Rojo

I was unable to find figures for tonnage throughput and waste. Not living near "coal" country, I am not au fait with that industry's operations.

However, your advice fails to allay my concerns, given that our current exports of uranium are only about 1% and we already have 100 million tonnes of radioactive waste from tailings - I believe that is mainly from 2 mines only.

Since we are flush with uranium and tenements are plentiful, the increase in uranium mining will be devastating for the environment.

Already one mine in SA is the biggest user of underground water in the southern hemisphere; the biggest electricity user in the state and taking millions of litres of water daily from the Great Artesian Basin and expanding.

How anyone can purport that nuclear is clean has me completely and utterly flabbergasted.

Many of us are already aware of the radioactive pollution of the North and Irish sea - a legacy of Sellafield and the contamination caused by La Hague (France) which is reported to dump an estimated 230 million litres of radioactive waste into the Atlantic each year.

There have been major non-conformances within the Australian uranium industry and in 2005, one operator was prosecuted (twice). Fines of $150,000 and $82,500 were imposed.

In fact Ian MacFarlane, in 2004, referring to that uranium company, stated that "...... have developed a culture of complacency".

I trust that the people of this nation are not as complacent and will perform extensive research into this proposal to enable them to make an informed decision rather than accepting the current spin as gospel.

However, the question is what to do in the meantime, whilst the Neros fiddle and Oz is burning? If nuclear is a reality then twenty years is a long time to wait before "mitigating" the damage already done if we don't pull our heads in now and take action!

Whilst I am inclined to share Ludwig's concern that adoption of measures to increase efficiency may only serve to encourage the fools currently in control of our destiny to add to our population, I, nevertheless, think we should still support measures that would genuinely increase energy efficiency.

The mess created by our political leaders who recklessly encouraged population growth, in spite of the considered warnings of the likes of Paul Ehrlich since at least 1968, will have to be tackled on many fronts.

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Regarding the 'bumping off people' argument, if we continue to allow human numbers to grow well beyond what this planet is capable of supporting, then I fail to see how hundreds of millions, if not billions, will not die horribly in future conflicts to divide up scarce natural resources. This happens to other species who overshoot the carrying capacity of their environment and there is no reason to assume that it can't happen to humans as well.

If we want to prevent such a horrific scenario becoming reality, we must do our utmost now to stop any further growth in human numbers.

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thebull (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=350#6230),

Why do you consider 0.8% annual population growth NOT to be rapid population growth? In any case the figures could be over 200,000 per year or 1% if we add in factors as cross-Tasman migration and the abuse of our tertiary migration system to facilitate migration.

In fact any substantial growth is too rapid if we have already exceed the carrying capacity of this continent. The Courier Mail newspaper in Brisbane, which paradoxically does its utmost to promote the maximum possible population growth has front page stories all the time of the chaos that our relentless population growth has caused: the congestion on the road, the housing shortages, the threats of power blackouts, the water crisis and the threatened destruction of rural communities around Wyaralong and in the Mary River Valley that building dams in order to 'solve' this crisis demands.

Even if we accept the figure of 0.7%, (140,000 PA) this means that after less than 14 years years on average, every community in the country will have to share its resources and spaces with 10% more people. Clearly such a process cannot be continued indefinitely.

If we manage to keep population growth figures down to 'only' 0.7%, then after 100 years our population will have doubled to 40 million, and after 1000 years our population will have increased to 19.8 billion.

In fact population growth has disproportionately affected some parts of the country such as South East Queensland. As an example Queensland's population has doubled from 2 million in 1974 to 4 million in 2005, and in South East Queensland, another 1.25 million are to be crammed in by 2026 according to the South East Queensland Regional Plan.

Dickie

The early nuclear reactors only used about 0.7% of the fuel, so developing breeder reactor designs that use over 90% of the fuel could reduce GHG emissions for nuclear energy to a few percent of present levels. Your GHG comments for current nuclear technology seem to conflict with Dr Switkowski's report, which suggests that emissions are one tenth that of conventional sources.

http://www.dpmc.gov.au/umpner/reports.cfm

My concern with the nuclear option is that Australia could find itself committed to building nuclear power stations that are obsolete by the time they are completed.

dickie, I didn't say clean I said "green" credentials, by which I mean cleaner than coal, not that it is clean.
One tonne of natural Uranium will produce the same as 20000 tonne of black coal. If Australia's ore has 3kg uranium/tonne of ore, or even world standard 1kg/tonne, then between 333 and 1000 tonnes of ore are required to produce that tonne of uranium. That is 20x less material to be mined than coal to produce the same equivalent amount of electricity.
Further, the uranium is seperated from the ore onsite meaning that up to 20000x less material has to be transported. As you know transportation is a large contributer to pollution levels.
You are not specific about which mine you are refering to with regard to water consumption. I'll assume Olympic Dam, which I have read has entitlement to 42 megalitres/day. Plenty of farms exract more than this daily (I do mean each) so it's a claim that may/not be true, but I'm not in Uranium country.
Concerns about safety are absolutely valid. It is of the greatest importance that reactors are safe, and a lot of the safegaurds are why it's power be more expensive than current fossil fuel power.
The tailings cannot contain more dangerous material than existed prior to mining, it's just more accessible. A simple solution is to put it back in the hole and cover it up, just as coal mines rehabilitate their sites.
I too hope the people of Australia make informed decisions, irrespective of spin.

(Apologies to Ludwig: I misread your posts earlier. On closer, reading I see that we are, in fact, in very close agreement, after all. The problem of resources shortage, in particular, energy shortage, must be dealt with every way we possibly can, including, most importantly, the limiting of human numbers demanding those resources.)

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Anyhow, the real problem we must deal with is the ever diminishing values of the Energy Returned Over Energy Invested. This was argued very well by Alice Friedemann in an article "Peak Oil and the Preservation of knowledge" by Alice Friedemann at http://www.energybulletin.net/18978.html, as I have already mentioned in a post to a discussion on "In defence of industrialisation and mining" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5291#66063

Here are some excerpts:

"At one time, the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) for oil was at least 100 to 1. We are reaching the point where the EROI of oil will be 1 and no more drilling will take place. It was while the EROI of oil was high that most of our current infrastructure was built. ...

"Evidence suggests that the EROI of corn ethanol is less than one, which means it takes more energy to make than you get out of it – an energy sink.

"Even if the highest claim of a net energy for ethanol of 1.67 were true, a much greater EROI than .67 is needed to run civilization. The 1 in the 1.67 is needed just to make the ethanol. An EROI of .67 has 150 times less energy than oil when we started building American infrastructure."