First of all I think that natural gas should not become the primary energy source, rather the backup source when other forms like renewables are experiencing low output. Most of the resource is in northwest WA which gives little comfort to the rest of Australia. Gas still has some CO2 emissions albeit much lower than coal but it excels as a portable fuel. I believe there will be a huge shift to compressed natural gas (CNG)to replace diesel in the national truck fleet.

As for cost and lack of nuclear expertise we have to start somewhere, if necessary paying top salaries. It is odd to have so much uranium and not run nuclear power stations for low carbon electricity and seawater desalination. As Australia moves up the learning curve we can get into lucrative waste disposal and possibly exert some control of who gets preferred customer status. Aren't the Russians going to build a nuclear station (possibly floating) in Myanmar? Australia has to learn to master the nuclear cycle quickly.

Everyone is happy to talk about mine tailings, spent fuel rods and nuclear security. No-one ever breathes a word about depleted uranium hexafluoride, which is the by-product of the uranium enrichment process itself.

The whole shebang is claimed to be "profitable", but only if you externalise the costs by dumping the intractable problems. This one can't be buried down a hole and forgotten, because the stuff is so reactive with the environment, no matter what.

It's no good using the old chestnut of "the uranium was there anyway" - a fact on the ground, so to speak. When we create uranium hexafluoride, we create a menace for which there is no equivalent in nature.

Waste uranium hexafluoride accounts for 90% of all the effort, water, mining, tailings, processing, diesel, petrol, electricity and money expended on the production of fuel rods. Will nuclear proponents be spending their long weekends re-painting the steel containers? - or their great-great-great grandchildren? I don't think so!

This 2007 paper from the Australian Uranium Association Ltd says that our government(s) have backed away from uranium enrichment (so far):

http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm

Australia is involved in the research effort to upgrade uranium by other means, specifically the use of lasers acting upon vaporised uranium, but the materials handling and energy requirements are formidable. No banana yet, or in the forseeable future.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/u-laser.htm

The Australian public seems to be blissfully unaware of the big picture where nuclear energy is concerned - and no-one is in any hurry to inform them. The whole thing would never have gotten a guernsey if it hadn't been for nuclear bomb making, and compact power units for submarines and aircraft carriers. Power stations were almost a by-product, to soak up the huge overabundance of research and technology. One by one, they are becoming a liability as the internal nuclear environment rots their hearts out.

- a shining example of profiteering gone mad.

- and an inability to understand the basics of nature.

"Taswegian" wants us to follow the Russian example on nuclear power.
Obviously he or she is not paying any attention to the way in which Russia is going about this. The nuclear and nuclear weapons industry in Russia are so government owned and sponsiored that the question of COST really doesn't enter into it.
If you've got the government paying the massive costs of setting up and running these industries, then Dr Coleman's financial arguments against nuclear power just don't matter.
Wherever there is such government involvement, and in dictatorships, it's much easier to get nuclear power happening.
But - notice that in democracies, not a single new nuclear power plant has been built for some 30 years.
Apart from the danger, it's just too expensive, unless the taxpayer takes on the costs of set-up, security, and waste disposal. Australia, with is huge resources in 21st century energy - sun, wind, geothermal, tidal - and of course - conservation and energy efficiency.Christina Macpherson www.antinuclearaustralia.com

I don't care whether or not people have the "right" reasons for being against nuclear mining, exporting and enrichment, just so long as they are against it.

I will even side with the great unwashed left against it, irrespective of their reasons.

But, what good will our opposition do? Howard (whose party I support as the least bad of the bad) has said we will have nuclear power - end of story; and who can trust Labor to stick to any policy for long? We have the erstwhile most anti-nuclear activist in Australia (Garrett) now having to go along with whatever Labor says because he is one of them!

And, please! Voting for an extremist like Bob Brown, who is more dangerous and evil than a barrel of yellow cake, is not the answer if you were thinking of giving me one.

This is a good article but I must, perhaps being a bit picky, make one point.

Perrow in his “Normal Accidents” (NASA buys Normal Accident theory, by the way) does not say that complex technologies that are tightly coupled, of which nuclear energy is a paradigm example, will lead to “routine” accidents. He states that a system wide accident is “inevitable” not “routine”. When and with what frequency such accidents would occur is not discussed. So, when the author here speaks of the USS Reagan etc, making a case for nuclear safety albeit outside of Oz, he is basing his analysis on a false premise. To be sure Perrow wrote in the mid ‘80s but he states that attempts to improve safety can make things worse because they can, unwittingly, add to complexity. A good research project for a PhD or something would be to look at normal accident theory and GenIII+ and GenIV, with the focus on GenIII+, light water reactors.

As an aside, for some scary bed time reading try Scott Sagan, “The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons.” Sagan here persuasively applies normal accidents theory to strategic nuclear command and control to demonstrate that the threat of accidental nuclear war is higher than commonly supposed, a threat that can only increase with further proliferation of nuclear weapons which could easily follow after an expansion in global nuclear energy systems. If Perrow and Sagan are right, accidental nuclear war is inevitable (though not routine: but then again nor can it be).

Leigh, (off topic, 'scuse me).

For the life of me, I can't understand where this mantra of "evil Bob Brown" comes from. Have you been drinking Kool-Aid?

If you nick down to Brown's place, you will find a sign on the fence that says, "Visitors welcome". Maybe you need to pay a visit.

However, you have given me a capital idea for next month's subject - Conspiracy Theories. Ta....