Wow it's all bad from start to finish. No mention of jobs and royalties or emissions savings when the uranium displaces coal. I wonder if coal mining ever affects subterranean fauna or farming or water supply. As for the yellowcake price let others worry about that, noting that China will have a huge demand for imported uranium by mid century.

What I don't understand about the indigenous lifestyle is how some of it is in 21st century and some of it isn't. If communities reject mining how come they don't reject cars, electronics and supermarket food? Then there's the urban non-indigenous community like FoE. How come articles like this come from the city not the outback?

Thankyou Mara Bonacci

What you describe is a blessing. Lew Uranium prices usually mean fewer reactor projects are beginning and/or fewer reactors are running.

Nuclear reactor advocates are often engineers who would personally benefit if Australia were to slip into nuclear industry failure.

Major nuclear reactor disasters (even if they are one per twenty years) cause reactor closures and disruption. Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011), Chernobyl disaster (1986), Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

As of 2014, there have been more than 100 serious nuclear accidents and incidents from the use of nuclear power. Fifty-seven accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and about 60% of all nuclear-related accidents have occurred in the USA.

This is for reactors that cost $Billions in taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks to build.

Decommissioning of reactors - never advertised when reactors are being planned - also costs $Billions in public money.

But engineers get paid for nuclear successes and are paid for failures and decommissionings.

More see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents

Pete
Submarine Matters

I wonder if the, so called original owners had to support themselves soley from their own industry or royalties, would they side so frequently with so called friends of the earth?

Who wax loud and lyrical about the dangers of no longer relevant, fifty year old technology?

While I have every respect for stone age primitive customs and belief! It ought not be allowed or used to mischievously or vexatiously postpone the future; or even the present! Nor the highly flawed ideology of the anti mining anti development movement!

This is the just the sort of errant nonsense that will ensure the Adani mine in Queensland goes ahead.

And with all due respect to the friends of the earth, it's carbon threatening us with an extinction event! whereas, there's already enough nukes to destroy the world 40 times over? Even if that were increased to a hundred times over and some nut job pressed a button somewhere? We'd be just as dead whether this and a dozen other mines went ahead!

Besides we need this stuff mined and used in peaceful reactors, then reused and reused again the only guaranteed way to actually prevent the uranium becoming nuclear bombs!

And modern technology such as pebble reactors would make them safer and almost incapable of reaching a melt down? And trucked onsite as factory built modules, decommissioning is far easier and less expensive?

I mean the modules can simply be lifted and placed in cast iron caskets and buried as is, fifty or a hundred years down the track?

Moreover truckable modules could replace the carbon producing diesel engines in shipping that's adding exponentially to the Co2 in the atmosphere, already in uncharted territory!

And that's why I'd prevent this mine for now, so we could save and then use this material ourselves in the future in our own national nuclear powered shipping fleet. And the sort of pragmatic future planning that would give us a foreseeable future.

Rather than selling it and our economic sovereignty, to anyone with a fistfull of dollars?
Alan B.

Yes we all know new technology doesn't break down. Just ask the Census people.

Terrorism against nuclear reactors might be structured to defeat new style reactor safety measures. The more (even new and miniature) reactors the greater the risk.

Turning a reactor into a radioactive fragment spreader http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiological_weapon cannot be dismissed - even by blokes who make money out of nuclear "benefits".

My grandfather rejected technology in favor of the old methane creating hay burner, claiming the old horse and cart was more reliable than the old model T that regularly passed us leaving us choking in their dust.

One day the horse got sick and had to be put down. We replaced it with a young frisky colt that wouldn't move over to let the model T go on by on our way to a regular livestock market. Much to the secret amusement of Granddad.

An uncle married well and arrived one market day with a Rolls Royce Phantom and offered us a ride. Granddad reluctantly climbed in and within minutes we were eating Mr T's dust.

Not for long, with a few pumps of nitrous oxide, we pulled out and passed him as if he were standing still. Granddad's eyes were like saucers!

We arrived well ahead of other folk and sussed out the best buys, which included a young jersey milker we bid on and bought while Mr T, who was there to expressly to bid on it, was looking for a dry parking spot.

THe old Phantom traveled around the globe without missing a beat until one day broke an axle in the Egyptian desert.

The story goes, Uncle George wired Rolls Royce for parts, which arrived around three months later on the next packet.

Months went by with no bill. Eventually uncle George enquired about the replacement axle? To which the factory replied that he had to be mistaken, their cars didn't break axles!

Granddad who had a few lessons in the roller bought a barely run in ex embassy Austin princess at auction, given it had a rolls Royce engine. Eventually even the diehards have to accept superior technology!

There has to be a way, perhaps with fibre to the home, to isolate our domestic communications system from idiotic international interference?

Even so it's not the fault of the technology if essential funding is cut and cut!
Alan B.

A touching tale Alan.

Regards

Pete
Submarine Matters
http://gentleseas.blogspot.com.au/