Uranium ban undermines clean energy goals

Labor's ban on uranium mining is illogical and counter-productive. By Nick Cater.

Anthony Albanese chose the Labor Party conference last month to announce “a fitting and final chapter” to the career of retiring Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney.

But then Albanese added an epilogue that will reverberate long after Burney’s undistinguished tenure on the ministerial benches is forgotten.

“There will never be mining at Jabiluka,” he said, triggering resounding applause from delegates in Sydney Town Hall. His government had listened to the pleas of the Mirarr people and would work with them to keep it safe for all time.

So that was it. Not only would the mine operator, Energy Resources Australia, lose its licence but mining would be banned from now until eternity. In a few saccharine sentences, Albanese had taken Labor’s uranium mining policy back to the 1970s, before Bob Hawke struck a compromise with the nuclear-phobic left to introduce the Three Mines Policy in 1984. Albanese had effectively announced a three mines policy minus one, restricting conventional large-scale uranium mining to the Four Mile and Olympic Dam mines in South Australia.

The world’s largest untapped reserve of high-grade uranium ore will remain undisturbed more than 200m below the ground in formations created in the Proterozoic Era more than 1.6 billion years ago. Just to be sure of its sacred, untouchable status, the government has promised to shift the boundaries of Kakadu National Park to embrace the Jabiluka mining lease, or non-mining lease as it has now become.

The consequences of this decision are profound. The Mirarr people and other underemployed Northern Territorians will be deprived of the opportunity of well-paid jobs. The government will miss out on tens of billions of dollars in royalties and taxes that would have flowed over the mine’s lifetime.

The senselessness of the Jabiluka decision was amplified on Saturday when Albanese delivered his annual address to the Garma Festival on the theme of economic empowerment. He proposed a First Nations economic partnership between the government and unelected bodies that presume to represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait people that would allow them to benefit from the global energy transition to renewables.

Albanese said the energy transition would allow Australia to become a renewable energy superpower. Indigenous people could play their part in producing critical minerals needed for the transition. He said it would be the “best chance Australia has ever had to bring genuine self-determination and lasting economic empowerment to remote communities”.

His speech was delivered without a hint of irony. Just a week ago, the Prime Minister had kiboshed the extraction of the most critical mineral of all in the transition to a low-carbon economy: triuranium octoxide (UO), one of the most kinetically and thermodynamically stable forms of uranium.

Digging it out of the ground and selling it on the international market is the most effective contribution Australia could make to the global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and advance prosperity.

The Jabiluka ore body is part of the Alligator Rivers Uranium Field, which hosts some of the world’s richest uranium deposits. The Jabiluka reserves are said to have an average grade of 0.48 per cent to 0.55 per cent UO, a concentration several times higher than reserves in Kazakhstan, the world’s leading exporter.

Even if the Albanese government lacks the courage to legalise nuclear power in Australia, it could at least supply the fuel for the US, France, Hungary, Finland and the 16 other countries that pledged to triple the output of nuclear reactors by 2050.

Yet Albanese’s farewell gift to Burney has locked in Australia’s place as the world’s nuclear laggard. Australia is home to roughly 28 per cent the world’s uranium reserves, yet our contribution to the international market was a miserly 9 per cent in 2022. Kazakhstan on the other hand has 12 per cent of reserves but 43 per cent of the market. Canada, with roughly a third of Australia’s reserves, had a 15 per cent share.

In 2021, Australia slipped from third to fourth place on the table behind Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia. With production effectively capped at around 4000 tonnes, Australia’s share of the world market will shrink further as demand for uranium grows.

The impact on the natural landscape of the Jabiluka mine would be minimal, since the heavy lifting would take place in tunnels up to 300m underground. Its surface footprint, comprising of a tunnel entrance and a handful of buildings, would have been smaller than that of the giant wind turbine complexes tearing apart vast areas of remnant bushland along the Great Dividing Range.

Albanese’s claim that Jabiluka “is home to some of the oldest rock art in the world” is pure misinformation. The most important discoveries of rock art are at Ubirr, some 50km away. Jabiluka’s environment impact approval contains stringent measures to protect any examples of rock art in that region.

If Labor had the wit and the nerve to stare down the fruitcake left, Australia might stand a chance of becoming the clean-energy superpower of Albanese’s dreams. Nuclear technology is tried and tested, unlike green hydrogen, quantum computing and other half-baked projects in which the government has chosen to sink taxpayers’ money.

Uranium mining needs no subsidies and will produce a return to the taxpayers from the year it starts production. Lifting the embargo on nuclear power would open the way for the refinement and processing of uranium in Australia, which is currently forbidden. It would enable Australia to tap the rich stream of international investment, and draw upon a track record of innovation in the Australian mining sector.

Instead, a timid Labor leadership, lacking intelligence and imagination, is taking its party back to three-eyed fish land, a country where dogma, superstition and tribalism prevent it from embracing the only proven source of low-emission energy available at scale.