meanwhile China are building 500 new coal fired power stations. What a worry when doctors are so dumbed down.

It really is a worry about the medical treatment we are likely to receive these days.

When these "Doctors for the Environment Australia" are happy to indulge in a mixture of half truths & down right lies to push their fuzzy thinking, it is hard to believe they are likely to be any better in their professional lives.

Hey Alan B,
I'm not altogether sure that government run businesses are failures due to incompetence.
Well surely there is a level of general laziness and mismanagement, but I think there's a lot of incentives from both within and without for them to be deliberately steered towards failure.

If you're government or a politician you're going to be offered good incentives by private interests to sell out, and if your working in upper tiers within the organisation, than there may be incentive (within the new private company or financially via redundancy / payrises) for you to get off government wages and move the business towards private ownership.

I might be wrong, but I always look at both sides of things.

I would like to see some statistics on World Coal Fired Power Vs Mineral Smelting Vs other uses for Coal.

Has anyone got those? What are the World Percentage uses of each.

I have never seen any Greenie Protesting at any of Australia's Smelters. Why is that? They use vast amounts of Coal, yet not a Protest.

I wish coal had peaked worldwide in the 1960's as we discovered thorium liquid salt reactors, and that the desperate search for more power sources had already lead us into the nuclear breeder reactor age where reactors eat nuclear waste. But we'll happily breathe carcinogenic particles and stuff the climate for our grandchildren to save a silly little buck now. All while the real cost accumulates for our kids and grandkids. We're selfish morons.

Max Green. The problems with your Thorium reactors is that while the theoretical concepts behind them are simple and well understood, the practicalities of making them work satisfactorily has so far eluded all the smart metallurgists of the world. Every community would already have one if that were not so. It may happen some time in the future, meantime we need to either continue to rely on coal, or get our heads out of the sand and build conventional moderm uranium powered nuclear reactors.

David