Lurid Green Energy
May 23rd 2007 15:34
When I read the findings of last year's parliamentary investigation into the pros and cons of Australia adopting nuclear power, I did it with the sensible skepticism of anyone who has lived under 11 years of the Howard government. John Howard had previously advanced the notion of nuclear power and met with a tepid response from the Australian public, so he announced an indepth report by a hand-picked panel of experts, led by former Telstra CEO, Ziggy Switkowski.*
Their verdict turned out to be strongly supportive of the nuclear option. I had expected no less from an “impartial” inquest engineered by the Prime Minister. My first reaction was a conditioned reflex to new Howard policies – I concluded that the government was using the prospect of “clean” nuclear energy as a smokescreen, a carrot on a stick to placate the Australian people regarding the global warming crisis. A dark horse solution like nuclear power is familiar enough in concept to sound realistic, but dithering with inquiries and so on could delay the process for as long as the government and the coal-energy industry required. When Kevin Rudd took the reins of the Labor party and went on the attack regarding Howard's apathy on climate change, my conception of the nuclear option as a smokescreen was reinforced. It was flouted as a way of saying, “see, we are doing something about it”. That's what I thought, and as it turns out, if I wasn't exactly wrong then I wasn't 100% right.
The Bush regime's own response to global warming is a “nuclear renaissance”, which proposes exporting nuclear energy worldwide. If the American plan were successful, the entire world would be consuming uranium in the same way it now consumes coal. And Australia has a lot of uranium. In fact, Australia has over 25% of the world's known uranium deposits, by far the most of any single nation. Not coincidentally, the past 4 years have seen the price of uranium jump from about US $15 a pound to roughly US $125 a pound. Connect the dots. We're sitting on a strapping cash cow, just lactating away like a son of a bitch in the desolate reaches of the Outback.
Any democratic country making money is, naturally, an appealing thought. But in this case, the rush to profit from a newly-precious natural resource is masking the reason for the nuclear push in the first place. That reason, that bottom line, is protection of the environment. Not chaining ourselves to bulldozers, or adopting stretches of highway and picking up empty beer cans on a Sunday afternoon. It's about ensuring sustainability for the future life on this planet. One country's fat bankroll will ring awfully hollow against an unlivable planet.
It is undeniable that carbon emissions would be cut drastically by replacing coal with nuclear energy. But that is not the only consideration. In fact, the more we learn about the viability of nuclear energy, the less it seems like a solution to our environmental problems.
The process is literally decades from being made efficient – presumably meaning we would have to endure many years more of coal energy, by which time it will most likely be too late. The most optimistic estimates suggest that if development starts now, nuclear energy will be able to supply a paltry one-third of Australia's energy needs by 2050. And for the development to start now, there would have to be a massive surge of interest among private investors. As of now, even Ziggy Switkowski admits that there is none whatsoever.
The disposal of the nuclear waste byproduct is uncertain at best – all over the world are repositories of nuclear waste locked deep underground in quarantined bunkers, barrels and bulkheads gradually corroding, for lack of a better idea of what to do with it. There is still no safe, indefinite way to store nuclear waste.
And while marked improvements in nuclear power technology safety have been made since the Chernobyl incident, the nightmare possibility of a reactor meltdown still hangs over every plant we build.
(Incidentally, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation since the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on human beings already has the biggest stockpile of atomic warheads in the world.)
Howard's fixation on nuclear energy as a solution to global warming would not seem so absurd if the alternatives had been weighed equally, but they have not. “Hot rock” technology, a science still in the theoretical stage but showing great promise, has been completely dismissed by the Howard government. Currently existing green-energy sources such as windfarms and solar power have been dismissed as inefficient, but the government will not allocate funds into refining the technology to make it viable. The opinions sought by the government have been very selective, to say the least; Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery – one of the world's leading experts on climate change – has repeatedly offered to brief John Howard on the science of global warming in good nonpartisan faith, and has been ignored.
Evidence of global warming has existed since the seventies. The first concrete scientific evidence was presented to the United Nations as a matter of urgency 17 years ago. Now nuclear energy, a science abhorred by environmentalists since its very conception, is being advanced as a solution to a serious global environmental issue. And as more financial incentives emerge in favour of nuclear power, the more it recalls to mind the Iraq war – also a disastrous venture in pursuit of a dangerous and outdated fossil resource. It is high time our government at least examined energy options with the future of the planet in mind instead of the future of the treasury's coffers.
I'd like to close with a suggestion from an environmentalist character in one Kurt Vonnegut book or another. He thought that we should leave a message carved into the side of the Grand Canyon in enormous letters, for any alien races that should stumble upon a dead, blackened and uninhabited Earth at some time far in the future: “WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO CHEAP.”
*On a possibly unrelated note, Federal treasurer Peter Costello publicly backed a multi-million dollar payout for Mr. Switkowski when he was sacked from his position at Telstra.
Their verdict turned out to be strongly supportive of the nuclear option. I had expected no less from an “impartial” inquest engineered by the Prime Minister. My first reaction was a conditioned reflex to new Howard policies – I concluded that the government was using the prospect of “clean” nuclear energy as a smokescreen, a carrot on a stick to placate the Australian people regarding the global warming crisis. A dark horse solution like nuclear power is familiar enough in concept to sound realistic, but dithering with inquiries and so on could delay the process for as long as the government and the coal-energy industry required. When Kevin Rudd took the reins of the Labor party and went on the attack regarding Howard's apathy on climate change, my conception of the nuclear option as a smokescreen was reinforced. It was flouted as a way of saying, “see, we are doing something about it”. That's what I thought, and as it turns out, if I wasn't exactly wrong then I wasn't 100% right.
The Bush regime's own response to global warming is a “nuclear renaissance”, which proposes exporting nuclear energy worldwide. If the American plan were successful, the entire world would be consuming uranium in the same way it now consumes coal. And Australia has a lot of uranium. In fact, Australia has over 25% of the world's known uranium deposits, by far the most of any single nation. Not coincidentally, the past 4 years have seen the price of uranium jump from about US $15 a pound to roughly US $125 a pound. Connect the dots. We're sitting on a strapping cash cow, just lactating away like a son of a bitch in the desolate reaches of the Outback.
Any democratic country making money is, naturally, an appealing thought. But in this case, the rush to profit from a newly-precious natural resource is masking the reason for the nuclear push in the first place. That reason, that bottom line, is protection of the environment. Not chaining ourselves to bulldozers, or adopting stretches of highway and picking up empty beer cans on a Sunday afternoon. It's about ensuring sustainability for the future life on this planet. One country's fat bankroll will ring awfully hollow against an unlivable planet.
It is undeniable that carbon emissions would be cut drastically by replacing coal with nuclear energy. But that is not the only consideration. In fact, the more we learn about the viability of nuclear energy, the less it seems like a solution to our environmental problems.
The process is literally decades from being made efficient – presumably meaning we would have to endure many years more of coal energy, by which time it will most likely be too late. The most optimistic estimates suggest that if development starts now, nuclear energy will be able to supply a paltry one-third of Australia's energy needs by 2050. And for the development to start now, there would have to be a massive surge of interest among private investors. As of now, even Ziggy Switkowski admits that there is none whatsoever.
The disposal of the nuclear waste byproduct is uncertain at best – all over the world are repositories of nuclear waste locked deep underground in quarantined bunkers, barrels and bulkheads gradually corroding, for lack of a better idea of what to do with it. There is still no safe, indefinite way to store nuclear waste.
And while marked improvements in nuclear power technology safety have been made since the Chernobyl incident, the nightmare possibility of a reactor meltdown still hangs over every plant we build.
(Incidentally, I'm not overly concerned about the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation since the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on human beings already has the biggest stockpile of atomic warheads in the world.)
Howard's fixation on nuclear energy as a solution to global warming would not seem so absurd if the alternatives had been weighed equally, but they have not. “Hot rock” technology, a science still in the theoretical stage but showing great promise, has been completely dismissed by the Howard government. Currently existing green-energy sources such as windfarms and solar power have been dismissed as inefficient, but the government will not allocate funds into refining the technology to make it viable. The opinions sought by the government have been very selective, to say the least; Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery – one of the world's leading experts on climate change – has repeatedly offered to brief John Howard on the science of global warming in good nonpartisan faith, and has been ignored.
Evidence of global warming has existed since the seventies. The first concrete scientific evidence was presented to the United Nations as a matter of urgency 17 years ago. Now nuclear energy, a science abhorred by environmentalists since its very conception, is being advanced as a solution to a serious global environmental issue. And as more financial incentives emerge in favour of nuclear power, the more it recalls to mind the Iraq war – also a disastrous venture in pursuit of a dangerous and outdated fossil resource. It is high time our government at least examined energy options with the future of the planet in mind instead of the future of the treasury's coffers.
I'd like to close with a suggestion from an environmentalist character in one Kurt Vonnegut book or another. He thought that we should leave a message carved into the side of the Grand Canyon in enormous letters, for any alien races that should stumble upon a dead, blackened and uninhabited Earth at some time far in the future: “WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO CHEAP.”
*On a possibly unrelated note, Federal treasurer Peter Costello publicly backed a multi-million dollar payout for Mr. Switkowski when he was sacked from his position at Telstra.
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