I admit to not knowing where I stand on this; it might help if there were working thorium reactors around for evaluation. It's all very well to say the technology proved itself decades ago but it wasn't taken up. We can and do see the less than best technological choices taken; better financed and politically positioned opposition, short-term cost disadvantage, short-sightedness but currently fossil fuels have the financial and political position and the short term cost advantage. But it could be that other technologies were always better.

It's clear that the major players - miners, power companies, governments - as much as the public, are all for fossil fuels and will hold up Carbon capture as the excuse for another decade or two of avoiding real action on emissions. I think opposition to nuclear energy won't survive in the face of climate change -over the longer term but I also don't Australia favouring nuclear solutions that, for whatever reasons, were abandoned by nations that do use nuclear.

Expecting Australia to lead the way in developing thorium reactors seems very unlikely and it's the existing energy sector more than the public that will be the biggest stumbling block for nuclear of any sort.

Examinator,

What the anti nuke lobby often lack is a sense of perspective. For example:

The smallest power station in the Latrobe valley produces a tiny fraction of Australia's power, but produces in a month about as much waste ash as the entire US nuclear high and low level waste from the past 40 years.

While it is not radioactive, coal ash contains disproportionately high contents of oxidized and soluble heavy metals, (arsenic, cadmium, etc) and are in reality a greater long term threat than glassed reprocessed uranium.

Obsolete nuclear machinery is classified as low level waste, and if contaminated is with rapidly decaying isotopes. If left above ground for 40-100 years the radioactivity will decay to a tiny fraction where it is close to the background level and can be recycled.

Alex Goodwin, you say I conveniently forget.

I do confess to an imperfect memory, but do you really expect those of us retaining a bit of memory to accept your statement “those subsidies (the bulk of which are and have been for military use and thus irrelevant to civil nuclear power)”?

What substantial change has occurred since 1969, the days of Operation Ploughshare? The Australian Government of that time assented to construction of a new harbour by peaceful nuclear means. That, even though Henry Kissinger was on shaky ground attempting to address the Limited Test Ban Treaty question. From Pentagon papers of the time: “The Cape Keraudren project, which will involve underwater excavation will inject radioactive debris into both the atmosphere and the ocean. Since the proposed harbor is on the coast of Australia, it will be extremely difficult to find weather conditions that will assure that debris vented to the atmosphere will not go past the three-mile territorial limits.”

That project did not proceed, only because the costs of “construction” were to be met by the iron ore entrepreneur, and they exceeded conventional methods.

Of course technology has improved over the past 40 years. And if they have become so economically favourable, in “the absence of any military connection”, why do Babcock & Wilcox and all need handouts?

If we can take on board your exclusion of potentially violently reactive sodium as a presence, please don’t deny us the potential excitement of thoughts associated with Liquid Fluoride.

Re emissions from coal fired power stations I thought that as Uranium is very widely distributed it also occurs at low levels in coal. Hence, bearing in mind the monumental amounts of coal that are burnt, there is a large amount of radioactive material emitted from all coal based stations. I feel sure that I have read somewhere that radiation from coal stations is comparatively very large. Would some of your comment writers or the original writer please advise the rest of us on what is a very big issue because it puts the emissions from nuclear stations into rather better perspective. It wuld be even better if someone could post the relative amounts of radiation from all sources including background radiation and, for example, radiation from substances such as concrete, wood and granite. Certainly Radon levels are higher in mines in particular if there is granite about.

Examinator, It is not the volume of nuclear waste that is the problem. Indeed to compare different toxic materials by volume of waste only is disingenuous. Most would agree that the waste problem with coal fired power stations receives far too little attention but to leap from that to arguing that since there is so much less nuclear waste nuclear must be better. (At least that appears to be the conclusion you are inviting us to draw.) At least one of the problems with nuclear waste is not a question of volume but a question of time - it needs to be stored in a safe condition for thousands of years. (whilst there is dispute about how long nuclear waste remains dangerous - I have yet to see nuclear physicist argue for a period of under a 10,000 years) Let us assume that we can store nuclear waste safely for a period of 10,000 years. That still does not get us out of the woods. Presumably we need warning signs and we need to clearly demarcate the danger zone. In otherwords we need to invent a means of writing warning signs that will still have meaning 10,000 years from now, we need to identify the zone in a way that it still will mean something to people 10,000 years from now. Given that we struggle to make sense of written text that is more than 500 years old you are assuming that we have the skills and ability to invent a set of warning signs that will still be unambiguously clear 10,000 years from now. ( we cannot assume that people can keep finding something like the rosetta stone)
Of course the foregoing assumes that you agree that we have a responsibility to future generations.

sorry examinator - I should have addressed that last post to shadow minister.