Guy,

The New York Academy of Sciences did not produce any document on the results of Chernobyl, they simply bought the publishing rights of a book produced by an independent group of Russian researchers.

So do you believe WHO with hundreds of accredited scientists with decades of accumulated information, or a small group of researchers with little to no resources and a political axe to grind?

As for all the renewable power supplies, they all have one major fault, and that is simply that they cannot be relied upon to generate power when needed. The cost of power storage doubles or triples their cost.

@ Michael:

Then it's just as well that the Americans and others such as ourselves have recently discovered that absolutely huge and previously unsuspected reserves of natural gas lay beneath our feet. It was all going to be slated for electricity peaking and shadowing of intermitent solar and wind, but given the immenant Peak Oil crisis, it will no doubt be diverted to be used as fuel for heavy vehicular operation. Given how vast these reserves are said to be by the renewables enthusiasts, they'll doubtless be sufficient to see us through to the full rollout of the nuclear economy.

simple thoughts - we could all use less electricity. and we could populate less.

the amount of power we waste is hard to believe.

Hi Craig. Rather than using boundless descriptors such as "absolutely huge" try putting some numbers behind your comments. This link will interest you on shale gas:

http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/shale_gas

and you will find the following text there:

"Shale gas plays in the United States are commercial failures and shareholders in public exploration and production (E&P) companies are the losers. This conclusion falls out of a detailed evaluation of shale-dominated company financial statements and individual well decline curve analyses. Operators have maintained the illusion of success through production and reserve growth subsidized by debt with a corresponding destruction of shareholder equity. Many believe that the high initial rates and cumulative production of shale plays prove their success. What they miss is that production decline rates are so high that, without continuous drilling, overall production would plummet. There is no doubt that the shale gas resource is very large. The concern is that much of it is non-commercial even at price levels that are considerably higher than they are today."

Michael, my comment on natgas was a toungue-in-cheeck swipe at the propaganda coming out of the natgas industry which is currently trying to convince everyone in the US that natgas is so cheap and plentiful that nuclear power can be sidelined.

But frankly, my point stands that there are sufficient fossil fuel reserves, be they natgas or coal-to-liquid, that there isn't going to be a short-term energy crisis so devestating that we will be unable to support the construction of nuclear plants.

Hi Craig,

That would be the most common opinion among economists but with developers currently unable to get finance even to build multistorey apartments and with the economic situation not set to improve in coming years (due to US and European indebtedness and Chinese and Indian growth pushing up oil prices plus the world economic instability brought on by growing food insecurity in the rest of the developing world etc.) and with oil decline set to accelerate soon, the idea that there will be financing - private or public - for nuclear projects in Australia seems (to me) farfetched.

The "rules" of the world economic game have been written during 100 years of overall energy growth and they just will not work under a regime of steady energy availability contraction.