Well, I wasted my time reading this article, because it says nothing of substance.

Sylvia.

If Australian's manage to reduce the green house gas production by 50% this equals a reduction of 0.5% of the total of the worlds green house gas output.

I made the observation to my wife only yesterday that her aged parents support nuclear power for Australia only because John Howard thinks it’s a good idea.

While I am politically conservative and have had some admiration for John Howard until recently, I most certainly do not agree with everything he does and says. So, despite the fact that I go for the Coalition as the least bad of a bad bunch, I believe that the Government is under pressure from the nuclear lobby and miners, who see the public panic and bullswool about climate ‘change’ as a way to enrich themselves, and to hell with the consequences. We have cheap coal – which can be cleaned up - and the possibility of our entire electricity needs being supplied from the centre of Australia via solar power.

Comparison with the nuclear generators used by other countries, without our advantages of natural resources, is pure humbug. Add the inflated price we would be paying for electricity – even when prices for coal have been artificially increased to make nuclear power “cheaper”, plus the dangers that we would be idiots to allow people with great wealth in mind for them to gloss over, and the whole idea is idiotic.

John Howard is keen on saying that so-called alternatives can provide only a small percentage of our power needs – never a base supply; so too can nuclear power NOT make a worthwhile difference to CO2 emissions.

This is one lunatic proposal that is just too dangerous to allow the dummies in Canberra to get away with.

Strangely I agree with most of what this article says but not the conclusions. I believe that several key 'wedges' (Scientific American Sep 2006 p.32) won't deliver. Geosequestration for older coal plants is unproven but nuclear is. Therefore nuclear gets a more reliable wedge. Renewables should get more investment dollars under a carbon cap but I bet they will still ask for substantial government handouts on top. If you include electrification of transport it comes down primarily to coal vs nuclear and I'd prefer nuclear even if we have to wait.

The Great and the Good assert a self-contained climate - stable and benign until disturbed by people burning fossil fuels. All we can expect is IPCC's implausible-sounding projection of just more warming in future - WITH NO COLD PERIODS. Then, of course, nuclear will be vital to meeting Australia's energy needs. But if ours is an ever-changing climate with an external (solar/planetary) driver, the future timing of inertial, resonant and electromagnetic influences can be calculated. If we sceptics are right, the next Little Ice Age cold period - doubtless bringing great human misery - will be obvious by 2020. Then, Australia's big reserves of low sulphur coal will be a vital resource for Australia and the world. On the other hand, China has much high-sulphur coal (in Szechuan) which should no longer be be used for power generation, in any case - now that nuclear technology has moved on. I spent time in Tsinghua University's nuclear department (accessing their PRC energy statistics). They are pushing the development of "inherently safe" gas-cooled reactors where the fuel is disseminated in ceramic balls. But if the mainstream is wrong, and ours proves not to be a people-driven climate (the giant 1997/8 El Nino may be the warmest point between the start of the Maunder Minimum in 1650 and the end of the Landscheidt Minimum in 2050), let's forget nuclear power for Australia. Just export uranium to those nations who still need nuclear power. Why not think before we jump?

Good stuff Fosbob. A few more points.

1. "Clean green nuclear" takes no account of the fossil fuel input to make the fuel rods for the reactors, nor the problem of disposing of the waste, and the dismantled power plant at the end of its life. Yes pebble bed reactors, laser enrichment of uranium, may change the equation, but they might create new problems too, and still do not fix the disposal problem.

2. Who is going to insure these 25 new power plants? The Insurance Industry in the US, the UK Lloyds, and the EU won't. The poor old taxpayer will pay again I suspect, just as in the US.

3. As well as helping China with cleaning up its high sulphur coal, we could also focus on the small coal briquettes most urban chinese use to cook and heat their homes with, with horrible urban air quality problems. I read recently the air pollution index in Beijing hit 400 for the first time last week, the top of the scale is 500, where breathing the air presumably will kill you. No signs of the clean up for the Olympics they keep promising.

Richard42