Antinuclear

Nuclear power for Australia? an expensive superstition

Rundle: Who ate all the yellowcake?

Crikey.com by Guy Rundle 19 August 2009

If you think it’s tough to get an incinerator built these days, trying putting a nuclear waste dump anywhere. Voters wouldn’t allow it, not in their backyards. Nuclear power is the defining struggle, around which a new politics is organised.

………………..Paul Howes of the AWU, the
employers enforcement authority, sorry, right-wing trade union, who used an
occasion at one of the Sydney Institute’s all gruel-and-gravel evenings to
spruik the idea of Australia developing a nuclear power industry.
Howes’s voice joins the chorus that began in the Howard government, as it
used its acknowledgment of climate change to open a fresh front in the
culture war, and get out from under the awful prospect of admitting that the
Greens were right about something.
Howes attacks the Rudd government’s continued commitment to not starting an
Australian nuclear industry as the continuation of a superstitious attitude.
Actually it’s because there is no way to start up a nuclear power industry
without a multi-billion dollar state commitment involving a direct transfer
of government money to private industry to create institutions that have no
power pay-off for a decade or more, and that generate a lethal poison
by-product the disposal of which raises NIMBYism to the highest power
imaginable……………………

Howes is right about nuclear power. It is a superstitious issue. Trouble is
the superstition is all on the side of the nuclear power lobby. Nuclear
isn’t a new technology. It’s the last of the old technologies, one where you
use a massive amount of energy to get a greater amount, the gap between
energy expended and created being your dividend……………

It’s not the opposition to nuclear power that shows old thinking, or lack of
imagination — it’s the belief that renewable energy is bound by the limits
of the pathetic level of commitment we’ve made to it over past decades, as
if aviation were to stop at the biplane……………….

Nuclear power means in grosse plante right at the centre
of things, owned by someone. Furthermore, the lethal nature of both the raw
material and end product of nuclear power demand a level of security
involving the state, and a widespread nuclear system is incompatible with
democracy.
It is a recipe for turning the world into one big China — authoritarian
rule over a red-in-tooth capitalist system……

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/08/19/rundle-who-ate-all-the-yellowcake

August 20, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics, uranium | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, uranium