dump.
Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth
Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor
newsletter.