WayneSmith declares that: 'Finally, Australia has a Prime Minister gutsy enough to face down the noisy minority, ecowacky brigade and do what is right for Australia.'

What he should have said is a PM who is craven enough do what is right for the neo-feudal robber barons who have taken over this nation.

The New Clear push is all about retaining control of power in the hands of a small, powerful elite and keeping the rest of society on the salary treadmill.

If enough households generated their own power from rooftop solar, installed rainwater tanks and rode bicycles, how would the tycoons make a buck?

Even without the financial and environmental cost of developing new clear power, which are staggering, the long-term ability of a society to maintain a nuclear facility is questionable.

Is WayneSmith seriously arrogant enough to guarantee that our society will be stable enough, secure enough and wise enough to provide the required security and expertise to manage and maintain nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years into the future?

I wish I had that much faith in mankind.

Bechtel Inc. The Company whose agenda George Bush and John Howard push is called Bechtel Inc. When not building nuclear power plants in the US, it builds gold & copper mines for Freeport McMoRan here in West Papua and operates the "US Indonesia Society" lobby group whose agenda for the US to cancel its ban and resume US funding of the Indonesian military, George Bush started campaigning on in Jan/2001.

America was stunned to hear the great oil man Bush say nuclear energy was America's future, but not those people who knew which corporation had been funding the Bush political careers for decades. Bechtel also tried buying Bolivia's entire water supply so they could sell water to the Bolivians at a great profit. And most recently Bechtel has been in the news for some of its wheeling-dealing construction work in Iraq.

Nuclear energy is a stupid option because it uses extensive oil energy to build and maintain.

A clever country, would instead invest money on mass producing high efficiency technologies to cut the future energy demands to a half or third of today's levels, a level at which the planet survives as well as letting you have your morning cup of coffee.

In a discussion with a friend who has worked all his life in the nuclear industry including reprocessing and power plants, and was at the very top of the field he outlined a proposal that would enhance safety and security.

First is to maintain control of the uranium you must stop export of yellow cake.
The government should set up a processing plant to bring the uranium up to power plant purity. (Well below weapons purity).
The plant makes the uranium into reactor rods. Each rod is given a unique identity, which is not lost even if melted.
The rods are not sold but leased and further rods are not available unless the depleted rods are returned.
The returned rods can be processed, (and I did not understand this part) the radio activity is considerably lowered.
They are then stored in a suitable location under Australian government and IAEC control.
The whole process to be supervised by the IAEC.
When the time comes that the uranium ore is exhausted then breeder reactors can be used.

This friend of mine was at a conference in Austria in 1956 when the Russians described their new reactors for power station use.
In question time it was pointed out to them that there was a design possibilty of a failure that could cause a meltdown.
They chose to ignore the warning and it was this very flaw that caused the Chernoble failure.

No reactors in the west had that possibility. The design makes that failure impossible.
It is interesting to talk to people who really know what it is all about rather than all the panic merchants whenever the subject comes up.

What a wonderful world Wayne Smith lives in - one where tree-hugging envirowhackys (gotta love that term, huh folks?) can manipulate world governments to ensure that perfectly 'safe' fast breeder nuclear reactors are banned by green decree!

Mr Smith would do far better(and be a ten times more accurate) to put such 'blame' fairly and squarely where it belongs, directly at the feet of those capitalists behind Mr Howard's determination to put nuclear reactors in many Australians' 'back yard' (come on all you nimbys out there!)

There are two reasons why Mr Smith's Utopian vision of a clean, safe nuclear future will not be happening any time soon. Primarily because of the $Billions at stake for the owners of the Uranium mines and the very valuable ore they contain (much like the oil barons of the 20th century controlled the use of more fuel-efficient motors and also killed off the non-polluting electric car) Having a reactor that makes its own fuel and thus makes the Uranium ore virtually unsaleable is a technology that they must prevent at all costs. Money is what talks the loudest to a politician and also closes his ears to any opposition.

The second reason has to do with the problem of some countries owning breeder reactors that produce weapons grade plutonium. While 'the good guys' (ie anyone who supports G W Bush) would only use such reactors for the purpose Mr Smith envisions (wouldn't they??) some countries will use the technology in ways other than the designers intended (Yes Virginia, such evil people do actually exist!) and easily extract materials that are able to be used in nuclear weapons including the so-called 'dirty' bombs. It is a relatively simple matter to put extremely radio-active and long lived plutonium around a conventional explosive and spread vast quantities of fall-out in a populated area that would kill millions and cause catastrophic economic results.

It is far easier to ensure your enemy's are not able to get their hands on such 'safe' devices (via international agencies and treaty's) when you are not helping to produce them yourself.

BTW Wayne - try telling the people of the Ukraine that the Nuclear Industry has not killed a single person this year - take a trip to Russia and see the 10,000 more leukaemia and cancer sufferers and babies born with serious deformities that have been born because of Chernobyl than were being born before Chernobyl.

Then explain to us how many millions of tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are produced in the mining of Uranium ore and processing of yellowcake into Uranium oxide and of processing that oxide into a fissile state of enrichment.

And then explain why the nuclear industry places billions of dollars and decades of research into producing more efficient and more expensive ways of boiling water when the Sun is quite capable of doing that for virtually no ongoing cost, twelve hours a day here in Aus for much of the year.

(and yes! - i do actually realise that power is needed 24 hours a day/365 days a year, which is why LNG power stations would greatly help support Solar (and to a lesser degree) wave energy sources in an enviromentally far more friendly way than our glorious leader would have us live in. That is, of course, as soon as someone ever finds a way to rip the populace off from such forms of energy production while at the same time convincing Coal mining companies to foregoe the billions of dollars of current supplies of black gold for which Australia and the rest of the world so desperately wants to pay them.

Wake UP people - the 'power' is where the MONEY is.

http://seven.com.au/sunrise/more_cooltheglobe

For people who care about the earth, please sign this petition.

I probably will post more later, running out of time right now.