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It's hard to believe the nuclear debate is back on again. Every few years, it seems to return like a bad penny.
Last week, Environment Minister Peter Garrett copped a real bucketing when he approved a uranium mine in South Australia. In the blogosphere, posts like this one attacked the former environmental activist for selling out.
His cred, people say, is burning. Such is the power and the passion.
Then earlier this week, Federal Resources minister Martin Ferguson welcomed an agreement formalising a uranium mining project in Western Australia. Ferguson wants Australia to consider nuclear energy and has condemned environmentalists for demonising nuclear, gas and coal-fired energy, saying solar and wind energy are not viable on current technology.
He is now at odds with Queensland premier Anna Bligh, who has ruled out uranium mining in her state.
Rio Tinto is urging the Government to start preparing the way for a nuclear regime and for a decision to be made by 2020.
Ziggy Switkowski, who heads the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, says that we could see a whole lot of "safe" mini reactors operating within the next five years. He reckons this would ease community fears about nuclear energy.
He has been followed up the Federal Opposition spokesman on energy and resources, Ian Macfarlane,
telling the ABC that nuclear power is the best way to address climate change.
For her part, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong has ruled out nuclear power, saying the government will focus instead on reducing coal fired power emissions and on renewables.
Three years ago, Al Gore told me that nuclear power was unlikely to play a role in the battle to stop global warming.
"Even if you set aside the problem of long-term waste storage and the danger of operator accident and the vulnerability to terrorist attack, you still have two others that are more difficult," he said. "Nuclear power plants are the costliest to build and they take the longest time and at present they come in only one size - extra large."
And then, he said, there is the problem with nuclear weapons proliferation.
Still, the debate continues, particularly with the Liberals placing nuclear power back on the political agenda.
And with the ALP set to dump a 2007 national conference resolution requiring the Rudd government to renounce its power to impose a nuclear waste dump on the Northern Territory, nuclear energy can't be ruled out completely.
What’s your take on the debate? Why does this keeping coming up? And do you think nuclear will solve the climate crisis? What should we do to resolve the problem?
Comments
It would be hard to imagine a sequence of nuclear accidents that could bring down human civilization. But it wouldn't be so hard to envision the collapse of human civilization as the result of an atmosphere loaded with CO2 to the tune of 1,000 PPM.
There's enough physical evidence left by events like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum to tell us that doubling or tripling today's CO2 levels would be far worse for human civilization than any possible combination of nuclear reactor accidents.
Perhaps if we had gotten ahead of the curve on this CO2 problem two or three decades ago, we might not have had to play the nuclear card. But given the situation we find ourselves in now, I don't see any alternative to nuclear power as a part of solution to the atmospheric CO2-loading problem. I'm not about to dismiss solar/wind/other-renewable -- but at this point, I don't think that renewable energy sources alone will get us out of our current jam.
We need to work on developing "next-generation" fast-reactor technology for future decades while we aggressively exploit wind/solar/etc now -- the bottom line is, we have to minimize future atmospheric CO2-loading, and we need to play every card that we have. And that includes that nuclear card.
Every time I read those Gore quotes I am more amazed at how despicable they were. Shall we "set aside the problem of long-term waste storage"? Shall we set aside the problem of small children's disappearances in the neighbourhoods Gore has lived in? Small children really do sometimes disappear, and always at a finite distance from Gore, but no neighbour of a nuclear installation, however close, has ever been harmed by nuclear powerplant waste, and by specifying "long-term" we have specified that it is infinitesimally radioactive compared to what's in the Earth.
(An illustration of infinitesimal-in-comparison: shall we set aside the problem of the long-term storage, in the wreck itself, of the saltshakers that went down with the Titanic, despite the threat they might salt the ocean? If table salt were a new thing, and its purpose had always heretofore been served by something much more expensive, much more lucrative both for government and for a long-established, very rich industry, then loudly setting it aside in order to suggest it exists is the analogous abuse to what Gore did.)
The debate keeps coming back because all honour is on one side, and all money on the other. The conclusion is not in doubt, but darn, it takes a long time to get there. I suppose for "all" I must quickly substitute "most". See chapter 16 -- "It Has All Happened Before" -- in Geoffrey and the late Sir Fred Hoyle's 1980 book, "Commonsense in Nuclear Energy", ISBN 0-7167-1237-7.