Oy vey, what a shemozzle...

I don't usually bother correcting errors because to err is human, but this:

//Did you know that nuclear power stations actually emit more ionizing radiation to the surrounding environment than coal fired power stations of the same output?//

should have been this:

//Did you know that nuclear power stations actually emit LESS ionizing radiation to the surrounding environment than coal fired power stations of the same output?//

Somebody's in for some flagellation this evening...

Steely, part of the answer may be that the gas link to load-following renewables was not grasped and the notion that coal-burning would happily go on for centuries was current.

Gas was not valued because everything was in place for transporting and burning coal and keeping the coal industry going for power generation and export, with thousands of associated jobs.

The imperative to burn cleaner fuel domestically wasn't as strong as it has become

Toni,

I'm well aware of the fact that nuclear is spectacularly safe and am not personally opposed to having them in Oz. Economically I think we're better off selling all the yellow cake we dig up and using coal to met our needs. But if there's any left over, then I'm all for sticking it in a reactor and spinning a few turbines.

My point however was that getting a majority to go along with that is well neigh impossible. As soon as such a proposal was made, even allowing for appropriate 'education', we'd be inundated with scary stories about the multitudes who almost died at Fukushima, and the multitudes that almost died at Chernobyl. The Greens, ALP, Fairfax and ABC would be shrieking at every opportunity. Bart's three-eyed fish would be the least of the campaign falsehoods. "The China Syndrome" would be on permanent rotation on SBS.

And even if, by some miracle, the proposal got up, the lawyers would have a field-day objecting to and filing suit against every word and comma in the contract. NIMBY's from 300 miles around would be demanding that it be located elsewhere and all sitting members in the affected electorates would be threatening to cross the floor at every opportunity. Rare species of frogs and parrots would be discovered daily. Unless they decided to locate it in the Simpson desert in which case 14.7 nanoseconds after the announcement, we'd find out that there were previously undiscovered sacred sites in that location (what are the chances, eh?) and that women used to go there over the millennia to whinge about their elders and give thanks that the Rainbow Serpent had forbidden the building of nuclear plants at the site.

Even places like Canada and the US, which have had nuclear since the 50's are opposed to new plants and none have been built or even proposed for decades.

"what a shemozzle..."

I think we understood your point from the context.

"Somebody's in for some flagellation this evening..."

So business-as-usual tonight at the Lavis household?

mhaze, another avenue is to establish the shortcomings of renewables. Presently the public has little idea of these, thinking the achievement of 100% renewables is simply a matter of will.

Watching young people on Q&A speak so uninformed about them, parroting what they hear from Greens and what is indoctrinated into them through the slanted school science curriculum, highlights the difficulty. The wow factor of renewables, something apparently for nothing, must be negated. The storage issue needs highlighting with the scale and cost of achieving reliable, 100% renewables made fully understood, perhaps expressed in terms the community values, such as hospital or public housing beds, or university places, for example.

The renewables solution to AGW must be loudly and publicly challenged, while spruiking nuclear's advantages.

//As soon as such a proposal was made, even allowing for appropriate 'education', we'd be inundated with scary stories about the multitudes who almost died at Fukushima//

Dude, they built a nuclear power reactor on the coast of a country known for it's geological instability and from whose language we have appropriated the word 'tsunami'. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that's all going to end in tears one way or another.

Pretty sure we can find better places to stick the odd reactor. It's a big country.

-10 points for Hufflepuff.

//and the multitudes that almost died at Chernobyl.//

And no mention of the people that died at Chernobyl? Seems a tad remiss...

Anyway, it's another failure of hippy logic: Chernobyl wasn't an accident. At least not in the conventional sense of the word accident. What happened at Chernobyl was that a bunch of idiots decided it would be a terrific idea to intentionally override half a dozen different safety systems - any one of which could have prevented the 'accident' - in order to play silly buggers.

In Soviet Russia, WH&S trains you.

The result was a steam explosion which blew a hole in the side of their secondary containment. They had no tertiary containment, because they were using a crappy reactor design. In the interests of Soviet efficiency, the Chernobyl reactor was designed for military and civilian purposes. In order to leave room for a crane to extract the weapons grade stuff, they left out the tertiary containment... the 'sarcophagus' they hastily erected afterwards was essentially the tertiary containment they should have had in the first place.

Two reasons it wouldn't happen in Australia:
1) We'd build reactors with proper containment.
2) Less vodka on the job. Sorry, that's probably racist or something. Still... six different safety systems?

Dear Lucifrase,

100% renewables is of course doable but we are certainly going to have to endure a transitioning period.

California now only has one small coal fired power station producing electricity in the state and a single remaining nuclear power station. Gas represents 34% of the energy source but even that is down from 44% in 2009 and renewables are at 30% and climbing.

It just requires acceptance of the threat of GW and the willingness to have a crack at reducing its impacts.

For Australia as the world's largest producer of natural gas not to have it as a major part of our power generation is a blight on federal governments who it seems have sold our future to the lowest bidder.