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.