On Newstalk ZB, Christopher Luxon said New Zealand’s 1987 nuclear-free policy is agreed “across the political spectrum” and “ain’t changing” while he holds office.
All of that makes sound political sense. National’s coalition is fragile, the election is on 7 November, and the nuclear-free policy is the closest thing the country has to a state religion. Killing such stories fast is what prime ministers do.
However, the second part of Luxon’s answer is harder to defend. Pressed on whether the policy might be one of the nuttiest things New Zealand had ever done, Luxon went the other way. It was, he said, “one of the best things we’ve done.”
But was it really?
New Zealand has great achievements to its name. It gave women the vote before any other country. Edmund Hillary, with Tenzing Norgay, made the first ascent of Everest. Ernest Rutherford was the first to split the atom … which, incidentally, led to the technology whose ban is now treated as an equal achievement.
Achievement or not, going nuclear-free was certainly not costless for New Zealand. It meant New Zealand lost Washington’s active commitment under ANZUS, the 1951 security treaty binding Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The United States did not tear up the treaty, but it suspended its obligations toward New Zealand in 1986, and the bilateral security relationship was downgraded in practice. Wellington has worn the demotion as a moral medal ever since.
The strangest thing about the “nuclear-free” policy is how little New Zealanders know about what it actually covers. It is less than most believe.
Yes, the 1987 Act — the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act — prohibits nuclear explosive devices. And true, it bars nuclear-powered ships from entering New Zealand’s internal waters. But it does not include a general ban on civilian reactors on land. Neither does it ban radioactive isotopes for medical use.
These four potential uses of nuclear technology are different. Still, Wellington treats them as a single, moral, anti-nuclear commitment. The political system has spent nearly four decades arranging itself around the pretence.
Yet, this posture – that all nuclear technology is bad – does not make much sense. A ban on nuclear weapons is a clear moral position, and New Zealand is entitled to it. But that same principle cannot be applied to other uses of nuclear technology.
Take naval propulsion. A nuclear reactor on a ship is basically a compact heat source. It makes steam, drives turbines and powers a vessel. It is not a bomb.
When the United States, Britain and Australia unveiled AUKUS, they leaned on the safety record of nuclear-powered ships. The American and British nuclear navies, they pointed out, have run for more than sixty years without a single reactor accident or a release of radioactivity that harmed public health or the environment.
American nuclear-powered warships call routinely at Yokosuka in Japan and Busan in South Korea, to no one’s evident alarm. Even Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles, the moral keystone of post-war Tokyo, distinguish propulsion from weapons. Wellington does not.
New Zealand’s refusal to admit nuclear-powered vessels to its ports is getting harder to maintain. Luxon waved that away, noting that Australia will not get its own home-built submarines until the mid-2040s, with deliveries running into the 2050s and 2060s. That is true but the policy will be challenged well before then.
From 2027, American and British nuclear-powered submarines are due to rotate through HMAS Stirling, the navy base near Perth. More will follow as the United States sells Australia three Virginia-class boats from as soon as the early 2030s, a transfer Congress authorised in December 2023. And so, vessels that Canberra treats as entirely ordinary will be calling at Australian ports while New Zealand still turns them away.
More absurd still is that most people assume the policy bans civilian energy. It does not. The Act contains no operative ban on land-based civilian reactors. David Seymour, ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister, said as much when he suggested civilian nuclear “should be considered again”. That was after a winter in which wholesale electricity reached record highs and several large industrial users had to idle production.
Luxon, meanwhile, in his interview distanced himself from even the thought of nuclear energy and insisted that New Zealand needed “a decent energy strategy,” as though the two were incompatible.
Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that New Zealand may never need nuclear power. It could tap its vast geothermal potential instead. Still, any debate about nuclear energy should start with the law as written, not as misremembered.
The anti-nuclear policy produces some strange contradictions. If New Zealand truly believed that everything nuclear was wicked, it would not use the output of other countries’ reactors. But it does.
Much of the country’s nuclear medicine relies on radioactive material that only a reactor can make. It is produced overseas and decays within hours, so it must regularly be flown in fresh. Without it, hospitals in Auckland and Christchurch could not run routine bone scans or cardiac stress tests.
Yet that dependence does not feature anywhere in New Zealand’s debates. Maybe it is because naming it would raise the awkward question about why a reactor across the Tasman is acceptable for sick New Zealanders to rely on, while a reactor at home would be beyond the pale.
Luxon may be right that an election year is no time to reopen any of this. As a political tactic, his reaction was defensible.
But his boast that the anti-nuclear policy was a great achievement is harder to forgive. It turns the whole muddle into a national virtue while leaving the country unready for a conversation about nuclear technology it should have.
Ban the bomb, by all means. But the country that split the atom should be able to tell a weapon from everything else an atom can do.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE
However, the second part of Luxon’s answer is harder to defend. Pressed on whether the policy might be one of the nuttiest things New Zealand had ever done, Luxon went the other way. It was, he said, “one of the best things we’ve done.”
But was it really?
New Zealand has great achievements to its name. It gave women the vote before any other country. Edmund Hillary, with Tenzing Norgay, made the first ascent of Everest. Ernest Rutherford was the first to split the atom … which, incidentally, led to the technology whose ban is now treated as an equal achievement.
Achievement or not, going nuclear-free was certainly not costless for New Zealand. It meant New Zealand lost Washington’s active commitment under ANZUS, the 1951 security treaty binding Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The United States did not tear up the treaty, but it suspended its obligations toward New Zealand in 1986, and the bilateral security relationship was downgraded in practice. Wellington has worn the demotion as a moral medal ever since.
The strangest thing about the “nuclear-free” policy is how little New Zealanders know about what it actually covers. It is less than most believe.
Yes, the 1987 Act — the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act — prohibits nuclear explosive devices. And true, it bars nuclear-powered ships from entering New Zealand’s internal waters. But it does not include a general ban on civilian reactors on land. Neither does it ban radioactive isotopes for medical use.
These four potential uses of nuclear technology are different. Still, Wellington treats them as a single, moral, anti-nuclear commitment. The political system has spent nearly four decades arranging itself around the pretence.
Yet, this posture – that all nuclear technology is bad – does not make much sense. A ban on nuclear weapons is a clear moral position, and New Zealand is entitled to it. But that same principle cannot be applied to other uses of nuclear technology.
Take naval propulsion. A nuclear reactor on a ship is basically a compact heat source. It makes steam, drives turbines and powers a vessel. It is not a bomb.
When the United States, Britain and Australia unveiled AUKUS, they leaned on the safety record of nuclear-powered ships. The American and British nuclear navies, they pointed out, have run for more than sixty years without a single reactor accident or a release of radioactivity that harmed public health or the environment.
American nuclear-powered warships call routinely at Yokosuka in Japan and Busan in South Korea, to no one’s evident alarm. Even Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles, the moral keystone of post-war Tokyo, distinguish propulsion from weapons. Wellington does not.
New Zealand’s refusal to admit nuclear-powered vessels to its ports is getting harder to maintain. Luxon waved that away, noting that Australia will not get its own home-built submarines until the mid-2040s, with deliveries running into the 2050s and 2060s. That is true but the policy will be challenged well before then.
From 2027, American and British nuclear-powered submarines are due to rotate through HMAS Stirling, the navy base near Perth. More will follow as the United States sells Australia three Virginia-class boats from as soon as the early 2030s, a transfer Congress authorised in December 2023. And so, vessels that Canberra treats as entirely ordinary will be calling at Australian ports while New Zealand still turns them away.
More absurd still is that most people assume the policy bans civilian energy. It does not. The Act contains no operative ban on land-based civilian reactors. David Seymour, ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister, said as much when he suggested civilian nuclear “should be considered again”. That was after a winter in which wholesale electricity reached record highs and several large industrial users had to idle production.
Luxon, meanwhile, in his interview distanced himself from even the thought of nuclear energy and insisted that New Zealand needed “a decent energy strategy,” as though the two were incompatible.
Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that New Zealand may never need nuclear power. It could tap its vast geothermal potential instead. Still, any debate about nuclear energy should start with the law as written, not as misremembered.
The anti-nuclear policy produces some strange contradictions. If New Zealand truly believed that everything nuclear was wicked, it would not use the output of other countries’ reactors. But it does.
Much of the country’s nuclear medicine relies on radioactive material that only a reactor can make. It is produced overseas and decays within hours, so it must regularly be flown in fresh. Without it, hospitals in Auckland and Christchurch could not run routine bone scans or cardiac stress tests.
Yet that dependence does not feature anywhere in New Zealand’s debates. Maybe it is because naming it would raise the awkward question about why a reactor across the Tasman is acceptable for sick New Zealanders to rely on, while a reactor at home would be beyond the pale.
Luxon may be right that an election year is no time to reopen any of this. As a political tactic, his reaction was defensible.
But his boast that the anti-nuclear policy was a great achievement is harder to forgive. It turns the whole muddle into a national virtue while leaving the country unready for a conversation about nuclear technology it should have.
Ban the bomb, by all means. But the country that split the atom should be able to tell a weapon from everything else an atom can do.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE
1 comment:
Doctor Hartwich’s cleverly crafted sentence nails it. “Ernest Rutherford was first to split the atom…which, incidentally, led to the technology whose ban is now treated as an equal achievement.”
This must explain why New Zealand prefers windmills that were invented in the 9th century over the outstanding efficiency of today’s nuclear energy plants.
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