An interesting commentary, one with which in general I find agreement. There are however other energy sources which are slowly being developed, even here in Australia, which may make our need for nuclear power less urgent, even though new nuclear technology is being developed and its use is probably inevitable long term.

For a start, I refer to the emerging fused salt technology which is being used to store energy from solar energy collectors, at the 10 megawatt station at Cloncurry. There are hundreds of towns all over Australia which could use this technology.

Geothermal is building what is hoped to be a 500 megawatt thermal energy plant in the Cooper Basin and it reckons there are available resources capable of generating power equivalent to fifteen Snowy Rivers.

On top of this, there are many wind farms, operating and planned for the coastal areas of Australia, all capable of significant power generation.

All it requires for governments to bite the bullet and spend money developing all these resources with the realisation that inevitably, we are going to pay significantly higher prices for our burgeoning energy needs.

David

Christinamac, how about giving us some logical argument against the article if you disagree with what the man had to say, instead of this inane diatribe about those who he represents. It gives your arguments, or lack thereof, no credibility whatsoever.

David

While I fully agree with the point about population control, I lack the ability to 'doublethink', which has to be necessary for anyone to put 'green' and 'nuclear' on the same side of any argument.
Surely one of the key contributors of not only global warming, but environmental degradation in general, stems from our continued insistance on living beyond our means, and being so shockingly wasteful.
History will remember the generations since WW2 as the ones who lived beyond their means, shackled their children to hugely inflated real estate prices, blew personal debt to almost unimaginable levels, and left their offspring to clean up the mess.
No country on earth has -or could- come up with a viable long term (and long term in nuclear terms is longer than written history) plan to deal with existing waste; apart from keeping it in Australia.
There's a great plan.
What if every country on earth had a nuclear power station (or twenty)?
Oh, that's right, we have the kids to clean up our mess... I'm sure they'll think of something.

I fully agree with Dr Ridd’s overview of the population connection to CO2 emissions and I share his great concern about ongoing inaction on population stabilisation.

But I don’t share his faith in nuclear power as being our saviour.

The most important thing that we simply MUST do is to get right away from the notion that we have to be forever growing, or growing until we come up against immediate and insurmountable barriers to further expansion.

If we don’t do this, then the implementation of nuclear power is simply going to facilitate continuous expansion, and hence ever-increasing energy and resource consumption, pressure on our environment, and pressure working against us developing a sustainable future.

If nuclear power can be shown be an absolutely necessary part of us developing a stable-population steady-state-economy sustainable society….then maybe, just maybe…it might have a place.

But we MUST be totally convinced by our illustrious leaders that this is the path that they will take us on before there can be any nuclear energy industry in Australia.

A well argued case from Dr Ridd. Of course, if Australia reduced its man-made CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow no one would ever be able to tell if it made a measurable difference to global temperature or not.

There was an overwhelming silence, vacuum, emptiness in Ridd's piece - not a mention of changing the way we live, consume and destroy. Not a mention of the capacity to stop consuming everything at the obscene and inexcusable levels that we currently indulge in. Not a flicker of understanding that population is inextricably linked to levels of consumption - and Australian are among the greediest, most gluttonous of all countries. Ridd is probably correct in saying that the chances of Australia solving the problem of climate changeare low - but not because we avoid the slow, centralised, expensive and definitely not energy neutral nuclear power - but because we seem unable to move beyond rhetoric and into acting.