In this episode, we explore the “nuclear mindset” – a term being thrown around in discussions about Australia’s plans to acquire conventionally-armed, nuclear powered submarines as part of the AUKUS trilateral partnership between the US, UK, and Australia. With the help of Veronica Taylor, Will Grant, and Ed Simpson, guest co-host AJ Mitchell and I explore what a nuclear mindset might look like, and discuss how we can help train a new generation of nuclear technology creators, regulators and dreamers approach their work with the care needed to make use of nuclear technologies safely, responsibly, and securely in an Australian context.
Along the way, we talk about Australia’s already lengthy history of working with nuclear technologies, tricky considerations like how to manage nuclear waste (even for widely accepted applications like nuclear medicine), and far more in this wide ranging and transdisciplinary discussion. There will be lessons in this episode for anyone who designs, manages, or regulates technologies used in safety-critical applications – including those enabled by artificial intelligence.
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Episode Credits:
Host: Liz Williams
Guest co-host: AJ Mitchell
AJ Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in the ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications. He is the convenor of the ANU Graduate Certificate of Nuclear Technology Regulation, does research in fundamental nuclear structure and applied nuclear science, and is a passionate educator and science communicator. He is also actively involved in teacher-training projects in Timor Leste and leads a program with the University of Yangon in Myanmar to build teaching and research capacity in physics.
Guests:
Veronica Taylor, the Professor of Law and Regulation in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (or RegNet) at ANU. She is former Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, is a member of the ANU Steering Group on Nuclear Technology Stewardship, and is one of the chief investigators for the newly awarded Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Radiation Innovation.
Will Grant is Associate Professor in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, which is based at ANU, and is a prolific writer and contributor on the interaction between science, politics and technology. He is also a member of the ANU Working Group on Nuclear Technology Stewardship.
He also has some fantastic podcasts of his own — The Wholesome Show, G’day Patriots and G’day Sausages.
Ed Simpson is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications, Nuclear Science Lead for the ANU Research School of Physics, and is one of the few nuclear theorists I know who can hold his own in laboratory settings. He is heavily involved in nuclear science education here on campus, has experience in government through service as an Australian Science Policy Fellow, and is also a Chief Investigator on the new Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Radiation Innovation.
Producers: Liz Williams, Martin Franklin (East Coast Studio), Zena Assaad
Acknowledgements: A special thanks to the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) for allowing us to use their recording studio for this episode.
Episode transcript:
Liz:
Hi everyone, I’m Liz Williams.
Zena:
And I’m Zena Assaad.
And this is season two of the Algorithmic Futures Podcast.
Liz:
Join us as we talk to technology creators, regulators and dreamers from around the world to learn how complex technologies may shape our environment and societies in the years to come.
***
Liz:
Today’s episode is different for a couple of reasons. The first is that Zena is off to do a very exciting residency with ABC and was unable to join us for this recording, so I’ve invited a friend and colleague, AJ Mitchell, to co-host with me today. Thanks for joining me, AJ.
AJ:
Thanks, Liz. I’m very excited to be here today.
Liz:
I think it’s fitting that you’re co-hosting today, AJ, because this episode is going to focus on nuclear technologies, and what’s required to use them responsibly in a world where the very word “nuclear” comes with significant baggage. This is something you and I have both spent a lot of time thinking about.
AJ:
Yes, it’s something that is front of mind when you’re working in a nuclear facility – which is how we met, right?
Liz:
Yes – a decade ago maybe? It feels like yesterday. I’m excited to share this with our listeners today, AJ. Zena and I spend a lot of time exploring artificial intelligence on this podcast, and I see so many parallels between the simultaneous challenges and opportunities both nuclear technologies and various forms of artificial intelligence present to the world.
I think there’s a lot we can learn from the nuclear community about how to help us access the benefits of technologies like this while significantly reducing the risk of harm.
AJ:
I agree, and I think we have excellent guests to help us explore this from very different perspectives. Joining us today are:
Veronica Taylor, the Professor of Law and Regulation in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (or RegNet) at ANU. She is former Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, is a member of the ANU Steering Group on Nuclear Technology Stewardship, and is one of the chief investigators for the newly awarded Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Radiation Innovation.
Liz:
Will Grant is Associate Professor in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, which is based at ANU, and is a prolific writer and contributor on the interaction between science, politics and technology. He is also a member of the ANU Working Group on Nuclear Technology Stewardship.
He also has some fantastic podcasts of his own – so please check our show notes for a link to some of his work. [For those of you interested in Will’s podcasts, please visit: The Wholesome Show, G’day Patriots and G’day Sausages].
AJ:
And Ed Simpson is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications, Nuclear Science Lead for the ANU Research School of Physics, and is one of the few nuclear theorists I know who can hold his own in laboratory settings. He is heavily involved in nuclear science education here on campus, has experience in government through service as an Australian Science Policy Fellow, and is also a Chief Investigator on the new Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Radiation Innovation.
***
Liz:
Thank you all so much for joining us today. I just want to ask you each to say hello so our guests can all hear who is who? Veronica, you’re joining us from Jakarta, correct?
Veronica:
Hello everyone.
Liz:
Hello. And Will, you’re joining us from CPAS
Will:
Yes, indeed, I am. Hi Liz.
Liz:
Hi. And Ed, you’re joining us, well, you’re also in CPAS.
Ed:
Hey Liz, how are you going?
Liz:
So we brought you here, as I mentioned, to talk about the nuclear mindset, which is the term that the Australian government has been throwing around a fair bit in reference to the culture they need to adopt to support this conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarine project that they would like to begin. How would you each define the nuclear mindset in your words?
Ed:
I’m a nuclear physicist. Nuclear mindset is not a terminology we tend to use within nuclear physics, and I think that’s probably because a lived experience every day. So in my mind, it’s about thinking through the consequences of everything you do to the end of time. It’s about understanding if you make some action or you do something, what is going to happen as a result and what is it going to happen as a result of the thing that comes after that? And that’s embedded in everything when it comes to nuclear technologies, right from the design phase to the operational phase and the safety culture that needs to be built around that to make sure that you can operate — reliably and safely operate nuclear technologies.
Liz:
So in your day-to-day experience, can you give us an example of what that might look like?
Ed:
Right. Well, we run the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility at ANU, so it’s Australia’s biggest particle accelerator. When we’re doing an experiment, essentially, we operate 24/7 and we need to get everything out of that 24/7 operation that we possibly can.
And so that involves enormous amounts of preparation to understand how everything works. It requires extreme diligence as you’re actually running it, to try and understand what it’s telling you and understand all the various diagnostics. And all of that requires diligence whilst you’re operating it, but also an enormous amount of understanding, backing that up so that you know what to look for in terms of signals to say something’s going wrong. Because all of those things can have massive consequences for the next two years when you’re analyzing the data that came back. So it requires enormously deep understanding of both the fundamental science underpinning it and all of the infrastructure that goes around it.
Will:
Can I add to that? I think this is fascinating from both your perspective as a nuclear physicist and from a government perspective, that I could absolutely imagine in your work that thinking through the consequences of actions to the end of time, or at least something like that, is absolutely part of a mindset that you would want to cultivate amongst your students and amongst the people coming through and in which government would be doing this as well. The thing that struck me, is the political consequences, the sociological, the societal consequences of anything that you do or that anyone else in the nuclear space is doing. So recognizing that, yes, there are absolutely super pressing safety concerns, there are super pressing long-term concerns. But also recognizing your actions have deep, deep consequences for the people that will be working in the nuclear space next year and 10 years time and 50 years time.
And I think the big case studies in society of nuclear things going wrong — thankfully we don’t really have those in Australia, but they’re held onto for a very long time. So I think it’s recognition that radiological stuff lasts for a long time. Political consequences last for a long time as well.
AJ:
And I think that’s an excellent point. Of course, the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility has just celebrated 50 years, but we organized an event where we opened the doors to the public and it was great. But for our listeners who maybe don’t know what a nuclear physics facility looks like, is this sort of a building that anybody can just walk up on the street and go into or there are checks and measures in place that really helped to tie into that nuclear mindset, that safety, that ongoing culture?
Ed:
On a basic level, the building is secure in the sense that you need card access to get in the front door. But I mean, even once you’re inside the building, so that might get you into the control room where basically, we run and control the accelerator, but that doesn’t necessarily get you into all the experimental labs. So if you actually want to go into what we call the beam hall, which is where you’re doing the experiments, you need appropriate kind of radiation safety training. And so there are kind of procedures to go through to make sure that everybody can operate in there a safe way and you have to wear a radiation monitoring badge.
In our context, in general, the levels of radiation are very low, but we’re all radiation workers, so you need to take that seriously. There are also lots of physical security measures within the lab, in the sense that different areas have interlocks. So if the radiation is above a certain level in a particular area and the doors are open, then the beam will automatically stop. And in general, that stops our radiation hazard.
But I mean, it’s a science lab and one of the good things is that we can get students in the door, right from undergrad to masters to PhD and it has enormous amount of benefit to their training. To actually operate in that environment where you need to understand all of that sort of stuff, you need to understand the safety culture and you need to understand the infrastructure, going beyond the sorts of science that you do in your everyday, is hugely beneficial to the education. And I think it’s critical to building that experience, working in and around nuclear technologies because you can actually get practical hands-on experience and there’s nowhere else in the country where you can do that sort of thing.
Liz:
I’m curious, so we’ve been talking about how this is actualized in a real working laboratory. Veronica, I’m wondering if we can zoom out a little bit and look at this from a regulatory perspective. How is a nuclear mindset represented through law and regulation of this space?
Veronica:
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. I completely agree with Ed, that one of the attributes of a nuclear mindset is that necessity to project into the future to think inter-generationally. And that’s something that we’re not really accustomed to doing in law, regulation, policy planning spaces. So whilst it’s not completely new, it is absolutely important for managing nuclear materials and nuclear technologies. So it’s a serious business. It requires serious accountability. In regulatory terms, a nuclear mindset is the absolute opposite of, “she’ll be right” or “we’ll deal with that when we come to it”, which is also something that we sometimes hear in public discourse.
But I also want to push back a little bit on the idea of nuclear mindset because what troubles me about the term is that it’s singular, as if there’s a singular view or a singular approach. And I think what we’re discovering very quickly, is that when it comes to nuclear materials, nuclear technologies and their applications, there are really diverse understandings in Australia. People are located very differently in relation to the multiple uses of this really important scientific and technical capability. And so I just want to note that it’s really important to understand that there are different perceptions and different understandings. And policy and regulation and law have to take account of those because we’re regulating for everyone in Australia, but also everyone in our immediate neighborhood as well.
Liz:
I love it. You’re getting into my current research area, which is really about how do we define all of these terms? Actually, we have many different definitions depending on the perspectives that we bring to the table. Can you maybe share how you might need to think through that from a law and regulatory perspective, if you are trying to create regulation that is meant to support safety and security — let’s say, to enable the use of this kind of technology in Australia — how do you have to think through that from a regulatory perspective?
Veronica:
Yeah, so let’s take the example of waste disposal because one of the really persistent issues in the use of nuclear materials and technologies is thinking about their extraordinarily long lifespan and what to do when the material comes to the end of its usable life. Where are you going to store that until it decays to a safe level? And we saw recently that the plan to store low level nuclear waste at Kimba in South Australia was overturned by the federal court, and that was a decision of the previous federal government. But essentially, the reason for the court accepting the challenge to that decision, was that there had been inadequate consultation.
And that raises the question of, who do we consult with on policy measures or decisions about how to manage nuclear waste? And I think one of the things that decision made very clear is that just stepping through a ritualized consultation with the local council or people who are in nominated positions of power is not going to be either legitimate or legally robust going forward. We have to think about First Nations’ ownership. We need to think about the interests of diverse community members and take those into account in decision-making and planning.
And so it troubles me when we sometimes hear in public discourse that the issues of managing the waste that will inevitably come from the building and utilization of nuclear propelled submarines is something that we can punt. We can put that off into the future because that decision point isn’t going to occur for several decades. While that’s true, it is a decision that must be taken and it will impact many, many different people and communities in different ways. So we need to be thinking about that carefully now and not leaving it for a future generation.
AJ:
And of course, the impacts from a regulation, a law, policy perspective impacts on the future submarines program, but also within Australia, we’re thinking about different industries like medicine, mining, so on and so forth. But as we know, Australia is a country that’s made up of different states and territories that have sometimes competing interests. What are the challenges associated with say, working at that federal level, the state and territory level and even breaking it down even further into working with those local communities, like you just mentioned?
Veronica:
It’s a great point and it’s one that is a major challenge for regulatory policy and lawmaking in Australia. We are a federation and the powers that relate to building and operating and storing and safeguarding nuclear materials are often powers that are located at state level. And there’s always going to be diversity in state postures towards technologies because the states are differently situated. And as you point out, AJ, they have different interests.
But in this particular field, because of the particular characteristics of nuclear technologies, I’d argue that we need to use that as a catalyst for thinking about a new way of doing national regulation. It’s not really helpful or indeed, safeguarding citizens, to have different levels of legally acceptable radiation across different states. That makes no sense scientifically and it makes no sense from a regulatory policy standpoint.
The other thing that I’d point out and that I’m sure everyone is very conscious about, is that as we move into a referendum, regardless of the results of the referendum on a voice to Parliament, what that referendum is signaling is that there is a new compact with First Nations peoples in Australia. And at the state level, we have treaty discussions progressing quite seriously. If the result of the referendum is yes, that will impact the way that we think about regulatory policy at a federal level as well. And so this is going to be a field in which that layering of legal interests and jurisdictions is going to become more complex. So we’re going to have to find a better way to do federalism, particularly for this policy area.
Will:
That’s easy. Just click your fingers and we’ll have that better way. I just wanted to pick up on a thing that Veronica was raising, the nuclear waste storage facility, knocked back by the federal court because of a lack of adequate consultation. And I think one thing that we need to recognize in building this nuclear mindset, understood broadly, is that we as a country, are going to be on the back foot with consultation because the submarines were announced as a fait accompli by our political leaders. And so we in the sciences and our friends in the nuclear industries, are going to try to do consultation, but we have come from a place where it’s been decided. And so whilst we might say, okay, how can we consult to get to a place where we want to have storage facilities or other sorts of things? We’ve got to recognize that sometimes consultation might say no. And then what do we do? We might be a little bit stuck.
AJ:
So listeners may have heard of the term social license used in regulation for nuclear technology. So I think this is really connected to these points that we’ve been discussing here right now. So really keen to get our panels thoughts on what is a social license, what does that mean and how does that fit into the broader conversations that we’re having here?
Will:
Well, I have feelings about social license. I like that it is a recognition from all sorts of actors in society to recognize that they need to have a relationship with society in order to continue operating. Whether it’s business or the scientific sectors or Government or Defence or anything like that, that there is a relationship we need to keep going and cultivate. So I think that is a good thing about social license.
I think one thing that we’ve got to step away from is the idea that a license, like your driver’s license, it’s sort of you’ve got it and then you can do stuff. I think we tend to think in the world of science communication in terms of, not acceptance, but acceptability, what do you need to do to maintain acceptability into the long term? And I think this is the thing about that nuclear mindset, and it’s great that you as nuclear physicists, are coming from that starting point of — it’s for the long term, it’s for forever. There is no place where you get to where suddenly, in the year 2060, yep, we click our fingers and you can be a bit more laissez-faire about it. No, you will forever be asked to maintain the highest possible standards.
And if there is a setback, here in Australia or globally, then that will set you back for 20 years and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just going to happen. So you’ll be held to high standards. And so your social license or your acceptability will be part of your work for forever. Sorry.
Ed:
Yeah, I mean we know. It always is. I think one of the important things when you have those discussions about social license is, that to have that kind of effective public discourse, the broader public needs to have some understanding of the science and the technologies and what’s going on, and there’s a kind of basic nuclear literacy issue that needs to be addressed to even effectively have those conversations. If you can’t even have the conversation on a level where people actually understand what you’re talking about in terms of the science and the technologies, it’s really difficult to have those sorts of conversations and you’re just kind of stuck at the starting block.
So I mean, I think as scientists, we’ve got a really important role in trying to help the broader public just understand what the issues are and what we’re talking about when we’re talking about nuclear science and technologies, and we have a long way to go.
Liz:
Yeah. I think part of that, which is not necessarily unique to nuclear technologies but is definitely important, is there is this larger discourse stemming out of nuclear weapons and this constant image of mushroom clouds and hazmat suits and all of that, that plays out in the media whenever we are discussing these kinds of things. And I know in the many conversations I’ve had with various people over the years who have found out that I’m a physicist, one of the first conversations is like, “Well, is that safe, what you’re doing, in that bunker down over there? Are you going to do anything to harm me?” There’s this immediate fear that you have to actually get over to have a conversation about, well, what is the science? What is the technology? What are the risks? What are the benefits? And how do you make a reasonable decision about whether, when and how to use these kinds of technologies for the public benefit?
And I think that’s one of the things that’s actually very challenging about this. There’s a lot of baggage and also, I don’t know, collective trauma, in some sense, that you have to sort of acknowledge and really be mindful of and understanding of, before you can have a meaningful conversation.
Ed:
I mean, that starting point of, the starting point always being fear, is always a challenge to those conversations. But I mean to some extent it’s on us. We are the people that know what we’re talking about, and it’s really important to have those conversations. It’s part of our role.
Will:
Totally. One thing I was just thinking about as you were talking is the idea of nuclear literacy. I am completely in favor of the idea that you, as physicists, need to be part of a conversation with wider Australia, the rest of the world, in offering people and giving people the knowledge that they need in ways that they can understand it, metaphors and good explanations that get the things that they need to do.
We just have to be cautious with the idea that increased understanding, so nuclear literacy or understanding how, will actually lead to acceptance. There’s a lot of literature in other places, but climate denialism is a great place where you can have people that know a hell of a lot about climate change, but they disagree that it’s happening. It’s weird. It’s weird. They actually know more than a lot of, not climate scientists, but a lot of climate activists, but they’ve got a flip on the whole situation.
So whilst absolutely, understanding is a key part of your job and helping the public and wider audiences when they want to know things, giving them that, totally, but don’t assume that that will then lead to acceptance. There’s going to be other things. And I think it’s part of that mindset and being trustworthy and transparent and open. All of those kinds of things are what will lead people to a place where they go, “All right, don’t understand it all, but they seem to be reasonable. They seem to be acting in my interest.”
Liz:
Veronica, I am curious. I wanted to go back. You had mentioned First Nations peoples and discussions with regards to what is the process through which we need to approach this idea of how we make use of these technologies? And again, I’m wondering from your perspective, how should we be thinking about that? Do you have any comments with regards to that?
Veronica:
So I’d loop it back to where we started in this last part of the conversation about acceptance and acceptability of nuclear technologies and their applications. And my question would be acceptance of what? Because we are really asking people to understand diverse pathways and applications for technologies. So if we’re talking about uranium that’s being processed for use in nuclear weapons and we want to test those nuclear weapons, that’s clearly something that Australia is legally and politically and socially opposed to. So, completely unacceptable.
But we’re still living with the trauma of testing both here at home, in Australia and in the Pacific. And those memories are intergenerational and they’re very real, and they color some of the discussion about new applications of the technologies. We’re talking about cancer therapies. There’s wide acceptance for this. When we go to the dentists and have an x-ray, no one questions the acceptability of the technology for that purpose, but when we’re talking about building and operating and decommissioning nuclear submarines and where that waste is ultimately going to live and how we’re going to keep workers safe, that’s a whole new conversation. Even though the foundational materials and technologies may be similar, the application is very different.
So when we are thinking about social license and acceptability, we’re really asking a lot of the general public to be able to distinguish between the different applications and pathways and discriminate between different levels of risk and safeguard. So the science communication challenge I think here, is pretty immense. And I think something that we want to push back on hard is not to allow the AUKUS and the submarines dimension of this to overtake the other applications that already have strong acceptance in the Australian community.
Liz: I wanted to bring up a couple of things that you said. You were talking about nuclear medicine and the acceptability of that, but we have trouble dealing with the waste for that. And so there is that difficulty with regards to thinking about the use of nuclear technologies and the consequences of those uses over time. We are already having trouble dealing with that for nuclear medicine where we clearly benefit. And I’m wondering: How do we help people think about this?
Veronica:
So I want to kick off with a regulatory idea, and it’s the idea of the precautionary principle. So the precautionary principle has fallen out of favor a little in recent times. And the idea is that if you don’t have a clear understanding of what the implications are going to be, you should proceed slowly and carefully. You shouldn’t assume that everything will be well and that you can just move towards the desired political solution.
In a genuine democracy you can’t assume that the community will simply fall into line and adopt your preferred version of a nuclear mindset. There has to be room for dissent. There has to be room for genuine contestation of ideas, and there has to be room for people to say, no, I’m not convinced or I’m not comfortable. And I think that allowing time and space to do that is important. But again, that doesn’t fit very easily with the pace at which policy is being made, particularly in the AUKUS environment, which is time limited.
Our partners in the UK and the US have put some time constraints around this, government has signed up for a fairly aggressive timeline to build and operate the nuclear propelled submarines. And so that in a sense, is artificially forcing the timeline that we are on for both educating ourselves and also consulting widely.
Will:
I was just going to say on the timeline thing, I think it’s really fascinating separating, say our governance timelines and how we need to think about time and governance, quickly moving to decisions, but also we need to bake in long, long terms. But we just have to recognize as much, as you asked Liz, how do we think about longer time? We’re terrible at it. Classic example is climate change — that we can see effects right in front of us, and we know they’re going to get worse in the decadal cycle, not the hundred-year cycle or the thousand-year cycle, but well, and we are very poor at societally thinking about those consequences. Even if we can see them, it’s the acting on them.
And I think, yes, potentially nuclear storage may be simpler than climate change. You’re lucky. You’re lucky. But I think asking people, asking society broadly to focus and pay attention to long-term concerns is a really tough one. And I recognize that that may be part of the job of government. That’s the job of government is to say, “Okay, we can think about these things over longer terms.” That’s just how government brain operates. But society, it’s a really challenging conversation to have because we are so bad at it in so many ways.
Ed:
Yeah, I think part of the challenge is there, going back to the nuclear medicine, the radioisotopes issue is that Australians across the entire country benefit from the fact that we’ve got medical isotope production, but the medical isotope production has predominantly done up in Sydney, a reactor at ANSTO, and that’s what’s producing the relatively low level waste that needs to be stored, but it needs to be stored in one place. So the benefits are going across the entire country. But the challenge of dealing with that on a longer term is a very much a local issue. And it’s a local somewhere. And lots of people say an argument against placing the storage facility in any given place is that, well, this is being produced at ANSTO, it should be stored at ANSTO.
Will:
What if we spread it really thin over the whole country?
Ed:
So that’s one option. So everybody that goes and gets a medical procedure, you give them a little shoebox and they go and bury it in the garden, right? It’s absurd, right?
Will:
That is not a real suggestion.
Ed:
No, no, absolutely. But this is the point. I think broadly we need to understand that everybody benefits, but practically doing that sort of storage, you do it in one location because of the logistics of it. So everybody’s broadly acceptive of the benefits, but the acceptance for dealing with the long-term consequences ends up being a local decision. So there’s that kind of dynamic that’s obviously complicated.
Will:
It’s a challenge around the world, and I don’t think Australia is immune to that.
Ed:
I mean, it’s not saying that’s an unreasonable objection. I mean, some people won’t want to live next to a nuclear waste storage facility. I wouldn’t mind, I guess. I don’t think, because I know it can be done safely and securely, but that’s obviously not how most people think. And that’s not unreasonable.
Will:
And we know in fairness to you, Ed, that you said you wouldn’t mind and you would do it, your job requires you to be in a place that’s probably not likely to, and I’m not picking on you, but we know that the people who will live next to it are the marginalized already.
Nuclear waste dumps will be in places where the most marginal voices in society, they’re not next to the politicians’ houses. They’re not next to the mansions of Mossman.
Ed:
But don’t call it a dump. It’s not a dump.
Will:
I have avoided that, haven’t I? I thought I’d been quite good.
Ed:
I mean, every time I see a story in the ABC calling it a dump, it really annoys me because it’s not a dump, it’s managed.
AJ:
And I think it is important as well to remember that radioactivity, radiation is everywhere. It’s literally in the walls around us as we’re sitting here recording this podcast. It’s in the air we breathe, the food that we eat. And because the industry has had such a long period of time to think through the regulation, the law, the human health aspects of storing this low level waste that we can–and is demonstrated around the world– that it’s a viable option.
And I quite often see photographs of people on the internet standing next to storage casks or on reactor facilities because the radiation that’s being emitted from those is, it’s less than the natural background that you would be exposed to. Actually, working in the facility, that Ed I do at ANU, the amounts of radiation that we, on an annual basis is probably less than would be exposed to on the flight back to Northern Ireland to visit my family.
Ed:
Right. And that point about the radiation being that low, that’s by design, right? It’s not purely by chance because safety is a key part of the operation of the facility, and the safety measures have been designed such that your exposure is low. Saying, I’d happily live next to a nuclear storage facility, I don’t mean that lightly. You have to take these things very seriously, but if you do, the risk is pretty minimal.
Will:
I think just bearing in mind though, that whilst in the actions that you guys are involved in or in a storage facility that we might have in Australia and in currently, all of Australia’s nuclear work, yeah, it’s absolutely low. And that’s thanks to significant work. But we know that the stories that sit at the far end, in people’s minds, that is part of, even when people have low nuclear knowledge, there is the existing background of Maralinga here in Australia or Chernobyl, Fukushima, Kyshtym, things like that. They sit there as the hyperbole. And just because they’re overseas, just because they’re different context doesn’t mean people might think, okay, step one, here, step two, we get to there. That’s just the world that you operate in.
Liz:
Oh, no, that’s totally understandable. We’ve all worked in these facilities. We know the people, we trust the people, we understand the processes and the procedures, and we understand why these things are the way they are. And we have taken part in maintaining those things through the culture of how the place operates. To some extent, it is easier for us to trust the system in the sense that we’ve been working within it, than it will be for somebody who has not been. But also, I mean, we were talking about these cultures of safety earlier, Veronica, the point that people have different perceptions of these things. You look at Chernobyl for instance, there was a very different culture with regards to the safety in those-
Will:
So this is the challenge that I have, is that I can imagine nuclear mindset to mean the mindset of people working in nuclear facilities. And you can have a good version of that and you can have a bad version of that. And historically, so some of those terrible examples are where they’ve been cavalier. And so whilst a nuclear mindset, and this probably goes to Veronica’s point about that diversity, of being as safe as we can, but also recognizing that doubt and not being certain are a key part of that and saying, “Well, actually, how can we always make ourselves more safe, more secure, more?” Because we know sociologically, groups of people get on a group think, a path dependency. And I’m not saying it’s you. I’m just saying that you’re dealing with high risk scenarios. And so how do we always keep that, what could I be doing better? What could I be doing wrong?
Liz:
Well, there’s also the added issue of it costs more to do all of these things well.
Will:
That’s great. That’s great.
Veronica:
Could I come in here on the last point? Because I think one of the real cultural assets that we have in Australia is a kind of colonial legacy of a strong commitment to rule of law and a really strong commitment to building high quality regulatory institutions. So even as government has signed up for a pretty accelerated pathway towards acquiring nuclear propelled submarines, they are also in the process of standing up and getting legislative approval for a regulatory agency to oversight that new application of nuclear technology. And the people who will staff that new agency and also those who, within the Defence forces and the Navy in particular, who’ve been responsible for managing nuclear propelled vessels that have visited Australia, are serious people. I think that one word that we wouldn’t use about regulatory culture in Australia is cavalier. People have a very, very serious commitment to stewardship. Stewardship is now being written into the obligations of all Commonwealth public servants. But in this field particularly, I think there’s a strong awareness that you need to both understand the science and understand the legal and regulatory environment very well.
And I think, Liz, you made the point that having that kind of regulatory quality costs money. So there will be a need to really continue to invest in the oversight of the technologies, as well as the technologies themselves. I think that’s well understood. What we’re still working out is exactly how to do that step by step. But the piece that is missing, I think, is the ability to communicate all of that effectively to different kinds of publics.
Liz:
Maybe this is a good place for you to comment, Will.
Will:
Well, the first thing I was just going to say, I’m very happy to be with Veronica’s assessment here, that we have good regulatory culture. I mostly take that in faith in Australia, and I think in the nuclear world, probably, yes so. So my point would be, yes, we probably have a pretty okay civic epistemology, but that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the case. And we always have to work to make sure that we are doing the best version of that. And this goes then to the communication of this, that we in the sciences, have a job to do to communicate what we are doing and what we’re part of. Government has a role to communicate as well.
And I think this is a challenge that I don’t know how well government has been at communicating all sorts of different things. I think they work with different stakeholders, they work with publics, and I think there is probably attitudes that work pretty well, but sometimes there is a, “I’m from Canberra, I know what I’m talking about.” Or maybe, “We can keep things a little bit secret.” And we are coming a little bit off the back foot, in the sense that AUKUS was announced as a fait accompli.
So we do have a few things where government communication culture is not perfect, and we as I guess fellow travelers in this world, in the nuclear world here in Australia, need to push our colleagues to say, yes, of course there will be secrecy and security, reasons that we can’t talk about everything. But being as transparent and open about what we are doing, both here with society in Australia, also with our friends and allies in the region, and our less friendly folk further afield, we need to be as transparent and clear about what we are doing all the time. And I think we can step that communication culture a little bit more into that way.
Liz:
I’m wondering if maybe we can bring up the idea of what is needed to actually achieve these things from an expertise perspective and what you’re all saying in terms of how we’re trying to do that.
Ed:
That is a very broad question. So the workforce to build and deliver this. I mean, just currently it doesn’t really exist on a basic level. We don’t have enough scientists and engineers coming through undergraduate degrees at university. We have very few places where they can actually gain nuclear expertise. Nuclear expertise in a sense, is kind of master’s level courses that have specialist nuclear content as opposed to being somebody that’s been in the field for a decade or 20 years becoming a genuine subject matter expert. There are just very few of those people exist currently. It’s not all about the university sector, obviously.
So as it happens, two of my uncles worked in the Dockyards in Plymouth. They went there as apprentices when they left school, and they worked out their entire career and did a lot of work on nuclear submarines. And they were trying to retire for almost, well at least five years. But they kept asking them to stay because they didn’t have the depth of expertise that they needed in the workforce. I mean, they were subject matter experts that weren’t necessarily people that come through universities, but you need expert welders, you need fitters, you need all sorts of expert trades. And when you’re dealing with nuclear technologies, the margins are so much tighter. You need to not just have a welder, but have a welder that’s got deep expertise in the skill of doing that and does it better than 99% of the other welders out there. So it’s not just expertise in terms of nuclear subject matter expertise, but everybody on the job needs to be doing stuff at an exceptionally high standard. And that’s a slightly different culture, so it’s going to take a long time to build that.
AJ:
I mean, nuclear-powered submarines I’ve heard described quite regularly has been the most complicated devices that have ever been built on the planet. So like I said, it’s not just about developing Australian nuclear science and engineering experts. It’s coming back to the points that Veronica was making about all of these new regulatory bodies that are going to be established who are experts in regulation and law, international relations. But also have that subject matter expertise, that knowledge, of the nuclear aspects that they’re working with on that day-to-day basis.
Veronica:
I’d add to that, that as well as going deep in the way that Ed and AJ were describing, we also need to go wide because we are going to need a generation of regulators who have both STEM and HASS capability. I had the pleasure of learning nuclear physics 101 from AJ and my head nearly exploded. It was like listening to lectures in Chinese, but it was terrific. And that’s the level at which we’re going to need new regulators because you can’t oversight technologies and their applications unless you understand what’s going on. You can’t make rules effectively unless you understand what it is you’re corralling and for what purpose and in what ways.
So the regulatory workforce also needs to be built up and nurtured. The people who are coming into the field early are very, very, very bright and highly capable and highly motivated because they also understand that this is a national mission. We’re working in the national interest and that the success is going to stand or fall on the capability of the people as much as the technologies themselves. The final point I’d make is that when regulation fails, as it often does, increasingly in Australia, we rely on diagnostic tools like the Royal Commission. And nuclear technologies is a field in which you would never want to have a Royal Commission. You would want to preempt that through the quality and excellence of your regulatory frameworks and the people who are applying those.
Liz:
I’m wondering if you can explain what does it look like to train people who are going to go into the regulatory space on this with a sufficient understanding of the technologies they will be regulating? What does that look like from an educational perspective?
AJ:
Well, from my side, I think it brings a word that we hear a lot at the ANU, this transdisciplinary approach to teaching. And this is something that we have looked at, at the ANU particularly over the last two years. We have a long history of teaching postgraduate level nuclear science through our Master’s programs [Master of Science in Nuclear Science;Master of Science (Advanced) in Nuclear Science]. But on the back of the AUKUS announcement, we took a step back and said, “Okay, across the entire university, what do we do well and what do we do well that could be connected here?” And one of the outcomes there was that we created a new Graduate Certificate of Nuclear Technology Regulation that was aimed at that diverse group of public servants, of people who are working in whichever industry or wherever they may be, who have an interest in the science, in the word nuclear, but also want to have a diverse education that’s going to contribute in countless ways.
And that in that program, we combine core nuclear science courses with what was initially a policy and practice of regulation course that Veronica teaches. But then, Veronica went out and spent a year talking with Australia’s nuclear experts, our nuclear agencies, and trying to learn more about what sorts of skills and knowledge they think that the workforce needs moving forward. And actually created a new course, it’s called Regulating Nuclear Capabilities, that I had the pleasure, the privilege of giving a few lectures on that course, on the fundamental nuclear science.
But then Veronica really took that and put the full regulatory slant on it and brought in some other experts from people who’ve had experience with the International Atomic Energy Agency and so on and so forth. That group of students is a mixture of people who have technical backgrounds, who don’t have technical backgrounds. From an educator perspective, it’s fascinating because you’re working with such diverse people. As a nuclear physicist, if I’m teaching a course to physics students, I can assume that they know what a proton and a neutron is and how they’re arranged in a nucleus.
But when you’re starting to think about groups like this, you really have to take a step back and think, “Okay, can I just say this technical term and assume that everybody’s going to understand it?” And a lot of the time, that just isn’t the case. So you have to approach the teaching side of things a little bit differently. But I’d say that the questions that get asked are, I think, they’re the ones that make me think, “Oh yeah, I haven’t thought of that that way before. I don’t have a good answer for you. Let me go and have a think and have a read and I’ll come back to you tomorrow.” Kind of approach.
Will:
Which is a really important part of teaching, but also suggests what we will need in the next few years. That your opening gambit in terms of a Graduate Certificate and this course and other things will be surely something that we will learn from. And in five years time, 10 years time, we’re building a workforce over the multi-decades here that we will learn and we will think, “Okay, how do I need to address that aspect and that aspect?’ And being open to that learning all the time, I think needs to be part of the nuclear mindset.
AJ:
Absolutely, I say we’ve touched on the physics, on the regulation, but that program incorporates law, science communication, engineering, so a really, really diverse set of courses that students can take, depending on what their interests and backgrounds are.
Liz:
So what’s been your experience, Veronica, developing a course for this particular audience, this broad audience, I should say?
Veronica:
It’s been a really terrific experience. One of the things that AJ mentioned and that I want to really reaffirm is that it’s not an easy thing to have people trained in science and people trained in social science speak and debate with each other effectively. So there’s just a foundational piece of work about learning each other’s languages. And just as the social science people in the room had to learn proton and neutron, there were regulatory terms and concepts that the engineers and the physicists in the room really struggled with, and they were surprised at how much complexity there was on the social science side of the material. So that is both important, but it’s an essential but not sufficient basis for building up that shared capability.
Liz:
Well, this is making me think of the first time I realized that people actually had philosophical viewpoints that might differ from each other. I now work in this transdisciplinary space, and I have to understand that and I have to be able to take those perspectives in mind and really figure out how to work amongst all of that. But I think that’s actually a failing in terms of physics education. We think the scientific method is amazing and whatever, and it is, it’s very useful, but it starts with a philosophical perspective. And when you start to get into the social sciences and you actually realize, actually no, there are these different ways that you need to look at the world, and that’s actually where you need to start, by understanding, what are these perspectives you’re bringing to the table?
Will:
I think one of the parallel things that we did at the same time as the transdisciplinary stuff is the critical thinking, and I think that needs to be part of the nuclear mindset as well. That critical thinking is yes, a huge chunk is about rigorous synthesis of the knowledge that you’ve got, but also it’s about doubt and recognizing uncertainty and about the courage to speak and the kindness to recognize people from different perspectives. And we’re only going to get there if we’re gathering together those different perspectives. That’s the sort of nuclear mindset that really will work.
Ed:
Yeah, I think we’re talking about this in a slightly ANU context, because we’re all ANU people, but I mean, I think we really need kind of sector wide change, in the sense that the vast majority of nuclear courses in the country are either aimed at physics students or engineers or people doing medical radiation, and that’s not going to cut it. I mean, we need people from a great variety of different backgrounds. Even just across science, we need chemists and biologists and doctors, to have some introductory understanding of nuclear science. And that’s because maybe they require it in the future roles, but it will also be important in making them consider careers that are in the broader nuclear sector.
And if they don’t get that exposure undergrad level, they’re not going to want to go into a master’s or a PhD to get deep expertise. But they probably also won’t going to work in a regulatory role where they’re doing nuclear stuff because they’ll feel exposed going in the door, if they don’t have any background in the area. So building a workforce, it’s a big triangle. So we’ve got the pointy expertise right at the top, but building the lower levels still requires some degree of nuclear education, and it requires a very broad church.
Will:
I was just thinking, I want to put up my hand, and you probably hate me for this, but to teach a course on nuclear disasters just because, but we need to understand them and we understand how people think about them and how they might inform us to do things better. That good engineering is sociology.
Liz:
Yeah. Can we teach that course together? I would love to teach that course.
Will:
Oh — 100%.
Liz:
Yeah. No, I also think that that kind of course is the kind of course that would also be very beneficial for people who are working in other areas of technology where there are significant risks involved in, I’m thinking artificial intelligence, et cetera. Those kinds of skills in terms of thinking through what are the many layers that might’ve led to this particular disaster? They are going to be useful across the board.
Ed:
And that kind of aspect of the nuclear mindset of thinking through the consequences to the end of time is not just about the technical engineering sides, it’s how the technical engineering sides interface with the human side. Because in nuclear disasters, issues have happened because somebody pressed the wrong button. And why was that not designed out? I mean, to some extent, you can’t mitigate the fact there’s a human in the room, but you can mitigate on an engineering side, but you need to anticipate that that might be a problem. So that human dimension to it and understanding its interface with the technology, is super important.
Liz:
My favorite example of that is the little maintenance tag hanging in front of just the exact wrong light in the Three Mile Island disaster is playing part of the role of how that proceeded. I mean, those kinds of things we have happen all the time because, “Oh, I need to go get a part.”
Will:
Which, I just want to, going back to your overall topic, the worst version of the nuclear mindset is a mindset that is narrow, but self-believing in its own capacities. It’s like, we can engineer the shit out of this and we can solve via engineering, every single problem. But if you don’t incorporate diversity of perspectives, different knowledge, doubt in your own knowledge, then those kinds of things, little bits that you just might miss or your discipline doesn’t allow you to see, could cause tremendous disasters.
Liz:
Yeah. Well, you can’t engineer out human behavior if humans are involved in the system. That’s just not possible.
Will:
It’s quite weird, isn’t it?
Ed:
But you can anticipate it, right?
Liz:
You can, and you can try your best plan for it and mitigate, but you always need to be aware that you cannot plan and mitigate for everything. There’s always going to be something, and it might not just be something, it might be a small number of little tiny things that add up to something big.
Will:
And you’d find that most of these disasters are actually where multiple things go wrong, because you can have a minor thing go wrong in a technical engineering context, and people step up and they go, “Actually no, this shouldn’t happen this way.” And then we solve it because people are good at solving things. But it’s when our sociology is like, “Oh, no, no, that’s not a problem. We just ignore that. That’s the dial we ignore.” That’s when things go really wrong.
Ed:
But I mean that culture of doubt, and you see one thing that you don’t understand, you need to understand it. And I mean, this is this, we have PhD students in physics, and it’s a PhD in doubt, right? I mean, you have to chase every single thing down and you have to chase it down until you really understand it.
***
Liz:
I wanted to touch on Article 14 of Australia’s agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency around its responsibilities as a non-nuclear state. This gives Australia the right to use nuclear-propulsion technology for military uses. This has not been used by another non-nuclear state so far, and so Australia is in some sense leading the way in how this is going to be applied. How can we think about the impact of the choices we make, particularly from the regulatory side, on how other countries make use of this option?
Veronica:
It’s a great question, and you’re right, Australia is trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, which is to be a non-nuclear state, a state that doesn’t build or maintain a nuclear weapons capability and that has affirmatively signed up to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, but to use nuclear technologies for defense purposes, but for propulsion rather than for weapons. So that’s a fairly fine distinction. Australian policymakers believe that they’re able to thread this needle. One of the things that helps Australia is that we are in good standing with the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and we have been really strong defenders of the non-proliferation frameworks and practices.
The reason that it’s important for us to have a very, very, very robust regulatory framework for the nuclear propelled submarines is that we are not the only middle-sized power that wants to acquire this capability. There are a number of countries lined up at different stages of developing this capability. The one that’s perhaps closest in line to us is Brazil, but there will be others and those other middle powers will also be in the Indo-Pacific.
So in a sense, what we’re trying to do is create high quality regulatory capability for ourselves domestically, to continue to ensure that we have a license to do this within the multilateral frameworks and community, but also as a model for other countries that are on the same pathway. But I think particularly, to share that regulatory capability with neighbors in Southeast Asia. The other actors that are important to us geographically are of course, the Pacific states who themselves probably won’t acquire this capability, but were the site of nuclear testing that had really traumatic effects. And so being able to assure Pacific neighbors that we are being good neighbors by really, both supporting the safeguards regime, but also creating strong regulatory capability, is going to be diplomatically important.
Liz:
I’m wondering about the soft diplomacy aspects of this, and I’m wondering what that means in terms of, again, I mean the education and the expertise needed to do this? There is a soft diplomacy aspect of this that is going to be needed if we are going to continue down this path.
Veronica:
So I’d push a little bit harder on that and say, yes, soft diplomacy is important. Information sharing is important. Trust building is important. But I actually would put it a little bit more strongly and say that Australia has an obligation to share its capabilities and build knowledge and capabilities for its neighbors in the immediate region, and that this should be part of our foreign aid program.
So our most proximate neighbor is Indonesia. Indonesia is going to need to utilize these technologies and capabilities in different ways into the future. We have a national interest in a safe, secure, and prosperous Indonesia. This is clearly a channel of sharing of all kinds that will open up. The slight tension at this point, is that the way that this is being framed for AUKUS purposes is building sovereign capability. And sovereign suggests closed, national, secure, and exclusive. And I’d like to think that we could get beyond that and share some of the learnings, particularly in the research and teaching space, with our immediate neighbors. And I think in the long term, that will be more effective and show good faith intent in a way that repeating soft assurances might not.
AJ:
I think I totally agree with that. And particularly on the education side of things. We have existing partnerships. We have a track record within Australia, within the ANU, of active engagement with the Asia Pacific region. But I think it’s on a very individual scale at the moment, to the best of my knowledge, and I know of great activities that are going on in this building I’d say, we’re recording this podcast with Graham Walker and his work in Samoa and beyond. So maybe, as part of what we’re looking over that one year, three years, 5, 10, 15 is really looking across at, say what opportunities are going on at the moment? How do we leverage off those connections? Because in my own personal experience, the most effective way to do this sort of engagement work is through established connections.
You can’t just rock up to somewhere and say, “Hey, I’m a nuclear physicist from Canberra. Come and learn from me.” It just doesn’t work like that. There has to be some reason, some established personal relationship or institutional relationship or some sort of foundation there, to get things going and how that expands, we’ll have to wait and see.
****
Liz:
Is there anything that we haven’t touched on here that you think is maybe important for us to share with our listeners about this particular topic?
Ed:
I would just say the biggest barrier that we face right now is just initial scale. There’s just not enough people to do all of these things. We’d love to be going to Southeast Asia, engaging. We’d love to be doing more outreach and trying to uplift nuclear literacy more broadly, but there’s just a handful of people in the country, and that’s the biggest barrier. There’s a lot of enthusiasm. There’s a lot of people that love their field and really know what they’re doing, but we just don’t have enough time. So uplifting the scale is going to be the critical point to build all of this off.
Will:
And can I say, whilst I respect Australian government historically, industry policy has not been something that has been super successful here in the past. And uplifting a brand new industry and building from scratch with all of its tentacles and tendrils into so many complicated bits of the world, that’s a big, big job. And if we just park the submarines, just recognizing that the workforce and research challenges that we have in front of us are multi-decade and multi, multi, multi thousands of people.
Veronica:
Yes, I completely agree. Globally, Australia doesn’t rank high for innovation. And one of the requirements of innovation is that you actually build your upstream capability before those technologies and capabilities can flow downstream to industrial applications. And we haven’t built the upstream part of this yet, so we’re at least a decade away from downstream application and the release of highly qualified people. So to borrow another metaphor, we are trying to build the aircraft and fly it at the same time. Let’s hope that we land it safely, but a little bit more attention to the upstream investment is what we really need at the moment.
For further information:
If you are interested in learning more about nuclear technology from a science, engineering, or regulatory perspective, Liz suggests having a look at these ANU offerings:
Short course / Micro-credential:
Post-graduate:
- Graduate Certificate of Nuclear Technology Regulation
- Master of Science in Nuclear Science
- Master of Science (Advanced) in Nuclear Science
- HDR: PhD projects are a great way to explore this topic in a variety of disciplines. It is best to identify a potential supervisor and speak to them about opportunities for PhD studies.
Undergraduate:
- Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) / ANU Bachelor of Engineering R&D (Honours)- Major and Minor in Nuclear Systems
Note: ANU has not asked us to post these links. Liz is doing this because she convenes the BEng programs, has taught into the Master of Science in Nuclear Science, and knows the people teaching into these programs (some of whom are featured in this episode). She is therefore sharing this for your information only.
