A HARD RAIN INTERVIEW
David Bradbury Interviewed for The Abolitionist-Online.
Interviewer: C Vaughan

David Bradbury is one of Australia’s best known and most successful documentary filmmakers. His films have been shown on all the major Australian commercial and public broadcast networks as well as overseas. He has won countless international film festival prizes and been the winner of five AFI awards and two Academy Award nominations (Frontline, which profiled war cameraman Neil Davis, and Chile: Hasta Cuando?, on the brutal military dictatorship of General Pinochet).

While political parties and sections of the media continue to promote nuclear power as an attractive alternative to fossil fuels, Bradbury’s latest film, A Hard Rain, explores ‘the other side’ of the debate - the real issues and grim truth.

Traversing five countries – China, France, UK, Japan and Australia, A Hard Rain exposes the hidden agendas behind the latest push for Australia to go nuclear and presents a compelling—and frightening—argument against allowing this to happen.

Abolitionist: How difficult was it to get this sort of information out to the public domain?

David Bradbury: These films aren’t made by international film makers because there’s no funding for them. No one is touching them. They are self censoring because they fear getting their wrists slapped by Canberra when it comes to funding. Both SBS Television and the ABC both have had their Liberal Government plants on their Boards and their Commissioning Editors know what they can and can’t get away with. They won’t tell you that they are self censoring. They’ll use the rhetoric that their films have got to rate thus doing what the commercial stations have justified as their basis for decades – they are chasing the lowest common denominator which is bored audiences, dumping down so they say these issues no longer rate. The news editors as a pretext to not fund them at all.

You said that alarm bells started to ring for you last year when Australia’s then Prime Minister John Howard returned from visiting George Bush, a sudden convert to nuclear power as the answer to global warming. The shame of it is if anybody could make a go at Renewables and be a world leader in this area, it’s Australia. Not only are Australians geologically and financially able and capable, they are temperamentally suited for the task ahead yet all this has been undermined with the rush towards nuclear power.

I know! Particularly with solar energy. Recently there was an article in the Herald devoted to Germany. It maintains there will be 90,000 jobs in Renewables for German citizens in the next 5 years. They have already gone solar but they are in the middle of Europe for God’s sake and they don’t have the same opportunities for solar that we have got in Australia. I think Dave Sweeney sums it up in “A Hard Rain”. He talks about 250,000 jobs we could have in regional Australia. Certainly there is a deliberate policy on the part of the Big Boys to keep the same show in town. Maurice Ilema, and the current Queensland Premier Anna Bligh – these Labor Premiers should theoretically know better, pushing the coal burrow and the doubling of the output of coal in NSW and Newcastle by increasing the infrastructure knowing that it’s going to add to greenhouse impact or the Howard Government putting 5 million dollars a year to the fossil fuel driven industries as opposed to the paltry amount that is given to the Renewable Industries for research and development to try and find a way to break out of this hold we have on using fossil fuels. These industries fund both major parties and when it comes election time they need that major funding. They aren’t going to get it from cake stalls in downtown Potts Point or Kirribilli to pay for the advertising they do on television. It costs $50,000 for a 30 second spot ad and they aren’t going to get that kind of money from a local genuine grassroots funding organization. They end up doing deals with the big end of town and that means giving concessions to them and turning a blind eye to what blind Freddie could tell you needs to be done if we are serious about leaving a future for our children and grandchildren.

If any lessons have been learnt from governments after Hiroshima, it appears to be how to stitch up and silence the media on the issue. Why though? I think it’s because they need to find a moral excuse these-days for the military industrial complex to use uranium in military operations, in space also, and climate change provides them with the best moral reason, so far, that they can find. Was global warming allowed to happen to provide a platform to usher in a new nuclear age and recommence uranium mining and the arms race?

I don’t know if it was allowed to happen. I think it’s bursting out at the seams. Green activists since the 70’s have been making that point and again into the 90’s when we were arguing against the killing of Old Growth Forests and the forests up here in Northern NSW. I don’t think it’s as conspiratorial as that.

I think they need a moral imperative to allow them to get away with what they are doing to all of us and future generations. The bottom line I think is greed that motivates them. They are real politic manipulators. They are cynical enough to use whatever tools come along and they have hi-jacked the climate change debate. The Nuclear Industry was making these noises which could lead one to think that they are cynical and manipulative enough to instigate the climate change argument. I think they are using whatever means possible and they locked into that one as using “our side of the argument” to really get to where they want to i.e., push the nuclear angle. Dr Gavin Mudd puts it well in “A Hard Rain” and alerted me to the fact that this is their last grasp. What’s so disillusioning I think for me and other people is the Labor Party has brought into the cynical and greed based exercise where they are supporting uranium mining in Australia. If we only could have a major party that had a chance of achieving Government I think that there would be some hope and I wouldn’t be so despairing of the future myself and feeling that it’s practically all over. I am in a very depressed state as a result of the Labor Party going down that route at their National Conference and not listening to the push within its own ranks and from those outside that lobbied them to say “Don’t open us these uranium mines.” That’s going to mean we are going to bugga up Australia as well as what we ship out overseas. I just keep on hoping for a ray of sunshine to come from somewhere or some major turning point environmentally that will then melt down to the economy. I am half hoping that we will have a Depression that will stop this stuff from occurring yet at desperation level at wanting something to take place but the other part of me has lapsed into a gloomy fatalistic kiss-my-kids goodbye now in front of me before all this stuff is put out there because when they open up Olympic Dam at the level that they want to expand it and other uranium mines, just Olympic Dam alone is enough to stuff up Australia for eternity.

If you take what I have discovered since making “A Hard Rain” Olympic Dam according to Dr Gavin Mudd they will only extract 63% of uranium from the rock ore that they bring up to the surface, 40,million tones of it each year, tailings will be left behind. So 37% of the uranium that’s in the original ore body that 350 metres below the surface of the earth underneath a cap of granite which is providing an engineering challenge to what they are going to do once they get down through 3-4 years of scooping out soil and the rocks to get to that ore body and then to penetrate the granite to get the uranium.

Once they bring that stuff out the uranium is going to be radioactive for 4.5 billion years as long as Mother Earth has been around and it will be pulverized into these fine particles on the face of the earth of Australia. Under The Roxby Downs Indenture Act the Western Mining Corporation had from the 1982 John Bennon Government to desperately get Olympic Dam up and running in which BHP Billiton had passed onto them by virtue of taking over the lease of Olympic Dam of Western Mining when they brought it out a couple of years ago but they aren’t accountable to anything in Australia. They aren’t accountable to the 1993 Environment Protection Act of the South Australian Government, they aren’t accountable to the Freedom of Information Act to say what they are going to do with those radioactive tailings largely according to Dr Gavin Mudd and David Noonan from ACF, a anti-nuclear campaigner in South Australia, they were largely dumped out on the face of the earth because its too huge amount of radioactive tailings (you’ll find the statistics in “A Hard Rain”) and this stuff cover it with a superficial deposit of dirt and so on will still literally eat away the environment and anything that’s blowing around it.

Separate from that is the alpha radiation from those radioactive finely dust particles that a pulverized and to get the yellowcake and the other valued minerals but leaving behind the radioactive plutonium and plus the uranium they don’t get out, according to Dr Gavin Mudd, it’s one of the world’s worse practices that’s going to be taking place at Olympic Dam –it doesn’t pay them to get the other 37% of uranium out of the tailings – so that’s alpha radiation and that’s what’s happening with depleted uranium weapons that explode and then circulate around the world. Alpha radiation is the most dangerous form of radiation once it’s taken inside the body.

We are not getting out the levels of low radiations that trigger cancer either that I have discovered by making “A Hard Rain”. The double strata – the DNA , the blueprint of life is breaking at much lower levels of radiation exposure once inside the body than what we are being told it is. I just fear it is catastrophic spiking of cancers and birth defeats that’s going to happen in my beloved Australia as a result of going into uranium mining and it is not being taken on board by the Labor Party or the Liberal Party.

I’m despairing of getting this information out because I couldn’t even get people like Philip Adams to return my calls and take it on board.

Even though journalists are pretty cynical and have been around the traps there seems to be missing a lack of intellectual rigor and there’s skepticism towards people like myself they’d see as Greenie hysterical scaremonger. All I’m asking is they take the information and look at themselves and see whether it stands up to the rigors of their own introspection or not. If it’s bullshit then out me but if there’s truth to it then they should come on board and use their investigative skills as it’s their responsibility to high-light this issue.

With “A Hard Rain’ you interviewed an impressive array of top scientists including Professor Ian Lowe, Dr Mark Diesendorf, Dr Gavin Mudd and Dr Rosalie Bertell. You felt there was an urgent need to make a film that addressed the hidden agenda of uranium mining and the nuclear industry. What surprises were there for you in making this documentary?

The great concern in stumbling into how a huge impact that Olympic Dam’s going to have and the science of radiation risk levels at low levels of exposure to uranium. What surprised me was how science can be brought for denying climate change just like the tobacco industry was brought in denying smoking didn’t cause cancer. I think there is a concern that the general public is being exposed at levels and are at greater risk than what we have been lead to believe. I think we need to reassess this because it’s such a huge issue.

What about the almost forgotten issue of Aboriginal Land Rights and uranium mining? Is this issue dead in the water?

Sure! Even to the Labor Party it is. I think John Howard didn’t give a stuff about Aboriginal people and what’s happening there. If it’s a means to an end, if there’s an election looming issue that he can gain something by then he’ll use it for his political end. He’s probably seen the writing on the wall and he’s going to be out at the next election. If he is then there’s the possibility of a plan to put in place land that can be exercised for the Aboriginal people.

Are anti-uranium mining activists in for the fight of their lives against Government, the Mining Industry and the Media in this country?

I think we do have a David and Goliath situation here. The combined force of any one of these forces whether it be Government or the huge multinational mining lobby or the media – any one of those – any head on that monster is going to be a huge uphill battle to take on. Combine all three of them makes it a real Herculean task.

I think activists are tired. There are not enough young people for the fight even at the time of Japiluka university students were in the fore-front of that fight. Years ago when Japiluka was knocked on the head you’d see young people switching onto this issue and seeing that it’s they primarily are the one’s who’s going to be screwed over by the impact it’s going to have on deformed babies. They are making decisions that in 10 years time they don’t want to have babies because of the impact this will have on them. I think they are the one’s who really should be taking up this issue because they have been denied their birth right to have a safe and happy children. According to Dr Helen Caldicott these they won’t show for another 50 years.

This stuff going down will have a major impact upon the face of Australia and our population. For those of us in the know we’ll need to yell loudly and effectively. We’ll need to work together with each other to get the word out on this issue. At least people need to be informed to know that their future is being decided now within the next 6-9 months. If the radiation genie is let out of the bottle, there won’t be any putting it back. They are determined to bring it out and we need to meet the challenge.

New: View the seven minute clip - All that Glitters is not Gold - about the real impact from the Olympic Dam uranium mine expansion in South Australia.

Visit: www.frontlinefilms.com.au