Coalition MPs open to nuclear in their electorates
ABC News, 5 Mar 24
“…………………………………………………………………………………………. The electorates containing coal plants scheduled to close are held almost entirely by Liberal and National MPs, with the exception of Hunter MP Dan Repacholi.
Nationals MP Colin Boyce said the Callide Power Station could be a good option for a nuclear plant, if the community supported it.
“Absolutely on face value I would be supportive of looking at those options. The Callide Power Station at Biloela in central Queensland is number one on the list for closure according to the current Queensland government, so that site there, all the infrastructure that’s already there, the transmission lines, the water supplies, that would be somewhere to me that would be a reasonable outcome,” Mr Boyce said.
“I would suggest that site is a possible site for a possible nuclear small modular reactor, or something similar.
“Having said that we would have to take that to the community and gauge their thoughts on it before any decisions were made.”
He added that safety concerns held by some communities were valid, and that was why an honest conversation to address those concerns was necessary.
Nationals MP Darren Chester, who represents the seat of Gippsland where the Yallourn coal fired plant is scheduled to close, told the ABC last year he would consider a nuclear reactor in the Latrobe Valley if it made sense.
“If a potentially suitable site was identified for a nuclear power station in my electorate, it should be considered in a transparent manner with widespread consultation and an explanation of the potential costs and benefits,” Mr Chester said.
“If it was in the national interest and there were social, economic and environmental benefits, I’m sure that Gippslanders would be willing to have a constructive conversation about nuclear energy.”
Mr Chester told The Australian yesterday any government wanting to introduce nuclear would first have to reassure host communities safety concerns had been managed.
Nationals leader David Littleproud told Perth radio station 6PR yesterday he was ready to lead the way on the prospect of nuclear power in his electorate.
“I’ve got four coal fired power stations [in my electorate], I’ve made it very clear. I’m prepared to lead my community in that discussion,” he said.
“And we’ve got time, we don’t have to do all this by 2030.”
Liberal MP Rick Wilson said it would be premature to speculate on sites, but was open to the idea of a nuclear site in O’Connor.
Communities such as Collie in my electorate, which have experience hosting power stations, have high energy-IQ and their existing infrastructure and workforces could make them potential candidates to host a next-generation nuclear plant in the future,” Mr Wilson said.
He said like any major project, it would need the backing of the community.
Dan Repacholi, whose electorate contains plants scheduled for closure, has been contacted for comment. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-05/coalition-nuclear-plan-identifies-retiring-coal-likely-sites/103545440
Western Australia’s Premier Cook goes nuclear on Dutton’s ‘simplistic, ridiculous’ power plan
SMH, Hamish Hastie, March 5, 2024 —
A Coalition proposal to build nuclear power stations at the sites of retired or retiring coal stations is ridiculous and a distraction from efforts to reach net zero using renewables, West Australian Premier Roger Cook has said.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton floated the idea of building nuclear power stations on sites of retired coal stations – which could include the South West town of Collie – as a zero-emissions solution to the nation’s energy woes.
Cook blasted the Coalition proposal that federal Nationals leader David Littleproud was spruiking in WA this week as a fantasy.
“The rollout of small nuclear reactors or modular reactors in other countries has been halted because it’s not commercial, it’s not viable,” he said.
“In addition to that, Australia has no experience in nuclear power generation so we don’t have the workforce, we don’t have the know-how to be able to bring them in.
“You simply cannot plonk these things into a landscape and plug it into the grid. These simplistic sort of ideas are ridiculous.
“What we need to do is accept that climate change is a reality and move to exploit the abundance of wind and solar that we have at our disposal.
“There’s no quick fix here, you’ve got actually do the hard work and this is simply a sound grab by the Nationals to distract people from the real hard work which is being done.”……………………………………………………… https://www.smh.com.au/politics/western-australia/cook-goes-nuclear-on-dutton-s-simplistic-ridiculous-power-plan-20240305-p5fa0r.html
Talk of nuclear power plant sites ‘conjecture’, says Liberal MP amid internal division on Dutton’s policy
Rowan Ramsey says overturning ban on nuclear first is the ‘most logical thing’ to do as opposition leader prepares to nominate up to six locations
Paul Karp Chief political correspondent, Guardian, 5 Mar 24
The Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey has said any talk of where nuclear power plants would be built or waste would go is “conjecture” that cannot sensibly be tackled until after the nuclear ban is lifted.
As the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, prepares to announce an energy policy nominating up to six possible sites for nuclear plants, he faces internal divisions about the level of government support required, proposed locations and questions about storage of nuclear waste.
On Tuesday Dutton all but confirmed the Coalition will propose locating nuclear power plants on the site of retiring coal power plants, claiming that this would save having to build new transmission infrastructure for renewables.
The plan would suggest that the Labor-held seat of Hunter, independent Andrew Gee’s seat of Calare and Coalition-held Flynn, Maranoa, O’Connor and Gippsland are on the shortlist for nuclear power stations.
The Gippsland MP, Darren Chester, has argued that his community would need to receive “direct economic benefits” if it were to host power plants.
The Liberal MP for Sturt, James Stevens, has argued that community concerns must be allayed by explaining where and how waste will be stored. This opens another can of worms for the Coalition, as Australia has failed for decades to build a dump for its slowly accumulating intermediate nuclear waste.
Ramsey told Guardian Australia that Kimba, a proposed site for a waste dump in his South Australian electorate of Grey, was “never envisaged, planned or promised to hold high-level waste”……..
It is unclear how the Coalition’s nuclear policy hopes to overcome the enormous cost, long lead-in time and lack of private investment to make new power plants a reality.
Stevens said on Monday that “embracing nuclear generation for civilian electricity purposes is not something to be done on a whim” and that Australians would rightly want to know “how we will deal with some challenges, such as the custody of waste, the location of these generation plants”.
But the Liberal candidate for Cook, Simon Kennedy, who is likely to take Scott Morrison’s seat in parliament, argued on Tuesday that voters in his electorate are “used to” the idea of nuclear waste, because the Lucas Heights reactor – for production of medical and industrial isotopes – is “right outside the electorate”.
Kennedy told Sky News that Australians want “clean, cheap and reliable” power, accusing the Albanese government of being “ideological” for not considering nuclear.
Chester told Guardian Australia he has an “open mind when it comes to the public debate regarding nuclear energy in Australia”.
“It is premature to rule regions in or out as potential locations for a nuclear power station because there’s no proposal on the table,” he said.
“But as a matter of principle, you would need to be able to demonstrate to a potential host community, including Gippsland, that any safety concerns could be ameliorated and there were direct social and economic benefits to our community.”……………………………………
Jason Falinski, the former member for Mackellar and the New South Wales Liberal party president, told Sky News on Monday that “nuclear energy is not something that we are necessarily advocating for”.
“What we’re saying is that it should be part of the mix, part of the option available for Australian policymakers.”
On Tuesday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, questioned where financing will come from and whether “taxpayers will be expected to pay” for nuclear, because “we know that nuclear is not only the most expensive form of new energy, it is also more than a decade off”.
“I noticed in today’s reports, [Dutton] seems to have backed away a little bit from talking about a technology that does not exist in small, modular reactors that he’s been speaking about,” Albanese told reporters on the sidelines of the Asean conference in Melbourne.
“He’s now speaking about large nuclear reactors. They need to be near populations and need to be near water.”
Albanese said “investment never comes” into nuclear because “it simply doesn’t stack up commercially”.
Dutton told reporters in Brisbane that nuclear is “the only credible pathway we have to our international commitments to net zero by 2050”.
Dutton would not rule out support for large-scale reactors, saying only that the Coalition wanted the “latest technology”.
“We’ve said we’re only interested in sites where you have an end-of-life coal-fired generation asset, so that means you can use the existing distribution network.”
Asked if taxpayers will have to support nuclear, Dutton did not respond but cited the Canadian province of Ontario and the United States as examples where businesses and households pay less for power with nuclear in the mix https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/05/peter-dutton-liberal-coalition-nuclear-power-plant-policy-locations-waste-rowan-ramsey
Coalition’s plan to go nuclear puts five regions on the table as favoured locations for nuclear reactors
ABC News, By political reporter Jake Evans, 5 Feb 24
There are just a handful of regions in Australia shaping up as the most likely candidates for the Coalition’s proposal to install nuclear reactors in Australia, as the party eyes retiring coal stations as a way to go nuclear.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says he will be up front with voters about where the Coalition is looking to place potential nuclear reactors when the party announces its policy in coming weeks.
Speaking on Channel Seven this morning, Mr Dutton confirmed the party was “interested” in replacing retiring coal plants with nuclear, because the sites come ready with poles and wires to distribute power.
“If there’s a retiring coal asset, so there’s a coal fired generator that’s already got an existing distribution network, the wires and poles are already there to distribute the energy across the network into homes and businesses, that’s really what we’re interested in,” Mr Dutton said.
Doing so would leave just a narrow range of possible regions for a nuclear reactor.
The federal divisions of Gippsland in Victoria, Hunter in New South Wales, Maranoa and Flynn in Queensland and O’Connor in West Australia are the only electorates with coal plants scheduled to completely close in the next two decades.
There are also partial closures scheduled at Callide, Loy Yang and Vales Point in the NSW Central Coast, which would add Labor minister Pat Conroy’s electorate of Shortland to the list.
With its policy yet to be announced, it’s not clear what the Coalition considers as viable options.
Australia also still has a total ban on nuclear energy in place, which the Coalition would have to win the support of parliament to lift even if it won government at the next federal election.
And there are a number of safety and technical requirements for installing any nuclear reactor, such as geological stability and a readily available source of water.
The national science agency CSIRO has estimated nuclear energy from small modular reactors (SMRs), modern reactors built in a factory and then shipped to a site for installation, would also be more expensive than powering the grid through wind and solar.
The agency projected in its draft GenCost report that wind and solar would cost an average of $82 per megawatt hour by 2030, while SMR nuclear power would cost an average $282 by 2030.
Even if the nuclear ban was lifted tomorrow and a decision immediately taken to commission a nuclear reactor, CSIRO estimates the first SMR would not be in full operation before 2038, ruling it out of “any major role” in reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Mr Dutton said nuclear reactors would provide a more reliable source of clean energy, and would avoid the need for thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines to be built.
“We need to make sure that we can firm up the renewables that are in the system. We know that of the G20 nations, Australia is the only nation that doesn’t have or hasn’t agreed to adopt nuclear power domestically,” he said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he looked forward to the Coalition announcing its nuclear policy.
“I look forward as well to [Mr Dutton] arguing where the financing will come for such reactors, whether taxpayers will be expected to pay for this, because we know the cheapest form of energy in Australia is renewables,” he said.
“Every ten years there are these proposals … what never comes is any investment, because it simply doesn’t stack up commercially…………………………………. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-05/coalition-nuclear-plan-identifies-retiring-coal-likely-sites/103545440
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’
who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police
The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithmsSun 6 Jun 2021 18.00 AESTShare
Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.
……………………………………… What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.
………………………..systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.
Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled – and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorise people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.
……………………………Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories – certainly an improvement – however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers].
And we could only study ImageNet because it is public. There are huge training datasets held by tech companies that are completely secret. They have pillaged images we have uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms and turned them into private systems.
……………………………………………. What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is published by Yale University Press (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/06/microsofts-kate-crawford-ai-is-neither-artificial-nor-intelligent
The nuclear narrative
What is a narrative? ……… In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Jean-François Nadeau, March 4, 2024, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/808350/chronique-narratif
The future of the world, at least according to the head of the AtkinsRéalis firm, lies in nuclear power. This company, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, has changed its name. The scandals that have affected her, she asserts, belong to the past.
For its campaign to promote atomic energy, AtkinsRéalis secured the services of two former prime ministers: Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris. In 2019, as revealed by Radio-Canada, Jean Chrétien had already gone so far as to propose, with astonishing lightness, storing foreign nuclear waste in Labrador. In a letter, the former prime minister wrote to a Japanese firm: “Canada has been the largest supplier of nuclear fuel for years, and I have always thought it would be appropriate for Canada to become, at the end of account, the steward and guarantor of the safe storage of nuclear waste after their first service cycle. »
No carbon neutrality without nuclear power , repeats the boss of AtkinsRéalis like an advertising slogan. We must replace fossil fuels, while doubling or tripling, thanks to nuclear power, the production of electricity, he pleads. There is no question, in this presentation, of rethinking a model of society based on an infinite expansion of consumption. Always more cars, as long as they are electric. Always more heating, regardless of the fact that our buildings are thermal sieves. In other words, what continues to matter is growth. And the increase in AtkinsRéalis’ turnover is largely due to nuclear power, as noted by Le Devoir .
Last week, Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon reiterated again that he was not closing the door to the return of nuclear power. Since the arrival of Michael Sabia at the head of Hydro-Québec , the signals pointing in the direction of this revival have multiplied. “I think that as a government, in the ministry, at home, we must stay on the lookout for what is happening in nuclear power,” the minister further affirmed in front of an audience of business people. To have such projects accepted, the minister specified that “you simply have to have a good narrative”. In Quebec, he laments, “we have not had any narrative on nuclear power” since the closure of Gentilly-2 .
What is a narrative? In 1928, Edward Bernays, the founding father of the public relations and advertising industry, called these language elements capable of manipulating public opinion propaganda . This word ended up, as we know, having unfavorable connotations. Others were therefore substituted. Here is the latest addition, used in all sauces: the narrative . In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Pierre Fitzgibbon shows interest in mini nuclear reactors. The boss AtkinsRéalis also praises this technology, which is far from wonderful. Nobody says too loudly that these types of plants produce more nuclear waste per megawatt. These mini power plants would produce up to thirty times more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants.
In his “narrative”, the boss of AtkinsRéalis barely concedes that the management of radioactive materials constitutes a serious danger for humanity.
In Ontario, a large dump for radioactive waste was approved on January 9. Tons of heavy metals, dangerous radioactive elements, plutonium, uranium, etc. will pile up there for a century, not far from the Ottawa River. The whole thing promises to occupy, for eternity, an area equivalent to 70 National Hockey League ice rinks.
In France, 280 km of underground galleries are being built to store nuclear waste. To give an idea, the galleries of the Montreal metro total 71 km. This giant sarcophagus will be the largest construction site in Europe. In these galleries, the most dangerous waste will be able to spew radioactivity for 100,000 years.
So that the hydrogen and the fumes released from this collection of waste do not explode, it is necessary to continually ventilate. Which requires electricity. A power outage, if it lasts more than a week, could be catastrophic. Obviously, electrical problems, cataclysms, wars, terrorists, this will never happen in a hundred years. Not again in a thousand years, probably. Moreover, at the entrance to these sites, in what language should we warn future generations not to dig?
The speech of the boss of AtkinsRéalis is very similar to that which is also being given these days by the cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s. Gary Pilnick, its CEO, is sad to see the cost of food soaring. However, he does not recommend reviewing the profit margins on which the food giants are fattening, nor the exploitation system which governs this surge in prices. He simply suggests eating cereal at dinner, so that consumers can lower their bills and cereal manufacturers can make more money. At the bottom of the scale, this makes no difference to the misfortunes of the majority. Agricultural producers in Quebec, for example, find themselves this year with the lowest net incomes since 1938, they say.
Nuclear industries operate according to the same elastic logic which consists of making money at all costs. Our dependence on automobiles and energy-intensive lifestyles suits them. And it is enough, to hear them, to continue to rush forward, head down, to escape from a reality that is ruining the future. Their technologies promise to fix everything. As long as you are willing to swallow their narrative first, like soft cereal .
TODAY. Normalising the unthinkable – the 16th Annual Nuclear (so-called) Deterrence Summit
The 16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Washington DC finished in early February
The propaganda guff should alert us to the deliberately misty thinking of the war-mongers, as they contort the facts, and kid themselves, and us, that they work for a peaceful world. The lovely phrases trip off their tongues so easily:
“Analytically driven data” “state of the art capabilities” “incredible efficiencies ” ” the cloud-based environments” “A digitalized enterprise”. Blah blah . My favourite is always “the cloud”, when what they really mean is acres and acres of dirty great machines guzzling electricity and water.
What this whole conference (now more gloriously termed “summit”) is really about, is profit, money for the American corporations – weapons ones, digital ones, space companies, contractors, and also the Pentagon, government agencies, corporate media and universities. Check out the sponsors –
There are words and phrases that you won’t hear at these conferences – “diplomacy” “negotiation” “understanding”. There’s no money in that stuff.
But you will hear “adversaries” “enemies” “evil” – there’s money in being “war ready” even better “global war ready”. Some participants actually believe that the USA could wage a nuclear war and win it – (whatever “winning a nuclear war” might mean)
I’m not religious, but I can’t help thinking what might have happened if Jesus somehow got into this crooked conference. He wouldn’t have been polite – tables overturned, lap-tops and projectors busted, corporate salesmen driven. Of course, he would be arrested as a terrorist, and given the Julian Assange treatment.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 