Nuclear Politics: Taking the A Train

Nuclear Politics: Taking the A Train

By: Alison Broinowski

Monday 1 October 2007

APEC leaders ate Sydney seafood and drank Grange in early September, taking in views of the harbour from the Opera House, while behind them, downtown was barricaded as never before. Small businesses complained about losing money but local madams reported enthusiastic trade. Some of Sydney’s police, became badgeless, and took their irritation out on a few demonstrators and a press photographer.

As was predicted by columnist Peter Hartcher in The Diplomat, nothing earthshaking, region-transforming, or climate-changing happened during APEC. But quietly, during the summit, Australia agreed to sign on to George Bush’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), and to sell uranium to Russia.

GNEP claims that it will ‘accelerate clean and safe nuclear energy.’ A select bunch of nuclear weapons states — plus non-nuclear Japan and Australia — went to Vienna after APEC and signed up to GNEP. Their aim — or their pious hope — is to control the distribution and reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the world. But it’s when they get to the storage of waste that all eyes turn to Australia, whose official line is to allow the export of uranium, but not to import nuclear waste. In Vienna, Australia agreed to ‘expand nuclear power to help meet growing energy demand in a sustainable manner and in a way that provides for safe operations of nuclear power plants and management of wastes.’

No-one in Sydney or Vienna mentioned a line of dots glowing in the dark. It starts from Lucas Heights (where, by the way, Australia’s only nuclear reactor has malfunctioned and been shut down for more than three months). It leads westward to Adelaide, then north to the Olympic Dam uranium mine, on through the desert past nuclear waste sites, military bases, and Aboriginal land, to the port of Darwin. The line completing the circuit and connecting the dots is the new north-south railway. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer calls speculation about a secret plan to import nuclear waste ‘wacky’ — another good reason to look more closely at it.

Always considered uneconomic, the rail link from Alice Springs to Darwin was suddenly found to be viable in 1999. A government/business partnership undertook to build it for $1.3 billion. FreightLink, a consortium of foreign and local investors that owns the railway, with a 50 year contract to run its freight operations, is a joint venture between 11 participants including Kellogg Brown Root (KBR, 36.2 per cent), Barclay Mowlem (13.9 per cent), and John Holland (11.4 per cent).

The sole tender for construction of the line was KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the US company that Dick Cheney headed before he became Vice-President. Cheney visited Australia in the late-90s to negotiate the deal with South Australian Premier John Olsen and Prime Minister John Howard. Defence contracts won by Halliburton and its affiliates were worth $2.5 million in 2000; that amount increased to $18 million in 2003; and in the following year they secured more than 150 State and Federal Government commissions.

Just after the railway line opened, a leader in the Australian freight business predicted....