Australia's Uranium Trade: the Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges of a Contentious Export.

• Author: Smith, Ron
• Position: Book review

AUSTRALIA'S URANIUM TRADE: The Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges of a Contentious Export

Editors: Michael Clarke, Stephan Fruhling, Andrew O'Neil

Published by: Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2011,212pp, 55 [pounds sterling].

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This volume presents a comprehensive account of the continuing political controversy in Australia concerning the mining and exportation of uranium. It is the product of an earlier workshop sponsored by the Australian Research Council and is substantially based on papers presented at that workshop. In part the papers collected here are simply descriptive of Australia's contribution to global nuclear activity from its earliest days, both in regard to the generation of nuclear power and in its inevitable relation to the production of nuclear weapons. In this they provide a useful history. Australia, after all, continues to supply some 20 per cent of the world's refined uranium oxide.

However, the main drivers of concern (what makes the uranium trade so 'contentious') are general fears about the dangers of radiation and radioactive material, which can arise from any part of the nuclear cycle, and specific anxieties about nuclear arsenals and nuclear proliferation. In the case of Australia, the focus has been increasingly on the extent to which Australian uranium might directly, or indirectly, contribute to the increase of these weapon stocks, and to their possession by more parties. The bulk of the book is concerned with this and the arguments are mostly still relevant, notwithstanding that the discussion in places has been overtaken by events.

Particularly, the workshop took place before the events at Fukushima in March 2011, which have had such a significant effect on the so-called 'nuclear renaissance', with its obvious implications for uranium demand. But this is not the only factor. Growth projections for civilian nuclear activity are also being impacted by the global economic slow-down and a sharp fall in the price of competitive energy sources. This is particularly the case with natural gas, as a consequence of the development of fracking technology, but it also applies to coal, where the cost has been inflated by 'carbon charges', which are now on an apparently unstoppable slide.

Despite this, and one other example (to be discussed below) where political events in Australia overtook the substantive discussion, there is much in this book which will be of interest to students of these...