Australia's Nuclear Horizon: Moving Beyond the Drumbeat of Risk Inflation
The 2006 Switkowski review report commissioned by the Howard government highlighted some of the economic and foreign policy benefits that could flow from a major expansion of Australia's uranium export program. It also identified the long-term advantages for Australia's energy security flowing from the development of a national nuclear industry. The report has been condemned by anti-nuclear groups, who argue that proposals for Australia's continuing and, possibly, deeper involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle are unacceptable. The primary risk identified is that Australian uranium exports will contribute to global nuclear proliferation pressures, but claims concerning nuclear-related terrorism are also an increasingly common theme in anti-nuclear commentary. These arguments, in turn, are framed within a broader set of assumptions about the ‘immoral’ nature of any engagement in the nuclear fuel cycle. This article examines the most prominent claims put forward by anti-nuclear proponents and argues that many of them are based on an unnecessary inflation of risk.
Australian Uranium Exports: Nuclear Issues and the Policy Process
Over the past decade the controversy which has surrounded nuclear power and technology since the end of the second world war has increased in intensity. The changing tempo of the international debate over the issue has been most noticeable in the nuclear consuming countries of western Europe, North America and in Japan where the expansion of commercial nuclear facilities to meet the rising demand has attracted considerable domestic opposition. However, the debate over nuclear power has not just been confined to these countries. It is perhaps one further indication of the growing interdependence of states in the international system that during the 1970s a debate over the safety and utility of nuclear power developed in Australia which was equal in intensity to any of those taking place around the world. Yet in contrast to those other debates Australia’s did not emerge from the process of formulating national defence or energy policies; rather it arose in conjunction with policy decisions regarding resource development and more particularly the exploitation of Australia’s uranium reserves. Put another way, Australia approached the dilemmas posed by the use of nuclear power from the standpoint of being a supplier of nuclear material rather than as a consumer of nuclear energy.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1