Senator Sean Edwards spruiks for the South Australian nuclear lobby

Yesterday, I wrote about the media publicity given to Senator Sean Edwards, a former estate agent, who is going very public in support of South Australia getting the entire nuclear fuel chain (around its necks). Meanwhile, Dr Helen Caldicott, a world authority, was denied publicity to put the counter case.

Today, I learn that Sen Edwards has now set up a website to promote this theme. It’s a corker.

He starts with an attack on the Greens – they should be “morally and philosophically compelled to support advanced nuclear energy”

Moves quickly on to the argument for nuclear power as “free energy” and the $billions of revenue for South Australia, in importing the world’ radioactive trash.

“Polling proves South Australians want this and they want it yesterday” – says Edwards. Actually – no! Polling shows that South Australians voters reject expansion of the nuclear industry.

He asserts that “nuclear reactors produce no emissions that contribute to global warming”. (That’s untrue, but especially untrue if you ignore the entire nuclear fuel chain)

They “deliver abundant energy without any mining”. Hey – he doesn’t count the mining required for the conventional reactors to produce the wastes to put into the reprocessing reactors that he is touting! Edwards must be a bit confused. One of the main arguments for the South Australian expansion, as put by nuclear proponent Oscar Archer, is that it will give a strong boost to Australia’s uranium mining and uranium export industry.

Edwards tells us how very safe the nuclear industry – except for 3 what he calls “incidents” (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima).

And without any evidence at all, he asserts that – for the new non existent untested reprocessing nuclear reactors – “The science is sound, the business case has been made and the public is behind us”

1.This month

For international news go to https://nuclear-news.net/

Climate change – the global emergency – theme for August 2017

The Uninhabitable Earth, Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. By David Wallace-Wells

To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here.

I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now:……..

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule……..http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=fb

EVENTS

more info at Action Australia

Sign the Petition – No Dump!

8,9 & 10 September 2017 – Melbourne – Conference: War, Peace & Independence: Keep Australia out of US Wars

Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items