France’s government ignores France’s majority opposition to nuclear power
Adjournment speech – Fukushima 6 months on – Australia’s Nuclear Free Alliance, Spokesperson Scott Ludlam, 14th September 2011,”.……Another guest who we were very fortunate to host at Seven Mile was Andre Lariviere, of the French network to phase out the nuclear industry-a network of 900 groups in France. We tend to think of the French as being the happy atomic country or as Andre puts it, the nation of the happy atom.
It is not the case. It has not been the case for a long period of time. A recent poll-I am quoting from a Reuters article of April this year-carried out in late March, subsequent to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, found the 57 per cent of respondents were generally in favour of dropping nuclear energy, with 20 per cent strongly in favour of the idea. So the footprint of the nuclear industry in France has taken on this profoundly anti-democratic side in that most of us here in Australia probably think the French are pretty happy with their clean, green nuclear industry generating 70 or 80 per cent of their electricity. It is absolutely not the case.
The French government will ignore that poll, as polls here in Australia about nuclear power and uranium mining have been ignored, because it is inconvenient. But the French have just suffered another accident, a blast at a reprocessing facility in the south of France that has killed one worker and put a number of others in hospital. There does not appear to have been a significant radioactive release, although you always have to take government officials’ proclamations with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, an explosion at a reprocessing plant dealing with plutonium and some of the material that has now showered the north-east part of Japan is still a cause for serious concern. I suspect it will not improve the polling numbers the next time a poll is taken in France.
The French are absolutely not alone in opposing nuclear power by various margins. In Japan, 82 per cent of Japanese favoured building more plants in Japan, or maintaining existing ones. That was a poll that was taken in 2005. Subsequent to the Fukushima disaster, somewhere between 41 per cent and 54 per cent of the Japanese people now support scrapping or reducing the numbers of nuclear power plants… http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/speech/adjournment-speech-fukushima-6-months-australias-nuclear-free-alliance
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