Australia is not planning to create a domestic nuclear industry to support the highly enriched uranium-powered submarines the country hopes to build using U.S. and U.K. technology, Canberra’s ambassador said this week.
“The subs will be using HEU [highly enriched uranium] and we’re just working out now the arrangements for what that will mean in practice, but the whole point is for us to avoid the need to have a civilian nuclear industry,” Ambassador Arthur Sinodinos said during a roundtable with the press. “[A]part from anything else, we thought if we went down that route it might conflate in the public’s mind what we were doing and raise broader issues about the politics of nuclear power,”.
Whether Australia will acquire U.S.-manufactured uranium fuel under AUKUS is one of the many issues the country will discuss with the U.K. and the U.S. in the 12 to 18 months the partners gave themselves, starting in September, to work out the details of the proposed technology transfer.
The nuclear-powered boats Australia plans to build in the state of South Australia will replace the country’s current fleet of six Collins-class diesel-electric vessels. The nuclear fleet also meant the end of a $90 billion program to buy 12 conventionally powered submarines designed by France’s Naval Group.
“The whole point of selecting this particular technology is once these reactors are in there they stay in there and they give you this increase in endurance and therefore with it greater range and so on and so forth,” Sinodinos said.
Meanwhile, the ambassador said his government has been in touch with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison met with IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi while in New York earlier this year.
For about a year before that, while AUKUS was still being held close by the three partners, Sinodinos Australia did “a bit of discovery with the Americans and with the British about what is possible” with procuring nuclear-powered submarines.
In September, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said it could take Australia decades to get the new boats in the water.
A version of this story first appeared in Exchange Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily.
