what's more, the supply of yellowcake, unlike oil or coal, is inexhaustible. so never any need to mess with renewables, we'll just drink our pina coladas while watching the sunset, and spent fuel rods can be milled into bicycle frames with a builtin glow-in-the-dark safety feature.

i was very glad to hear that booksales are involved in this post, otherwise we're dealing with psychosis.

that's not fair,really. some people really can't distinguish between 'year after next' and 'never'. i blame 'see and say' literacy teaching.

Hi Demos,

I enjoyed your sarcasm. You're good. I think the time has come, however, to stop the jokes about nuclear power and face the truth...even the inconvenient truth. According to most scientific minds our planet is in danger from global warming. Many ideas have been put forth on how best to stop or even reverse global warming.

Unfortunately, there are also jokes (in most cases, well deserved) about global warming. For example windmills, solar panels and the suggestion by some singer that we use less toilet paper....yeah, that oughta do it!

The truth is that windmills, that have destroyed much of our visual environment, and solar panels that work when there's sunshine are at best just "band-aids" that can't even begin to keep up with population growth.

The "inconvenient truth" however, is that there is one way....and only ONE way...to stop and hopefully reverse global warming. That one way is with clean, safe, inexpensive and inexhaustible nuclear power. Hundreds of nuclear power plants, and eventually thousands, have the ability to clean up this dirty world...if we have the dedication, the political will, and the "guts" to take advantage of nature's greatest gift, NUCLEAR ENERGY.

I strongly urge you to read my book, NUCLEAR GREEN. It is available at Amazon.com in either paperback or hardcover. If you can't afford to purchase one, however, I'll be happy to have the publisher send you the paperback. If you read my book, I'm confident that your next comments will not contain sarcasm.

I can't really see that the world would be hugely different in a practical way. It was probably more the incompetent Soviets with Chernobyl that killed off nuclear power than the greenies.

I doubt that Australia would have nuclear power even now, because while it's reasonably competitive in some markets, it would still be more expensive (though not hugely so) than coal in Australia. The only reason it's now open to some consideration here is that there is possibly (with some level of probability that I'm not debating here) an external cost to coal that has not previously been taken into account.

My main concern with power is that the opposition to nuclear power is resulting in other more expensive "solutions" (I have doubts about whether they really are solutions) are being adopted. Also, the fact that a project requires power is starting to be regarded as an objection in itself (for example, with Sydney's desalinator), rather than merely an economic issue to be taken into account when deciding a project's viability.

Sylvia.

Goddess,

There is a real show stopper when it comes to power supply, which is that we have no economic and practical way of storing energy on a large scale. This seriously impacts on the viability of solar and wind power. In addition, both of those technologies are expensive. Wind farms seem likely to remain expensive forever - they just involve a lot of hardware for the amount of power generated. Solar power will remain expensive absent a major breakthrough in technology, because the existing technologies have already benefited from the usual economies of scale (solar cell manufacture is a multi billion dollar industry).

Denmark has been the poster boy for wind power generation, but even there things are not as they seem. See these links.

http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/sharman-winddenmark.pdf

http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/White-DenmarkTooGood.pdf

In short, Denmark exports the instability in generation of its wind farms, and there is the possibility that the supposed CO2 benefits are wiped out, or at least much reduced, by the reduced efficiency that the instability causes in conventional power plants.

The easy solutions would be adopted if they worked and were economically viable. If a solution is not adopted, it's either because it doesn't work, or because it's unacceptably expensive.

Sylvia.

I have enjoyed viewing this forum because between you the facts about nuclear power have been laid out in one hit for someone unsure of the whole story such as I.
I've gone from not having an opinion to being pro-nuclear.Thanks guys.

While I am sure that "climate change" is probably the strongest argument in favor of nuclear energy, the rest of the arguments seem pretty bloody weak. For instance, I fail to see the benefits of nuclear medicine (ie putting radioactive pellets near ones genitalia in the cited example) as a reason for adopting nuclear power plants on a large scale. Australia already has a nuclear reactor that produces isotopes for research and medicine, something that I am very much in favor of. I myself have used unsealed radioactive isotopes in the course of my work and am not scared of handling radioactive isotopes. I believe I am far from "brainwashed" as it seems that Ralph Andrews would label anyone who disagrees with his pro-nuclear viewpoint.

However, it seems that in the course of his argument Ralph "Troublemaker" completely ignores many of the ideas of risk assessment and risk management. Yes,nuclear power plants generally have had less direct fatalities and probably less indirect ones as well, than conventional plants. But does anyone stop to consider why exactly this would be the case? Is it because the technology is inherently safer? No. It's because of strict risk management strategies put in place to contain a very high-risk technology. Which has failed (or at least come extremely close to failure) more times than cited by Ralph, especially if one considers nuclear submarines and other types of plants. To understand the inevitability of failure, as most failures are due to human error, you should read "The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Dorner (amazon.com). Considering the actual number of coal-fired power plants, and the actual number of nuclear plants, and the extra security and risk management protocols put in place for nuclear, I would expect a far lower death or injury rate, in fact considering the risk for environmental release and contamination, I would want a zero accident rate for the technology to be considered "safe". Failure of containment in any case would be considered a disaster.

cont'd