Australian uranium exports and security: Preventing proliferation
Release of Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) Strategic Insight No. 28/2006
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has today released a new Strategic Insight publication titled Australian uranium exports and security: Preventing proliferation by Andrew Davies, ASPI Program Director Operations and Capability.
The government has recently put the issue of Australia’s future nuclear industry firmly on the table, and has established a taskforce to review uranium mining processing and nuclear energy in Australia. This ASPI Strategic Insight examines the impact that any change to Australia’s place in the nuclear supply chain might have on the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It examines the issues that need to be managed if Australian-sourced nuclear materials are to be sold to a wider customer set without leading to a growth in the number of nuclear weapon armed states.
Australia has the world’s largest reserves of uranium ore, totalling almost a quarter of known deposits and 40 per cent of the uranium that is easily exploitable.
‘There is little doubt that increased global interest in nuclear energy is a potential economic opportunity for Australia. However, the laws of physics impose a necessary overlap between the technologies required to generate nuclear energy or to produce nuclear weapons’, Dr Davies says.
‘It is therefore incumbent upon us to adopt a defence-in-depth approach that can minimise the possibility of a would-be proliferant nation being able to use a civil power program to develop expertise and technologies required to ‘break out’ into a nuclear weapons program.’
The paper also offers several policy recommendations to help Australia continue to be a responsible nuclear supplier.
‘For exports to countries with no existing capability to enrich uranium or separate plutonium, the best security solution is for Australia to export uranium through NPT-signatories that already possess those capabilities. If Australia was to develop its own value-adding nuclear industry it would need careful diplomacy and the utmost openness and transparency.’