And we are to believe this person because he says so?

He is entitled to his opinion as are you.

Sorry Tony, Your assurances of non bias flies straight in the face of published antidump advocacy! From deep inside the allegedly Unbiased Jury!

Malcolm Turnbull often waxes lyrical on tax reduction as a way of boosting our economy! And if correct how much better off could we be, if nobody needed to pay tax?

First we need a state owned energy company, who would build several molten salt thorium powered reactors, which apart from providing the world's CLEANEST SAFEST CHEAPEST electricity, would be tasked as slow breeder reactors to burn and reburn nuclear waste, desalinate copious seawater, create our entire liquid fuel needs from seawater, and be paid billions. And in combination earn trillions

The cash returns, paid straight into internal revenue. The same energy could be applied to state owned rapid rail, some of which would be double decker container carrying trains, transporting bulk freight the length and breadth of the nation and onto a national fleet of nuclear powered fast ferries and on-offloaded as whole trains.

Bulk freight forwarding remains one of the most profitable enterprises on earth.

A 100 MW reactor able to process 41,000 barrels daily? A 300 MW reactor, able to produce the entire fuel requirements of the US navy?

Two or three able to manage the entire needs of this nation?

With all the net profit returned to consolidated revenue.

If nobody paid tax and we had the lowest costing cleanest safest energy in the world? Shackled to cooperative enterprise! What other nation could compete with us?

Particularly if we were one of half a dozen nations supplying all the made from seawater, endlessly sustainable "carbon neutral" liquid fuel?

Think about that and what we could do if the national interest was genuinely first and foremost!?

Then watch what our leaders do instead? Thorium reactors? Where? Show me a thorium reactor! What? Are they serious? OK, I'll just go get the magic wand!
Alan B.

Ateday,

If you are addressing we without actually indicating that you are, the difference between 'he' and me, is that I wasn't on the jury; he was, and clearly indicated that he wasn't too keen on nuclear - just like the female ratbag who showed up on OLO in a once only performance to tell us that she was anti-nuclear, period, well before she was selected for the jury. 'Entitled' is not the right word in this case.

I don't care whether SA has a nuclear storage or not (I am South Australian) and I loathe our Socialist government. But I totally agree with the premier's liking for a referendum so that ALL South Australians, not 350 unrepresentative scrapings off the the footpaths, can have a say. That is not going to happen because the dropkick Liberals, not knowing whether it is fashionable here to be Right, Left or just the hapless idiots they are, are opposing a referendum just because they can (they will have done nothing else in the 14 years the Comrades have been in government).

Frankly, I find the idea off us taking waste from other countries a touch bizarre; none have asked us to; they store their own, and we only use a little nuclear material for medical and research purposes. I don't believe that we will have nuclear power in the foreseeable future, and the same people who are frightened of nuclear are also frightened of coal, the cheapest source of energy yet, and the one that helped Australia be the economic power house it was, until recently, when the Green climate madness took hold. Now, I agree that you are entitled to disagree with me, but I firmly believe that this author and all Green freaks and a climate wonks have well and truly used up their entitlements.

I see that one commentator has already written off the Citizens Jury members as "350 unrepresentative scrapings off the the footpaths".

I watched the videos of the jury sessions, and followed the process as far as possible. It was clear to me that the jury members were taking their tasks very seriously and responsibly.

Had they come out with a "Yes" to nuclear waste dumping, Jay Weatherill and the nuclear lobby would have been full of praise for these "ordinary citizens"

In this time of glorifying the "ordinary citizen" - the result was a shock to them. Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis solved that problem, suggesting that the elite witnesses told the jurors what to think.

I have supported the jury process all along, though I am disappointed to learn about some biases in the system this time.

In legal cases, we accept that common sense and intelligence will guide the ordinary citizen, provided they are given the evidence.

Surely the same concept applies here. By having non experts as jurors, we avoid the conflict of interest that would be inevitable if the decision were left to nuclear experts.

If making any state or country the word's nuclear garbage dump were such a brilliant idea it would have been developed somewhere else long ago.

Certainly some people will make a mint, but the average South Australian probably wouldn't benefit. Thank you jurors.

mac,

It's loaded rhetoric like that that's a big part of the problem. Are you so anti-SA that you regard SA as a toxic waste dump just because there's a toxic waste dump in SA?

If no, please refrain from making the dishonest claim that building a nuclear waste storage facility would turn the state into a nuclear rubbish dump.

(And if you are so anti SA that you think the state's already a toxic waste dump, what reason have you to oppose a nuclear waste dump here too?)

Also, what reason have you to doubt that the average person in SA would benefit substantially from it? Have you failed to notice how the state's being held back because of the government's inability or unwillingness to fund things?

Hear, hear and well said Adian!

At some point, we will need to find and use something beside finite fossil fuel! And well before we run out of the stuff!

The best carbon free alternative, will be cheaper than coal, cleaner than coal and safer than coal, thorium!

The truly wise will reinvent the economy so it works for us, rather than at present the reverse, where the average rube is little more than a numbered slave?

With ultracheap, extremely abundant, clean, safe, energy at our beck and call, we can make the deserts bloom and turn seawater into liquid fuel for as long as we need to!

Even export significant amounts to the world, along with the massive new food surplus.

Cooperative capitalism will ensure we are as competitive as we can be, while maintaining a good living standard and returned affordable housing! Thanks to doable decentralization!

We can halve the cost of living and doing business, just by eliminating middlemen profit takers and accompanying sharp practise, as Tesla has done!

Resisted by the parasitical drone class, who think money works?

Cooperative capitalism would deal most of these parasites out! All while handing fair and equitable shares to the doers?

And bound to be misrepresented as communism or worse as unearned income streams dry up and Wall street and the sharks, drones, tax avoiding leaners, (George Orwell's Pigs) who've lived off the blood sweat and tears enterprise and endevour of other folk, the doers, become little more than an unpalatable memory.

If not the blind leading the blind, we are governed by folk in bed, it would seem, with the status quo?

Unfortunately we need a bloodless revolution that in effect, tells the ruling class, the can't do folk, who are like rabbits frozen in the headlights, when asked for meaningful action! Need to get out of the way, or follow the (hijacked) Democrats!

Action that simply stops leaving folks (whole states) behind, to serve the interests of debt laden tax avoiders? Sometimes euphemistically referred to as (big) business (as usual)!

Don't just do something, stand there!
Alan B.

Aidan,

"Are you so anti-SA that you regard SA as a toxic waste dump just because there's a toxic waste dump in SA?"

Talk about shallow rhetoric.

Listen to the podcast "Follow the Money -- Nuclear Dumps", which discusses what a barking mad scheme it is.

or this,

http://www.tai.org.au/sites/defualt/files/P222A%20Digging%20for%20answers%20-%20SA%20Nuclear%20Royal%20Commission%20Submission%20FINAL.pdf

I'm not anti-SA, just pro Australia.

mac,

You were the one using shallow rhetoric. Regardless of whether SA should build such a facility, claiming it would turn the state into a nuclear waste dump is fundamentally dishonest, and seems to indicate that you're ignoring the facts and appealing to the emotions of the ignorant.

I do not have sufficient information to determine whether it's worth building, but there certainly doesn't seem to be any good reason to rule it out yet. As for the document you linked to, it uses Australian costs for electricity generation. I agree that the economic case for nuclear power in Australia is weak, but that's not the point. Consider somewhere like England: not sufficiently sunny for solar power to be its main energy source, and nowhere near enough sites for wind turbines to meet the demand. It's already having to resort to offshore wind, which is much more expensive.

The case for nuclear energy is compelling, if it is thorium based!

After removed any possibility of any of it winding up in a thermonuclear device, safely store it for 300 years!

And given abundant clean safe carbon free energy, make all our catalytically created liquid fuel requirements, from seawater!

One 300 MW thorium molten salt reactor able to produce around 120,000 barrels of ready to use liquid fuel per day!

And use some of the energy to desalinate copious water using the new deionization method that separates out the salt and other unwanted elements on the fly from the flowsheet! And for around quarter of the energy requirement of traditional desal! All while processing it to 95% potable!

And the cost of that energy component reduced from 24 to 3 cents or less, per K.H.!?BLOOMING DESERTS!

The good news doesn't end there, given a molten salt reactor, produces medical isotopes that can be removed from the operational reactor, while it's lighting a million homes!

Meaning these medical miracles can be extended to the masses, rather than remain the medical miracle cures, only millionaires can afford!

SEEN death sentence liver cancer clear of all tumors in just hours!

We don't want that and you mustn't have it! End of story!

Why? Because it includes the word, nuclear! And nuclear always means bombs, hiroshima, chernobyl, fukushima, and mushroom clouds dotting the sky!

#1, A molten salt reactor can't melt down, given this safest of all peaceful use nuclear reactors operates in a molten state and is walk away safe!

#2, Thorium power is old fifties technology abandoned because it couldn't be used to make a bomb or plutonium!

#3, But it can be safely used as a slow breeder reactor to burn and reburn nuclear waste including plutonium until it is completely de weaponized!

IS THAT NOT A GOAL WORTH PURSUING?

Even were the only priority, let alone save the planet, end want and war, stabilize then start to reduce population numbers; and on the back of good science, not unfathomable ignorance coupled to irrational fear and loathing!
Alan B.

Apologies, my most recent post does not compute as Robby the Robinson's robot, would have repeated. But only because of dumbing down word limits. Sorry Graham.

And the need to edit my comment to fit the editorial imperative!

Store waste for just 300 years!?

WE ALL KNOW WE NEED TO STORE THIS TOXIC POISON FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS!

Not true! It can be burnt and burnt again and again, in a slow breeder reactor, to.
#1 extract all the remaining unused energy component! EVEN WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM!

#2 Be paid billions to do it!

#3 Which reduces the half life to 300 years.

Why, even (NO, NO, NEVER NO MORE) Chis or Mac could safely manage that much? Reducing the volume by 95%, which is what occurs as the extractable energy is removed!

Means, over a hundred years from now, we could maybe put a ton or two in a capsule and use a really big rail gun to fire it, from the top of Kosciuszko into mercury? And repeat the gunnery detail a couple of hundred years after that and another hundred years on? You get the picture?

I don't believe the inhabitants of mercury would ever object? But wait with mouths wide open?

Repeating, for what we are about to receive, etc? And, a long time between feeds, why are we waiting, mine will be cold!

Who called the cook a bar steward? Who called the bar steward a cook? Eh Mac?
Alan B.

They say being marched to the gallows concentrates the mind. We'll understand that when Hazelwood closes in April taking 12 Twh of reliable electricity much of it at night, in wind lulls and when dams are dry. In my opinion creating the Citizen Jury was not astute. The correct path is for Australia to build one or more nuclear power stations, maybe even a generic thorium burner when they are ready in the 2040s. Let spent fuel accumulate for one or two fuelling cycles. If some or none of the spent fuel can be re-used look for a remote spot to bury it. I think it can be done at a fraction of the $40.2 bn cost originally quoted by the Royal Commission.

If nobody gets irradiated in that time then maybe think about taking foreign waste in an expanded facility, logically in SA. I think this is the only approach likely to work. Meanwhile no doubt opponents have got employment prospects lined up for retrenched Holden and Arrium workers, perhaps with cheap reliable power for new industries.

We shouldn't have to wait until 2040 for a thorium reactor! And before waste can be buried, it needs to spend some time above ground. So burying it before we build a walk away safe, molten salt thorium reactor, seems counterintuitive?

By all accounts, the Indians are well advanced on a 300 MW thorium reactor? I mean they claim to have one third of the world's thorium in their beach sand. And their plans include using thorium to burn their current stockpile of nuclear waste!

It's odd don't you think, that some of the anti nuclear brigade are green advocates, who accuse climate change denialist of ignoring the science?

Yet when it comes to the peaceful use of safe clean cheap nuclear energy? They are the most vociferous deniers of all!

And greet the factual evidence, with no nay never! Or kick it down the road too far for it to reverse climate change!?

Climate change science good science!

Proven nuclear science. Bad science!

Why? Because it fits the confirmation bias and the ideological imperative!

Reason and logic trumped by dogma and ideology! Factual recorded evidence! Just some nuclear nut case's opinion!

Herding cats would be easier than getting these folk to take an objective look at the huge body of scientific evidence and journals, daily reports and records!

Science must be objective not predetermined! The green approach toward nuclear energy?

Climate change deniers, not the only folk able to ignore a mountain of scientific evidence? While hundreds of Australians wait in vain for their chance of a cure!

And tantamount to a (willful, killed by neglect or self induced, selective blindness) death sentence?

Why don't we reintroduce corporal punishment? At least we'd be honest?
Alan B.

from Noel Wauchope, in reply to Alan B.

I completely agree that science should not be ignored. That applies also to pro nuclear lobbyists, who have a distressing tendency to not only ignore science, but to be unaware of science outside their own narrow technical discipline.

For example, all world scientific bodies accept the Linear No Threshold Theory (LNT) of ionising radiation - meaning that every additional amount of radiation increases cancer risks. This has been further backed by very recent research in Scientific Reports http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32977

On climate science, it is clear that for nuclear power to have any effect at all, it would require the rapid build of thousands of reactors. In the case of thorium reactors, this could not possibly be done for decades - too late. Meanwhile rapid advances in genuinely clean, safe, technology, and in energy conservation might be in jeopardy, if public effort and funding were diverted to the thorium dream.

While science is important, it is not the whole story. The economic realities do matter - and they don't favour the costly thorium experiment.

The social realities matter, too. Indigenous people worldwide are getting fed up with being the toilet for modern technology.Thorium fans make the extraordinary boast that their devices leave only 300 years worth of toxic radioactive wastes. Just the mere 300 years! And where is that poison expected to go?

When the last ferry is about to pull out from the wharf? Intending passengers have to stark choices! Climb on board, or miss the boat! And if missing the boat is linked to massive misinformation as to the power source?

A very long swim in shark infested waters beckons!

Look, we're confronting some economic realities only present in history, as a prelude to the great depression, only more so!

The world is awash with massive (unrepayable) debt! Some of which could cancel each other out?

Even so, we confront two equally stark choices?

The point I'm making, with my homespun homily. we can rescue our economy with a debt led (frying pan to the fire) recovery? Then as is most likely confront runaway inflation, increasing interest rates and consequent, suddenly, massively unaffordable mortgages!

And record bankruptcies, foreclosures, bank auctions, and or bank failures! Interest rates as high as a historical 17%!

And folks working three jobs, selling family heirlooms, the family jalopy and household furniture etc, to avoid the inevitable! Job queues, tent cities and soup kitchens!

Get the picture?

Alternatively, we could have an energy led and an energy underpinned recovery that allows us to go from strength to strength!

Always providing we can keep it out of the hand of the parasites, who have created the current problem, by sucking too deep and too often on our finite wealth!

So, stop prevarication and assembling entirely counterproductive roadblocks and interminable mindless delays, and just get on the far king boat!
Alan B.

The LNT hypothesis fails to explain why residents of high background radiation areas (eg Kerala, India) are exceptionally healthy.

I'm told the mayor of Hawker SA was on ABC radio early this morning and expressed fears that the low level waste site will morph into high level. There was talk of storing spent fuel canisters above ground at a holding site before reprocessing or outback burial. If true that is another example of how the SA govt has mishandled the issues. Put any such canisters at the top of a remote mineshaft but get it sorted out beforehand not afterwards.

The premise that we (as a country who exports a resource) e.g. Uranium Oxide, should become a repository for the waste product of the original exported commodity is preposterous. Given that line of thinking, should we then accept that all waste steel products should be dumped here because we have in the first place exported that iron ore and coal?

Mac, as you surmise, the only folk to benefit will be the operators of the "dump", the government who let the dump happen and probably a few others associated with the operation.

Having been the driver who came across the drums of Uranium Oxide which had spilled across Victoria Rd, Glebe in the early hours of a cold winters morning during the 1980's. Many years later working as a mechanical fitter on the actual 'calciner' (gadget that bakes the Yellow Cake into U2) at Ranger ERA Jabiru, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that: the care and control of hazardous radioactive within this country still leaves a lot to be desired.

I for one have great concerns for the way many companies handle hazardous substances generally. That highly radioactive waste substances were going to be left at Pangea's (mid western WA) and Muckaty Creek (NT) sites, both of these were over the Great Artesian Basin. Capital idea - let's pollute forever, the one resource that we all need for survival.

The definition of safety is nothing more than this: "A risk mitigation strategy designed by lawyers at the behest of insurers to minimise the losses to ordinary shareholders".

The resuscitated push for nuclear waste importing has pretty much died the death already. The discussion has been all about social consent -which clearly is lacking.

However, equally important are the legal obstacles. State, national, and international laws are formidable barriers to overcome, see https://antinuclear.net/2016/11/19/legal-obstacles-statenational-and-international-to-australia-importing-nuclear-wastes/

Europe has just set out regulations about exporting nuclear wastes. Such regulations would clearly forbid the South Australian Nuclear Royal Commission scheme, which involves importing wastes FIRST, and building the repository LATER. Those regulations state:

"The third country must have a final deep geological repository in operation when the waste is shipped"

Albie,

Yes, indeed. The country is riddled with abandoned mines, some huge holes in the ground, some leaking toxic wastes. The managements and shareholders who made their fortunes from those mines are long gone and beyond any justice. The taxpayers are stuck with the clean up bill.

Given the cost cutting, risk taking capitalist culture It would be monumentally naive to assume that there wouldn't be, sooner or later, a major accident. Of course the shareholders and management would evade responsibility and hide behind their lawyers. The public should remember that the Fukushima disaster didn't occur in some Third World country but in one of the world's most technically advanced societies.

As always, fact mixed with fiction to tell loathsome lies?

Yes gamma radiation can and does kill! Yellow cake is not particularly radioactive!

Alpha radiation as in radioactive isotope, bismuth 213, saves lives of folks otherwise waiting out the final months on death row!

A Banana, more radioactive than thorium!

Mr wetherall could arrange it? Get a team and camera's to India and another guided tour of their new nuclear facility.

Take a tested accurate geiger counter. Then be deafened by the silence coming from that machine!

Given I'm likely the only poster commenting here who has worked with radioactive material on a daily basis? I'm here to say, there's a lot of fear mongering going on here by clinically dishonest folk, who believe they can hijack the community response and presume to speak for the blackfella?

Who cannot be allowed to decide anything on the economic merit on their land, but rather, on a highly flawed geopolitical green agenda?

I for one have never advocated burying waste as is. Just burning it!

To then combine it with a silica product, invented by our own CSIRO! Rockcrete, inert even when exposed to acid or alkaline liquids! More than safe enough to return to a worked out mine? Or, fired into space, with a large rail gun, when there is nothing between us or Mercury; hundreds of years from now, when we've created a payload; given most of the mass inherent in waste would have been converted to energy!

Yes correct on one point Mac. We'd need to crack on building hundreds of thorium reactors, which we can do, and then ship them in shipping containers, to an energy starving world, to desalinate their water, grow their crops and power the obligatory washing machine, currently missing in some 60% of this planet's homes!

Or is that just too good for the poor and downtrodden? What are we waiting for? Environmental armageddon?

We have the technology and the fuel!

Stop giving the decision makers excuses for doing nothing! Enough already!
Alan B.

Taking the waste goes together with the taking the money to excavate over the 10 or 11 years to then store the stuff underground. It is not the same shipment that sits above-ground for 100 years or so, but tranches that will be moved below in turn as the excavation is completed to house them.

It makes business sense to take profit in tranches, doesn't it, always with the option of withdrawing from the business should profitability fall? But good Greens always want tidy, gift wrapped, absolute certainty of the business case, just like they did over the Malaysian Solution, where they were so pleased to take the high moral ground at the expense of people drowning. Fascists.

There was no attempt to hide the simple fact of tranching waste. Only simpletons point to it as if the emperor is naked, including ABC online reporters (who thought they had the smoking gun).

PS. Nuclear repositories elsewhere were closed down by Green scare-mongers affecting public opinion (a la SA), not economic viability. Further to, Greens love to say how expensive nuclear is when it is they that make it so in all sorts of sneaky ways, such as levies upon nuclear electricity to subsidize renewables.

Meanwhile, Rome burns.

Noel,

The LNT has been accepted as a precautionary principle, not as a scientific reality. In fact the levels of cancer from areas of radiation exposure after Chernobyl differed very little from other non exposed areas compared to what LNT predicted.

Alan B, "fact with fiction"...?

Please tell my 2 co workers who were covered in raffinate pumped from the SX area of Ranger ERA, that the stuff isn't too harmful after they spent 3 days in the Jabiru clinic. The fact of a young engineer who physically removed 9 Personal Danger tags and locks with a bolt cutter (that's 3 of my locks and 3 each of my co workers) doesn't matter I suppose mate?

As your own experience would tell you Alan, raffinate is the Yellow Cake in solution "no more dangerous than 'Coke a Cola'..." we were told. Your Thorium reactor proposition is a great idea, as is steam power, but both have been done to death.

Instead, let's see the rise of the renewables, let's see the cartels of fossils and their fossil/ionising radiation utilising devices go in the direction the dinosaurs that created them did.