A Hard Rain’s David Bradbury on Australia and Uranium Mining, Depleted Uranium and its Global Consequences, Halliburton and the AntiNuclear Movement.
By David Bradbury
 A former ABC radio journalist, David Bradbury is an independent documentary filmmaker based in northern NSW. He has been twice nominated for an Academy Award and is the winner of five AFI awards.
www.frontlinefilms.com.au
The trip took him to the United Kingdom, France, Japan and China as well as around his own country as he sought out the latest science and the ‘other side’ of the nuclear debate.
We are about to embark on the biggest environmental disaster since the white man stepped ashore on this pristine landscape. And it will be irreversible.
For months now, no matter how late I go to bed, a pervading sense of doom creeping over my beloved Australia, forces me from my slumber before dawn’s light breaks over this ancient land.
Its an urgency spiked with frustration at a growing sense of powerlessness as the federal elections approach and both major parties are now committed to mining and shipping offshore so much more uranium. The media and those who should know better are not giving a true picture of the ‘other side’ to the nuclear debate the Prime Minister keeps telling us we have to have.
Its been months now since I shouted abuse at Kevin Rudd at the ALP’s national conference in Sydney that late April afternoon. At the Labor party’s
National conference. It came out of my frustration that ordinary people no longer have any real say in the democratic process; after the Chosen One (Rudd) overturned the party’s 25 years of opposition to unfettered uranium mining.
It’s hard to confront power. Speaking truth to power. Even when your moral conscience tells you, obliges you to speak your truth out loudly because ‘power’ is not listening to you.
All done in front of the cream of Australia’s political journalists watching on disapprovingly because, at the best of times they dismiss me as an agenda driven, left leaning renegade. And one must never break with the golden rule of journalistic ‘objectivity’ and lose one’s cool, to give vent to one’s emotions.
“Shame on you Kevin Rudd for selling out the future of all Australian children!” I shouted, my voice trembling like a pubescent schoolboy’s about to break.
Like a frightened rabbit trapped in the blaze of the pursuing hunter’s spotlight, I froze as the news cameras panned to me.
I turned to face Rudd and South Australian premier Mike Rann who more than any other party number’s cruncher had helped pushed through the narrow margin of winning votes.
Although Rudd knew me, had sung forth my praises for my films on Latin America when we first met in East Timor in 2001, he has refused to return any of my calls or emails offering to brief him on the uranium issue.
Rudd looked at me dismissively with the same contempt I daresay he expressed for the ‘feral’ fringe of protestors who earlier this year shouted abuse at the visiting US Vice President Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney whose old company Halliburton, finished construction of the Adelaide to Darwin rail link. Halliburton whose Texas spin off company Kellog, Brown and Root now has a controlling share of this vital north-south rail link through the heartland of Australia’s richest uranium deposits and the rail junctions where the Commonwealth has mooted the nuclear waste dumps in the NT are to go. The same territory Prime Minister Howard has moved to forcefully take from Aboriginal communities which some say is the real reason behind his latest land grab.
 My latest anti nuclear documentary A Hard Rain owes its initial inspiration to the Prime Minister. Alarm bells started to go off after John Howard came back from visiting George W. last year, a sudden convert to all things nuclear. When I could get no funding from either of the public broadcasters (SBS or the ABC) or any of the taxpayer supported film funding bodies, I dusted down the old camera, grabbed my credit card, kissed the kids goodbye and headed off around the world. On someone else’s frequent flyer points.
I’ve made four documentaries on the nuclear issue over the past 26 years so I cannot pretend not to hold strong views on the subject. However what I discovered left me reeling. Some startling revelations from overseas scientists which challenges the hitherto believed ‘safe’ level of radiation we all can be exposed to before cancers and birth defects are potentially triggered.
The trip took me to the United Kingdom, France, Japan and China as well as around my own country as I sought out the latest science and the ‘other side’ of the nuclear debate.
We can adapt to climate change dramatically tragic and costly though it will be the longer we allow our politicians to tinker on the margins avoiding the hard decisions. However if the scientists I interviewed are right, once the radiation genie is out of the bottle at the level proposed by the uranium miners and green lighted by the politicians, we will not be able to adapt to the potentially catastrophic health effects this decision will leave all Australians exposed to.
Based on this science and the precautionary principle, after making this film, I would argue that like asbestos mining of the last century, we should oblige the giant mining companies, the banks and the super funds who bankroll them, to carefully mothball the current generation of uranium mines we already have and leave the rest deeply buried in the ground. Pragmatically, nothing has changed in the nuclear debate since we first knocked this on the head 30 years ago.
We finished editing A Hard Rain two weeks before the ALP national conference was set to vote on the uranium issue. We sent 200 of the 400 ALP delegates a free 20minute dvd of the final film which spelt out the specific dangers of uranium mining and the latest scientific findings of radioactive release into the atmosphere from the minesite. Judging by the paucity of debate at the conference, most of those dvd copies ended up in the waste bin unwatched or collecting dust in the delegates’ bottom office drawers.
Anthony Albanese, Peter Garrett and others argued passionately that lifting the No New Mines ban would lead to nuclear proliferation; the world doesn’t need yet more mountains of nuclear waste when we don’t know what to do with current stockpiles. All true. Yet never did they mention the one simple but profound truth with relevance for all of us in Australia.
That insight was first given to me ten years ago by a feisty, grey haired nun when I was making my second documentary on the nuclear issue, Jabiluka.
Dr Rosalie Bertell (78), one of the world’s leading epidemiologists looked straight down my camera lens and told me:
“The uranium mine is one of the dirtiest parts of the nuclear fuel cycle.”
Dr Bertell should know about ‘dirty’ manmade disasters having lead international medical teams that investigated human tragedies on a grand scale from the Chernobyl meltdown to the Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal, India.
She is also an expert on the effects of low level internal radiation. It is low levels of ionising radiation taken inside the body that should concern us most when we look at the health effects of uranium mining and nuclear power.
Dr Bertell, a Canadian nun of the Sacred Heart order, is one of a growing number of scientists who dispute the notion there is a ‘safe’ threshold level of radiation that any of us can afford to be exposed to.
A strong body of evidence now argues we have based our regulatory health standards of ‘safe’ levels of radiation exposure for the general population on old science.
The physicists set radiation protection standards in 1950, at the height of the Cold War during atmospheric nuclear testing and before having the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a risk versus benefit trade off, to allow for the production and testing of nuclear weapons because the fear of the Soviet Union was greater than the fear of triggering cancer on a massive level in the human population.
The main regulations were not changed for 40 years, not until 1990 when worker levels were lowered by 60% and exposure of the general public by 500%. As with signing the Kyoto protocol, Australia and the U.S. has not yet accepted this lowering.
As we watch cancer rates spiral, the latest research now reveals these revised readings are also outdated and need changing. Science has recently discovered that something very strange happens once very low levels of radiation are inside our cells, something that defies hitherto conventional scientific logic.
First a bit of background. Radiation is measured in milli-sieverts(mSv) or Grays. Prior to 1990, the international body of scientists that recommends safe levels of radiation - the International Commission on Radiological Protection (the ICRP) - recommended that five milli-sieverts a year was the maximum safe dose of radiation the public can be exposed to.
Then in l990, responding to pressure from dissenting scientists who said the methodology on which this safe standard was based is inadequate, the ICRP lowered the recommended safe level of radiation exposure for the public to one milli-sievert of radiation in a year.
This was still not good enough for the dissenting scientists who claim the International Committee of Radiological Protection is too strongly influenced by funding and pressure from the nuclear lobby which they claim, has worked out safe levels of radiation that suits the nuclear fuel industry, the giant mining companies and the military rather than the need to protect the general population and nuclear workers.
The dissenting scientists formed an alternative scientific body called the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). They believe the general public should be exposed to radiation at levels ten times lower than the present level we can be ‘safely’ exposed to in Australia. Not that we can sleep safely in our beds under our politicians’ watchful eyes because nobody is consistently measuring or has any clue how much radiation we’re all taking in.
According to their calculations, uranium mine workers in Australia are currently working under health regulations that allow radiation levels which are fifty times higher than what the ECRR believes they should be.
The union boss for uranium miners (the Australian Workers Union) Bill Shorten who should have a vested interest in protecting his members would not be interviewed by me for my documentary. Nor would pro uranium lobbyist and former mining unionist Martin Ferguson.
Enter the Germans. Hamburg, October 2002.
In groundbreaking research, two scientists working out of the Saarlandes University, demonstrated a double-strand break can occur in the human DNA – the blueprint of life - when the DNA is exposed to radiation at very low levels of radiation, much lower than previously thought.
“DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are generally accepted to be the most biologically significant lesion by which ionising radiation causes cancer and hereditary disease”.
“We show that double-strand breaks can be detected after ionising radiation as low as one milli-Gray…we further show that DSB’s induced by very low doses remain unrepaired for many days. This finding challenges current models of risk assessment for low ionising radiation,” write Kai Rothkamm and Markus Lobrich in their peer reviewed scientific paper.
According to Dr Bertell, double strand breaks of the DNA are usually not repaired well by the body’s repair system. The second break comes before the first break is repaired. So this mutation is passed onto the daughter cells and as the Germans point out, conventional science says the double strand break in the DNA can lead to leukaemia and other cancers.
It all sounds very technical, impenetrable. Certainly not a ‘sexy’ read for the Sunday morning tabloid papers who wanted a cover shot of a beaming, triumphant Kevin Rudd and South Australian Premier Mike Rann after they pushed through the pro uranium vote and buried a sacred tenant of Labor party policy for 25 years. However, given that both major parties who would rule over us now have a policy of open slather uranium mining, we would be advised for the sake of ourselves and our grandchildren (if we still chose to bring children into this world…) to try and come to terms with its meaning.
The ‘safe’ level of radiation we can be exposed to has been largely influenced by the external atomic blasts which ended World War II. The dissenting scientists base their opposition to this standard on a growing body of evidence that shows low levels of internally received radiation has a different but potentially equally dangerous effect over time to radiation received from a one off big external atomic blast like the explosion that wiped out Hiroshima.
Internally taken alpha radiation, while much more subtle initially than radiation from an atom bomb blast, can be just as deadly though its effects take longer to manifest. This low ionising radiation can come to us in the wind or water from nuclear power plants, radioactive dust size particles from uranium mine waste or fine aerosol particles from exploded depleted uranium munitions used since the first Gulf War.
Alpha radiation once inside the body can radically interfere with the cells and the DNA which can be passed on through successive generations of cells or offspring resulting in cancer and birth defects. The various studies around the world are showing it doesn’t take much radiation to affect the human cell.
The German researchers Rothkamm and Lobrich continue:
“Estimates of cancer risk from exposure to ionising radiation are based on epidemiological studies of exposed human populations, mainly the atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This approach has provided relatively reliable estimates of risk for high dose and high-dose rate exposures, yet it is in the effect of low doses and low-dose rates that is of major importance for the general population…no information is available for the situation most relevant for public health, where a single electron track impacts on a cell”.
The key here is ‘low doses’ of radiation.
All this has particular relevance in the light of the huge triple expansion planned by BHP Billiton at its Olympic Dam minesite in South Australia and a swag of other uranium mine hopefuls now dusting down shelved plans to open up uranium mines all around the country as uranium prices go through the roof.
The former Big Australian, now the world’s biggest resource company, plans to bring to the surface of the earth 40million tonnes of radioactive rock ore each year for the next 50 years. They proudly boast it could even be for the next l00 years, the mineral deposit at Olympic Dam is so rich.
What the mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto don’t tell us in their glossy annual reports announcing record profit levels is that when they mine for uranium and other valuable minerals, most of the radioactivity - 80% or more of the original radioactivity - is left behind in the tailings.
Radioactive thorium, bismuth, polonium, radium and lead are all radioactive heavy metals found in nature with uranium. But these radioactive heavy metals have no commercial value so they are literally dumped at the mine site. Tonnes of topsoil thrown over the 40million tonnes of radioactive tailings produced each year will not stop the radioactivity leaking out into the atmosphere.
After uranium is extracted from the ore, thorium-230 becomes the parent isotope of the remaining radioactive waste in the tailings. It has a half-life of 76,000 years. That means that after 76,000 years only half of the radioactivity is left in the tailings, and after 300,000 to 900,000 years the radioactivity is reduced to l0% of its original radioactivity, depending on the original ore grade.
However the radioactivity once buried and stably bound, once inert within the rock ore deep below the earth’s surface with millions of tonnes of dirt, rock and vegetation over it, has now been brought to the surface.
The radioactive ore has been pulverized in the giant crushers. It has been hit with chemicals to extract any valuable minerals. The rest – the radioactive slurry - now ground into fine dust size fragments is available to move with the wind from the mountains of tailings that are deposited on the face of the earth.
In the case of the tailings dumped at Ranger (majority shareholders Rio Tinto, keen to kickstart the neighbouring Jabiluka uranium mine again) and Olympic Dam, they also contain unusually high amounts of uranium that could not be extracted. Ranger uranium mine extracts some 89% of the uranium; Olympic Dam even less than 63% of the uranium which may be world’s worst practice for large contemporary uranium mines.
This means that some 11% and 37% respectively of the uranium radioactivity in the tailings will diminish, not with a thorium half-life of 76,000 years, but with a half-life of 4.5 billion years – the half life of uranium. This is the time span for which those tailings would have to be safeguarded from blowing around. No mining company can possibly guarantee that, let alone be around that long to be finally held accountable.
The mounds of radioactive tailings from the Olympic Dam expansion if it is allowed to go ahead as the company proposes, will cover thousands of square hectares up to eight storeys in height. Out of sight, out of mind.f
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation’s nuclear campaigner David Noonan, 40 million tonnes of radioactive tailings left behind annually by BHP Billiton is “the equivalent of filling the MCG stadium to the height of the goalposts twice a week for 52 weeks a year.” For the next 50-l00 years.
By the time the mine closes, four billion tonnes of crushed rock ore and its radioactivity will be left behind for countless generations of Australians to deal with. According to Dr Gavin Mudd, an environmental engineer and lecturer at Monash University, left behind with minimal legal and environmental obligations upon the company to contain that radioactivity on site following closure.
As the crow flies, its only l300 kilometres to Sydney from Olympic Dam. As the wind blows it’s a thousand kilometres to Melbourne. Five hundred k’s to Adelaide. The red dust of central Australia where these mines are located regularly turns up on the snowy mountain slopes of New Zealand. So we cannot pretend this radioactive legacy won’t reach us or our grandchildren.
The German researchers continue:
“Risk estimates for low doses (of radiation used by the nuclear industry)…are based on extrapolations from existing high-dose data. This model assumes that cellular responses, including the DNA repair, operate equally efficient at low and high ionising radiation doses.
“ Clearly the data presented here do not support this assumption and could suggest that a linear extrapolation model significantly underestimates the risk for ionising radiation induced carcinogenesis…” Rothkamm and Lobrich conclude.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=154297&blobtype=pdf
In other words, the basis on which our regulatory health bodies who determine what is a ‘safe’ and acceptable level of radiation for us is seriously flawed. This research shows cancers can potentially be triggered at far lower levels of radiation than we hitherto believed.
BHP Billiton will also continue to dump the radioactive tailings into giant holding tailings dams the size of small inland lakes. The finely pulverised radioactive materials at Olympic Dam, Ranger, Beverly and Honeymoon uranium mines (the latter two mines bordering the Great Artesian Basin and drawing on it for their water supply to process the ore) will inevitably enter the underground water table over time as the clay walls deteriorate, allowing the radioactivity to travel far offsite and pollute our underground water table that farmers depend upon to feed us.
When I was in Japan last August filming for A Hard Rain, I discovered the Japanese are now going to incredible lengths and expense to bag up a mere l6,000 cubic metres of radioactive contaminated soil from Japan’s first uranium mine. Opened in l955 in the Katamo area, the local population feels so strongly about the continuing toxic effects of radioactivity from the tailings, they have obliged the government to ship these tailings to a treatment facility in Nevada to dispose of them there.
As with preserving their own forests while ravaging other countries for woodchip, the Japanese (who don’t have much uranium anyway) learnt years ago it made better sense to close their uranium mines and let someone else make a mess in their backyard. They now import our yellowcake to fuel their 55 nuclear reactors.
Another ‘nasty’ when they mine uranium we need to know about is radon gas. Radon is a very mobile gas released from the radium found in nature with uranium. According to Dr Rosalie Bertell the radiation it gives off causes cancer and birth defects to a child in utero.
Significant quantities of radon will be released when the Olympic Dam minesite is converted into an open cut operation because more open surfaces of the mine face will be exposed to the air. Currently uranium from Olympic is mined using a tunnelling approach. BHP Billiton plan to make their mine the biggest hole in Australia. Three kilometres wide and over one kilometre deep.
That gives the radon gas many more open surfaces from which to escape.
Because radon gas is seven times heavier than air it sticks close to the surface of the earth. Radon has a radioactive half life of 3.8 days. In that time it drops off radioactive lead, bismuth and polonium. It readily dissolves in water or enters the food chain.
“Even on a light breeze, it can easily travel over a thousand kilometres in its radioactive half life. It the wind is stronger it will go further,” says Dr Bertell.
Again, like the radioactive tailings dust, that puts it within reach of our major cities. Radon gas is odourless so you don’t know you’re breathing it in.
So why then aren’t the miners showing signs of poisoning and a radical increase in cancers since they are working with this all the time?
According to Dr Gavin Mudd of Monash University, there have been no modern era long term studies done anywhere in the world over the necessary time span of 20 to 30 years on the health effects of uranium mining on miners or people living near the mines.
Cancer and leukaemia have long incubation periods ranging from five to sixty years. Typically, miners are a very young, healthy and transient population.
Many will have moved on or left mining long before the tumours manifest themselves. So it’s hard to demonstrate a higher incidence of cancer and birth defects amongst them without any long term study being done.
Now would be an ideal time to do a study of long term effects of uranium mining on miners and nearby residents with those at Ranger or miners who could be tracked down from the closed Narbarlek and Mary Kathleen mines. However it is unlikely any Federal government would push for it in the present climate of expansion. And its not in the interests of the huge mining companies to fund such a study which they might be liable for huge compensation payouts after the findings are published.
The average age of the population at Roxby, the Olympic Dam mining town is 29. For many years it had the highest birth rate in South Australia. Last year it slipped back into second place. We’ve already seen what dangerous levels of lead in the sky can do to kid’s development.
Ultimately, as Dr Eric Wright from the University of Dundee’s Medical School in Scotland told me when I visited him last year to record an interview for A Hard Rain, its a game of genetic Russian roulette.
Some of us will fall prey to cancer from extremely low doses of radiation hitting our cells and affecting our DNA. Others will have repair mechanisms that will deal with it. Science does not yet know who that will be the ‘lucky’ ones or how many of us it will affect. Who wants to take the chance?
Medical science and good governance should operate on the precautionary principle. The more radiation you put into the environment, the more hits from it you’re likely to get and therefore the greater chance of the double strand of the DNA being permanently mis-repaired leading to cancer or birth defects.
The impact from millions upon billions of extra tiny radioactive particles the uranium miners will let lose like ‘terrorist’ sleeper cells into the Australian environment each year to do their damage over time is incalculable. When people wake up to this reality and force the politicians to close the mines as they did with asbestos, it will be too late.
All this was whirling around in my mind as I filmed the historic vote at the ALP’s national conference pass without a whimper. In l982 Bob Hawke, Peter Beattie and those that pushed through the original three uranium mines only policy at least had to step over protestors’ bodies lying prostrate on the ground to get to the bar to order celebratory drinks. Kevin Rudd got it easy.
But if Rudd’s hero is Dietrich Bonhoffer, a German Christian executed by the Nazis for his moral courage in standing up to Hitler, one of my inspirations has been the conservative l9th century political philospher Edmund Burke.
Of “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing” fame.
After the vote was taken and it was all suddenly over, I wandered up to the back of the Darling Harbour convention centre to collect my camera gear. I turned to watch the media paparazzi gather around Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann far below me. Beaming smiles. A sense of gloom hung over me.
Money over common sense yet again had derailed the Australian dream.
I thought of my four year old daughter Nakeita and the innocent, blind trust a child has in her parents to protect her. Knowing what I fear will be an unparalleled explosion of cancers and birth defects in this country, I felt I’d let Nakeita and her generation down. Worse. I’d given my tacit approval by my silence.
Like a moth attracted to a light, I found myself descending from the bleachers towards the press circling around Rudd and Rann. What a sham it all had been. A democratic vote. A party so determined to wrest power from the other lot that they will throw any semblance of principle or precaution to the wind in order to get over the line with their new leader.
I took my cue from anti uranium activist Treena Lenthall (34) who quietly took a banner from her bag and unfurled it for the cameras – a silent backdrop and protest to Rudd and Rann as they beamed triumphantly for that night’s tv news and tomorrow’s Sunday papers.
Ten years ago without fanfare, Treena had chosen on principle, to go to gaol for three months in the Northern Territory rather than pay a fine for disabling a front end loader at the Jabiluka uranium mine site. A part time social worker by day, environmental and social justice activist the rest of the time, she too was sickened by the ease with which Labor had been able to overturn its long standing if contradictory No New mines policy.
Her protest banner showed the iconoclastic image from the Jabiluka campaign – the long bony black fingers of a hand raised defiantly saying ‘Stop’ set against the radioactive symbol with a rainbow backdrop thrown in.
“Shame on you Mike Rann for selling out to BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Murdoch and the big banks..”, I blurted to the cameras suddenly lost for words as Rudd and Rann looked disdainfully at me then exited the scene with their minders.
Mike Rann who came to Australia from New Zealand some 30 years ago to join Don Dunstan’s team as an anti nuclear campaigner in South Australia. Now convinced that uranium is ‘safe’ to export after all. Just no nuclear waste dumps or power generators in my state thanks.
“Shut up ya mug!” one of the trade union delegates called out as Labor party national secretary John Faulkner called for order.
Escorted outside the conference hall by a party apparatchik, I carefully avoiding skewering the rotund figure of Barry Jones and the portly powerbroker John Della Bosca with the sharp end of my camera tripod. The day before the vote, I’d tried to engage Barry, a bright intellect you’d have to say, about my findings and concerns. But he like the others did not want to listen.
I avoided the embarrassed sideways glance of the ABC’s veteran political correspondent Jim Middleton with whom I had started my career in journalism some 30 years ago. I don’t any longer see myself as a journalist but in the media pack’s code of ethics, I’d broken the unwritten rule of journalism and stepped down from the heights of ‘objectivity’ with my outburst. I’d shown my hand and revealed my emotions.
I’d sent out 75 press kits and excerpts from the film to the leading lights of Australia’s journalists and broadcasters. With the exception of Alan Ramsey writing in this paper, none had bothered to highlight or follow up on my concerns.
How long will it take Australians before they wake up and show their emotions to the potential disaster our politicians and miners have in stall for us? How long will it take Mr Howard, Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann before they realise their nuclear freeway to bonanza returns for the mining companies and the Tax Office will be potted with fool’s gold?
As the party man stripped me of my press pass and pointed me to the anonymity of the street below, I couldn’t help but think…A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.
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