NUCLEAR UNDER TONES? PT 2

From last week's post...


...the taxpayer will have to foot at least part of the bill for this enormously expensive scheme which would place nuclear reactors up and down our coastline, sites which would become prime and very dangerous terrorist targets, and which would generate waste which would remain highly toxic for thousands of years, and which we would dump in a big hole in the ground on or near tribal Aboriginal lands, and pollute the last water we could rely upon in the droughts to come. And that is not to mention the danger of increased nuclear proliferation.

So all in all, it’s obviously a very attractive idea, this “clean and green” nuclear energy. 

Now read on...

Then why would any political party ever consider a scheme that is so vexed, and that no-one wants? The reason Liberals are again pushing it, as part of their brawl-crafted non-response to the global warming many of them don’t believe humans are causing anyway, is the profit would stay in the hands of those would build and operate the plants. It is a big money-led, centralised, top-controlled model, with the bonus of lots of space age decontamination suits, white coats and clipboards.

The billions spent to create an Australian nuclear nightmare could so readily fund an effective, safe national solar power scheme.

Solar offers the opposite solution to nuclear: the potential for individuals to meet their own electricity needs through the power they generate off their roof. Decentralised and localised, it also provides employment to a wide range of small industries and businesses. 

Critics of the solar option say it cannot provide the holy grail of 24/7 baseload power. 

But according to the CSIRO, solar technology could supply all of Australia’s electricity needs by 2020, using an aggregate of only fifty by fifty kilometres of otherwise arid land. 

Its solar/gas prototype uses solar energy focussed from mirrors to energise natural gas, embodying the captured solar power into the gas so that there is a 25 percent increase in energy yield. This means both a 25 percent reduction in Greenhouse Gas emissions, and an extension of the life of Australia’s gas reserves by a similar amount. 

The “solar-embodied” gas could be piped to cities for baseload power generation, and exported in liquid form too, to resource-poor countries such as Japan and Korea.

Such a technology could also be part of a set of solar options that could obviate the nuclear option. 

Australia is now dotted with homes whose owners took advantage of the Federal Government’s solar rebate scheme, which allowed them to install a 1 kilowatt system on their rooves for as little as $1200 after the $8000 rebate. Mine is one of them.

One thousand houses doing the same thing could generate a megawatt. As there are literally millions of homes, apartment blocks, commercial, industrial and other structures in Australia, it’s not difficult to see how far we could go as a nation towards meeting our collective power needs, from our own rooftops. 

We also have open areas around many of our cities and towns suitable for siting large arrays of solar cells for solar power stations. Thus we could use a combination of solar arrays on rooftops throughout the nation, as well as solar power stations attached to cities and towns, to generate power for the grid by day - and switch back to fossil fuel generation at night, or in cloudy conditions. 

Such a measure would provide a significant reduction in Greenhouse emissions, while buying time for other alternatives such as wind and tidal power, and “clean coal” - should that ever eventuate - to kick in significantly. The imminent wave of hybrid and electric vehicles could be re-charged from solar generation too, reducing transport emissions.

Such a scheme would require a huge national investment, but it would be a once-off. Installed, the solar network would require minimal maintenance, as opposed to the safe disposal for many generations to come of deadly nuclear waste. 

But still the nuclear lobby is present and it is vocal. And make no mistake, it is not confined to the Liberal Party. Uranium has tainted the very heart of the Labor Party, which has the hide and hypocrisy to flog it off to distant nations while seeing it as too dangerous for our own use. The Liberal push for nuclear power has possibly less hypocrisy, but poses an even greater peril for Australians. One can only hope Tony Abbott can resist the temptations of that shiny, ugly Lucifer, nuclear power. 

NUCLEAR UNDER TONES?

The day he defeated Malcolm Turnbull for the Federal Liberal leadership at the end of last year, Tony Abbott came out strongly for a debate on nuclear power for Australia.

In the following days he backslid, admitting it would be a long way off - and too far in the future to be part of any immediate response to human-caused global warming (not that he believes in it anyway). Besides the time lag to get nuclear power stations into service - usually estimated at around two decades - the other difficulty for the Nuclear Liberals is that Australians don’t want them, and certainly nowhere near where they live. 

Recently there have been numerous articles in the press putting the nuclear case, as part of an obvious attempt to get the nuclear push going again, as it was in the dying days of the Howard government.

Notable among these was a piece late last year (The Australian, 18 December 2009) by Ziggy Switkowski, the former Telstra boss who chaired the Howard Government’s review of uranium mining, processing and nuclear power in 2006.

Titled “A clean and green way to fuel the nation”, Dr Switkowski’s piece addresses a range of concerns of Australians about nuclear power.

In it he first addresses toxic waste, stating “A reactor providing electricity for one million people produces a volume of radioactive waste roughly the size of a family car a year. This is judged to be a small amount.” 

He does not tell us how toxic that family car of waste is, and what risks it would pose to people if they ever came into contact with it. Nor does he mention that radioactive materials in this waste take an extremely long time to break down, and would remain very toxic for literally thousands of years.

Dr Switkowski continues: “Eventually spent fuel is transported to a national repository, a well-engineered deep hole in the ground, probably in central Australia.” 

Here we have the price for nuclear power - turning an area of central Australia into a “deep hole in the ground” for highly toxic waste. 

Northern Territory lands are already under threat from Rudd Government plans to bury tonnes of radioactive waste accumulated over decades - but that would be nothing compared to the waste that would accrue from a commercial nuclear power programme.

One can only wonder how most people in indigenous communities would feel about yet another dose of radioactivity, another Maralinga on their tribal lands, courtesy white Australia. 

And what would Dr Switkowski have to say if and when toxic waste escapes and poisons the land and mutates generations of Aboriginal children? That’s right: Sorry.

Central Australia is not a blank, there for the grabbing and polluting. It is a part of our continent, precious to us all, but especially so to the peoples who have lived there for tens of thousands of years. If there is nothing whatever to fear from nuclear waste, perhaps Dr Switkowski should drill his big hole where the nuclear shareholders will be, in Paddington, or Toorak. Those living there need have nothing to fear, as the hole will be very well engineered, to world’s best practice.

A major omission in Dr Switkowski’s comments concerns what effects over thousands of years that leaking and leeching radioactive waste might have upon Australia’s precious subterranean aquifers. For a nation as reliant as we are on underground water, that represents a massive gamble to say the very least.

He next addresses the probable location of any nuclear power plants for Australia, noting “use of sea water [for cooling] is a practical option so reactors are frequently sited along a coast.”

Where would they be then, on our beautiful coast? Manly? Byron Bay? Portsea? No, they would go where industry has already left its mark - Port Kembla and Geelong, for instance. One can only imagine how the communities of Wollongong and Geelong would greet the nuclear spruikers coming to town with their Homer Simpson job offers: “Get a life - and a half-life too!”.

But Dr Switkowski is determined to meet community concerns about reactor placement head-on. 

“’Reactors in your back yard’ is an easy scare campaign but it's silly and insults the community's intelligence,” he said.

It’s also easy to dismiss legitimate concerns of communities with high-handed, patronising comments. As a wealthy former CEO, he is unlikely ever to have to have to expose himself and loved ones to the risk of living near a nuclear power plant. 

Communities have every right to weigh the costs and benefits, and potential risks to their families, of any planned development in their area, be it residential or industrial, a prison, a nuclear dump, or a nuclear power plant.

If Dr Switkowski has clear ideas of where such plants would go, as he seems to, let him publish them now. After all, if he thinks “scare campaigns” are merely silly, then he should be confident his profound common sense will prevail.

Dr Switkowski also considers the risks to any potential plant from terrorism, stating: “Nearly half of the capital cost of a reactor is spent on safety and security systems that are expected never to be stressed. A dirty bomb has yet to be activated. Terrorism is a serious issue but civilian nuclear establishments are very difficult targets with no known penetration.”

His difficulty here is that a single “penetration” would be enough to cause truly catastrophic consequences. Nuclear power stations would be prime terrorist targets, and with Australia having been a frontline participant in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as recent terror cases have shown there are zealot nuts aplenty who wouldn’t blink about killing us in their pursuit of their own lofty goals or lack thereof. 

It’s one thing to shoot people or blow up a bridge, but another entirely to fly a light plane packed with explosives just a little way off course, and into a nuclear reactor. Does he propose to equip nuclear plants with anti-aircraft batteries, or to have the RAAF patrolling all of them 24 hours a day? We must remember too that the even the US Air Force failed to scramble fighters quickly enough against the September 11 hijackers to intercept them. So much for the security systems he expects “never to be stressed”.

Dr Switkowski also considers the cost of nuclear power, admitting: “Nuclear energy has the highest capital cost, up to $4 billion to 6bn for our first 1000MWe reactor”, but assures us that after that there would be “low running costs largely independent of the cost of uranium itself”. He does not say what the second, third, fourth and so on reactors would cost, but admits: “We must have bipartisan support for nuclear energy and a robust world-class regulatory system. No commercial enterprise will accept the financial risk otherwise.”

For “support”, read “subsidy”. In other words, the taxpayer will have to foot at least part of the bill for this enormously expensive scheme which would place nuclear reactors up and down our coastline, sites which would become prime and very dangerous terrorist targets, and which would generate waste which would remain highly toxic for thousands of years, and which we would dump in a big hole in the ground on or near tribal Aboriginal lands, and pollute the last water we could rely upon in the droughts to come. And that is not to mention the danger of increased nuclear proliferation.

So all in all, it’s obviously a very attractive idea, this “clean and green” nuclear energy.

- Larry Buttrose

Part Two of this article will be posted next week, examining the solar alternative to nuclear.