Scientific Activism in the Nuclear Age: Atuhiro Sibatani and the Ranger Uranium Mine
This book chapter was published in 2023 in an edited collection on the cultural and political legacies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is based on research I conducted as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science International Research Fellow at Japan Women’s University from 2019–2020. The book is available from the publisher here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003320395/art-activism-nuclear-age-roman-rosenbaum-yasuko-claremont
In February 1977 Atuhiro Sibatani, Senior Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s peak scientific research body, published an essay in the Japanese weekly magazine Asahi Journal about the emerging anti-uranium movement in Australia.[1] Sibatani explained that the magazine’s editors had invited him to write about uranium mining in Australia because anti-nuclear activists in Japan had only the vaguest idea of the Australian movement against uranium export. In the article, he argued that plans to mine uranium in Australia were intimately connected to the development of the Japanese nuclear industry. Japanese electric utility Shikoku Electric Power had already signed contracts to purchase uranium from the Mary Kathleen mine in Queensland. Shikoku Electric’s Ikata nuclear power station was at the centre of a political and legal fight by local residents who were opposed to its construction and expansion. In his article, Sibatani tried to connect the struggles of local communities fighting the expansion of the global nuclear industry at these two disparate points in the nuclear fuel cycle: uranium mining in Australia and nuclear power generation in Japan.
Since the 1950s, numerous Japanese communities had experienced the negative environmental impacts of rapid industrialisation. The Asahi Journal featured regular coverage of pollution issues such as the notorious Minamata disease, caused by the dumping of methyl mercury into Minamata Bay from a Chisso Corporation chemical factory. Japan’s growing pollution problem was met by new environmental social movements made up of scientists, residents in affected communities and anti-pollution activists. These movements developed extensive connections with communities outside Japan that were experiencing similar pollution problems, spurring the development of a transnational environmental movement.[2] Moreover, as Japanese companies responded to the domestic anti-pollution movement by moving the most polluting parts of their operations overseas, anti-pollution activists in Japan realised they had an ethical obligation to fight “pollution export” overseas or risk becoming complicit in it. Mining uranium overseas to fuel Japan’s domestic nuclear power industry was understood within this pollution export framework.
Like many of the leading lights of the anti-pollution movement in Japan, Sibatani was a scientist. As a molecular biologist with postgraduate degrees in biochemistry and anatomy from Nagoya University and Yamaguchi Medical School, Sibatani had held a number of academic positions in Japan. However, Sibatani found that his work in the new interdisciplinary field of molecular biology brought him into conflict with the rigid Japanese university system, in which powerful professors exerted enormous influence over their own small research groups. As he became more aware of the institutional problems affecting science, Sibatani joined in efforts to reform the Japanese university system. This experience left him still further disillusioned. Unsure of how to proceed, he felt the need to remove himself entirely from the Japanese university system in order to have time and space to think more clearly about these issues.[3] These factors led him to Sydney in 1966, where he joined the CSIRO’s Division of Animal Genetics (later the Molecular and Cellular Biology Unit). There he became more and more deeply involved in the transnational ideas of “Science for the People”. This transnational movement, made up of practising scientists and engineers questioned the role of institutionalised science in issues such as war and polluting industry. It was a movement that would come to play an important role in the anti-nuclear movement in both Australia and Japan.
The basis of Sibatani’s Asahi Journal article was an account of his testimony at the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry. This inquiry, known as the Fox Inquiry after its Presiding Commissioner Mr Justice R. W. Fox, was commissioned by the Whitlam government in July 1975 to consider the environmental and economic consequences of uranium mining in the Alligator Rivers region. It was also tasked with examining the broader question of whether Australia should develop a uranium export industry. The Fox Inquiry provided a public forum where conflicting social forces with an interest in the future of uranium mining in Australia could articulate their arguments. Proponents presented their case for the economic benefits of mining and tried to reassure an anxious public about its safety on both environmental and weapons proliferation grounds. For the nascent anti-uranium movement, the inquiry’s openness to dissenting voices made it the ideal place to air their concerns about the dangers of uranium mining.
Sibatani’s involvement in the inquiry grew out of his relationship with the grassroots environmental and anti-nuclear campaign group Friends of the Earth. This chapter examines the emergence of Science for the People as a transnational movement and its relationship with the nuclear industry. As the Australian government and mining interests sought to position Australia as a major provider of nuclear fuels for a growing global industry, environmental activists and critical scientists began reaching out to their counterparts overseas, including Japan. They developed a systemic critique of nuclear power that was grounded in a radical conception of the role of science in society. Sibatani was a scientist and public intellectual with roots in both countries. At a time when Australia’s uranium trade with Japan was still in the planning stage, he acted as a bridge between the environmental, anti-nuclear and critical science movements in both countries.
Science for the People and the Anti-nuclear Movement
Nuclear science has always raised political and ethical problems for its practitioners and many have engaged in public advocacy. When the field first emerged in the 1930s, its pioneers were conscious of the potential military applications of their work and they clashed over whether to publish their results openly.[4] The scientists who joined the Manhattan Project were motivated by high ideals and pursued their research on the atomic bomb in the hope that beating Hitler’s scientists in developing the technology would prevent the Nazi’s taking advantage of nuclear weapons. However, as their research began to bear fruit and the possibility of using the atomic bomb in the war became real, some voiced concerns.[5] These concerns only intensified after scientists witnessed the bomb’s effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A number of atomic scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project later lobbied for civilian control over the technology as members of the Federation of American Scientists formed in 1946. Later, the US-based Society for Social Responsibility in Science, formed in 1949, brought together scientists opposed to the use of science in war. In 1957 the Pugwash movement was formed by eminent scientists from both the socialist and non-socialist worlds. The movement was inspired by the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, issued by philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein and focused primarily on the threat of nuclear war.[6]
Japan’s harrowing experience of war and defeat in the first part of the twentieth century prompted the development of broad movements for democratisation and demilitarisation in many parts of society. In the scientific field, Liberal and Marxist scientists founded the Association of Democratic Scientists (ADS) in an attempt to democratise science and technology. In the 1950s, the Japanese government announced unilaterally its intention to develop a nuclear energy research programme using technology imported from the United States under the terms of the Atoms for Peace initiative. Japan’s peak national science body, the Science Council of Japan, drew on the democratic ideals of ADS to formulate its Three Nuclear Principles for Japan’s nuclear energy research programme: transparency, democracy and independence from foreign powers. ADS members were also among the leaders of the first major anti-nuclear weapons movement that followed the irradiation of Japanese fisherfolk during the US tests at Bikini Atoll. ADS member Sakata Shōichi, in collaboration with Yukawa Hideki and Tomonaga Shin’ichirō, proposed the establishment of a Kyoto Scientists Conference in 1962 in response to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament.[7]
The first wave of critical science movements was motivated primarily by ideals of the social responsibility of scientists. By the late 1960s and 1970s, however, younger scientists began to advance a more radical and systemic critique of science. David Biggins has identified three principles underpinning the movement during this period. First, “the implications and effects of scientific research are first known to and best understood by scientists engaged in the research” who therefore have a responsibility to share this knowledge. Second, “the social responsibility position is that of effective communication and controls”, meaning that one of the main tasks of critical scientists was to disseminate information about science to the public. Third, “the most important problems facing society need political solutions rather than scientific ones”.[8] Concerns over social issues, including nuclear power, undermined earlier beliefs in the ability of science to solve social problems, replacing them with the “belief that science is partly the cause of some of them” and leading to a “loss of faith not only in the value of scientific research but, more fundamentally, in the scientific world
view”.[9]
For the Midnight Notes Collective, an anti-capitalist collective whose members were active in the early American movement against nuclear power, the emergence of a critique of nuclear power from within the nuclear science and engineering professions was particularly significant. They argue that nuclear power represented a particular form of capitalist production highly dependent on central planning and the cooperation of a highly trained class of workers. They characterise “the responsible progress-abiding, intellectual-technical workers of the fifties” as the “truly ‘scientific’ Stakhanovites of the second half of the twentieth century”. They note that the growing number of these ideal scientific workers joining the ranks of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s and 1970s signified the growing instability of the capitalist social relations that were established during and after the Second World War.[10] The development of commercial nuclear energy prompted a growing number of scientists, often with a high level of training and expertise in nuclear issues, to become involved in the movement against nuclear power. In 1976, for example, three managing engineers from the nuclear reactor division of General Electric resigned over concerns about the risks of nuclear power. In Japan, too, the defection of highly trained scientists to the anti-nuclear cause undermined claims that a scientific consensus existed on the safety and reliability of nuclear energy. Takagi Jinzaburō was one of a number of Japanese nuclear scientists who became prominent campaigners against nuclear energy and advocated for an alternative “‘citizen’ science”.[11]
In Australia, opposition to the Vietnam War proved to be a major impetus for scientists to take a public stand on the military uses of science and technology. In August 1969, discussions held at the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) led to the development of social responsibility in science groups around the country. The Society for Social Responsibility in Science, Sydney Group, was formed in 1969 by senior academic scientists. At its peak in 1971/72 it had a membership of about 400, most of whom were academic scientists.[12] Opposition to nuclear power was an important part of the Science for the People movement in Australia. Jim Falk, who trained as a theoretical physicist, became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement in the mid-1970s as a member of the steering committee for the national coordinating group, Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM). His background as a scientific expert was highly valued. Falk recalls that: “As a young physicist I found that my understanding of the issue was in strong demand”.[13]
However, rather than pursuing a career as a research scientist, Falk began teaching “liberal studies” to engineering students at Melbourne’s Swinburne College of Advanced Education, a course he renamed “Science, Technology and Society”. Later he wrote Global Fission, an account of the global struggle against nuclear power and joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Wollongong.[14] The academic discipline of “science studies” emerged out of these struggles within the academy over the relationship between scientific and other forms of knowledge. It informed subsequent generations of activists and thinkers grappling with the social implications of scientific practice. At Wollongong, for example, future Friends of the Earth activist and anti-nuclear campaigner Jim Green completed his PhD research on the struggle over Australia’s own experimental nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights and became Nuclear Campaigner for Friends of the Earth.[15] The transnational pathways of science in the 1970s spawned new cultural innovations in both social movements and university education.
The growing pollution crisis in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s motivated many scientists to join with citizen activists to raise awareness, fight for compensation, and regulate polluting industry. Chemical engineer Ui Jun was the pivotal figure in the Independent Lectures on Pollution (kōgai jishu kōza) group that brought together professional and citizen scientists to tackle Japan’s growing pollution problems.[16] The group derived its name from a series of open lectures on pollution issues held at the University of Tokyo. Ui and the Independent Lectures on Pollution (ILP) group were an important influence on Sibatani Atuhiro’s evolution into an outspoken critic of scientific orthodoxy. Sibatani saw their attempt to open the university up to citizen-participation as suggestive of a new direction for channelling scientific activity in the service of society.[17] After his move to Australia, Sibatani developed his critique of the institutional and ideological structures of science in dialogue with the ILP and the Science for the People movement, publishing his first book on the topic for a non-specialist audience in 1973 under the title Anti-science.[18] In this book, Sibatani considers many of the problems raised by the critical science movement, including the ends to which science is put and the institutional arrangements for teaching and research. He quotes from a wide range of literature in both English and Japanese, demonstrating the contemporaneous emergence of overlapping concerns that shaped the transnational science for the people movement. The work of physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn was an important influence on radical scientists who were rethinking the idea that scientific progress was necessarily linear and independent of other social forces. His The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in Japanese translation in 1971 and sparked debates among historians and philosophers of science in Japan, influencing not only Sibatani, but was also the nuclear scientist and prominent anti-nuclear campaigner Takagi Jinzaburō.[19]
Although he left Japan before the peak of the student revolts on Japanese university campuses in 1968, Sibatani framed his “anti-science” as a response to the student movement. He argued that science had failed to provide an adequate response to questions posed by student movement, such as “what is science?” and “what is research”. During a brief trip to Japan in August 1968, he found that the issues raised by the student strikes and barricades were on everybody’s lips. He felt that the “problems [posed by the students] could not be resolved by differentiating them from one’s position on the Vietnam war and from the problem-consciousness concerning pollution”.[20] He locates his own intervention in this global context of critical science emerging out of the movement against the Vietnam war and the complicity in science and technology in the issues of pollution and environmental destruction. The Social Responsibility in Science movement in Australia originated with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS). In Sydney, Sibatani became active in one of these groups, called Science for the People. The Sydney group concerned itself with the role of science in war, racism and oppression.
Discussing the group’s history in his Asahi Journal article, Sibatani notes that the British group, which started in 1969 had radicalised, prompting its more liberal members to leave. However, the Australian group evolved along an opposite trajectory that alienated some younger and more radical scientists. Sibatani saw that the proliferation of environmental movement groups that went beyond discussions on the social responsibility of scientists to more explicit forms of activism, contributed to a loss of purpose for a separate organisation of scientists. The more radical scientists preferred to work in broader activist and campaigning groups. When a number of radical young scientists who had been active in Britain returned to Australia in 1973 and linked up with environmental groups, they went on to hold the Radical Ecology Conference in Melbourne in 1975 that helped to launch the new anti-uranium movement.[21]
Origins of the Anti-uranium Movement
Australian anti-nuclear activist Greg Adamson attributes the birth of anti-uranium protest to the generational experience of anti-Vietnam war protest.[22] This was certainly true for Sibatani, whose active opposition to uranium mining was inspired by student unrest and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Around 1974 a petition arrived on Sibatani’s desk at the CSIRO calling for opposition to the mining and export of uranium on the grounds that it posed a nuclear proliferation risk. Its originators had Sibatani’s address thanks to his previous contact with the anti-war movement. Sibatani signed the petition immediately, taking his first step towards active involvement in the campaign. In January the following year, he had the opportunity to witness Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s support for uranium mining first-hand, when Whitlam addressed the question in response to a group of anti-uranium scientists at a meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS).[23]
As Verity Burgmann explains, opposition to uranium mining in Australia was motivated by a wide range of concerns—from environmental contamination at mine sites, risks to worker health, concerns about waste, risks posed by nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons proliferation.[24] The first street demonstration against uranium in Australia took place in Melbourne, in March 1975, at the Radical Ecology Conference.[25] Described by one participant as “a key event that brought together environmentalists, unionists, scientists, socialists, anarchists, urban activists, hippie ratbags, [and] students”, the conference “revealed a substantial ecology movement whose members had similar basic beliefs”.[26] Sibatani described his attendance at the Radical Ecology Conference in his article in the Asahi Journal. He was impressed by the diversity of the participants at this gathering of the nascent environment movement in Australia, commenting on the conference’s inter-generational make-up and the presence of a wide spectrum of people from New Age-types with an interest in meditation, to communists, members of other political parties and women’s liberation activists.[27]
Also in attendance at the Radical Ecology Conference were two representatives from Independent Lectures on Pollution (ILP) in Japan. ILP originated in the struggle against domestic pollution problems, notably the methyl mercury poisoning crisis at Minamata Bay on the Japanese island of Kyūshū. From the late 1960s, ILP activists travelled extensively abroad. They began to see connections between the pollution problems in Japan and similar problems overseas. They developed a framework for understanding pollution as a problem of environmental injustice, in which the impacts of heavy industry were pushed onto marginalised peoples and places. As the domestic anti-pollution movement began to make gains and Japan introduced some of the world’s first environmental legislation, anti-pollution activists realised that many Japanese companies were simply sending the most heavily polluting industries offshore. They understood that this “pollution export” was leading to the reproduction on a global scale of the same structures of environmental injustice they recognised in Japan.[28]
During the 1970s, ILP issued a monthly magazine that featured extensive coverage of pollution export issues in the Asia-Pacific. As Japan was poised to import uranium from Australia, the group also developed connections with the anti-uranium movement in Australia. ILP’s opposition to uranium mining was based on the same concerns about the way economic prosperity in Japan was tied up with environmental injustice overseas. Activists Takubo Masafumi and Kanetama Yasuko travelled to Australia to build relationships with the growing movement. They gave a presentation to the Radical Ecology Conference on their work with ILP in which they explained the pollution problem in Japan, gave slideshows and showed the documentary film Kōgai genron (Industrial Pollution). They took part in discussions on uranium exports and developed contacts with Australian activists. After joining Australia’s first anti-uranium march, held as part of the Radical Ecology Conference on 30 March 1975, they visited the Melbourne offices of Friends of the Earth with FoE activist Peter Hayes. There they learned about the groups plans for the forthcoming Bicycle Ride Against Uranium and decided to take part.[29]
The first Bicycle Ride Against Uranium involved protesters from three state capitals, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, converging by bicycle on the national capital Canberra to protest the Whitlam government’s uranium export plans. Along the way, they hoped to inform local communities about the problems surrounding Australian uranium exports. The largest contingent originated in Melbourne, where approximately 200 gathered in City Square on the morning of May 10 to ride out of the city. In regional centres along the route, participants organised lectures and distributed information about the protest, sometimes showing a film that featured scenes of the devastation of Hiroshima. On May 18 a small contingent of eight cyclists from Adelaide joined the main group. A further twenty from Sydney joined the following day as the cyclists paused in Yass to begin their final ride into Canberra.
On May 21 the group rode into Canberra and held a demonstration on Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. They converged on the lawns of Parliament House where they set up a protest camp at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. That evening, Takubo and Kanetama presented a petition on behalf of the group to Environment Minister Moss Cass. Performative protest actions continued the following day. Activists presented a model nuclear warhead to Energy Minister Rex Connor and performed a theatrical encounter between Connor and his conscience. The ILP representatives joined a tour of the Italian, Iranian and Japanese embassies, where they presented petitions calling on them not to import Australian uranium. According to one report in Friends of the Earth’s magazine Chain Reaction, “the Japanese representative [at the embassy] knew nothing about the issue, or understood why Masa and Yasu were here, or why the Australia Party, being political, could be involved in the anti-nuclear movement”.[30] Nevertheless, despite the apparent ignorance displayed by Japanese embassy officials in Canberra, thanks to the ILP connection there was some awareness of the issue in Japan. Activists in Tokyo coordinated a small protest outside the Australian embassy on the same day in solidarity with the action in Canberra. Later in the afternoon, a group of protesters, including Takubo and Kanetama, occupied the Department of Minerals and Energy. There they were invited to join a meeting of ministry staff, where the ILP representatives explained the history of nuclear accidents in Japan and implored the Australian officials not to be swayed by Japan’s electric utilities but to listen to the residents’ movements in Japan that were opposed to nuclear power.[31]
The “Ride against Uranium” format proved enduring, being repeated over a number of years and returning again as a tactic in subsequent anti-uranium movements in the 1980s and 1990s.[32] Reflecting on the Ride Against Uranium in Chain Reaction, participants Mike Frankel and Karin Ruff were sober in their assessment.[33] However, both agreed that the 1975 ride was successful in the way it connected activists. A few days later a national meeting of anti-nuclear activists in Sydney brought together groups from around the country to decide on a national policy for the anti-nuclear movement. Takubo wrote that plans to fulfil existing contracts for Australia uranium from government stockpiles were one of the central points of discussion. He hoped that the activists would be successful in opposing this, as it would give a boost to the movement against the Ikata power plant back in Japan, whose operator Shikoku Electric had contracts to purchase uranium from Queensland Mines.[34] The meeting also discussed the need to develop further transnational links between Australia and Japan. One reflection of this ambition was the reporting on Minamata disease and the anti-pollution movement in Japan that appeared in Chain Reaction the following year, presumably a result of the information obtained from Takubo and Kanetama during their tour the previous year.[35]
The anti-nuclear power movement in Japan had started with local movements objecting to nuclear power plant siting. However, as Australia prepared to commence uranium exports, the anti-nuclear movement in Japan was already beginning to organise on a more systematic basis. The same year, anti-nuclear scientist Takagi Shinzaburō, nuclear chemist Kume Sanshirō, theoretical physicist Taketani Mitsuo and other nuclear experts established the Citizen’s Nuclear Information Centre. The organisation brought together experts in nuclear science and anti-nuclear campaigners who produced reports on various issues related to the nuclear industry and initiated public activist campaigns. It also cultivated relationships with anti-nuclear movements overseas. At one time, Sibatani was asked to act as an interpreter for a planned delegation of anti-nuclear activists from the residents’ movement opposing the Ikata nuclear power plant in Shikoku in Japan. He also fielded similar requests from anti-nuclear scientists Takagi Jinzaburō and Kume Sanshirō in Japan and began to facilitate conversations between activists in the two countries. This plan never eventuated due to practical difficulties of bringing ageing anti-nuclear activists from Japan and Sibatani’s own time-constraints. However, shortly thereafter Sibatani found another avenue through which to share his knowledge about the movement in Japan by testifying before the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, which commenced its public hearings in Sydney in September 1975.
Atuhiro Sibatani and the Ranger Uranium Inquiry
The Environmental Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974 encapsulated some of the contradictions of the Whitlam government. By empowering the Department of Environment to intervene in disputed development proposals, the act committed the government to a new, more stringent approach to environmental approvals. On the other hand, the government’s agenda for stimulating economic growth and domestic manufacturing industry depended on the exploitation of Australia’s mineral resources. When Gough Whitlam asked Justice Fox to chair the Ranger Uranium Inquiry under the terms of the new act, he gave him extensive powers to determine the inquiry’s terms of reference. Fox interpreted his brief widely. The eligibility criteria for making submissions and appearing at the inquiry’s public hearings were extended to anyone with an interest in uranium mining and exports. Friends of the Earth and other anti-nuclear and anti-uranium groups focused considerable efforts on the Inquiry over the course of 1975 and 1976. Neil Barrett, who was Friends of the Earth Victoria coordinator during the Fox inquiry, received a federal grant of $30,000 to prepare a submission against uranium mining. One of the issues Barrett chose to explore was Japan’s demand for uranium.
The supposed need for uranium by the energy-starved Japanese was used by the Liberal government—led by Gorton and then McMahon—as a major reason why we needed to dig up and sell uranium. The author’s work showed that there was growing opposition to the industry in Japan and for good reason: there were too few suitable sites and the country had had quite a problematic history with nuclear matters. Already, by the time the Fox inquiry came around, even the Japanese government had quietly cut back its nuclear target and therefore its need for our uranium.[36]
Sibatani was impressed with the quality of Barrett’s reports on the nuclear industry in Japan, especially given he only had access to materials available in English. When Barrett asked Sibatani to prepare his own submission to the Fox inquiry, Sibatani compiled a report on the anti-nuclear movement in Japan using the latest information from Japanese sources.[37] On February 10, 1976, Sibatani appeared before the Inquiry at a public hearing in Sydney to respond to questions on his submission from both pro and anti-uranium advocates. His submission focused on safety issues affecting Japan’s nuclear reactors that had been highlighted by citizen anti-nuclear power movements, such as the residents’ movement opposing Shikoku Electric’s Ikata nuclear power station. He argued that the Japanese government, electric power companies and reactor manufacturers had been hesitant to “state frankly the actual and potential dangers inherent in nuclear power generation” and that the issues arising from the established nuclear power industry there had not been widely reported on outside Japan.[38] He tried to show how the anti-nuclear movement in Japan might impact Australian uranium exports by arguing that, given the dangers of nuclear power, an accident at some point in the future was likely. This might then lead to a nation-wide movement to shut down the industry. Were this to occur, it would bring Australian uranium exports to Japan to a halt. Sibatani was gratified when this specific risk was mentioned in the Fox inquiry’s official report.[39]
Sibatani also provided evidence that Japan’s reactor fleet was performing far below its theoretical capacity, suggesting that safety problems meant reactors were frequently being taken offline for repairs and investigations. Details of the source of these problems, he alleged, had been kept from the public. He also gave examples of other nuclear safety problems in Japan, including the Mutsu nuclear-powered ship, which leaked radiation into the Pacific during its maiden voyage and the lawsuit filed by residents against the Ikata nuclear power plant in Shikoku, whose owner had contracts to purchase Australian uranium. Sibatani questioned the long-term future of Japanese demand for uranium at a time when Australia seemed poised to commence large-scale uranium exports. In an opinion piece in the Canberra Times, academic Geoff George also noted that claims by some Japanese industrialists and government leaders about Japan’s booming nuclear industry were not necessarily in line with reality. Quoting from Japanese newspapers, he claimed that:
a large and growing body of opinion in Japan is questioning the wisdom of proceeding with nuclear-power development. The anti-nuclear movement is already so effective that it has forced severe cuts in Japan’s nuclear-power program. This opposition is likely to grow stronger. It will make any future Japanese market for uranium even more unpredictable than that for beef.[40]
The inquiry process was also significant to Sibatani because it addressed some of the key concerns he had outlined in his critical science work and in Counter-Science: the social responsibility of scientists, the problematic social position of scientific expertise and the appropriate forums for making decisions about controversial scientific and technical problems. He opened his testimony at the Fox commission by introducing his involvement in the Social Responsibility in Science group in Sydney and tried to show the commissioners that the issue of uranium mining could not be divorced from the conflict over the nature of decision-making about scientific and technical problems. He stressed that controversies within the scientific community in Japan had dogged the nuclear industry from its earliest days. Scientific experts represented by the Japan Science Council had hoped to maintain effective domestic control over nuclear power research. On the other hand, industrial interests represented by the National Atomic Energy Research Institute (AERI) favoured the importation of existing technology from the United States. Sibatani explained how this led to a conflict between the safety-conscious Japanese scientists and General Electric engineers, ultimately leading to the replacement of nuclear physicist S. Kikuchi, as chair of the AERI with the former chairman of Mitsubishi Shipbuilding in 1964. “With this”, Sibatani maintained, “the scientific, or more objective, research spirit has been largely displaced from the development of nuclear power generation in Japan”.[41]
Sibatani’s article for the Asahi Journal is structured around these broader critical science concerns. He begins by discussing the publication of a “Statement of Concern by Members of the Australian Scientific Community” in the weekly newspaper National Times in January of that year. This strategic intervention in the debate by 202 scientists coordinated by peak bodies in the anti-uranium movement indicates the depths of support for the movement within the scientific community. It argued that despite early signs of promise, “fission energy cannot fulfil these promises and presents humanity with problems that may well be insoluble”, including nuclear accidents, weapons proliferation, the creation of a plutonium economy vulnerable to accident and terrorism, radioactive waste and nuclear hijacking and blackmail. Based on these concerns, the authors oppose nuclear power in general and call for a government ban on the mining and export of uranium (with the exception of uranium for biomedical uses).
Sibatani notes that this letter was the first action of its kind taken by Australian scientists. He contrasted the public stance adopted by these signatories with what he saw as institutional problems preventing Japanese scientists from taking part in public discussions of scientific problems, and nuclear energy in particular. When Barrett asked Sibatani about the possibility of his facilitating a similar letter from anti-nuclear scientists in Japan, to be published in an Australian newspaper, Sibatani dismissed the idea on the grounds that “in Japan, the Japan Science Council and the Japan Scientists Association have been entangled in opportunism and policy flip-flops and there is an atmosphere where scientists hesitate to even speak of opposition to nuclear power”. He further noted that Japanese scientists have no custom of taking direct action, concluding that this issue had forced him to recognise “the difference in the nature of the opposition movements in Japan and Australia”.[42] Given Sibatani recognised that the open letter on uranium mining was the first action of this kind by Australian scientists, the differences between scientists in the two countries do not seem to have been quite so great. Nevertheless, this line of reasoning suggests that at least on a personal level, his experiences in Australia allowed him to reflect on the situation in Japan. Elsewhere in the 1977 article he makes another, more oblique, reference to the organisational problems of Japanese science. When he discusses his attendance at a meeting of ANZAS, he notes that similar general organisations of scientists exist in the United States and Britain but not in Japan. In Counter-Science, Sibatani argues that scientists have a responsibility to contribute to public discussion of scientific problems.[43]
Given the importance Sibatani ascribes to scientists’ responsibility to act as individuals and as members of scientific institutions, it seems ironic that the during the inquiry and in his writing about it he insisted on speaking from the position not of a research scientist, but of an ordinary citizen. In his Asahi Journal article he notes that he cannot write objectively about the issue because it has forced him to make real decisions affecting his daily life: “I got involved in the movement as a response to the question of what I am to the anti-nuclear movement”.[44] Here he expresses the thinking articulated in Counter-Science, where he criticises the authority of scientific expertise and validates forms of knowledge that arise directly from personal experience. He also states his intention to treat the problem of nuclear power not from the privileged position of an English-speaking Japanese research scientist in Australia but as an issue of relevance to any resident and any worker.
At the Fox Inquiry and in his account of his involvement in the Asahi Journal, Sibatani went to considerable lengths to disclaim any specific expertise in nuclear science. He presented his testimony as that of “an informed layman” or “an interpreter volunteering to inform the inquiry of the course of events in Japan”. He insisted on speaking “as an individual, as a citizen” in public under oath.[45] He finished with a comment that sums up his general attitude to science—it should be lead by the people rather than by scientists. In Counter-Science, Sibatani had criticised the professionalisation of science and its appropriation of institutional power. He argued that science ought not to be the exclusive provenance of professional scientists and questioned notions of scientific objectivity, finding that while science may have served a critical function in its early days vis-a-vis religious elites, it has been professionalised and now serves military, economic, and political power. As Ito notes, “Sibatani interpreted Kuhn’s notion of paradigm and normal science as addressing concern about the self-serving and self-proliferating aspects of scientific communities, which made science detrimental to the well-being of society”.[46] Sibatani wanted a paradigm shift within science that would shift its role in society. His public advocacy over the uranium issue was an attempt to put that idea into practice.
The Fox Inquiry provided Sibatani with a model for thinking through a third stream of concerns within his work on counter-science: public involvement in decision-making about science and technology. Reflecting on the Fox Inquiry some years later in the Japanese intellectual journal Science of Thought, he presented the inquiry’s process as a model for public participation in decision-making about science and technology.[47] As Les Dalton observes, the Fox Inquiry was unique in the history of public inquiries in Australia for its openness to public participation. This was a result both of the provisions of the Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act and the decision of the presiding commissioner Justice Fox. The Act was designed by Whitlam’s Environment Minister Moss Cass in order to strengthen public participation in environmental policy. Cass sought to enshrine in legislation some barrier to the usual government process of setting terms of reference of inquiries such that they will produce a pre-determined outcome. It gave the commissioner wide discretion as to the scope of the inquiry. Fox was sympathetic to the view put by mining opponents that the Inquiry should look beyond the immediate environmental impact of the Ranger mine to the broader global impacts of the nuclear fuel cycle.[48]
Sibatani contrasted this approach with what he saw as the lack of public involvement in decision-making in Japan. He ascribed this to Japan’s immature democracy, in which “public participation has not been firmly institutionalised and all sorts of immature arguments are advanced that assert that efforts to ensure the public participation in social decision-making are inappropriate”. He later expanded on these ideas in a lecture, where he explained how controversies over the format of public hearings on nuclear power plant siting had led many opponents to simply boycott the hearings, allowing proponents and government officials to declare that the public hearing had given its support to siting of the plant.[49] Acknowledging that even where more public involvement is practised, such as in the case of the Ranger Uranium Inquiry, the results are very often ignored, Sibatani insists that public participation is still important. “Giving full opportunity for the expression of democracy may be a much more expensive and slow business”, but “even if the net results appear to be the same in the short run, experiences accumulated on both sides by the parties involved in the confrontation, through the course of democratic debate, could, in the long run, suddenly generate a salutary change in society”. In his view, a lack of serious public consultation in Japanese scientific and technical decision-making robs the public of the opportunity to gain from this experience.[50]
By the time Justice Fox delivered his first report to government in October 1976, the Whitlam government had been dismissed by the Governor-General in an unprecedented use of his prerogative and a new Liberal-Country party coalition government led by Malcolm Fraser was in power. Fox announced that the Commission would issue its findings in two reports. The first would examine objections to the mining and selling of uranium in general terms with a second report to be issued the following year looking specifically at the Ranger proposal. Fox recommended caution in the development of a uranium mining industry but found that the objections to mining and milling were not sufficient as to justify not developing Australia’s uranium resources. Opponents focused on the many notes of caution Fox included in the report. However, the Fraser government and mine proponents saw the report as giving the go-ahead to mining. The media also reported it as having given a “green light” to mining. Japanese government officials monitoring the situation at the Japan External Trade Organisation were concerned. In a 1977 report on mineral mining and exploration in Australia, they expressed disappointment with the Fox inquiry’s first report for its failure to deliver a clear verdict on the question of whether uranium should be mined immediately and noted the divided response to the report in Australia.[51] The government moved quickly to dispel any such concerns on the part of investors. A few days after the release of the first report, Environment Minister Kevin Newman announced that the report “provides a basis for future decisions on the industry”, despite the second report not being due until the following year. He said that the government would honour existing contracts for the purchase of uranium with Japan, the United States and West Germany.[52] It would allow Mary Kathleen Uranium Ltd, in which the government owned a 42 per cent stake through the Australian Atomic Energy Commission along with its partner Conzinc Riotinto Australia, to export uranium from the government’s own stockpile. Queensland Mines and Peko EZ would also be permitted to make deliveries on existing contracts from the government stockpile.[53]
Conclusion
The Fraser government’s decision on uranium mining triggered the next stage in the anti-uranium movement, as activists moved beyond legal arguments to a campaign of direct action. In April 1977, 15,000 people marched against uranium in Melbourne and a further 5,000 in Sydney. In June, demonstrators stormed Sydney’s Glebe Island wharf in protest at the loading of the first shipment of uranium from the Atomic Energy Commission’s stockpile at Lucas Heights.[54] In July, 300 people stormed the wharf at Melbourne when a ship carrying uranium docked to pick up additional cargo, leading to a state-wide stoppage by waterside workers and a resolution by the Victorian branch of the Waterside Workers Federation not to service ships carrying uranium.[55] As the anti-uranium movement grew, it developed local and state-based grassroots activist groups. A national body, the National Uranium Moratorium Campaign, played a loose coordinating role and was supplanted after 1979 by the Movement Against Uranium Mining (MAUM).[56] Importantly, with the major uranium deposits discovered in the early 1970s being located on Aboriginal lands where Traditional Owners had maintained strong ongoing connections to country, the issue of uranium mining became intertwined with the growing struggle for Aboriginal land rights.
For Sibatani, the Fox Inquiry was an exemplary process for allowing public participation in decision making about science and technology. His faith in the Fox Inquiry process seems somewhat naïve, given the report had little impact on the government’s decision to mine uranium. Within the anti-uranium movement, even though it committed considerable resources to fighting the uranium debate within the formal terms of the Fox Inquiry, there was always a recognition of the limitations of such a forum. Even Fox recognised that the commission’s power to determine any final outcome on the question of uranium mining was limited. The inquiry was a manifestation of the growing importance attributed to questions of democratic control over scientific and technological decision making. Dalton, for example, notes British socialist politician Tony Benn’s concern about technological assessments being left to experts outside of democratic control.[57] Fox, too, noted in his First Report that once questions of fact had been aired the ultimate decisions were social and ethical and therefore ought to rest with ‘the ordinary man and not be regarded as the preserve of any group of scientists or experts, however distinguished’.[58] Sibatani, with his prescient concern over these issues having changed the course of his life, stepped into the opportunity that was offered by the Inquiry. While subsequent governments of both stripes have eschewed such radical attempts at public participation in technical decision-making, the fight against uranium mining in Australia gave its participants an education that has informed subsequent movements dealing not only with nuclear issues but with broader questions of environmental justice.
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An earlier version of this chapter was previously published in nos 9–10 of the online newsletter Contesting the Nuclear Age, https://contestingthenuclearage.substack.com/p/a-japanese-scientist-in-australia.
[1] Atsuhiro Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undō: Ōsutoraria kara no hōkoku”, Asahi jānaru (Asahi Journa), February 25, 1975.
Note: Although Sibatani Atuhiro would be rendered as Shibatani Atsuhiro in modern Hepburn romanisation, the author chooses to retain the romanisation Sibatani adopted in his many published articles in English.
[2] Simon Avenell, Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017).
[3] Sibatani Atuhiro, Hankagakuron: hitotsu no chishiki, hitotsu no gakumon o mezashite (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1973), 5.
[4] Margaret Gowing, “Reflections on Atomic Energy History”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 35, no. 3 (March 1979): 51.
[5] Anthony Burke, Uranium (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 25–32.
[6] David Biggins, “Social Responsibility in Science”, Social Alternatives 1, no. 3 (1978): 55.
[7] Hideto Nakajima, “Depoliticization or Americanization of Japanese Science Studies”, Social Epistemology 27, no. 2 (2013): 166–8.
[8] Biggins, “Social Responsibility in Science”, 55–6.
[9] Biggins, “Social Responsibility in Science”, 54.
[10] Midnight Notes Collective, “Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe”, Midnight Notes 1 (1979).
[11] Simon Avenell, “Antinuclear Radicals: Scientific Experts and Antinuclear Activism in Japan”, Science, Technology and Society 21, no. 1 (2016).
[12] Biggins, “Social Responsibility in Science”, 58.
[13] Jim Falk, “The Movement Against Uranium Mining”’, Breaking Out: Memories of Melbourne in the 1970s, ed. Susan Blackburn (Willoughby: Hale and Ironmonger, 2015), 80.
[14] Jim Falk, Global Fission: The Battle Over Nuclear Power (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982).
[15] Interview with Jim Green, June 3, 2019.
[16] Avenell, Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement.
[17] Sibatani, Han-kagakuron: 193.
[18] Sibatani, Han-kagakuron.
[19] Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was translated into Japanese by Nakayama Shigeru (who had studied with Kuhn at Harvard) in 1971, see Kenji Itō, “Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Early Social Studies of Science in Japan”, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 6, no 4 (2012): 549–554; and Hideto Nakajima, “Kuhn’s Structure in Japan”, Social Studies of Science 42, no. 3 (2013): 462–466.
[20] Sibatani, Hankagakuron, 3.
[21] Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undō”, 80–81.
[22] Greg Adamson, Stop Uranium Mining! Australia’s Decade of Protest 1975–85 (Chippendale: Resistance Books, 1999).
[23] Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undo”, 80.
[24] Verity Burgmann, Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 172.
[25] Geoff Evans, “In the midst of the serious stuff there was fun and music: some reflections on the early days of FoEA”, Thirty Years of Creative Resistance, ed. Friends of the Earth Australia (Fitzroy, Victoria: Friends of the Earth, 2004), 13.
[26] Evans, ‘In the midst of the serious stuff there was fun and music’, 13; Roman Orzanski, “Friends of the Earth Adelaide University”, Thirty Years of Creative Resistance, ed. Friends of the Earth Australia, (Fitzroy, Victoria: Friends of the Earth, 2004), 100.
[27] Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undo”, 81.
[28] Avenell, Transnational Japan in the Global Environmental Movement, 112–147.
[29] Masafumi Takubo, “Uraniumu o saikutsu, yushutsu suru na”, Jishu kōza, July 1975, 42–48.
[30] Karin Ruff, “bike ride to canberra”, Chain Reaction, September 1975, 6–7.
[31] Takubo, “Uraniumu o saikutsu, yushutsu suru na”, 42–48.
[32] Marty Branagan, “The Australian Movement against Uranium Mining: Its Rationale and Evolution”, International Journal of Rural Law and Policy, no. 1 (2014): 8–9, http://epress-dev.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/ijrlp/article/view/3852,
[33] Mike Frankel, “bike ride to Canberra”, Chain Reaction 6, (September 1975; Ruff, “bike ride to Canberra”, 6–7.
[34] Takubo, “Uraniumu o saikutsu, yushutsu suru na’”, 48.
[35] “The Pain of Minamata …”, Chain Reaction, Autumn 1976, 14–17.
[36] Neil Barrett, “Some Reflections on Friends of the Earth: 1974–76”, Chain Reaction, September 2015, 17.
[37] Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undo”, 83.
[38] Ranger Environmental Inquiry hearings, Transcripts, Sydney, February 10 to February 11, 1976), National Archives of Australia: A4153/24, 5476–5663.
[39] Sibatani, ‘Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undō’, 83.
[40] Geoff George, “… But do the Japanese want our uranium?”, Canberra Times, April 11, 1977, 2.
[41] Ranger Environmental Inquiry Hearings (transcripts), Sydney, February10–11, 1976, National Archives of Australia: A4153/24, 5476–5663.
[42] Sibatani, “Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undo”, 83.
[43] Sibatani, Hankagakuron, 143–9.
[44] Sibatani, ‘Genpatsu keikaku wa nai keredomo uran yushutsu ni hantai undō’, 80.
[45] Ranger Environmental Inquiry hearings, Transcripts, Sydney, February 10–February 11, 1976, National Archives of Australia: A4153/24, 5476–566.
[46] Ito, “Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Early Social Studies of Science in Japan”, 551.
[47] Atuhiro Sibatani, “Ōsutoraria no uran kōzan kara”, Shisō no kagaku (November 7, 1981): 55–67.
[48] Les Dalton, “The Fox Inquiry: Public Policy Making in Open Forum”, Labour History 90 (May 2006): 137–145.
[49] Atuhiro Sibatani, “Science, morality and the state”, Democracy in Contemporary Japan, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 220.
[50] Sibatani, “Science, morality and the state”, 223.
[51] International Economic and Trade Information Center, Ōsutoraria no kōbutsu, enerugii shigen kaihatsu dōkō, Japan External Trade Organisation, November 1977, 11–12.
[52] “Honour deals”, Canberra Times, November 12, 1976, 1.
[53] “Mary Kathleen Uranium Exports allowed”, Canberra Times, November 12, 1976, 8.
[54] Sydney Morning Herald, 2019.
[55] Falk, ‘The Movement Against Uranium Mining’, 82–4.
[56] Burgmann, Power, profit and protest, 172.
[57] Dalton, “The Fox Inquiry”, 152.
[58] Cited in Dalton, “The Fox Inquiry,” 148.
