Japanese reactor restart timely for Australia, says MCA

The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) has called on the Royal Commission looking into the future of nuclear in South Australia to view the restart of Japan's Sendai 1 reactor as a timely indicator of the nuclear industry's strong future.

MCA executive director Daniel Zavattiero said the restart of the reactor earlier this week was good news for the Australian uranium sector. Japan is a major market for Australia's uranium, but the country's entire nuclear fleet has lain idle for almost two years following the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Sendai is the first reactor to restart after it was confirmed to meet new, more stringent, safety standards.

Zavattiero said that the restart of Sendai provided a "strong indicator" for the South Australian Royal Commission of the ongoing strength of the global nuclear industry. "The MCA firmly believes that nuclear energy will play an important role in global electricity generation given it has the capacity to provide reliable baseload power and is virtually emission free", he said.

South Australia's Royal Commission on the nuclear fuel cycle was launched in March to carry out a wide-ranging and independent inquiry into the state's potential participation in the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium exploration and extraction, mineral processing and radioactive materials manufacturing, nuclear generation, and the storage and disposal of radioactive waste.

Earlier in August the MCA made a submission to the commission in which it strongly supported the consideration of nuclear energy as part of the state's, and the nation's, energy mix. As well as calling on the commission to "seriously consider" the potential for nuclear power in South Australia, the MCA also asked it to recommend the necessary legislative and regulatory reforms to enable this to happen.

Normalization and reform

In a separate submission, the MCA called for the "normalization" of the country's uranium industry as a prerequisite for the country to benefit fully from the development of its uranium resources. "Normalizing attitudes towards nuclear power and uranium globally […] provides the social licence foundations for reform to enable Australia's uranium industry to fulfil its potential," it said.

The MCA called for a raft of reforms which it said would form the bedrock of national and state visions to develop Australia's uranium industry. Environmental legislation should be amended to ensure that :uranium projects are treated in the same way as other resource projects for environmental assessment purposes; environmental approval processes are streamlined; consistent policies are developed on uranium exploration, extraction and milling across states and territories; access is enabled to the most appropriate transport routes and ports; and legislative and regulatory impediments to the establishment of nuclear fuel cycle industries are removed.

Such reforms would "legitimise" nuclear energy as an option for Australia to consider, validate its uranium industry as a supplier to the global nuclear energy market, and improve the Australian uranium industry's competitiveness and attractiveness to investors, the MCA said.

The MCA is an industrial association representing companies involved in minerals exploration, mining and processing in Australia. Its member companies' output includes precious metals, base metals, light metals and iron ore, as well as energy fuels, such as coal and uranium.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News