Its alot easier to be critical of the leadership's decisions than it is to have to make them yourself. I suggest that, rather than deliberate promise-breaking policy changes, Ferguson and the Rudd goverment are simply having to deal with the problem at hand, rather than be critical of the solution without having to offer an alternate.

I wonder why an "acknowlegement" from the Indigenous Affairs minister that we "dont need" nuclear reactors is worth quoting. Clearly as the minister for the health and welfare of the land's native peoples she knows all about energy policy. Or not.

Perhaps your essay should have been titled "Irrational environmentalists do not support nuclear power: why James Lovelock and Patrick Moore have been excommunicated from the Church of Gaia".

When the big bucks start flowing I think owners/managers of potential sites will be forming a queue. Even 25% of the land in the UK is thought to have potential sites with Copeland in Cumbria I believe to be the location of a high level repository. Personally I like the Woomera area site since there is an 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' kind of symmetry about returning material to a uranium mining region. Of course some of that material may be ex-Soviet warhead but that is possibly also true of old smoke alarms thrown on suburban tips. If low and high level waste are at the same site security and possible retrieval can be done together saving costs. Apart from rent and fees to landowners the employees are likely to earn very high wages. A good job for former coal miners with far fewer risks.

Nuclear power? Moot point.

"A new clear direction: Securing nuclear medicine for the next generation." Report from The Medical Association for the Prevention of War.

This 2004 MAPW study concluded that the new nuclear reactor then planned (and since built) at Lucas Heights in Sydney was not needed for medical purposes.

It describes the argument that the reactor was needed for nuclear medicine as a "myth", arguing that medical radioisotopes can be imported, produced in some cases without a reactor, or that other diagnostic procedures can be used.
http://www.mapw.org.au/download/new-clear-direction

With apologises to Professor Nick Haslam in a previous article. It is clear that Dr. Jim Green and his fellow lefties (including a large contingent of ALP members) are suffering from the well known psychiatric state called “chronic radio phobia.”

Radio-phobia meets the five criteria as set by Haslam:

1 Radio-phobia is an irrational and excessive fear.

2 Fear is clearly at the root of radio-phobia. True it may provoke anger. Consider the opposition to the transport of radioactive waste. This is clearly based on fear, because the same individuals do not campaign against the transport of even more hazardous goods. A flask containing spent reactor fuel obviously does not have the destructive and explosive potential of petrol tankers - which daily are to be found in busy domestic areas.

3 Fear of radiation can and does in many minds, give rise to irrational anxiety.

4 One really has no need to recruit the stigma of mental illness to diminish the anti-nuclear people. They successfully do this for themselves. One has only to briefly refer to their literature.

5. I am well aware that the anti-nuclear activists are capable of dressing their phobia up in the garments of morality and ethics. As if ethical theory can disguise fear and irrationality.

I note that "anti-green" falls back on the old arguments that anti-nuclear people are "irrational, and have a phobia".

It's a phobia that is shared by many - for one example, Barack Obama. The soon-to-be President of the USA is reported as favouring nuclear power. However, it should be noted that on every occasion when Obama has spoken about this, he has pointed out that the future of nuclear power depends a safe method of disposal of nuclear wastes being found.

It is a sad reality that wherever nuclear wastes are at present dumped, or planned to be dumped, the site is always where the local population is least powerful and least informed.

That is the origin of the USA's planned Yucca Mountain dump - now opposed by a better informed and more politically powerful local community.

European nuclear wastes continue to be dumped in the ocean, and on to impoverished Third World countries, where a relative pittance is paid to the local state.

If the aboriginal populations do succumb to the pressure to have
nuclear wastes dumped on their land - it's a very sad reality that the bribe money might merely lift their living standards and services to the level already expected by the rest of the Australian population.

There is a wealth of information and evidence on the health and environmental hazards of radioactive waste - not to mention the obvious risks of accident or terrorist attacks, involved in the transport of these wastes.
Christina Macpherson www.antinuclear.net

Both Jai and anti-green,(whoever they are) should, when involved in discussions of this type, try and focus on presenting some sort of valid argument to back there positions. I know it maybe hard for them to find any, when there position is so tenuous, but please try.