Antinuclear

Nuclear power financially out of the question for Australia

Judging by the US experience, a nuclear power industry would require huge government subsidies to produce energy at an affordable cost for consumers. …which insurance companies would agree to insure the nuclear industry without iron-clad government guarantees to underwrite the risks?…According to the President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, physicist Professor Ian Lowe, direct subsidies to the US nuclear industry totalled $115 billion between 1947 and 1999. Decommissioning nuclear power plants is expensive and dangerous, and no one has yet found an economically or environmentally sensible (or indeed a politically acceptable) solution to the problem of radioactive waste.
Furthermore, building new nuclear power stations would lead to a short term increase in our carbon emissions, at a time when we need to be quickly and efficiently reducing emissions to slow the pace of dangerous climate change. And even if we were willing to cop that increase, maintaining a reliable, long term supply of uranium ore to fuel those stations would also require increasingly carbon-intensive extraction and processing.

I challenge any Labor Government to persuade the residents of a major Australian city that a nuclear power station is safe enough to be built in their backyard. Our memory banks may be shrinking as digital technologies take over the work of our brain cells, but few Australians over the age of forty won’t shudder at the mention of the word Chernobyl. And which insurance companies would agree to insure the nuclear industry without iron-clad government guarantees to underwrite the risks?

Labor going nuclear in rush to self destruct – Unleashed (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

February 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, business