Jim Green is (unsurprisingly) a Greenie. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Everybody is a bit of a greenie today. But Jim obviously does not want Australia to progress into nuclear energy, and he just wrote a very long winded article giving all sorts of spurious reasons as to why Australia should not build a nuclear waste dump.

The most spurious reason he gave, is that the site selected at Kimba belongs to the Traditional Owners who are some mob calling themselves the Bungaria Traditional Owners.

Look mate, if the government want to resume my land to build an airport or a new highway, they have the power to do just that. Why should the race of people who call themselves "aborigines" but who are Australian citizens, be exempt from the very laws that the rest of us have to abide by? I have never been to Kimba, but you can bet it is nothing more than a howling wilderness that has not seen any development by "aboriginal" people for the last 60,000 years.

Furthermore, you can bet that every single one of the Bungaria Traditional Owners is either on the dole, and will be forever, or they are public servants doing non jobs like "aboriginal cultural advisor" so that governments can claim that aboriginals are contributing to the common wealth.

Australia is a continent in it's own right. Most of it is worthless desert and most of it is virtually uninhabited. . It is idiotic to claim that in a continent the size of Australia, with the most stable geological formations in the world, we an not find a site in nowhereseville to dump some nuclear waste. You can bet that the members of the Bungonia Traditional owners probably don't live anywhere near Kimba, and if they do, it is just another aboriginal settlement that can not exist without massive government subsidies. What the least productive and most trouble prone people in this country want, I just don't care.

The sooner we go nuclear, the better.

Jim makes it easy. No need to plough through his four pages. He is anti-nuclear, and that's that.

This article is chock full of misinformation and BS. For starters, how would one import alpha particle, bismuth 13 with just a half-life of 45 minutes!?

As for nuclear waste, in MSR technology it is mostly unspent fuel with 90 to 95% of the available energy quotient available in MSR technology the burns and reburns this unspent fuel until the half-life is just three hundred years. Moreover, this final waste product from the reuse project is far less toxic, stabilises in around 30 years and is eminently suitable as long-life space batteries.

What is being proposed is, I believe, s a thorium fuelled reactor that can also be retasked with burning nuclear waste other nations will pay us annual billions to take off their hands. And we could then use those funds to mass-produce SMRs that can be safely sited anywhere. As for terrorists removing anything.

Does anyone with a fully functioning brain believe that after breaking through security and the shielding double-walled water-filled shield? to then be exposed to gamma radiation that is likely to give them a killer dose in just 5-10 minutes? To then remove a liquid that is around 700C minimum! With what, their unprotected bare hands?

Jim Green knows SFA about nuclear reactors or nuclear medicine but plenty about BS scaremongering as his stock in trade!? He tries to imply that new nuclear technology is unsafe and on that count alone he is wrong, wrong, wrong! To the point of imbecilically!?

And as a geenie is in good company. The government needs to ignore this imbecilic moron and his equally ignorant cohort and just crack on with what now has wide majority, community support!

However, it might need to build several reactors, to one, produce the miracle cancer cure, the alpha particle bismuth 213. And two, also burn and burn yet again nuclear waste, ours and that of other folks who will pay us annual billions, to provide the service!

Doing anything in an energy gobbling cyclotron is enormously expensive! Let alone bombard seriously radioactive radium with highly accelerated particles!
Alan B

Jim Green is just doing his job as an anti-nuclear activist and campaigner for FOE. He should try something a bit harder. Scaring children and little old ladies with tales of the dangers of nuclear waste is too easy. There are 450 nuclear power stations in the world and there must be thousands of other facilities for producing and using nuclear materials for medical use. None of these seem to have any trouble disposing of their waste. No-one seems to get hurt. And they do an enormous amount of good. Nuclear energy produces by far the greatest quantities of waste. There's no problem with storing it. Yes, it can be dangerous if handled poorly. Yes, it can last a long time. That’s true of thousands of other wastes we generate unavoidably. The longer lived the nuclear waste, the less dangerous it really is. Dozens of ways of turning nuclear waste into ultra-stable forms that would satisfy the fussiest of critics have been developed but no-one bothers to use them because there is no actual problem deserving the extra expense. The inconvenient truth for Jim is that nuclear energy will turn out to be crucial for meeting the clean energy goals that his employer, inter alia, is so keen on. That campaigning job won’t last forever.

What else could you expect from a fruity activist from a fringe party.

Yes Tombie, the longer-lived the nuclear waste the less radioactive it is! The radioactive minerals have half-lives of 5 billion years for uranium and 15 for thorium. Which is more time than the expected time for the universe to survive?

Meaning we can never ever run out of thorium. The refined metal thorium is less radioactive than a (OMG) banana! And is fertile not fissile.

Thorium was rejected in the fifties due to the extreme difficulty of weaponising it.

Even weapons-grade plutonium can fire up an MSR and depleted until it cannot be used in nuclear missiles

(OMG) Brazil nuts and (OMG) milk are also naturally radioactive. And unshielded produce more rads than a properly shielded reactor.

Coal and gas-fired power produces more radioactive smoke stack material than any rouge emissions from a modern and properly shielded reactor!

Quantities of uranium And many carcinogenic materials that pollute the environment are sent out of coal-fired smokestacks and radon is often expelled from (frac) gas-fired power plants!

But are read as merely part of normal background radiation.

I believe we need to be a nuclear powered economy and given its MSR thorium that we own and operate via co-ops, we can expect power pricesas low as 1 cent PKWH. And with that an real tax reform. A rush to reindustrialise our economy!

Simply put, coal with power prices around 24-30 cents PKWH. Has a very limited future! And those prices simply cannot support local manufacture! Which is where we must now go, no ifs, buts or maybes!
Alan B.

"The sooner we go nuclear, the better."
We ARE nuclear. Solar IS nuclear.

Oh dear - the usual nuclear propagandists have wasted no time in attacking Jim Green, in their usual style - ad hominem attacks. I note with amusement that one of them describes Australia as mostly a desert - therefore suitable for nuclear waste dumping But he doesn't mind a radioactive trash dump on FARMING LAND.

Another writer assumes that Jim is in favour of importing short-lived radioisotopes. Evidently that writer did not understand (or perhaps even read) the part about cyclotron-produced radioisotopes.

Sorry, nuclear lobby, you'll have to produce some new shills, as nobdody's going to be persuaded by the present lot.

Both Pro fossil fuel Jim Green and his alter ego, coal-fired Christinamac are the ones who haven't bothered to read?

I could be wrong but their time warp from the fifties, commentary serves the aforementioned as well as coal-fired tomato head BJ! Given we are discussing ultra-safe, clean, reliable, dispatchable 24/7, cheaper than coal, carbon-free energy!

And given the amount of energy consumed in a cyclotron is prohibitively expensive! And the radium they would bombard is radioactive material! Their preferred coal-friendly alternative doesn't stack up if you ask for a comparative business case!

Moreover, the aforementioned cyclotron might well cost more to build than a thorium powered, molten salt reactor. Where the medical isotopes would be produced almost free as final nuclear decay products we can harvest and use in all manner of medical radiology. One of which (bismuth 213) holds out hope for all manner of death sentence, cancers!

One of which is ovarian cancer that was the subject of several successful European clinical trials in 2006! Trials according to the notes, did not include significant damage to the healthy surrounding cells.
Alan B.

To Christinamac1

1. Only shadowminister could be said to have carried out an ad hominine attack on Jim Green. All of the other contributors simply pointed out, quite truthfully, that Green was a Greenie. That all sensible people know that Greenies are virtue signalling, spoiled brat, blithering idiot Luddites, who are a disappointment to their usually wealthy families, did not have to be brought up, as it is already common knowledge. So I think your criticism was unfair.

2. If you don't know that most of Australia is desert could you please purchase a book called "an atlas" and enlighten yourself on the geography of Australia? One supposes that the reason you have no knowledge about your own country is because, if you live in Sydney, you are a denizen of the eastern suburbs, and have never gone further west than the Gladesville Bridge in your whole life?

3. On the subject of persuading anybody about anything, you first you have to submit a reasoned argument and then defend your position. So where is yours? Sneery hit and runs will not convince anybody of the validity of your position.

I genuinely hope that this post by me will aid you in promoting your cause, and help you to explain your position? The fact you did not even bother to do so, I presume was because you don't know yourself why you oppose nuclear energy? It is just a fashionable view among public servants, and the siblings of the wealthy, who think that they are the new aristocracy. Among this regressive class, who have a compulsive need to think that their class is better than everybody else, advocating fashionable causes exhibits their class identification. Class identification is extremely important to you, and you know how to chant the fashionable mantras.

Oh dear, again!. the ad hominem attacks on anti nuclear opinion continue - ''all sensible people know that Greenies are virtue signalling, spoiled brat, blithering idiot Luddites, who are a disappointment to their usually wealthy families, did not have to be brought up, as it is already common knowledge'' - (from ''Lego'')
However, I was flattered to learn that I am Jim Green's ''alter ego'' (from Alan B) I have long admired Jim Green, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of nuclear issues. I did not aspire to seen as equally knowledgeable, or to actualle be him!
I did note, to give Alan B his due, that cyclotrons are costly to build, but Australia does already has several cyclotrons, so the cost is not prohibitive. As for nuclear costs - well, they pretty much are prohibitive now, and that's without doing full costing, which would include the virtually eternal problem of nuclear waste disposal and security.

To Christinamac.

Throughout history, people have disagreed over everything. Where two groups of people disagree over a subject, it is as natural as breathing that they will not like each other, will make personal attacks upon each other, and call each other nasty names. Your own caste of educated elitists are probably the worst at that game. To your mob, anybody who does not possess a degree is a an ignorant peasant. And that includes the former president of the USA, Donald Trump. So spare me the virtue signalling melodramatics.

I do not like Luddites like yourself, or Mr Green, because you are holding back the prosperity of my country and my people, because of your religious objection to nuclear energy. The funniest thing about your opposition to coal was that it opened up the question as to how an advanced society could fulfil it's energy requirements without fossil fuel? The only credible answer is nuclear power. But like Christian Scientists with appendicitis, your coven of educated, Gaia worshipping religious fanatics will just never concede what your belief system tells you is heresy.

University types such as yourself in Russia once cheered on Lenin's armies. In Korea they cheered on Kim il Sung's armies as they marched into Seoul. In Cambodia they cheered on Sorbonne educated Pol Pot. They could not recognise reality until they were being herded against the wall for their executions. It just the way that educated ideologues like your good self think. They can not see reality until their backs are against the wall.