Comments

You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

Down Under

PM signals support for nuclear power industry Down Under

2006-10-16

PRIME Minister John Howard has given his strongest support yet to the use of nuclear power in Australia, backing the local development of the "clean" energy industry.

An expert taskforce is due to release a draft report next month on the merits of nuclear power and whether Australia should be thinking of value-adding options, such as enrichment, for its vast uranium stores.

But before the experts have even had their say, Mr Howard has indicated he believes nuclear power is an industry Australia should be developing. Mr Howard has previously suggested nuclear power was something Australia should consider if economically viable. "I'm in favour of Australia developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes," he told the Nine Network. "It's clean and green and, in an age where we're worried about global warming, we should be looking seriously at nuclear power as an option because it's clean and it doesn't emit greenhouse gases.

"I can't understand why the extreme greenies oppose it."

Mr Howard's one-time adversary, former prime minister Paul Keating, sees the issue completely differently. "Nuclear energy is a bad fuel, a dirty fuel, a dangerous fuel," he told Sky News. "Nuclear is a no-no generally in my opinion - it is a bad business."

Instead Mr Keating would prefer to focus on alternative strategies to reduce Australia's reliance on fossil fuels, options such as hybrid cars and hydrogen fuel cells.

Labor has pledged there will be no nuclear power if it wins Government, but it does plan to re-examine its policy of no new uranium mines at its national conference next year. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley wants the policy changed but faces a difficult job convincing some sections of Labor that it is the way to go.

Mr Keating thinks a change in the Labor policy would be a mistake. "I think I would stay with the existing policy," he said. "This is not a good industry to encourage, and anyone that has an electricity program, ipso-facto ends up with a nuclear weapons capability."

Posted by:Oztralian

#3 Gday SpecOp!

I too want freedom from buying oil off of people who are trying to kill us and strangle our culture.

It's a problem! I'm just not so sure that nuclear power is the solution. Maybe there isn't one solution perhaps each country or each region must find their own?

Brazil runs their cars on ethanol: it works for them with their massive sugar industry

New Zealand runs on hydro and geothermal: they can, they have massive waterfalls and volcanoes.

Australia can do a bit of lots of things: we have ethanol burning generator in Queensland, hydro in Snowy Mountains, solar out in the desert, wind farms in Victoria.

I think we need a reactor so we can have nukes which we need as insurance against indonesia (which we don't actually need because hopefully our defence treaty with the US can keep them in check for the moment)

I understand that new technology makes new generation reactors safer than the old ones, but what bothers me is the people running them.

No problem trusting reactor in a developed nation like the US or UK... it's when they start sprouting in places like indonesia on the edge of a volcano (serious they wanted 7 reactors, one on the edge of volcano), or vietnam or places which have a social system raddled with corruption and a shortage of skills.

The plant might be fine it's the idiots running it I worry about. Flicking wrong switches, not checking parts, not replacing old pipes... and then there's the temptation to sell off spent fuel rods to bin Laden.

Terror states like Iran and NorK can legitimately argue on the world stage they want the plant for power. And developed nations stand on a weakened position saying: we can have them but you can't. So they get the power reactor. Voila they have nukes. It's bad for proliferation.

I appreciate coal-fired plants produce pollution, and by volume more than Nuke reactors but it's the intense and long-lived nature of that N-pollution, and the cost of getting rid of it that makes me want to avoid nuke plants.

At the end of a reactor's life the whole thing: pipes, topsoil, lightbulbs everything becomes radioactive and needs to be "decommissioned".

But the thing that bothers me is the highly radioactive waste stays hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. Our human civilisation including all recorded history from the pharoahs on is barely a few thousand years old.

Certainly in three thousand years - and probably as little as 100 years - society as we know it won't exist: but we don't know what will.

Most think that is too far ahead to care, but deep time will affect our children's descendants.

They may be hitting each other with rocks and sticks for all we know.

But these worries aside (after all they are philosophical rather than practical) mostly it is the cost of set-up, security and dismantling that makes them not the best option in my idea.

But I thank you for a very reasonable and informative reply!

Posted by: anon1 2006-10-16 19:58

#2 Anon 1, I appreciate your positions, but we need nuclear power badly. This is really the only viable alternative which can efficiently produce enough power to allow complete freedom from the oil shiekhs and other wackoffs like Chavez. New design pebble bed reactors are really fail safe, and can operate at higher internal temperatures which would allow a more optimal path to hydrogen production from water. If fuel is reprocessed, which we used to do until Jimmah started meddling, we could burn that fuel in a second cycle in breeder reactors and attain a yield of about 90% potential. This gives us much more fuel and eliminates much of the long term storage issues, though not all. If nuclear is held back, the result is many more...about 40 immediately...new coal fired generation plants. This actually produces much more environmental pollution than the latest design nuke plants. Nothing is cheaper over the life cycle of generation facilities then nuclear. Proven and documented over the past 40 years.

Posted by: SpecOp35 2006-10-16 14:23

#1 I oppose it. The hidden costs make nuclear economically non-viable - hence it has stalled in the last couple of decades. No new reactors built for ages, until this latest push.

Plus nuclear power makes it easier for rogue states to get nuclear weapons. We want a reactor for power. 1 year later: we have a nuclear weapon.

Worse: nuclear accidents in third world countries who have poor safety skills but who have demanded reactors, anybody remember Chernobyl? The fallout crosses borders.

This is the trick behind the whole greenhouse scare, it's being used as a PR piece by the nuke industry.

Average volcanic eruption puts more carbon in atmosphere than humans do. Global warming here to stay: change is inevitable, we should just deal with it by building dams and breakwaters and saving money for species rehabilitation and habitat conservation: not throwing it at nuclear reactors.

Posted by: anon1 2006-10-16 10:15

00:00