I understand that the latest generation of nuclear power reactors are capable of utilising both U238 and U235 and do not have the ability to produce Plutonium.
There is also very little long half life waste produced so waste is no longer a serious problem.
These reators will solve the carbon fuel supply and pollution problems. They are capable of extending nuclear fuel reserves such that human energy needs could be met from nuclear sources for about 50000 years.
Clean coal and carbon dioxide sequestration are proposed technologies with little hope of success. Why are we wasting effort researching them?

Another fluff piece by Sue, using vague emotions to justify a flawed policy.

The cost of developing weapons grade fissile material is 99.9% the refining of the uranium not buying it.

There is sufficient low extraction cost uranium in present mines to supply current demands for 200 years, the boycotting of any country will simply mean that they buy it else where at a slightly higher price.

As the cost cost of uranium is a tiny fraction of the cost of generation, this will have absolutely zero impact on either the production of power or weapons, but put a lot of Australians out of work.

What next? Boycott iron ore sales because a tiny fraction is used to build tanks? It is just as stupid an idea.

The problem with debate on this issue is that there are really two issues. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Is it possible to debate first whether or not we want nuclear weapons as a separate issue? Do we want nuclear weapons? If the answer is yes may I suggest you visit Hiroshima on August 6 and see if you change your mind.
Then comes the question of power. We are probably at a stage where we know enough to develop safe nuclear power, and this could be the way go in the future. If it is than how do we achieve this without having nuclear weapons as a by-product?
If the choice comes down to both or neither my vote would be for neither. Instead of the continuous knocking and insults that is a feature of OLO how about ideas and suggestions on how to get rid of nuclear weapons without limiting our options on nuclear energy?

Daviy, Do we want nuclear weapons? If the answer is No may I suggest you visit Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC, USA, on any day you like and see if you change your mind. I'm not trying to be adversarial, just presenting a different opinion you understand.

My point is that Arlington is for fallen US soldiers, it is absolutley huge and vast, it would be over twice as big if the Atomic bombs had not stopped the Pacific War in 1945, and the US had to invade.

Yes, there was an attempt at surrender so another poster mentions, it was not unconditional, why should the allies have accepted anything less. Yes of course the Japanese are now horrified by the Atomic Bomb, like they were not at the time horrified by the way they dealt with everyone else. It was a hard lesson, but it appears to have been learned. (some people don't learn you know and repeat their errors, e.g. Germany was in 2 world wars)

I understand the horror of a bomb that could do so much so fast, and also understand the horror of weeks or months of hand to hand urban combat that would have achieved the same result, with possibly ten times as many dead and many more lives ruined.

RPG is correct.

More than 1 million Japanese were killed in the fire bombing of Tokyo and Kyoto in the two months preceeding Hiroshima.

The estimated casualties of the imminent invasion would have been in the millions.

The bomb was the lesser of 2 evils.

The issue is emotive and is similar to the fear of planes crashing or shark attacks when the real dangers are car crashes or drowning.

It is perception rather than reality.

rpg

The war could have ended eight days earlier if the Americans had accepted the Japanese surrender on the 29th of July. Two things stood in the way. The Americans wanted to test their bombs and Russia wanted to go through the motions of declaring war on Japan before Japan surrendered.
Saving allied lives was an excuse to justify the un-justifiable.
Even this is of no consequence because it belongs to a past generation. The question is 'Do we want it?' This is now, and now is our responsibility. Are we to continue the sins of our fathers?
Shadow Minister. Kyoto was spared convention and nuclear attack because the Americans wanted to have it as their administration centre. Nuclear weapons perception rather than reality?

Ideally no one wants atomic bombs, but then no one has attacked a country WITH them for fear of retaliation. The only problem is the rogue states that support terrorism and the terrorists don't seem to mind retaliation as long as they kill the opposition..............which of course they would do with or without any nuclear ban or disarmament. Unfortunately throughout history there have always been, and always will be, people with different philosophies who want to impose their ideas on others and will kill to achieve them.

I would feel safer in Australia if we had a nuclear deterrent.

Daviy - I don't want to get into an argument, there is no need - we disagree and that's that. I won't convince you nor you me.

I believe we need the bomb as a deterrent since they exist - if they did not exist, I would be against the development of them, now that we know what they can do.

Before the first one was dropped, no one knew for sure what would happen. So I cannot agree the circumstances were so contrived. The Americans were sick of death and sick of war by that time, thankfully President Truman did not listen to MacArthur who wanted personal glory at the cost of US and Japanese lives through invasion.

What happened at the end of the war regarding surrender, Russia joining in and why Kyoto was spared are all topics of endless conjecture.

Your point of "Are we to continue the sins of our fathers?" sums it up, you feel it is a sin, I do not, it was in my belief a great lifesaver. (I have a personally autographed picture of the plane and pilot by Col. Paul Tibbett (later Gen.))

Let's leave it at that, I can see you are quite passionate about it, I have military training and have a dispassionate strategic and tactical view.

"Its glib reassurances might help sell uranium, but at the cost of the nuclear weapons free world that has eluded us since the terror of Hiroshima."

and it is glib to presume not using nuclear weapons would have produced a better military outcome over an enemy whose highpoint in social development was the rape of Nanking.

I agree with those who point out the deaths attributable to a conventional invasion and occupation of Japan would have caused far greater death and carnage than dropping the atomic bomb.

Any debate to the contrary is based soleyl on famciful myth and conjecture.

As to the nuclear industry of today, when I consider the deployment of nuclear powerstatoins across USA and Europe and compare their "failure rate" to that of the former Soviet Union, it is patently obvious, wetsern capitalist societies have the methodology to control their nuclear assets and the old socialist / communist operators did not.

As to dealing with terrorists and rogue states.. drop a bomb on them and see how they react to formenting terror against us... there is no point in having a detterant unless one is prepared to use it.

One day someone, whether terrorist or government, will use one and then maybe we will learn.

Oh wait that already happened didnt it. How many times do we need?

Is that the minister for very dark shadows?

Because there is seldom, if ever, any light, or indeed anything truly positive, in your postings.

Just gross "realistic" cynicism.

Or perhaps you are Darth Vader?

The truth about nuclear weapons.

The idea behind nuclear weapons is the idea of total war. Total war is not about conflicts based on confrontations between the armies of the warring states. Total war is about the practice of war in which the people altogether are the target.

Total war is an obscenity. It is evil. Total war would destroy the people, and it would destroy everything--for a political advantage.

The seed, or root, of the idea of total war is the commitment to global dominance. Total war has no function except except for a nation state, or an alliance of nation states, that is interested in global dominance.

This kind of warfare has become global policy in the course of the twentieth century, and now into the 21st.

Total war is absolutely unacceptable, and so the current war-like posturing must stop. It is on the verge of producing its ultimate catastrophe.

It is not that this or that nation-state should not have nuclear weapons. Absolutely no state and nobody should have nuclear weapons.

There needs to be an immediate intervention on behalf of humankind to eliminate all nuclear weapons and to establish a working process for settling issues.

At present, a "culture" of total war, a "culture" of death is ruling, while the people are engrossed in self-oblivious and self-destructive consumerism.

Shadow Minister,

The nuclear industry is the only energy sector to fuel WMDs. Nuclear power was a by-product of military research and infrastructure, not the other way around.

General Electric's and DuPont's Hanford facility, overseen primarily by Westinghouse, produced the plutonium used in the Manhattan Project.

The UK's Calder Hall at Sellafield, England, billed as the world's first civil nuclear power station in 1956, was producing not just electricity but also plutonium for nuclear weapons.

India's first nuke was produced using fuel from a Canadian research reactor, 'capable of manufacturing enough plutonium for one to two bombs a year.' (www.fas.org/nuke/guide/india/nuke)

Nobel Prize winning physicist Hannes Alven described the peaceful and military atom as 'Siamese twins.' Over 20 countries which have built N-power or research reactors are known to have used their 'peaceful' nuclear facilities for covert weapons research and/or production.

More to the point, I can think of no reason why the issue of self-inflicted total annihilation should NOT be emotive. That's a false argument. To compare the deaths from the Japanese firebombings vs the A-Bombs is pure ignorance. You may as well turn your back on local homelessness and poverty due to Africa.

I don't think anyone who truly comprehends the destructive power of today's weapons (typically 1,000 times as powerful than the 14kt Hiroshima bomb) could be anything but loudly opposed to nuclear weapons. They have not prevented wars, and we have come within minutes of accidental nuclear war on several occasions.

As mentioned by mikk, above, hindsight is strong, but is not preventative. We continue with complacency at our own peril.

Responding to Foyle ("I understand that the latest generation of nuclear power reactors are capable of utilising both U238 and U235 and do not have the ability to produce Plutonium"), even the number of the 'advanced' reactor concepts being studied involve a closed fuel cycle that involves reprocessing and thus the actual or potential separation of weapons-usable plutonium (or weapons-usable Uranium-233) from irradiated fuel or targets.
- www.energyscience.org.au.

Re pebble bed reactor designs:
- The nature of the fuel pebbles may make it somewhat more difficult to separate plutonium from irradiated fuel, but plutonium separation is certainly not impossible.
- Uranium (or depleted uranium) targets could be inserted to produce thorium targets could be inserted to produce uranium-233.
- The enriched uranium fuel could be further enriched for weapons.
- The reliance on enriched uranium will encourage the use of and perhaps be used to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons. And in China's pebble bed test reactor, 'What to do with growing piles of nuclear waste is a problem that not even this reactor can solve'. – 'Catalyst', ABC TV, Feb 2007.

And thorium reactors:
- Neutron bombardment of thorium (indirectly) produces uranium-233, a fissile material that can be used in nuclear weapons.
- The USA has successfully tested weapons using Uranium-233 cores, and India may have investigated the military use of Thorium/Uranium-233 in addition to its civil applications.
- "Thorium (Th-232) absorbs a neutron to become Th-233 which normally decays to protactinium-233 and then U-233. The irradiated fuel can then be unloaded from the reactor, the U-233 separated and fed back into another reactor as part of a closed fuel cycle." – World Nuclear Association, 2006.
- 'No thorium system would negate proliferation risks altogether." – Friedman, John S., 1997, 'More power to thorium?', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 53, No.5, September/October; Feiveson, 2001.

My two posts here invite the attention of RPG, Shadow Minister and Daviy.
Japan attempted several negotiated settlements during and late in the war, mostly through Russia and its Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Secretly agreed terms of the Potsdam terms of surrender required Russia to declare war on Japan within months of the Axis defeat in Europe. In addition, the Japanese failed to appreciate the continuing Russian hostility and imperative for revenge over defeat in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War and the invasion by Japan of Siberia at the outbreak of WWl at the behest of the Allies. Molotov personally informed the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, that Russia declared a state of war between their respectve countries as of 9th August 1945. Russian troops by this time had already entered Manchuria. [Herbert Feis, CONTEST OVER JAPAN] The very first attempt at a peace settlement was suggested by Marquis Koichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and supreme confidant of the Emperor, before the fall of Singapore! [Lester Brooks, BEHIND JAPAN'S SURRENDER ch.10] At no time before the deployment of the bombs did Japan accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The terms set out for cessation of hostilities by Japan were, at that time and at any time previously, unacceptable to the Allies.
Actually, Japan had a dread of Russian occupation, cognisant as it was of the brutality meted out to the Germans when Russia invaded Germany itself and when Russian armour defeated all before it in dispossessing Japan of Northern China. It preferred by far an occupation by the western Allies.
Nor did the Allies wish Russia to invade the home islands of Japan. The administrative nightmare of a divided occupation of Berlin and Germany was a significant factor in preventing Russia from another
similar occupation. The Allied plans for the rehabilitation of Japan were diametrically opposed to those that could be forseen in any Russian plans. It was a given that the latter would execute the Emperor Hirohito for war crimes.

Continued...........
Japan's documentary evidence of the attempted surrender of July 29 is too selective and too simplistic to give a true and accurate representation of the circumstances. Absolutely nothing, whether political or military in these particularly turbulent times, is susceptible of a simple explanation. The so-called attempt to surrender was in fact a Japanese reaction to the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. First news of the terms reached Japan on July 26. On July 28 Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki declared that the cabinet would "mokusatsu" that document. Hizatsune Sakomizu, chief cabinet secretary said he intended to convey the meaning of "no comment" but the subtlety of the Japanese language spread the meaning to "treat with silent contempt" or "to ignore". And this was how the Japanese English language press interpreted it in their headlines. On this basis, on the rejection of the Potsdam Declaration's terms by Japan, President Harry Truman, under immense pressure to end the war at any cost and to save thousands of American lives should an invasion be required of the Japanese home islands, gave the go-ahead for the deployment of the nuclear bombs. [Brooks, ch 12]
I repeat, Absolutely nothing, whether political or military in these particularly turbulent times, is susceptible of a simple explanation. To declare Japan already beaten into submission is a simplistic single factor in a multitude of factors that bear on the events that ensued. Strict control of these events up to and during the occupation was necessary for a unified Japan to suffer a benign administration and rehabilitation.