In recent years we have witnessed renewed expressions of political enthusiasm for nuclear power in Australia. Most notably perhaps, opposition leader Peter Dutton has fiercely advocated nuclear as a solution to Australia’s future energy needs. “The time has come for a sensible and sober conversation on nuclear power in Australia,” he told the Institute of Public Affairs in 2023. My own university, the University of Adelaide, has declared its support for a “nuclear-powered future” by collaborating with weapons manufacturers to advance Australia’s AUKUS nuclear submarine capabilities. Today, expanding uranium mining enjoys bipartisan support. And, in a kind of faux-environmentalism, the nuclear industry is often presented as a green alternative to fossil fuels.

As militarisation is embraced, and energy transitions are contested, nuclear is being rehabilitated. Yet contemporary debates cannot be properly understood without reference to Australia’s tumultuous nuclear past. Extracting uranium — the fundamental nuclear fuel — has long been an uneasy business in this country. Uranium is an eminently political mineral. As political scientists James Goodman and Stuart Rosewarne have written, it is a rare example of a commodity that has undergone a conceptual transformation from fuel to poison. As an environmental historian, I find it illuminating to explore what Goodman and Rosewarne describe as the “cultural pendulum” of uranium’s legitimisation, de-legitimisation and, more recently, possible re-legitimisation.

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Uranium’s story begins during the Proterozoic, in felsic rocks emplaced by waves of igneous activity and other mineralisation processes. These still-mysterious forces in the earth’s surface and sedimentary basins left concentrated deposits of the radioactive element. There it rested, for hundreds of millions of years, furnishing the Australian continent with the world’s largest reserves of easily recoverable uranium.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 inaugurated the atomic age. From that moment, uranium’s geological past intersected with its social and political history. Uranium was, for the first time, transformed into a valuable commodity.

Before the Manhattan Project, during the early twentieth century, the motivation for Australia’s extraction of radioactive minerals was chiefly scientific and academic. Small amounts of uranium were even used as an iridescent pigment in decorative glassware and ceramics. But, during the final years of World War Two, small-scale mines like Radium Hill and Mount Painter in South Australia began to supply uranium for the British and American militaries.

Between 1952 and 1963, the Menzies government handed uranium — and Aboriginal land —to Britain for its weapons-testing program. This was to be the height of Australia’s nuclear ambition. As historians such as Wayne Reynolds have argued, Australia aspired to join the nuclear club by developing its own atomic arsenal. South Australian Premier Thomas Playford sought to transform his state into an atomic powerhouse, using local uranium to light up rapidly industrialising cities and towns.

Uranium promised to break the militant and Communist-controlled mining unions who controlled supplies of coal from New South Wales. But, perhaps more than any other factor, uranium signified global relevance and catapulted Australia onto the Cold War map.

Uranium’s first boom was accompanied by nationalist triumphalism. In 1954, at Rum Jungle, the opening of Australia’s new uranium treatment plant was marked not by public protest but nuclear optimism. The devastation of Japan was already a distant memory. “The world will forget about atomic bombs and concentrate on using uranium for the benefit of mankind”, Prime Minister Menzies predicted. Australia’s ore would “provide power and light for the producers, consumers and housewives of Australia.”

In Cold War literature, uranium was not a dangerous substance to be left in the ground, but an emblem of economic wealth and post-war national progress. In The Fortune Hunters (1957), travel writer-cum-prospector Frank Clune sets out from Sydney for Australia’s far-north armed with little more than a Geiger counter. Like the gold rush of old, Clune enthused, “Uranium is the modern ‘Midas’ mineral which lures the adventurous diggers of today.”

The print culture of the labour movement and the left was also saturated with uranium fever. In language not dissimilar to Menzies, the Australian Workers’ Union lauded in 1947 the “immense possibilities of the atomic age” and “mechanised miracles from nuclear energy”. Writers in the Communist press denounced American military applications of uranium whilst maintaining an optimistic belief in uranium’s future as a “potential source of atomic power” (thus The Communist Review in 1952). Uranium at this time was yet to become the subject of significant social or environmental anxieties.

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Australia has no nuclear power industry of its own. The enthusiasm surrounding the arrival of the atomic age has long since given way to consternation about its consequences. So, why was it that despite possessing the necessary components of the nuclear cycle, Australia’s atomic ambitions never came to pass?

Post-war plans stumbled against declining demand for uranium and competition with conventional fossil fuels. In 1971, the Gorton government’s proposed nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, on the New South Wales south coast, was torpedoed. This was largely because of nuclear’s economic expense compared to coal and disagreements about preferred reactor design and tenderer. However, the Jervis Bay plant also attracted trade union and community opposition, including a refusal by the South Coast Trades and Labour Council to work on the project due to safety concerns.

Such protests were an early sign of ambivalent and oppositional responses to nuclear development. The industry was increasingly becoming a source of concern, anxiety, and debate. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the decisive factor curtailing Australia’s atomic ambitions was the development of an anti-uranium movement.

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Uranium’s fortunes changed significantly in these years. A host of enormous new deposits were discovered, above all on Mirarr land in the Northern Territory. This turned Australia into a uranium province of worldwide importance. A global nuclear boom following the 1973 oil crisis made Australia one of the Western world’s biggest potential suppliers of uranium. In this context, efforts to revive and expand the industry were first initiated by the Whitlam Labor government and then aggressively pursued by its conservative successors.

However, this time, the prospect of large-scale mining ignited vociferous political mobilisation. Enthusiasm for atomic development collided with a burgeoning environmental movement. The 1970s was the height of worldwide environmental concern. In Australia, a nascent ecology movement overthrew traditional conservationism to instead embrace an agenda of radical social change and political protest. Whereas activists in the United States, Europe and Japan were preoccupied with opposing nuclear power plants, Australian campaigners sought to stop the global industry at its source.

The anti-nuclear movement began to reframe uranium as an environmental issue. Of particular concern to activists was its implication in the nuclear fuel cycle and possible contribution to the risk of nuclear Armageddon. During the early 1970s, campaigners began to question whether Australian uranium could be present in the bombs tested by France in the South Pacific. Peter Hayes, founder of Friends of the Earth, recalled:

I began to research foreign mining companies in Australian uranium mining and export, and quickly found that indeed, French, Japanese and American companies were all involved in the Australian uranium mining sector as investors and as buyers … there were clear linkages between nuclear weapons, uranium mining, land rights, ecological devastation and risk of nuclear power, and we began to seek allies in each sector and country and to make common cause.

Friends of the Earth was one of many new anti-nuclear campaign groups and organisations formed in opposition to French nuclear testing. Australian unions banned trade and communications with France in protest until the atmospheric tests were abandoned in 1974. Activists criticised the hypocrisy of the Whitlam government for formally opposing French testing while continuing to export uranium to France. This signalled a significant shift in understanding uranium as an environmental hazard and it tore asunder previously accepted separations between “warlike” and “peaceful” atoms.

Uranium fever was no more. In its place, many environmentally conscious Australians agonised about the dangers of this radioactive mineral and its vast destructive capacity. Rather than defined primarily as a fuel, uranium was recast as a danger. A 1975 publication by the Australian Conservation Foundation baptised uranium as the new “metal of menace”.

Opposing uranium meant thinking along time frames fanning out into possible dystopian futures. Uranium tailings and nuclear waste remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. This is often overlooked in discussions about nuclear power and it remains an unresolved and controversial problem. Radioactive waste is deeply associated with images of mushroom clouds, radiation poisoning, and the possibility of catastrophic accidents. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-uranium movement highlighted the intergenerational impacts of radioactivity, especially the potential for harm to workers’ health and long-term damage to the natural environment. It was on this basis that many Australian trade unions proscribed their members from working in uranium mining or handling the material.

The anti-uranium movement had decisive political impacts. It culminated in 1983 with the newly-elected Labor government imposing a ban on more than three uranium mines, a moratorium that remained in place for almost thirty years. Historian Mia Martin Hobbs writes that “uranium was a divisive issue debated in polarised terms” in Australia. Was it a “commodity” or “calamity”?  From the perspective of Australian environmentalists, the answer was simple: uranium was not a valuable commodity but a planetary calamity.

Australia is a nation grounded in mineral wealth. Robin Gerster reminds us that the public is generally sympathetic towards resource exploitation and fiercely proud of their mining heritage. In this context, Gerster notes, keeping uranium in the ground was no minor achievement. For three decades, some of the world’s most significant uranium deposits lay largely undisturbed. Today, Australia possesses about one third of the world’s uranium reserves, but services a relatively small percentage of the global market. This is a direct legacy of past campaigns and a figure that nuclear advocates have long sought to remedy.

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If the story so far shows the possibility of “keeping it in the ground”, uranium’s more recent transformations suggest it may be on course for political revival. Australia’s radioactive riches did not go away. Policies to ban or limit extraction are therefore built on unstable foundations. As Andreas Malm explains, “conservation measures under capitalism are fragile letters that snap as soon as the state falls to the more aggressive fractions of capital.”

On the one hand, in the context of the Cold War, nuclear disarmament campaigns, and enduring concern about atomic safety in the wake of Chernobyl, it was difficult for uranium to be treated like any other mineral commodity. On the other hand, these risky associations have long been a source of persistent irritation to industry.

In his 1980 book The Struggle for Power: What We Haven’t Been Told and Why, geologist John Grover railed against the anti-nuclear “propaganda deluge that has swept the country virtually unhindered for some years.” Tony Grey, CEO of Pancontinental Mining, explains in his memoir how “the mining industry, unused to justifying itself to the public, was caught off guard” by the anti-uranium movement. As mining historian Bernard O’Neil puts it, the industry had gone from “national heroes” to “national villains.”

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The project of re-legitimising uranium took different forms, the crudest of which was the “jobs blackmail”. During the 1980s, capital took advantage of economic uncertainty and high unemployment to sell uranium mining as a panacea for unemployment, especially in South Australia. This was particularly clear in the successful campaign to open the enormous Olympic Dam mine at Roxby Downs. A poster produced by the Chamber of Mines and other business groups for the 1982 state election threatened voters: “BUILD ROXBY DOWNS OR THE SIGN OF THE TIMES WILL BE … NO WORK”. In an unfavourable economic climate, workers and unions were subject to tangible pressures to accept employment in the industry.

Roxby Downs evolved into one of the world’s largest uranium operations. At the same time, governments fumbled to reassure the public that Australia’s uranium exports were used only for peaceful purposes and subject to strict safeguards.

But perhaps the most significant transformation has taken place this century, with growing concern about climate change. Nuclear power is being presented as a way to reduce dependence on dirty coal-fired power, once again repositioning it as a fuel for the future. This has been a political gift for nuclear advocates.

Over time, the anti-uranium movement’s relationship with the Labor Party has proved to be an Achilles heel. Upon taking office in 1983, Bob Hawke quickly deleted Labor’s ambitions to phase out Australia’s involvement in the uranium industry. Since then, the party has come to embrace a nuclear future. Within the corridors of power, the pendulum has swung decisively towards uranium’s re-legitimisation. Labor returned to government in 2007 and officially repudiated its “three mines policy”. Although Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has so far rebuffed Peter Dutton’s proposals for domestic nuclear power, his party has helped cement Australia’s international reputation as a merchant of uranium. Julia Gillard’s government had few, if any, reservations about selling uranium to nations, such as India, which have refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is therefore possible that Australian uranium has clandestinely found its way into nuclear weapons.

Labor is currently spearheading the development of a local nuclear industry in South Australia based around the AUKUS military alliance. The federal government is spending $368 billion on constructing nuclear-powered submarines and has announced plans to dump waste produced by the fleet in the working-class suburb and former Nuclear Free Zone of Port Adelaide.

Despite its declining political fortunes, however, the anti-uranium movement has left a residue. Uranium not only has long-lasting environmental effects. It also has an unstable political half-life. Notwithstanding its process of re-legitimisation, it remains contentious. It is still not quite a commodity like any other and the nuclear industry has not entirely shed public anxiety and scepticism.

Aggressive pro-nuclear campaigns have often re-ignited popular opposition, as in the case of the successful blockade against the Jabiluka uranium mine in 1998. Perennial attempts to establish a radioactive waste dump, thus closing the circle of uranium’s commodity chain, have so far failed. Most recently, in 2023, South Australia’s Barngarla people defeated the federal government’s attempt to impose a toxic nuclear dump on their land. In fact, the prominent role of Indigenous communities in opposing nuclear waste dumps and new mines has added a new dimension to the anti-uranium frame. Indigenous concerns are now much more firmly embedded alongside ecological, public health, and other interrelated considerations.

At the same time, uranium mining has continued to inflict its slow violence on the planet. BHP’s Olympic Dam mine exports uranium around the globe. Environmental advocates and whistleblowers have warned of the ongoing danger posed by millions of tonnes of radioactive tailings produced by the mine since 1988. The Kokotha traditional owners tell stories of cultural murder by the mine.

I have interviewed many former anti-uranium activists for my PhD research. In their memories, Roxby Downs often stands as a monument to a failure to keep uranium in the ground — to industry’s victory over its environmental adversaries. Nicky Page was one of hundreds of campaigners who travelled to blockade the mine in 1983 and 1984. “It’s still up there,” Nicky told me, “pumping millions of litres of contaminated water into the underground aquifers. It’s still happening now. It’s been happening for forty years now.”

Activists have increasingly sought a kind of harm minimisation. Their legacy is in “slowing” the industry, “constraining” its expansion, “holding the line” — all descriptions used by activists in oral history interviews. In recent times, it may be the case that economic uncertainties have proven a more significant obstacle to atomic ambitions than protests or blockades.

“The infamous and illogical three-mine policy might be no more,” writes uranium advocate Ian Satchwell, “but the remaining confusing tangle of policies inevitably leads uranium-focussed companies to feel unwelcome.” After more than a decade of mothballed projects in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, there are signs that the situation is changing. The uranium industry now predicts future opportunities to expand operations amid projections of booming commodity prices and growing global demand.

In April 2024, Boss Energy produced the first drum of yellowcake from its recently reopened Honeymoon mine, located near Broken Hill. Once the target of community protests, Honeymoon remains controversial for its use of in-situ leaching and track record of spills and radioactive leaks. A range of uranium deposits are being delineated, identified, and mined across the country. Astron Corporation’s mine in Victoria will start exporting uranium to the United States in 2026, despite a state moratorium on uranium mining.

Today, in a world struggling to halt climate catastrophe, nuclear energy is increasingly cast as a green successor to fossil fuels. Many politicians have become as avidly pro-nuclear as their conservative forebears during the heights of the atomic age. Within these current debates, uranium must be historicised as a pertinent social and environmental concern. Uranium has come a long way from the “modern Midas mineral” of the 1950s. However, in an increasingly dangerous, militaristic and volatile world, it remains a lucrative and potentially lethal metal. And it is so important precisely because of its contested past and possible futures.

Image: The Ranger uranium mine at Kakadu National Park, NT (Wikimedia Commons)

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