Stealth and surprise are related tactical characteristics that are key to a submarine’s success in battle. They are also, it seems, key tactical characteristics for the Government advancing a highly controversial AUKUS submarine program. Ex-submariner Rex Patrick explains.

Those familiar with the classic work of Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, will remember the scene where Arthur Dent lies in front of a bulldozer to stop his house being demolished to make way for a new freeway bypass.

 

AUKUS waste plans. The hitchhiker’s guide to nuclear approvals

     by Rex Patrick

 

Arthur complains that he has only just learned of the project. Mr Prosser, the manager in charge of progressing the bypass, points out that the plans have been available for Dent to examine for several months:

Mr Prosser: But, Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

Arthur: Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.

Mr Prosser: But the plans were on display…

Arthur: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.

Mr Prosser: That’s the display department.

Arthur: With a torch.

Mr Prosser: The lights had probably gone out.

Arthur: So had the stairs.

Mr Prosser: But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?

Arthur: Yes, yes, I did. It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard.

The arrangements for public consultation on AUKUS-related developments bear a great deal of resemblance to this.

 

Low-level waste in Perth and Adelaide

It would be unfair to suggest that the Albanese Government wasn’t up-front in its plans to base nuclear submarines at HMAS Stirling on Garden Island, near Perth, from 2027 and to build nuclear submarines at Osborne, in the Adelaide metropolitan area in the late 2030s.

But it is fair to say that the communities of Perth and Adelaide weren’t engaged on the issue, and certainly not on details that may have direct impacts on them. The first revelation to the public that Garden Island would become the home for the storage of low-level nuclear waste was after an FOI was released to me in December 2023.

After a very short consultation a license to store waste in a facility to be built on Garden Island was approved by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

And it’s only just breaking news in Adelaide this week that low level radioactive waste will also be stored at the naval shipyard at Osborne. The media only became aware of the issue after the passage of the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023 brought out some protest by local interest groups and a nearby council.

Adelaide nuclear environmental checks

As might be expected, before a nuclear submarine construction yard can be built, the Australian Submarine Agency needs to jump though federal environmental hoops in relation to protected matters. Protected matters include; World heritage, wetlands, threatened species, marine environment, migratory species and nuclear actions.

The Submarine Agency initiated a process to address legislated environmental requirements in November 2023. They started a public consultation as part of that process. In January 2024 the Port Adelaide Residents Environment Protection Group made a submission highlighting the fact that there were no plans to address ‘nuclear actions’.

However, on 22 June 2023, the Parliament passed the Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Bill. Most were oblivious to the fact that the Bill created a carve-out for naval nuclear propulsion plants from regular environmental approval and regulation.

The parliamentary library was alert to the potential implications, warning senators:

It is also unclear to what extent existing exemption provisions in the ARPANSA Act and the EPBC Act exempting declared activities from approval requirements could be utilised at the discretion of the relevant decision-makers at some future point in time on the grounds of defence or national security. This would exempt SSNs and associated infrastructure and facilities from the approval requirements under these Acts, leaving the yet-to-be-established ANPSSR as the principal regulator of SSNs and their supporting infrastructure and facilities.

We now understand there will be no EPBC Act nuclear action approvals for the new Osbourne Site. Rather, environmental issues will be handled by the Director-General of the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Regulator – a bureaucrat sitting inside the Defence portfolio.

 

Along with the lack of consultation on low-level waste, perhaps of greater significance is the lack of consultation on the fact that nuclear reactors will be operating not far from Rockingham in WA and the Adelaide metropolitan area.

Parliament formalised that fact with the passage of the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023.

The Government cast the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023 as “a Bill that establishes a framework to regulate the nuclear safety aspects of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine enterprise”. It sounds a little innocuous, but the Bill did a lot more than that.

Section 10 of the Bill declared both HMAS Stirling and Osborne designated zones for naval nuclear production facilities. In 15 years, when nuclear reactors go critical for the first time at Osborne, residents will have to look back to the afternoon of Thursday, 10 November 2024, when the Bill was passed in the Senate.

And if they look hard they’ll see that the Bill was passed in a blitzkrieg Labor guillotine manoeuvre, supported by the Coalition, which saw it go through the Senate without any debate. Thirty amendments were put to the vote without any senator being allowed to explain or speak to their amendments.

Perfect for a decision that would otherwise have invoked considerable public debate.

For those in opposition to AUKUS, the show is effectively already over.

East Coast nuclear submarine base

Stealth and surprise are the preferred modus operandi of a Prime Minister whose constituent base opposes the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear project.

So, it’s little wonder the Government has not moved to reveal the East Coast basing location for future nuclear submarines. Port Kembla is the likely location, but no one is saying anything definitive and certainly won’t do so before next year’s federal election.

Prime Minister Albanese was quite insistent on opposition leader Peter Dutton revealing his future plans for seven nuclear power station sites,

but he’s utterly unwilling to apply the same transparency upon himself.

In some sense, the arrival of enough nuclear submarines to warrant a second base is decades away (as are Peter Dutton’s power reactors). Hence, there’s only political harm in announcing a base. That will likely be left to some future government after Albanese has left the Parliament.

High-level nuclear waste facility

This week, I had a first direction hearing in the new Administrative Review Tribunal as I challenged the Albanese Government’s secrecy around a report on how a future high-level nuclear facility site will be selected. It was refused to me under FOI.

The Government refused to release the report on the basis that it is a cabinet document. However, now that we’re in the big FOI league they’re backing up their claim with other exemptions, including national security exemptions. While we’ll have to see how the Government’s legal arguments play out, in some sense, it might be all moot.

When the Parliament declared HMAS Stirling and Osborne designated zones for nuclear submarine activities, it also passed into law the ability for a Minister to declare any other area a designated zone – for example, to store high-level waste.

There is no requirement for public consultation about a High-Level Nuclear Waste Facility location. As the selection of Kimba as the site of a low-level National Radioactive Waste Management Facility at Kimba proved, that might all be a bit too hard. Better then, at least as far as the Government is concerned, to have an unconstrained selection power tucked away for when the need arises.

Surprise and stealth is the AUKUS way.

 

The big picture obscured

On 5 April 2023, I made an FOI request for the “Analysis of likely/necessary legislative change associated with the AUKUS program”. The idea was to get access to the big picture of the new legal measures the Government might want to enact to push AUKUS through.

Access was refused and an appeal of the decision is currently buried in the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. It will, as the Government would understand, take another few years before a decision on the appeal is made. By that time, it will be of historical interest only.

That suits the Government just fine. Imagine the big picture being available to the public up-front. On a contentious project like this, transparency would just be a little too dangerous.

The Defence Department and its nominal political masters rely on a broken FOI system to preserve their options for surprise and secrecy. They might as well have requested a sign to put on that FOI file: Beware of the Leopard.

https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-waste-plans-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-nuclear-approvals/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

“It’s hard to do cartoons without FOI…”

         Gus Leonisky