No substance has sparked as much emotional hype and frenzy as uranium.
No substance has sparked as much emotional hype and frenzy as uranium.
Political parties have even been created because of fear of uranium.
And this despite the fact uranium deposits have been known of in Australia since the 1890s.
Small quantities were mined in South Australia during the 1930s and the Northern Territory and Queensland during the 1950s and 1960s.
Until 1976 the Australian Labor Party enthusiastically backed the mining of Australia’s huge Northern Territory or ‘Top End’ reserves at Ranger, Narbarlek and Jabiluka.
The Whitlam Labor government even devised WA Inc-style joint ventures with miners to develop those deposits in what was called a sequential manner.
The aim was to develop the deposits one after another so the international market was not flooded, thereby depressing the price of uranium.
Those deposits were so large that Australia was seen as being able to have the same impact on uranium’s price as Saudi Arabia can have on the price of oil.
In 1974 an agreement created a joint venture consisting of Peko Wallsend Operations Ltd, the Electrolytic Zinc Company of Australia Ltd, and the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, to exploit the Ranger deposit, which Peko had discovered in 1969, just three years before Labor gained power.
Similar future joint ventures were envisaged as part of Labor’s intended corporatist “sequential” approach with owners of the other Top End deposits.
Federal Labor ministers, including senator Ken Wriedt and Jim Cairns, travelled the world on uranium selling missions.
They told potential buyers, including pre-Islamist Iran, of Australia’s huge reserves that, in 1974, were set to be developed with government participation and Canberra’s willingness to supply uranium for peaceful purposes under long-term contracts.
Then, after the Whitlam Government’s sacking, Labor changed course by reversing its stance at its 1977 national conference.
During the 1977 and 1980 federal election campaigns, letterboxes across Australia were stuffed with Labor propaganda bumph opposing uranium mining.
Australian Labor had gone the way of Germany’s later influential Greens by pulling up the shutters on an energy source that only a few years earlier was seen as mankind’s saviour.
One WA Labor federal candidate who had completed a physics doctoral project that required working at Australia’s nuclear reactor facility in Lucas Heights, near Sydney, enthusiastically filled letterboxes during the 1980 campaign condemning uranium outright.
The halcyon days of opposition to uranium as an energy source had therefore moved into high gear by 1980.
However, despite this, when Labor regained power in 1983 under the leadership of Bob Hawke, it approved the Nabarlek and Ranger mines, which were already operational.
By the middle of the 1980s, because of pressure from several mining unions and Labor’s Northern Territory and South Australian branches, Labor reluctantly permitted mining at three deposits within both jurisdictions, thereby allowing the go-ahead for South Australia’s Olympic Dam (Roxby Downs) mine.
This reluctant turn-around or partial return to its pre-1977 position of enthusiasm for uranium mining was to be dubbed its ‘three mines’ policy. In reality, it promptly became a two mines – Ranger and Olympic Dam – policy, because the Nabarlek mine closed in 1990.
The most significant outcome of the three mines policy was that the Jabiluka, Koongarra and Yeelirrie deposits – the latter in WA – were shelved, although in some cases mining, environmental and Aboriginal approvals had been obtained.
Moreover, sales commitments of several years’ production were in place for Jabiluka.
Often forgotten is that the “three mines” policy was ostensibly intended to phase out uranium mining altogether over the longer term, that is, after the closure of the then currently operating mines of Nabarlek, Ranger and Olympic Dam.
This was in stark contrast to the Canadian stance, which looked to expand uranium production and sales.
Then, later in 1984, the Australian Science and Technology Council released a report on Australia’s role in the nuclear fuel cycle.
The report was commissioned by the Hawke Government and recommended proceeding with uranium mining, in other words, the dumping of the “three mine” policy.
It also recommended that Australia become involved with other stages of the nuclear fuel cycle.
It stressed the need for international collaboration in the management and disposal of high-level nuclear waste.
And it recommended relaxing the mining policy so other uranium deposits could be exploited.
The report even urged that uranium enrichment should be undertaken by Australia.
Despite all these anti-restrictive recommendations and similar ones made by the Industry Commission in 1991, Labor left its uranium policy unchanged.
Therefore, although the “three mines” policy did not do away with uranium mining, as envisaged especially by Labor’s left-wing, it severely hindered expansion and blocked the emergence of a uranium mining sector in WA.
South Australia, in contrast, never underwent such a debilitating outcome.
With the discovery of the Olympic Dam deposit in 1975 – the year before Labor dropped its enthusiasm for mining uranium – plus several deposits in remote areas of WA, Australia had emerged as a major player in the global uranium market despite the three mine policy.
By 1990, Australia could therefore boast 28 per cent of known global uranium reserves, compared to Canada’s 14 per cent. But Canadian exports exceeded Australia’s.
In 1996, the Howard Government moved to treat uranium like other minerals, except that export controls remained in place to affect non-proliferation objectives.
In 2000, the first new mine at Beverley, South Australia, was opened.
The recent turnaround in thinking by influential Greens personalities has, largely due to fear of global warming and the greenhouse effect, revived interest in Australia’s huge uranium reserves, including WA’s unexploited deposits at Yeelirrie, Kintyre and Manyingee.
Labor, on the other hand, has returned to its policy of blocking the emergence of new uranium mines.
Item 68 of Chapter XII of its current platform reads: “In relation to mining and milling, Labor will prevent, on return to government, the development of any new uranium mines.”
This means Labor will abide by its three mines policy of 1984.
Labor’s anti-uranium stance was further reinforced by its left wing, which was competing for the backing of younger voters who were being targeted by the Australian Democrats and the emerging Greens, both strong opponents of uranium mining.
The formation of the Greens was greatly influenced by the personal turnaround of Mr Cairns who promoted, after leaving Federal Parliament, a message of human intimacy and love, and a return to nature.
Uranium was condemned as a high-tech energy source which could, with little effort, be displaced by solar energy and wind power, sources that were seen as natural and thus preferable.
Other left wing ginger groups and parties, especially the Socialist Workers Party (now Socialist Alliance), saw the mixture of love of nature, fear of science and technology, opposition to war and rejection of American and Australian foreign policy aims as an opportunity that couldn’t be ignored.
The Nuclear Disarmament Party emerged in WA in 1984 with the election of its candidate, Jo Vallentine, to the Senate.
Senator Vallentine resigned from the Senate in 1992 saying that move was in line with the German Greens approach of regularly replacing MPs.
Midnight Oil singer, Peter Garrett, was also a high-profile NDP member, though he has since joined the Labor Party and was elected at the 2004 federal poll.
However, soon after the 1984 election, Mr Garrett and senator Vallentine quit the NDP because, they said, Trotskyists had infiltrated their party.
Next came the Greens, who won representation in WA’s upper house in the 1990s and also in Tasmania and the Senate with the emergence of Tasmanian anti-logging activist, Bob Brown.
Although WA’s Greens focused primarily on the logging issue, they never relinquished their opposition to the mining, export, processing and use of uranium as a fuel by Australia.
But the past few years have seen a steadily growing number of high profile Greens worldwide beginning to re-think their earlier anti-uranium stance.
Last month, London’s The Economist wrote: “Keith Parker of the Nuclear Industry Association, a British trade group, points to a recent quote from James Lovelock, a founder of Greenpeace – ‘Only nuclear power can halt global warming’.”
By 2005, some Greens and scientists were speaking out and urging governments to block use of coal and consider opting for uranium which, despite nuclear waste, was seen as not contaminating the atmosphere.