Not right there SHRODE. Germany now has a completely schizophrenic power industry.

They went all renewable & nuclear to reduce CO2 emissions, silly children.

They have discovered renewables are not working, & are killing their industry. Their ratbag greenies used Fukushima to force them to shut down their nuclear, so what do they do.

Yep they build a dozen, & now more, coal fired power stations, running on, wait for it, brown coal.

When the wind blows they have to give most of their wind power to Sweden to pump water up hill, because their grid can't handle it.

When it doesn't blow they have to buy hydro power from Sweden, some of it generated with the water their wind power pumped up hill.

You can easily see the hand of greenies in this wonderfully planned power system, can't you?

God help them, the Poms are almost as bad, & if we let a Green controlled Labor lot back in here, we will go the same way.

Sadly Dr Caldicott you are living in the distant past. The use of nuclear technology is very well understood these days and modern nuclear power technology is very advanced and safe. In fact if eventually the use of fossil fuels is significantly reduced across the planet, nuclear fission and eventually nuclear fusion, will be the mainstay of the massive power grids needed to maintain the majority of the world's major population areas.

Here is some excellent education for Helen Caldicott and all those who trust her integrity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6aL3wv4v0&feature=youtu.be

The video is newly released, by an authoritative source who is and not politically motivated and not associated with nor gets anything from any industry. Many people will take the time to watch a video but not read an article. So I think this video is a way to get some people to gain some appreciation of how badly they've been misled by the fear-mongering about radiation and nuclear power. I'd also encourage people to forward it.

My interest is in rational energy policy and the economics of the various alternatives, including nuclear power. I believe the irrational impediments we've imposed on nuclear power over the past 50 years or so are somewhat akin to regulating that every motorcar must have a man walk in front waving a red flag to warn horses of its approach. Wade Allison says unjustified safety regulations have increased the cost of nuclear energy by a factor of 2. Professor Bernard Cohen says regulatory ratcheting raised the cost of nuclear by a factor of 4 up to 1990. I suspect it has raised it another factor of 2 since then. Whereas the learning rates (cost reduction rates per doubling of capacity or energy output) are positive for all other electricity generation technologies, the learning rate for nuclear is negative. That is clearly not justifiable and is irrational. I suggest it is due almost entirely to the irrational fear of nuclear power.

AUSTRALIA and NUCLEAR POWER and WASTE
Radioactive waste disposal is a huge problem. It is best to store it on the surface even though that also has problems. Everywhere deep underground there is a water problem. Even storing it in a 3,000,000,000 year old granite such as we have in WA is not suitable. Granites have joints and cracks in them and water move through these, as they found in Scandinavia when they tried to store radioactive waste underground. As the waste breaks down over time it heats up and will spread wherever the underground water takes it. This is not reversible.
Use of nuclear power should be postponed until a method of consuming all the radioactive material in power production is found.
We are inflicting many problems on future generations do not let us add to their problems.
Lloyd

LLoyd,

"Radioactive waste disposal is a huge problem."

No it isn't.

It's a negligible problem if considered in proper perspective. The big picture perspective the anti-nuke activists fail to recognise is that if we allowed nuclear power (e.g. remove the irrational, unjustified, impediments we've imposed on it), it could largely substitute for fossil fuel baseload power generation over the decades ahead and doing so would avoid around 1 to 2 million fatalities per year world wide. That's the big picture.

Now to your comments about nuclear waste. It is a relatively trivial technical and cost impact if taken in proper perspective.

1. the quantities of waste are trivial compared with the chemical toxic wastes we release to the environment continuously, and compared with the quantities of CO2 released.

2. Nuclear wastes are contained and not released to the environment, whereas the toxic chemical wastes are released to the environment all over the world.

3. Nuclear waste disposal is about 1% of the total cost of electricity generation (see Figure: ES-2: http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2013/7061-ebenfc-execsum.pdf

4. Nuclear waste can be stored safely at or near surface or disposed of permanently in deep geological repository (DGR). There is negligible chance of any impacts on health from DGR. I'd urge you to research this; a good place to start would be with the excellent Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organisation's DGR site. Start at Home and progress down to the technical reports, e.g. TR-08-10 here: http://www.nwmo.ca/dgrsitecharacterizationtechnicalreports.

In simple terms it means:

cont ..

Horizontal hydraulic conductivities of the target formation are around 1E-14 m/s. Table 3 shows that the vertical permeability is about 10x less than the horizontal permeability; i.e. about 1E-15 m/s. These permeability values mean that, even if anything leaked from the engineered barriers and could travel in ground water without being absorbed by the rock, it would take many millions of years to reach the surface.

But there’s even more good news. See Section 7, p16, in this report: http://www.nwmo.ca/uploads/DGR%20PDF/sitecharactechrep/TR-08-31_Pressure_and_Head_Monitoring_DGR-1_to_4_R0.pdf . The pore pressures in the rock in the target formations are a massive ‘suck’. Under-pressures of 114 m below sea level (300m below ground surface). Those pressures cannot be explained by even the removals of kilometres thickness of ice sheet since the last glacial maximum. They date back hundreds of millions of years. They are important because they indicate that if water could have got through the rock it would have done so long ago and the pressures would have returned to near hydrostatic. The rock is impervious and water cannot get through it.