Kevin Scarce’s Nuclear Conflict of Interest
Bias of SA Nuclear Royal Commission finally exposed, REneweconomy, By Jim Green on 4 November 2016 “………The Royal Commissioner, retired Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce, denied claims of a conflict of interest. He told the ABC: “The conflict of interest would arise if they [Jacobs MCM] were the only source of information that we were using to assess the evaluation. They were not.”
Scarce’s claim is false. As Prof. Barbara Pocock, an economist at the University of South Australia, told the ABC: “All the economists who have replied to the analysis in that report have been critical of the fact that it is a ‘one quote’ situation. We haven’t got a critical analysis, we haven’t got a peer review of the analysis”.
Another South Australian economist, Prof. Richard Blandy from Adelaide University, said last week: “The forecast profitability of the proposed nuclear dump rests on highly optimistic assumptions. Such a dump could easily lose money instead of being a bonanza.” Blandy contributed a submission to the Royal Commission but was not invited to speak at the Commission’s public hearings.
SA Conservation Council CEO Craig Wilkins said that asking pro-nuclear advocates to provide “independent” advice was “like asking the crew of the Sea Shepherd to provide an independent review of whaling in the Antarctic.”
The Jacobs MCM report estimated that the total costs associated with the project would amount to a whopping $145 billion. And while some allowance is made for cost overruns, both Jacobs MCM and the Royal Commission glossed over massive cost overruns evident overseas. Estimates of the clean-up costs for a range of (civil and military) UK nuclear sites have nearly doubled over the past decade. Estimates of the cost of a building a deep underground nuclear waste dump in France have nearly doubled over the past decade.
And between 2001 and 2008, the estimated cost of constructing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in the US and operating it for 150 years increased by 67 percent. The Yucca Mountain project was abandoned by the Obama administration, so the US wasted A$17.8 billion on a failed repository project.
The Jacobs MCM report is honest enough to state that many of its assumptions are highly speculative; for example, no-one knows which countries might want to off-load their nuclear waste to South Australia or how much they might be willing to pay. But the speculative nature of its findings was downplayed in the Royal Commission’s report and has been largely ignored by the SA government and its Nuclear Consultation and Response Agency.
The Australia Institute crunched the numbers presented in the Royal Commission’s interim report and wrote a detailed rebuttal. Kevin Scarce responded on ABC radio on 31 March 2016, saying that the Royal Commission would “take apart” the Australia Institute’s report “piece by piece”. When asked if such an aggressive attitude was appropriate, Scarce said: “I’m a military officer, what would you expect?” …….
Before his appointment as the Royal Commissioner, Kevin Scarce said little about nuclear issues but what he did say should have excluded him from consideration. Speaking in November 2014 at a Flinders University guest lecture, Scarce acknowledged being an “an advocate for a nuclear industry”. Just four months later, after his appointment as the Royal Commissioner, he said the exact opposite: “I have not been an advocate and never have been an advocate of the nuclear industry.”
Other than generalisations, and his acknowledgement that he is a nuclear advocate, Scarce’s only comment of substance on nuclear issues in his 2014 lecture was to claim that work is “well underway” on a compact fusion reactor “small enough to fit in a truck”, that it “may be less than a decade away” and could produce power “without the risk of Fukushima-style meltdowns.” Had he done just a little research, Scarce would have learnt that Lockheed Martin’s claims about its proposed compact fusion reactor were met with universal scepticism and ridicule by scientists and even by nuclear industry bodies.
So the SA government appointed Scarce as Royal Commissioner despite knowing that he is a nuclear advocate who has uncritically promoted discredited claims by the nuclear industry. Scarce appointed an Expert Advisory Committee. Despite claimingthat he was conducting a “balanced” Royal Commission, he appointed three nuclear advocates to the Committee and just one critic. There wasn’t even a single, token critic on the staff of the Royal Commission.
More recently, the SA government’s Nuclear Consultation and Response Agency is conducting a thinly-veiled state-wide promotional exercise under the guise of ‘consultation’ and the Agency doesn’t have even a single, token nuclear critic to provide any balance to its nuclear advocates………http://reneweconomy.com.au/bias-sa-nuclear-royal-commission-finally-exposed-57819/
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