“The System” needs to change. War crimes whistleblower David McBride
by David McBride | Apr 20, 2025, https://michaelwest.com.au/the-system-needs-to-change-war-crimes-whistleblower-david-mcbride/
Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride languishes in prison while war crimes perpetrators roam free. David McBride writes for MWM on politics and whistleblowers.
As most of MW readers will know, I’m presently serving a five year sentence for the crime of being a whistle blower. From within my prison I watch the much vaunted National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) continue to do nothing, the Office of Special Investigator (OSI) continue its fumbling, and Ben Roberts-Smith travels the world.
While there is much more to government than simply law, justice and transparency, the fact that Labor promised so much in this space but delivered so little shows they can’t be trusted to deliver what they promise in any area. They certainly don’t deserve to be re-elected to office on the basis of their promises versus their actual treatment of whistleblowers.
Over the next three weeks Labor will promise the world, and announce a raft of ideas that will sound plausible, one of which is likely to be the Whistleblower Protection Authority. While this sounds good, as the idea of the NACC did before it, it is likely be just as much a disappointment. At least if historical performance is any guide.
As with the NACC and the OSI, the WPA will likely be staffed with specially appointed government-friendly staff who are well aware of their unwritten brief: act busy, do nothing.
It’s the system
Probably only one thing is guaranteed about this election: that in three years time Australia will be in worse shape that it is now. That is because our system promotes ‘window-dressing’: pretending to do good things with expensive PR and media campaigns, while actually doing the opposite. The party which tells the biggest boldest lies, and makes promises that it has no intention of keeping, will win. Australia will lose. A hung parliament is our only hope for progress.
If you want to understand the concept of window-dressing, all you have to do is consider how Labor came in on a promise of more transparent government, a better deal for women and climate action. Its hard not to smile in a black-humoured way when those three things are now considered in light of the last three years.
The Albanese Government is now in the process of offering a similar package of plausible and attractive policies to voters. Chances are they will be returned, just. But its a certainty that they won’t keep their promises this time any more than they did last time. A strong cross-bench however may compel them to keep their word.
We don’t need a new government in Australia, we need a new system of government. Nor is this an impossible dream. The only thing that makes this impossible right now is that the two major parties act in concert to stop it.
They are on a good thing, and they don’t want anything to change much to change. When Labor wanted the NACC to remain secret they went to Dutton, their supposed ‘sworn enemy’. They both love AUKUS in equal measure, claiming its a good deal for Australia, when it’s really just a good deal for the major parties.
Merry-go-round
MWM readers will know all this. The only way to get real change in this country is with a minority Labor government. Despite the fact that the media give them equal air time to the government, there is now little chance of Dutton forming a government. This time.
But 2028 will be a different prospect. We need to act now to keep ‘Morrison 2.0’ out in 2028, and putting Albanese back in charge, unfettered will make a Dutton victory inevitable. Albanese likes to style himself as the Joe Biden of Australian politics, and he is. But all know what happened after Joe Biden, and why.
I’m reluctant to tell anyone how to vote, its their choice, and the individual characteristics of each electorate are their own to decide. That said, I can’t be accused of not putting my money where my mouth is. I’m in jail because I stood up to Govt who has lost respect for truth and law, and the nation of Australia, and sacrifices our nation for their own selfish re-election campaigns.
So it is not hypocritical of me to ask MWM readers to vote strategically this election: for independents and minor parties. Nor do they have to be on ‘the left’. Don’t forget those conservatives who stood up for Julian Assange for example. But a vote for Labor is a vote for Liberal, next time, and it keeps our nation on this awful merry-go-round of sleaze, pretence and inaction that will surely destroy what we, and our parents worked so hard to create for our children. Australia can do better. But it starts with us.
Editor’s Note: David has appealed his conviction and sentencing and is awaiting a decision by the Bench of the ACT Supreme Court. In the event of a loss on either, he intends to appeal to the High Court. You can help to fund his legal defence here.
Dotty and Cretinous: Reviewing AUKUS
April 20, 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/dotty-and-cretinous-reviewing-aukus/
It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is now finally receiving the broader opprobrium it should have had from the outset. Importantly, criticism is coming from those who have, at points, swooned at the prospect of acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability assuming, erroneously, that Australia somehow needs it.
A report by the Strategic Analysis Australia think tank has found that AUKUS, despite the increasingly vain promise of supplying the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear powered submarines in 2032, has already become its own, insatiable beast. As beast it is, with the cost over the next four years for the submarine program coming in at A$17.3 billion, exceeding by some margin the capital budget of the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) at A$12.7 billion. One of the authors of the report, Marcus Hellyer, notes that “in terms of acquisition spending, the SSN [nuclear-powered attack submarine] enterprise has already become the ADF’s [Australian Defence Force’s] ‘fourth service’.”
The report notes some remarkable figures. Expenditure on SSNs is estimated to be somewhere between A$53 billion and A$63 billion between 2024-2034, with the next five years of the decade costing approximately A$20 billion. The amount left over for the following years comes in at $33 to $44 billion, necessitating a target of $10 billion annually by the end of the financial decade in the early 2030s. What is astounding is the amount being swallowed up by the ADF’s investment program in maritime capabilities, which will, over the coming decade, come to 38% of the total investment.
The SSN program has made its fair share in distorting the budget. The decade to 2033-4 features a total budget of A$330 billion. But the SSN budget of $53-63 billion puts nuclear powered submarines at 16.1% to 19.1% more than either the domains of land and air relevant to Australia’s defence. “It’s hard to grasp how unusual this situation is,” the report notes with gravity. “Moreover, it’s one that will endure for decades, since the key elements of the maritime domain (SSNs and the two frigate programs) will still be in acquisition well into the 2040s. It’s quite possible that Defence itself doesn’t grasp the situation that it’s gotten into.”
To add to the more specialist literature calling large parts of AUKUS expenditure into question comes the emergence of disquiet in political ranks. Despite the craven and cowardly bipartisan approval of Australia’s dottiest military venture to date, former Labor senator Doug Cameron, who fronts the Labor Against War group, is a symptom of growing dissent. “There are other more realistic and cost-effective strategies to protect our territorial integrity without subjugating ourselves to a dangerous, unpredictable and unworthy Trump administration.”
On the other side of the political aisle, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pessimistically inclined to the view that Australia will never get those much heralded submarines. “There will be Australian sailors serving on US submarines, and we’ll provide them with a base in Western Australia.” Furthermore, Australia would have “lost both sovereignty and security and a lot of money as well.”
The spineless disposition of Australia’s political cadres may prove irrelevant to the forced obsolescence of the agreement, given the scrutiny of AUKUS in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The pugilistic nature of the tariff system imposed by the Trump administration on all countries, friendly or adversarial, has brought particular focus on the demands on naval and submarine construction. Senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, told an AUKUS dinner in Washington this month that “We are already having trouble getting these ships and subs on time [and] on budget. Increase those prices – it’s going to be a problem.”
Taine’s point is logical enough, given that steel and aluminium have been targeted by particularly hefty rates. Given the array of products requiring exchange in the AUKUS arrangement, tariffs would, the senator reasons, “slow us down and make things harder.”
Another blow also looms. On April 9, the White House ordered the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to comb through the procurement of US Navy vessels in order “to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes” and contribute to the Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan. Consistent with Trump’s near obsession of reviving national industry, the order seeks “to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”
Australian taxpayers have every reason to be further worried about this, given the order’s emphasis that US departments and agencies pursue “all available incentives to help shipbuilders domiciled in allied nations partner to undertake capital investment in the US to help strengthen the shipbuilding capacity of the US.” Given that that US submarine industrial base is already promised $US3 billion from Australia’s pockets, with $500 million already transferred in February, the delicious exploitation of Canberra’s stupidity continues apace.
In the UK, the House of Commons Defence Committee this month announced a parliamentary inquiry into the defence pact, which will evaluate the agreement in light of changes that have taken place since 2021. “AUKUS has been underway for three years now,” remarked Defence Committee chairman and Labour MP, Tan Dhesi. “The inquiry will examine the progress made against each of the two pillars, and ask how any challenges could be addressed.”
The first pillar, perennially spectral, stresses the submarine component, both in terms of transferring Virginia class SSNs to Australia and the construction of a bespoke nuclear-powered AUKUS submarine; the second focuses on the technological spread of artificial intelligence, quantum capabilities, hypersonic advances and cyber warfare. While Dhesi hopes that the inquiry may throw up the possibility of expanding the second pillar, beady eyes will be keen to see the near non-existent state regarding the first. But even the second pillar lacks definition, prompting Kaine to suggest the need for “some definition and some choices”. Nebulous, amorphous and foolish, this absurd pact continues to sunder.
The real cost of living fix is renewables, not nuclear.
Rebecca Huntley, 17 Apr 25, https://www.theage.com.au/national/the-real-cost-of-living-fix-is-renewables-not-nuclear-20250416-p5ls6g.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawJugrVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHtL82zfItVvTzl1Whe-Xljzky1fA18I2OzDTIwenfyKp9DOUjyNmJ66-LmtG_aem_hNiWeGlA3t9nFn0LY_ilkQ&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
Right about now in the election cycle, you would be expecting the Coalition to double down on its energy policy. Labor made a whopping announcement to bring down the cost of batteries for all Australian households, but we have had radio silence from the Coalition on its much-touted nuclear policy.
Why? Because Australians know it won’t bring down bills. And this is a cost-of-living election. Despite what Peter Dutton and other pro-nuclear forces would have you believe, polling consistently shows strong public support for renewable energy. In some places, it’s even growing.
In my own polling from February this year, 70 per cent of Australians supported a shift to renewables such as solar, wind and hydro. But what’s even more interesting is that even amid the escalating attacks on renewables from fossil fuel interests, almost half of people we surveyed said they felt more supportive of renewables now than they did a year ago.
Australians see renewables delivering tangible benefits in their daily lives. They notice solar panels slashing bills on rooftops across their neighbourhoods. They hear about large-scale battery projects stabilising the grid during peak demand. They understand that wind and solar, paired with storage solutions, offer a clear path to lower power costs – one that’s clean and safe.
Voters want cost-of-living solutions that will really bring down energy prices today, not in 20 years. A striking 72 per cent of Australians believe that renewables such as solar, wind and battery storage are the fastest way to cut power bills. Sixty per cent say they’re more likely to vote for political candidates who can help them access energy upgrades like rooftop solar.
Contrast that with nuclear. Recently touted as the solution to our energy challenges by the Coalition, nuclear power is now conspicuously absent from the national conversation. The reason is simple: Australians don’t buy it. Only 15 per cent believe nuclear reactors would lower energy bills. It’s no surprise, then, that its political champions are quietly retreating from the spin.
Nearly 40 per cent of voters blame profit-seeking by energy companies for rising power prices – more than any other factor. And 60 per cent say the federal government has a responsibility to step in to bring bills down. The message is clear: voters want leadership that prioritises their needs over corporate interests.
This presents an undeniable opportunity for political leaders to connect with voters across demographics. But it also demands courage – a willingness to challenge the status quo dominated by fossil fuel companies and their record-breaking profits at the expense of struggling households.
This election will be even more of a power struggle than usual and if politicians want to come out on top they will need real policies that voters believe can deliver cheaper energy now.
Six months ago, I wrote in this paper that “if you give voters free solar and batteries, they might keep you in power, Mr Albanese.”
There’s a winning strategy staring our pollies in the face: embrace renewables as the foundation of Australia’s energy future and deliver solutions that cut bills now, and for decades to come.
Australians are already on board. Labor is catching up. And it’s clear. Australians don’t want nuclear. They simply want the solution that brings bills down now.
Dr Rebecca Huntley is one of Australia’s foremost researchers on social trends and a Fellow of the Research Society of Australia. She is Director of Research at 89 Degrees East.
Almost 7 months underwater pushes UK nuclear submariners to the limit.
Nuclear-armed HMS Vanguard spent 204 days underwater, finally docking last month — and such gruelling conditions are causing experienced personnel to quit
Charlie Parker, Friday April 18 2025, The Times
Guarding Britain’s most powerful weapons deep beneath the waves are sailors who have not seen sunlight, breathed fresh air or spoken to their families for months.
Operating in total isolation on increasingly long patrols, submarine crews are enduring “mind-boggling” marathons underwater to ensure nuclear missiles can be launched at any moment.
Now, after a Vanguard-class vessel returned from a record 204 days at sea, submariners tasked with maintaining the deterrent have revealed what life is like on board the boats.
The £6 billion “bomber” looked grey, barnacled and rusty as she docked at HM Naval Base Clyde, in Scotland, last month. Welcoming her home was Sir Keir Starmer, the only person capable of authorising a nuclear strike, who thanked the crew for completing the tour. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/life-on-britains-nuclear-subs-as-record-patrols-push-sailors-to-limits-m5m7q58p8
Dutton’s nuclear revival smells rotten to Gens Y and Z
By Glenn Davies | 19 April 2025, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/duttons-nuclear-revival-smells-rotten-to-gens-y-and-z,19640
Forty years on from the first Palm Sunday anti-nuclear marches, Peter Dutton’s attempt to revive nuclear power is thankfully still a hard sell, writes history editor Dr Glenn Davies.
THIS YEAR, Palm Sunday, the traditional day of protest for peace, will occur on 13 April.
Australia has a long history of resisting uranium mining and nuclear development. During the 1980s, Palm Sundays in Australia were occasions for enormous anti-nuclear rallies all across the country, reaching a peak in 1985.
On 19 June 2024, Peter Dutton announced:
“…nuclear energy for Australia is an idea whose time has come.”
At the same time, he released “the seven locations, located at a power station that has closed or is scheduled to close, where we propose to build zero-emissions nuclear power plants”.
Nothing announced by Peter Dutton today changes the fact that nuclear energy is, according to reams of expert analysis, economically unfeasible in Australia. This is as true today as it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Palm Sunday peace march is an annual ecumenical event that draws people from many faith backgrounds to march for nonviolent approaches to contentious public policies. The event is based on the account of Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem, which some see as an anti-imperial protest — a demonstration designed to mock the obscene pomp of the Roman Empire. Palm Sunday is now considered an opportunity to join together to demonstrate for peace and social justice.
A major focus of activism in Australia during the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s was the campaign against uranium mining, as Australia holds the world’s largest reserves of this mineral.
The Australian anti-nuclear movement emerged in the late 1970s in opposition to uranium mining, nuclear proliferation, the presence of U.S. bases and French atomic testing in the Pacific.
During the 1980s, Palm Sundays in Australia saw enormous anti-nuclear rallies all across the country.
The annual Palm Sunday rallies were organised by the People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND), beginning in 1982 and reaching a peak in 1985.
On Palm Sunday in 1982, an estimated 100,000 Australians participated in anti-nuclear rallies in the nation’s biggest cities. In Melbourne, more than 40,000 people marched to call for nuclear disarmament and highlight the multiple dangers associated with uranium mining and nuclear power. They were joined by a similar sized rally in Sydney. During the same week 5000 marched in Brisbane while numerous other protests were held across Australia.
While 1984 was the year of George Orwell’s dystopian future, the 1980s were less about a surveillance society than nuclear fear. In 1984, Labor introduced the three-mine policy as a result of heavy pressure from anti-nuclear groups. This was also a time when many Australians were concerned that the secret defence bases at Pine Gap, North West Cape and Nurrungar, run jointly with the United States on Australian soil, were “high priority” nuclear targets.
An estimated 250,000 people took part in Palm Sunday peace marches in April and the Nuclear Disarmament Party gained seven per cent of the vote in the December 1984 Election and won a Senate seat. In addition, the election of the Lange Labor Party Government in New Zealand in July, resulted in New Zealand banning visits by ships that might be carrying nuclear weapons and were also considered targets in a nuclear war
The refusal of New Zealand to permit a visit by the USS Buchanan in February of that year threatened the future of the ANZUS alliance.
Australia did not follow the example of New Zealand.
In 1985, more than 350,000 people marched across Australia in Palm Sunday anti-nuclear rallies demanding an end to Australia’s uranium mining and exports, abolishing nuclear weapons and creating a nuclear-free zone across the Pacific region. The biggest rally was in Sydney, where 170,000 people brought the city to a standstill.
In 1985, I was a first-year James Cook University student living at University Hall. JCU students in Townsville supported the massive Palm Sunday rallies by our southern cousins in a public protest by tagging on the end of the May Day (Labour Day) march along The Strand.
As we marched behind the Townsville unionists with their hats and placards, remembering and publicly affirming the sacrifices their forebears had made – the mateship, the loyalty and the determination to build and protect the freedom and rights we now enjoy – we realised this march was about empowerment in a world where individuals still too often have little control over their own destiny when it comes to the workplace. And this was the lesson we young students learned on that day from our older working brothers, as we also were desperately looking for more say in the safety of our world.
May is a beautiful time of the year in Townsville, with breezy, high-skied blue days. Marching along The Strand, we were proclaiming our concerns for ensuring a better and safer world for all our futures.
It would be irresponsible for us not to chant:
Two, four, six, eight. We don’t want to radiate.
One, two, three, four. We don’t want no nuclear war.
By the late 1980s, the political, social and economic mood had swung firmly in favour of the anti-nuclear movement. Though it was clear that the three already functioning mines would not be shut down, the falling price of uranium, coupled with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, ensured that there would not be a strong effort to broaden Australia’s nuclear program.
During the 1980s, there was a mushroom cloud shadow cast over Australia. The protests of the anti-nuclear movement were successful in linking the horror of nuclear war to the zeitgeist of the 1980s. The anti-nuclear movement served an important function in Australian politics, where it visibly prevented any further pro-nuclear policies from being enacted by the Australian Government.
Former Labor Environment Minister Peter Garrett is the lead singer of rock band Midnight Oil and a prominent nuclear disarmament activist since the 1980s.
He recently stated in a Sydney Morning Herald op-ed:
Younger voters understandably won’t know that a generation their age once packed the Sidney Myer Music Bowl with Midnight Oil, INXS and other friends to “Stop the Drop”.
They won’t remember our Nuclear Disarmament Party campaign, which won Senate seats in Western Australia and NSW in the ’80s.
They can’t know what it was like to grow up during the Cold War era or live through horrific meltdowns at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants, which were also “completely safe” until the day that they weren’t.
But generations Y and Z can still smell a rotten idea when they give it a good sniff.
The use of nuclear energy as a solution to Australia’s future energy needs is still a hard sell.
Times have obviously changed since the 1970s, but significant political and economic barriers remain — and the problem of cost is still unsolved. This is compounded by apocalyptic visions of global destruction as part of our contemporary zeitgeist. It’s just that in its modern incarnation, the apocalypse has become more varied.
Gone is the single event; now we have a multiple-choice-question-sheet worth of ways to end our time on Earth. In the 2020s, the apocalypse continues to figure heavily in social life with constant references to wild weather, global financial crises, lone wolf terrorism, environmental collapse and zombie plagues.
And perhaps the greatest fear of all is that in this fracturing of fear may come complacency.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will continue to struggle to get traction, not only during the current Federal Election campaign but as long as the spirit of the 1985 Palm Sunday protest march lives.
Nuclear Fantasies and Migrant Fearmongering: Dutton’s Debate Playbook Is a Fact-Free Zone
April 17, 2025 Lachlan McKenzie, Austrlian Independent Media
How Dutton Dodged, Distracted, and Drowned in His Own Déjà Vu
Snarky Essay Critique: Peter Dutton’s Greatest Hits (of Avoidance)
If leadership debates were Olympic sports, Peter Dutton would medal in mental gymnastics. The ABC Leaders’ Debate, moderated by David Speers – Australia’s answer to a human fact-checking algorithm – exposed Dutton’s campaign as a greatest-hits album of deflection, fearmongering, and policies reheated from the Tony Abbott Memorial Bin. Let’s dissect the carnage…………………………………………………………………………………………….
3. Nuclear Power: Dutton’s Radioactive Fairy Tale
When Speers asked if Dutton would cling to his nuclear pipedream, the Opposition Leader dodged like a TikTok influencer avoiding accountability. No costings. No timeline. Just vibes. Speers, ever the adult, reminded viewers nuclear plants take 15 years and $387B – funded by… checks notes … pixie dust?
Fact-check fail: Dutton’s energy chaos narrative collapsed when Albanese cited renewables’ grid share (40%) and falling bills in states with actual climate policies. Dutton’s reply? Crickets………………………………………………. https://theaimn.net/nuclear-fantasies-and-migrant-fearmongering-duttons-debate-playbook-is-a-fact-free-zone/
Is Elon Musk a halfwit ?
April 19, 2025, https://theaimn.net/is-elon-musk-a-halfwit/
A silly insult! I hear your cry. Yes, as the Oxford Dictionary defines a “halfwit” as a”foolish or stupid person” And I do agree, it is stupid to call Elon Musk “stupid”.
But that’s not what I mean. I guess that I have invented a new interpretation of “halfwit”.
According to my view , one can be brilliantly clever with one kind of thinking, yet lacking in understanding of other important ways of thinking, as though half of one’s brain is sort of not functioning. I was prompted to ponder on this by Gautam Mukunda‘s article in The Business Standard – “Musk and the dangerous myth of “omnigenius“. Mukanda deplores “the Halo Effect” – a cognitive bias in which we revere someone for remarkable success in just one area, and assume that they will be equally great in other areas.
Mukunda gave a chilling example. “Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE )fired hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency responsible for the production and security of nuclear weapons and management of nuclear waste sites” (These cuts were soon reversed under the advice of Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball).
Mukunda is exploring the attitude of people in general, towards valuing a high achiever So he’s not actually discussing Musk himself and Musk’s way of thinking.
But it looks as if Elon Musk had no insight into the potential negative consequences of the firing of nuclear safety staff.
This touches on Musk’s apparent lack of interest in some areas of life – employment relationships, social studies – the non-technical areas. We all know that Elon Musk is a genius in science and technology. He’s got all that impressive knowledge. And let’s not forget – his early, and no doubt continuing motivation – to save and benefit humanity. Hence his desire, and technical know-how – aimed at creating a safer home for humanity -on another planet.
And what about Musk’s undoubted knowledge of science? Does it include those “soft” sciences – biology, ecology, cytology, genetics, psychology, neuroscience….
Neuroscience comes up with some clues to human ways of thinking. For one example, the development of the frontal lobe of the brain comes at different ages between males and females. Complex research has also shown for example, the role of testosterone in embryonic development in both sexes. It may account for males having, on the whole, better abilities in spatial understanding, and for female thinking on the whole encompassing more regions of the brain at the one time. Now this is a terrible digression from the immediate topic, but just my attempt to indicate that individual brain function differs between people.
Getting back to Elon Musk, it is just my guess that he, for one reason or another, is really good at STEM thinking (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). And unfortunately, even within that STEM, those so-called “soft” sciences don’t seem to count. It would seem that Musk is uninterested both in those other sciences, and of humanities studies.
So – that’s what I’m calling being “half-witted” – terrific at the concrete technical stuff, but sadly lacking in that other half – those other, less well-defined , areas of thinking.
So I think that Gautam Mukunda is onto something, when he warns us “why do we listen to these people? And why should they get positions of power in areas where they have little knowledge or experience?”
10 reasons why nuclear energy is a bad idea for Australia
There’s a lot of information and disinformation out there on nuclear energy. These are my 10 reasons why nuclear energy would be a bad idea for Australia
By Arthur Wyns, University of Melbourne, https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/10-reasons-why-nuclear-energy-is-a-bad-idea-for-australia 16 April 2025
As always seems to be the way, energy and climate policy is proving to be an area of contention between the major parties in Australia’s 2025 election.
One issue that’s provoked a lot of discussion and confusion is the Liberal-National Coalition’s proposal to build seven nuclear power plants across Australia.
It’s a controversial idea that’s opposed by Labor, the Greens, many independent MPs and some Liberal groups.
Both the Climate Change Authority and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) concluded that the deployment of nuclear energy in Australia would significantly increase the country’s energy prices and cause us to miss our climate change targets.
1. Too expensive
It’s extremely expensive to build and operate nuclear power plants anywhere in the world. Independent analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that building nuclear power in Australia could see average household electricity bills rise by $AUD665 a year.
Estimates by CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) for the 2024-2025 GenCost Report also found renewables are the cheapest option for any new electricity generation.
2. Too slow
Even if we drop everything else and throw all our weight behind nuclear energy, it wouldn’t play a role in Australia’s energy grid for more than a decade.
It took an average of 11 years to build the nuclear reactors that came online around the world in 2023 – largely in countries with a well-established nuclear industry, like China.
In Australia, CSIRO estimates it would take at least 15 years before we’d reach the first nuclear generation.
3. Too risky
Nuclear accidents are rare but they have devastating consequences.
The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Fukushima disaster in 2011 contaminated large areas and continue to impact the health of hundreds of thousands of people. Both disasters caused a rise in anti-nuclear sentiments in the Australian public.
They also led to the majority of German citizens supporting an end to nuclear power in the country, with the three last remaining nuclear power plants in Germany taken offline in 2023.
4. Hard to build
Nuclear power stations are huge and complicated infrastructure projects that almost never stay on schedule.
The UK’s Hinkley Point C nuclear plant construction is now running 14 years late and is costing three times more than it was estimated: a whopping $AUD90 billion.
Smaller nuclear power plants, known as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), have been proposed as an alternative, but there are no known commercial SMRs operational anywhere in the world.
The only company to have a small modular nuclear power plant approved in the US has since cancelled its first project due to rising costs.
5. Produces nuclear waste
Once in operation, nuclear reactors continuously produce radioactive waste. Generally, this waste is buried underground, where it remains radioactive for thousands of years.
Australia already produces a relatively small amount of low-level radioactive waste for some medical and research activities.
However, Australia currently doesn’t have any waste storage facilities to process high-level radioactive waste that would be produced by nuclear reactors – and recent efforts to build the country’s first radioactive waste storage facility have failed.
6. Uses lots of water
Nuclear reactors need to be cooled constantly, which requires high volumes of water.
It might not make sense to switch to a water-intensive energy source in the driest inhabited continent in the world, which is already facing increasing droughts and extreme heat.
Even countries like France and Sweden – with dramatically cooler climates compared to Australia – are increasingly being forced to shut down their nuclear power plants during warm periods when their cooling water heats up.
This means they then have to import energy from neighbouring countries.
7. No energy security
Australia’s remaining coal-fired power stations are old and increasingly breaking down, with over 60 per cent of our coal-generating capacity now more than 40 years old.
Even in the most optimistic scenarios, nuclear power is unlikely to come online before 2040, by which time all of Australia’s coal plants will have retired, according to the National Electricity Market.
In other words, the timelines for a coal-to-nuclear transition don’t add up.
Extending the life of these ageing coal-power plants would mean spending billions to prop up coal rather than investing in updating the electricity grid and expanding more cost-effective and readily available forms of energy like renewables.
8. No expertise
While nuclear generation is well established in many countries, it has never been deployed in Australia.
We currently lack the trained workforce and technical capability required for building a large-scale nuclear reactor.
Any attempt to go nuclear would leave Australia reliant on foreign companies and expertise. This is something we’re seeing play out in building and maintaining the nuclear submarines Australia agreed to host as part of the AUKUS deal.
In comparison, the renewable energy industry already creates more than 25,000 local jobs in Australia and this is expected to grow.
9. We’ll miss our climate goals
While nuclear energy is a form of low-emissions energy in many countries with established pre-existing nuclear facilities, focusing on the development of new nuclear energy in Australia is a diversion from taking real climate action.
Australia’s Climate Change Authority (CCA) recently released a detailed analysis concluding that a nuclear pathway for Australia would result in an additional two billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
It would extend the use of some coal-fired generators, slow down the uptake of clean technologies, and obstruct existing national plans to deliver 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030.
10. Illegal in Australia
In the late 1990s, the Australian Federal Government introduced several new laws banning nuclear energy, including the National Radiation and Nuclear Safety Act (1998).
This Act prohibited the development of any new nuclear power sites in Australia.
The Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999) also introduced rules preventing the construction or operation of any facilities that generate nuclear power.
Building nuclear reactors is currently illegal in every Australian state and territory.
Ultimately, pursuing a lengthy, expensive and potentially harmful energy source is a misguided step for Australia, particularly when we have all the resources and potential to make us a renewable energy superpower.
Arthur Wyns is a research fellow at Melbourne Climate Futures, University of Melbourne. He has written widely on climate change and global health issues, and regularly advises national governments and UN agencies. In 2023-2024, Arthur was the senior health advisor to the government of the United Arab Emirates as the host of the COP28 UN climate conference. He was a climate change advisor to the World Health Organization during 2019-2023, where he represented WHO at the UN climate negotiations, authored several UN reports on climate change and health, and acted as WHO’s speechwriter on climate change. Arthur is an editor of the Journal of Climate and Health and sits on the editorial board of ClimaHealth, the knowledge platform of the WHO-WMO Joint Office for Climate and Health.
The Australian investors betting big on fusion – the “holy grail” of nuclear tech
ReNewEconomy, Rachel Williamson, Apr 17, 2025
One of Australia’s biggest super funds is backing nuclear tech – but not the kind being pitched by the federal Coalition.
Hostplus is investing in fusion energy.
CIO Sam Sicilia says a combination of tech advances in the last five years and a youthful member base means fusion is now a real option for big, patient investors…………………
Fusion power is the holy grail of energy technologies: it makes more energy than nuclear fission, produces less waste, doesn’t create anything that could be used in a weapon, and has zero risk of meltdown.
The truth is more complicated, not least because the longest ever sustained reaction was only achieved in January, when China’s “artificial sun” reactor in Heifei managed a whole 17 minutes. …………………..
And with almost half a billion dollars of funding sunk into the industry last year, the race is on for companies ranging from Commonwealth Fusion Systems – the MIT spinout that is leading so far and Hostplus’ investment pick – to Australian startup HB11………………………………………………………………………………
If this sounds ambitious for a technology that just five years ago was still wrestling with major functional problems, it isn’t to people in the industry – even in Australia.
Patrick Burr leads the student project to build a donut-shaped tokamak fusion reactor – just a little one – at University of New South Wales (UNSW). He also works with Australia’s only home-grown fusion company, HB11 Energy.
He says commercialisation of fusion energy is now an engineering problem that requires money and people…………………………………………………………………………..
Australia as a fusion power? Maybe
Matt Bungey is taking a bet that fusion energy will be ready for launch – in Australia – by the late 2030s.
Bungey is a partner at Western Australian venture fund Foxglove Capital and an investor in another fusion frontrunner, Type One, which recently set up an Australian subsidiary.
He believes fusion should be part of a diverse energy strategy even if by the late-2030s renewables and storage are the dominant generators.
But he does admit there is a deadline.
“There’s a timing element here, if you don’t get it right before the mid 2040s there’s a question of whether you really need it,” he says.
The other view is that Australia’s energy needs will scale in unimaginable ways as the demands of decarbonisation and AI require more electricity……………………………………………………………..
Today the global industry has attracted $US7 billion ($A11 billion) in funding, according to the FIA.
But even the $A130 billion Hostplus is merely dipping a toe in – its CFS investment is worth $US136 million.
Still, CFS CEO Bob Mumgaard says there is enough curiosity in the technology from within Australia to warrant a look here – even if nuclear power generally is still illegal. ……………………………………………………………………………………
Australia enters the chat, with HB11
Australia does have its own fusion startup in HB11. It is forging a technology path quite different to those pursued by CFS (a tokamak design) or Type One (a stellarator).
HB11 is using lasers and a proton-boron fuel, rather than the more common deuterium/tritium, deuterium/deuterium, or deuterium/helium3 combos.
“The key difference between what we’re doing and what most of the other private fusion companies are doing is we’re using [boron] which does not produce neutrons,” McKenzie says.
Boron is abundant and costs about a dollar a kilogram, and the method of firing a laser at small pellets to create an ongoing reaction doesn’t make the materials around them radioactive – more on this later.
McKenzie gently negs the tokamak and stellarator players, saying none have produced a net gain – more energy out than in – whereas laser fusion has, in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility in California.
“The catch is it’s much harder to produce. Essentially we’ll need much bigger lasers [than we have now],” McKenzie says.
How big, you might ask?
Computer simulations suggest that, right now, they may need to be several football fields long and multiple storeys high. The National Ignition Factory’s laser is in a 10-story building about the size of three American football fields; China’s version in the southwest city Mianyang will be 50 per cent larger again, a size MxKenzie says “is about right”.
HB11 has a plan for its version of fusion to be widespread by the mid-2050s but it has a long way to go.
“When we achieve a neutronic hydrogen-boron fusion energy gain we’ll be on our way to Stockholm to pick up a Nobel prize,” McKenzie says.
Is it illegal or not?
Australia’s ban on nuclear fission technology for energy might apply to fusion – but also might not.
Experts spoken to by Renew Economy say there isn’t much interest within federal government to revisit nuclear rules and carve out a new area for fusion, somewhere between legal nuclear medicine and illegal fission.
But the UK and USare showing how fusion might be introduced, without dumping it in with fission.
Both countries say they won’t regulate fusion technology like fission, but instead treat the new reactors more like a particle accelerator.
That’s a framework that advocates like Bungey are pinning their hopes on, given almost every major hospital in Australia houses a particle accelerator to make nuclear medicines. These are controlled by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) as well as a suite of other regulators.
McKenzie says the deuterium-tritium fuel might be difficult for nations to support, given both are fuels used in nuclear weapons, but generally fusion should not be affected by national bans on fission energy.
“My legal understanding is that it will not come under Australia’s nuclear ban. But yes … what the rest of the world is doing, fusion is a relatively new field with no regulations,” he says.
“The US and the UK very recently passed legislation where the nuclear fission and fusion regulators are different and they require different standards, so you’re starting to separate the two technologies and that makes a big difference.”
But it’s Italy that might be the most appropriate model for Australia because it’s coming from a total ban on nuclear energy as well, Mumgaard says.
But Italy is also un-banning fission technology after a 40-year hiatus, producing a draft law in March to set up both fission and fusion technologies.
Pros and cons
Fusion is now such a small sector in Australia that it’s hard to find one person who isn’t connected to one of the local or global companies competing to be first, cheapest, or most realistic.
UNSW’s Patrick Burr is involved with HB11 but happy to also cut through the marketing speak. Every technology, as Burr says, has its drawbacks.
The main problem today is talent. Burr says companies are already cannibalising each other’s staff, from fusion engineers, scientists, down to people in the supply chain, and educating new talent was one reason why UNSW launched the student-led tokamak project.
But there are some practical problems as well which are high on the ‘to solve’ list of the engineers.
One of the first dot points on any ‘why fusion is better’ powerpoint slide is the tiny amount of waste it produces from a reaction.
But this is misleading. The irradiated waste of a fusion plant is the whole internal structure, albeit with a hundreds of years half life instead of a thousands of years half life.
Dealing with concrete or equipment that is toxic for hundreds of years is manageable for a society, Burr says. The challenge will be figuring out how to handle the higher volumes of radioactive material.
Another drawback is the source of fuel.
The most common fuel pairing is deuterium and tritium – the former is abundant in nature, the latter is not and has a short half life. Other fuels have their own challenges, such as HB11’s boron-hydrogen method, which right now requires giant lasers to activate.
Taking a position on nuclear energy in a country like Australia, where it doesn’t exist outside the medical sector, is a bet on the distant future.
For Burr, it’s a question on whether Australia will have won the fight with hard-to-decarbonise sectors in 50 or 100 years’ time. And whether the country wants to make a bet today on a technology that may – or may not – be that solution. https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-australian-investors-betting-big-on-fusion-the-holy-grail-of-nuclear-tech/
Peter Dutton insists there’s enough water for his seven nuclear plants, contradicting shadow frontbencher
ABC By chief digital political correspondent Jacob Greber, 17 Apr 25
In short:
Voters are getting mixed messages about whether Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plan takes account of water needs.
The opposition insisted in Wednesday’s ABC Leaders Debate that allocations for all seven sites have been assessed.
What’s next?
But Nationals MP Darren Chester said water requirements would be based on experts’ “facts not opinions” and take up to 2 ½ years to determine.
The Coalition has sent voters contradictory messages about whether it has accounted for the vast water requirements of its seven proposed nuclear plants after Peter Dutton declared the issue all but resolved.
In Wednesday night’s ABC News Leaders Debate the opposition leader said he has already assessed water allocations for “each of the seven sites” where he plans to build nuclear power plants.
When challenged by ABC debate host David Speers whether “you need more” water for nuclear, Mr Dutton replied: “We’re comfortable with the analysis that we’ve done”.
The remarks undermine comments given just hours earlier by a senior Coalition frontbencher who represents one of the potential nuclear sites and who insisted the issue would first need to be resolved by water “experts in the field”.
Darren Chester, the member for the Victorian coastal seat of Gippsland, told local ABC radio that there would be a two- to two-and-a-half-year investigation to determine whether enough water was available.
They would also consider other risks, including the potential for earthquakes.
“What that means [is that] the experts in the field would be required to report on all seven sites around issues surrounding water and seismology, so earthquake risk … and the question around the viability in terms of access to the network” via transmission lines, he said.
“You have to do a full site characterisation study based on facts not opinions … to find out what water is available and what’s possible at each of the seven sites.
The Coalition’s mixed messaging on water comes amid signs the opposition is struggling to sell its vision of a nuclear powered future, including from groups that say they are close to the Liberal Party.
Part of the challenge is that nuclear power stations would require a large quantity of water in addition to what is already earmarked for agriculture, environmental flows and remediation of old coal sites, raising fears of major shortfalls during inevitable periods of drought.
A report this month by Australian National University visiting fellow Andrew Campbell, commissioned by Liberals Against Nuclear, found the Coalition’s plan would require 200 gigalitres of water a year.
Professor Campbell found that half of the proposed nuclear capacity would not secure enough water and that another 40 per cent of the proposed nuclear generation would be curtailed during dry seasons.
Mr Chester, who is a member of the Nuclear Energy Select Committee, indicated he supports nuclear energy as long as it stacks up…………………………………………………….https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-17/dutton-insists-theres-enough-water-nuclear-plants-election-2025/105189220
The Conservative Argument Against Nuclear Power in Japan
It has been said that nuclear power stations are like nuclear weapons directed at your own country. I couldn’t agree more.
Getting rid of these “nuclear weapons directed at our own country” will not require huge defense spending or difficult diplomatic negotiations. All that is required is the ability to look square at the facts, and a conservative mindset determined to protect our rich and productive land and pass it on to the next generation.
Higuchi Hideak, Apr 15, 2025, https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01111/
A Devastating Loss of Territory
“Conservatism is essentially realism. A conservatism that refuses to confront reality is as worthless as a progressivism without ideals.”
This is how I opened my Hoshu no tame no genpatsu nyūmon (Nuclear Power: An Introduction for Conservatives), which came out last summer. In the book, I tried to bring attention to the contradictions inherent in the policies of the Liberal Democratic Party: a party that claims to support conservative values and uphold the ideals of patriotism but nevertheless advocates that Japan should continue or increase its reliance on nuclear power, even in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.
In the book, I made three main points. First, nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with conservatism and patriotism. Second, nuclear power stations are inherently vulnerable to earthquakes, for structural reasons. And third, nuclear power stations are also vulnerable from a national security perspective.
The disaster at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in March 2011 led to the evacuation of more than 150,000 people. More than 20,000 are still not able to return to their homes even today. And the state of emergency declared shortly after the disaster has still not been lifted, 14 years later.
In Fukushima Prefecture, evacuation orders are still in effect across more than 300 square kilometers, in what the government has designated as “closed to inhabitation indefinitely.” This is in spite of the fact that the annual safety limits for radiation exposure among the general population were lifted from 1 millisievert to 20 millisieverts. An area of more than 300 square kilometers—equivalent to the size of Nagoya, one of Japan’s key economic centers—is still effectively under evacuation orders. The country has effectively lost territory 50 times larger than the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture, controversially claimed by China and the frequent focus of national security anxiety. As if this weren’t bad enough, more than 300 young people have been diagnosed with childhood thyroid cancer, a condition that would normally be expected to affect only around one in a million. Many of these have been serious cases requiring invasive surgery.
When I sat as presiding judge in the case brought before the Fukui District Court to stop the planned reactivation of the Ōi Nuclear Power Station, operated by the Kansai Electric Power Company, the argument put forward by the Liberal Democratic Party (then newly returned to power) and the business lobby was that shutting down nuclear plants would force Japan to import vast amounts of oil and natural gas to fuel thermal power stations. This would result in a massive outflow of the nation’s wealth and lead to national impoverishment.
On May 21, 2014, the court handed down its verdict. Even if shutting down the plant did lead to a trade deficit, the court rejected the idea that this would represent a loss of national wealth. True national wealth, the court held, consists of rich and productive land—a place where people can put down roots and make a living. The risk of losing this, and being unable to recover it, would represent a more serious loss of national wealth. Compare the arguments of the LDP and economic business lobby with the decision of the Fukui District Court. Which represents true conservatism, unafraid to look squarely at the facts about nuclear disasters? Which best represents the true spirit of patriotism?
Disaster Caused by a Power Failure
Let’s consider a few of the characteristics of nuclear power stations. First, they must be continuously monitored and supplied with a constant flow of water to cool the reactor. Second, if the supply of electricity or water is interrupted, there is the risk of an immediate meltdown. A serious accident could potentially mean the end of Japan as a nation.
The accident at Fukushima Daiichi came perilously close to rendering much of the eastern part of Japan uninhabitable. Yoshida Masao, the director in charge at the time, feared that radioactive fallout would contaminate all of eastern Japan when it looked as though the containment building at the Unit 2 reactor would rupture after venting became impossible. The chair of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission also expected it would be necessary to evacuate the population from a 250-kilometer radius of the plant, including Tokyo.
The accident at Fukushima did not happen because the reactor was damaged directly by the earthquake or tsunami. The initial earthquake interrupted the external supply of electricity, and the tsunami that followed cut off the emergency supply as well. Essentially, a power failure made it impossible to cool the reactor, and this was enough to trigger a catastrophe.
These characteristics mean that the resilience of nuclear power stations depends not on how physically robust the reactors and containment buildings are, but on the dependability of the electricity supplied to them. Nuclear power plants in Japan are designed to be able to withstand seismic activity between 600 to 1,000 gals (a gal being a unit of acceleration used in gravimetry to measure the local impact of an earthquake). But earthquakes over 1,000 gals are not unusual in Japan, and some have exceeded 4,000 gals. For this reason, some construction companies build housing that is designed to withstand seismic shocks up to 5,000 gals.
There are only 17 fully constructed nuclear power stations across the country. Six earthquakes exceeding the safety standards have already occurred at four of these: Onagawa, Shika, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, and Fukushima Daiichi (twice each at Onagawa and Shika). Japan experiences more earthquakes than any other country on earth. Although the country accounts for just 0.3% of the world’s landmass, more than 10% of all the world’s earthquakes happen here. Despite the inherent dangers, there are 54 nuclear reactors along the coasts, around 10% of the world’s total.
Since it is impossible to forecast what scale of earthquake might hit a given site in an earthquake-prone country like Japan, construction companies operate on the principle that houses should be able to withstand seismic events equivalent to the strongest earthquake on record in the past.
The government ratified the Seventh Strategic Energy Plan at a cabinet meeting in February this year. This latest iteration of the plan removed references to an ambition to reduce the country’s dependence on nuclear power as much as possible, and signaled a clear intention to restore nuclear power to a more prominent position in the country’s energy strategy. Despite this, the seismic planning standards for nuclear power stations still assume that it is possible to accurately predict the maximum size of any earthquake that will hit in the future by analyzing past seismic data and running a site assessment of local geotechnical conditions. Whose position demonstrates better scientific judgement and a more realistic assessment of the facts—the government’s or the construction companies’?
Why Europe’s Biggest Nuclear Power Plant Fell into the Hands of the Enemy
TEPCO was a huge company, with annual revenue of around ¥5 trillion and a profit margin of 5%, meaning the company was making ¥250 billion every year. But the economic damages from the Fukushima accident came to at least ¥25 trillion, equivalent to 100 years in revenue for the company. What can we say about an approach to electricity generation in which a single accident can wipe out a century’s worth of revenue and essentially bankrupt a huge company like TEPCO? It is an energy source that is not just cost-ineffective but unsustainable.
For example, it is estimated that if an accident on a similar scale happened at the Tōkai Daini Nuclear Power Station in Ibaraki Prefecture, it would cause damage worth ¥660 trillion (compared to the national government budget of ¥110 trillion). As head of the Fukushima plant, Yoshida was resigned to losing the containment building of the unit 2 reactor to an explosion. He was saved by a “miracle” when a weakness somewhere in the structure of the building allowed pressure to escape and a rupture was avoided. Without this lucky intervention, it is estimated that the economic damages might have reached ¥2.4 quadrillion.
These figures make clear that the problem of nuclear power is not merely an energy issue. It has profound implications for national survival, and should be regarded as a national security priority. Russia’s war in Ukraine has provided a stark reminder of the seriousness of this threat. The Zaporizhzhia station on the Dnieper River is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. A threat from Russia to attack it was enough to persuade Ukraine to hand over the plant to Russian control. If the plant really had been attacked, it might have caused a crisis with the potential to lay waste to large parts of Eastern Europe.
It has been said that nuclear power stations are like nuclear weapons directed at your own country. I couldn’t agree more. And in Japan we have 54 of these reactors bristling our shores, all but unprotected against earthquakes, potential enemies, and terrorist attacks. The LDP government mocks those who oppose Japan’s holding the offensive capability to attack enemy bases and argue for an exclusively defense-oriented posture as indulging in “flower garden” thinking. At the same time, the party is blind to the fact that nuclear power stations represent this country’s biggest national defense vulnerability.
Getting rid of these “nuclear weapons directed at our own country” will not require huge defense spending or difficult diplomatic negotiations. All that is required is the ability to look square at the facts, and a conservative mindset determined to protect our rich and productive land and pass it on to the next generation.
In my previous books and articles, I addressed the legal issues involved in nuclear power. In my Nuclear Power: An Introduction for Conservatives, I made clear that my own political stance is conservative. I was prepared for a backlash from progressives, who make up the bulk of the antinuclear movement, but in fact I received no pushback from that quarter all. In fact, I was taken aback by the resounding support I received.
Most of the criticism came from supposed conservatives who were apparently determined to discredit my sincere intentions and grumbled that it was unseemly for a former judge to be sticking his nose into politics. On Amazon, my reviews were flooded with apparently coordinated personal attacks and slander. But I am still convinced that true and fair-minded conservatives will understand my true intentions.
Geologists acknowledge that it is simply not possible to accurately predict earthquakes with today’s science. A huge earthquake could strike tomorrow, causing a catastrophe at one of the nation’s nuclear power stations that could wipe out or render inhabitable large parts of the country. My aim is simply to make as many people as possible aware of this terrifying fact.
(Originally written in Japanese. )
Donald Trump flounders about on the Ukraine situation
17 Apr 25 https://theaimn.net/donald-trump-flounders-about-on-the-ukraine-situation/
Trump’s previous presidency resulted in huge job losses, a massive increase in the national debt, and global uncertainty about economics. Still, the stock market went up, and the very wealthy got wealthier. His purpose then was perhaps to enrich himself and his rich mates. Apart from that, it all looked like incompetence. If the job of President is to preserve the security and well-being of the nation, his administration was floundering about.
So – no real surprise that this is now happening again.
And what better example of the flounder is there than Trump’s dithering about over the Ukraine war?
As far as the Ukraine war goes, Trump’s big advantage over his predecessor Joe Biden, is that he is willing to negotiate at all. But Donald Trump’s concept of “negotiation”really needs to be examined. He is inordinately and mistakenly proud of his “art of the deal”. But when we observe his actual behaviour, it’s more like a form of childish bullying, than any real method of negotiation.
Major tenets of negotiation, as explained by Herb Chen, to achieve a win-win situation, are to prepare well with information on the situation, seek out and understand the other side’s needs, respect the other side and establish trust.
To start with. Donald Trump aims to win, i.e to defeat the other side. Is Donald Trump even capable of going for a win-win situation? He is quoted as saying “My whole life is about winning” – though I could not find the source. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YPg9sBtuMJw
So already it appears that Trump’s goal in negotiating is to get what he wants, in a bulldozing manner. And what he wants now is for USA business interests to win in Ukraine, rather than an acceptable peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia.
As to “preparing well with information on the situation”, Trump seems to have understood some of the critical facts – for example, that Putin will not tolerate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, that Zelensky depends on USA military backing. But the more complex picture concerning the national borders, and the industries in the region seems to be beyond him. And this starts to matter when questions arise about the ownership of rare earths resources. This is a complicated story, but industry experts and economists warn that for the USA to gain control of Ukraine’s mineral resources is not likely to be a success, either commercially or geopolitically.
But Trump’s focus in the negotiations is on American business taking over Ukraine’s minerals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya9WKaveRXU
The “deal” that Trump is pursuing also involves that very thorny question – which nation will own and control the Zaporizhzhia nuclear station. I have previously written about this. But suffice to say that the ownership of this particular NPP is a very fraught matter. All three nations, Ukraine, Russia, and USA, seem to want to take on this huge responsibility – massive out-of-action nuclear reactors, all very dangerous and lacking a dependable supply of cooling water.
So, squabbles over industrial resources, and nuclear facilities would be predictable to anyone who bothered to prepare for negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
Seeking out and understanding the other side’s needs? Has Donald Trump any concept of this? He might appreciate strongman Putin’s need to look tough and insistent on tough conditions – but Trump does not take account of Russia’s need for to have sanctions on it ended, nor to have Ukrainian troops gone from Russia’s Kursk region, nor to prrevent a pause that enables Ukraine to build up weapons. Trump doesn’t take any interest in the complex needs of the Ukrainian side either, – with many in the Donbass area especially desperate for the war to end.
Respecting the other side and establishing trust? Trump’s manner shows that he doesn’t even respect his own side – as evidenced by his recent rudeness to Ukraine’s President Zelensky. About the other side – he’s said that he’s “pissed off” with Putin, and has threatened to impose secondary tariffs on countries that buy from Russia. He has broadcast his anger with Putin, – but added that “the anger dissipates quickly … if [Putin] does the right thing”.
So much for Trump’s promise about quickly ending the carnage in Ukraine. Almost three months after he took office, Trump has achieved nothing. Thousands of soldiers and civilians continue to be injured or die each month.
Without going into the nightmare of the Trump tariffs situation, the economic effect of the current Trump administration is starting to look very like the economic effect of his previous one. Unless the purpose of it is solely the enrichment of Trump and billionaires, the whole operation looks like being massively incompetent. And, sadly, the Ukrainian people are prime victims of this incompetence.
The Coalition Nuclear Policy is a Fake
Arena Online, Darrin Durant, Jim Falk, Jim Green, 17 Apr 2025, https://arena.org.au/the-coalition-nuclear-policy-is-a-fake/
Calls for commercial nuclear power in Australia have historically all featured the Liberal National Party (LNP) promising nuclear power but later quietly shelving such plans. With a looming federal election date, that pattern seems to have returned with the Coalition running silent on nuclear power, despite the election being only weeks away. Why?
The Coalition’s policy is a bit like a Potemkin Village anyway—the fake villages said to be erected by Grigory Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great. Like them, the nuclear proposal is at best a facade, lacking essential content but acting to distract attention from division within the Coalition on emissions reductions.
Nuclear Potemkin villages
The Coalition has an electricity plan, but it is highly unlikely to actually involve nuclear reactors. The idea of nuclear reactors (large or small) with their low life-cycle emissions (at least compared to fossil fuels) provides a facade for misdirecting public attention. Behind the facade are continuing placeholders for fossil fuels, a stalling of renewables development, and a plan to keeping coal plants running as long as possible—probably switching to gas when those coal-fired power stations become technologically and economically unviable.
The long-promised Coalition nuclear plan was eventually outlined with minimal detail in June 2024 as seven reactor-site locations across New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, producing 14 gigawatt, or 38 per cent of electricity, with the first reactor supposedly coming on line by 2035–37. The claim was for an outcome ‘significantly’ cheaper than the Australian Labor Party (ALP) renewables plan. It invoked the myth of baseload power as the only route to grid reliability, and claimed it would ‘responsibly’ integrate with renewables.
On Friday 13 December 2024, when most news outlets would have already filed their stories, the Coalition released actual costings of their nuclear plan, using modelling by Frontier Economics. These costings were roundly criticized for sins of omission:
- mass under-estimations of the cost of keeping coal-plants running, the amount of planned curtailment of renewables, how much transmission nuclear would need, and the implications of not meeting net zero commitments;
- poor market-design assumptions, with the low projected cost ($263 billion less than the ALP renewables plan) being incompatible with lived experience of contemporary reactor costs. The claim of smooth renewables integration was undermined by Frontier’s own modelling suggesting solar would be curtailed to create room for nuclear;
- obfuscation of emissions, including the issue that the Coalition plan would emit more than 1.7 billion extra tonnes of carbon dioxide up to 2050 compared to the ALP renewables plan;
- assumptions about a contracted not expanded industrial manufacturing base (the Frontier scenario assumes 40 per cent less electricity use);
- systematic under-estimation of full costs of nuclear reactors (estimated in the Coalition plan to be $10 billion per gigawatt while real experience shows $15–28 billion per gigawatt).
Economic analysts have confirmed that the Coalition nuclear plan rests on accounting tricks, hiding the true cost of nuclear, ignoring the cost of petrol and gas, neglecting the cost of replacing coal-fired power stations—which will otherwise be permitted to pollute for decades—and failing to cost the damage from those higher emissions.
Astroturfing nuclear support
There is a strategic vagueness in the Coalition’s nuclear plan, which replicates a key pattern in the history of nuclear power proposals in Australia: make promises, provide insufficient detail, then walk away (rinse and repeat so long as nuclear can pretend to be a climate policy). The vagueness is strategic because the lack of essential detail in the LNP nuclear plan encourages other social actors to read their ideas into the plan. It is a form of astroturfing where the proponents of an orchestrated message attempt to hide its actual sponsors but make it appear that it is supported by unsolicited grassroots individuals.
The Frontier Economics Report purports to compare the ALP’s renewables and LNP’s nuclear plans, yet in fact compares apples to oranges, based on quite different energy-demand scenarios. The ALP scenario costs more because it serves a much higher energy consumption projection. Despite it being three years since the nuclear policy was first suggested, we have been offered no idea of what the socio-political contours of a nuclear industry would look like in Australia.
There are constitutional questions. How would the LNP garner parliamentary support to overturn both federal and state bans on nuclear facilities or impose nuclear on states? There are waste disposal questions: what confidence can publics have that vastly increasing the stock of nuclear waste to be managed would succeed, given a history of failed repository siting at Kimba, Muckaty and Woomera and a legacy of Indigenous distrust of government sowed by atomic bomb testing and the extractive industries?
There are proliferation questions. When will uncertainties in Small Modular Reactor designs be resolved in a way that permits open assessment of the proliferation risks in the nuclear fuel cycle for a nuclear-juvenile nation like Australia? There are integration questions: the Coalition assumes smooth integration of nuclear and renewables but research suggests nuclear does not ‘ramp’ well, that nuclear undermines carbon emissions mitigation strategies, and that cycling limitations and the high capital costs of nuclear make nuclear power poor fits within renewables-heavy grids.
Only half-baked answers by a flood of interest groups attempt to fill the empty policy space. Thus, the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) has engaged in disinformation in their support of nuclear power, attacking renewables seemingly because adopting nuclear would diminish investor confidence in renewables. Whereas the MCA engages in corporate and parliamentary lobbying, media networks such as The Australian and Sky News have populated the mainstream media with repackaged climate denial and delay talk: renewables are economic black holes, solar and wind are unreliable, and decarbonization transitions need to be managed (glacially).
Popup nuclear groups, including Nuclear for Climate and WePlanet (an offshoot of the UK fossil-fuel funded RePlanet) litter the online social media spaces with new denialism. Old denialism denied anthropogenic warming. New denialism, a ‘regime of obstruction’, throws sand in the gears of the decarbonization transition to keep fossil capital in the driving seat. The effects and urgency of climate mitigation are sidelined, disarming the objection that nuclear is too slow and piecemeal. Renewables-based climate solutions are discredited. These popup public groups reinvent the rationalist critique of environmentalism, deriding anti-nuclear critics as emotional. The scientism of the popup nuclear groups is palpable.
The astroturfing effect—creating a perception of broad public support where little exists—is in part explained by an effect discussed by the experimental psychologist F.C. Bartlett in his Remembering (1932). His argument was that the complexity of a response is a function of the complexity of the responding agents, not the stimulant. Audiences fill a simple message with missing meaning. With the LNP plan, plural, polarized publics have loaded up the vague nuclear proposal (closer to a meme than a policy) with meanings. The LNP simply prodded audiences with rhetoric about ‘renewables will not cut it’ and ‘we need reliable power’, then let the existing regime of obstruction interest-groups jump in. In this way, public support for nuclear is manufactured. It’s astroturfing, via experimental psychology and the politics of division.
The Coalition nuclear plan: A Claytons policy
The Australian Coalition government has repeatedly advanced nuclear as the solution to a problem, falling in love with nuclear publicly, and then ghosting it after a brief flirtation.
The John Gorton-led Coalition Government sought to build a reactor at Jervis Bay in 1969, but the idea floundered by 1971. The John Howard-led Coalition government introduced legislation in 1998 to ban nuclear facilities in Australia, ostensibly to secure support for a new research reactor at Lucas Heights but also reflecting bipartisan agreement that commercial nuclear power lacked political legitimacy in Australia.
Yet in 2006 the Howard government commissioned a task force to spruik the potential for commercial nuclear power. The Report, authored by Ziggy Switkowski and released in 2007, suggested Australia could start in 2020 to build twenty-five reactors that by 2050 would supply one-third of Australia’s electricity. However, by 2007 the Coalition again tried to run dead on nuclear power. Having announced reactor siting would be decided according to commercial decisions, community backlash saw the Coalition first backtrack by promising binding local plebiscites for any proposed location, then shelve any nuclear legislation until after the election. Howard lost his seat, and the Coalition did not raise nuclear again.
Until they did. The South Australian (SA) Liberals pushed for a nuclear power royal commission and the SA Labor Party obliged in 2016. In 2017 the New South Wales Liberals called for a debate on nuclear power. In 2019, the federal Liberals established a parliamentary commission to canvas what would be needed to introduce commercial nuclear power into Australia. In May 2022, Peter Dutton, then in government and (supposed) fan of nuclear power, stated that nuclear was ‘not on the table’, citing concerns to reduce costs rather than raise them. Yet in October 2022 the Liberals (now from opposition) introduced a bill to remove nuclear prohibitions.
What changed? One suggestion is to be found in a podcast that emerged in 2023, where the Coalition’s Minister Matt Canavan (who introduced the bill) admitted his colleagues were ‘not serious’ about nuclear power and only engaging with it ‘because it fixes a political issue for us’.
The Australian LNP has a plan for commercial nuclear power reactors in Australia that is a Claytons energy policy. Some may recall that Claytons was a non-alcoholic beverage, marketed in the 1970s and 1980s, and promoted as ‘the drink you have when you’re not having a drink’. To refer to ‘a Claytons’ means to refer to a shadow of the real thing, a substitute, an imitation. Nuclear power in Australia is the energy policy you have when you do not have a viable energy policy.
Australian nuclear news 14 – 21st April
Headlines as they come in :
- Fact Check: No, Mum, Nuclear Won’t Reduce Costs By 25%
- No walk in the park for nuclear reactors at life’s end.
- HALF-BAKED!
- Nukes kill kids.
- Dotty and Cretinous: Reviewing AUKUS.
- The real cost of living fix is renewables, not nuclear.
- Dutton’s nuclear revival smells rotten to Gens Y and Z
- 10 reasons why nuclear energy is a bad idea for Australia.
- Tim Wilson, secretive money and “think” tanks. Australia’s democracy is at stake.
- The Australian investors betting big on fusion – the “holy grail” of nuclear tech.
- Nuclear Fantasies and Migrant Fearmongering: Dutton’s Debate Playbook Is a Fact-Free Zone
- The Coalition Nuclear Policy is a Fake.
- Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plan could lead to major electricity shortages, analysis says.
- Peter Dutton insists there’s enough water for his seven nuclear plants, contradicting shadow frontbencher
- Forget nuclear, Australia is on fast lane to 100pc renewables.
- Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs
- Victorian Liberal leader distances state party from Peter Dutton’s nuclear proposal: ‘Our focus is gas’
- Coalition’s nuclear power pitch falling flat with some voters, Vote Compass data suggests.
- Rightwing lobby group Advance says it makes ‘no apology’ for support given to anti-Greens groups
Forget nuclear, Australia is on fast lane to 100pc renewables
by Andrew Blakers | Apr 11, 2025 https://michaelwest.com.au/forget-nuclear-australia-is-on-fast-lane-to-100pc-renewables-solar/
Gas is the talk of the town, while nuclear is not, but a massive increase in solar power generation capacity has already put Australia on the fast track to a 100% renewable energy future. Solar cell engineer
Andrew Blakers explains.
An academic living in cold Canberra retired his gas heaters a few years ago and installed electric heat pumps for space and water heating. His gas bill went to zero. He also bought an electric vehicle, so his petrol bill went to zero.
He then installed rooftop solar panels that export enough solar electricity to the grid to pay for electricity imports at night, so his electricity bill also went to zero. That Canberra academic will get his money back from these energy investments in about eight years.
I am that academic.
Solar energy is causing the fastest energy change in history. Along with support from wind energy, it offers unlimited, cheap, clean and reliable energy forever.
With energy storage effectively a problem solved, the required raw materials impossible to exhaust — despite some misconceptions in the community — and an Australian transition gathering pace,
“solar and wind are becoming a superhighway to a future of 100 percent renewable energy.“
While the technological arguments for solar and wind power are compelling, it’s clear renewables have to overcome obstacles.
One is the division over the impact of the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure. It has divided affected communities across the country and needs to be addressed. Generous compensation and effective education about large regional economic opportunities are good ways forward.
There is also the political debate about what form Australia’s energy transition should take.
Solar surge
Yet, beyond those issues, solar offers unlimited energy for billions of years and provides the cheapest energy in history with zero greenhouse gases, zero smog and zero water consumption.
That explains why solar energy generation is growing tenfold each decade and, with support from wind, dominates global power station construction markets, while global nuclear electricity generation has been static for 30 years and is largely irrelevant.
In 2024, twice as much new solar generation capacity — about 560 gigawatts — was added compared with all other systems put together. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and nuclear added up to about 280 gigawatts.
There will be more global solar generation capacity in 2030 than everything else combined, assuming current growth rates continue. Solar generation will pass wind and nuclear generation this year and should catch coal generation around 2031.
About 37 percent of Australia’s electricity already comes from solar and wind, with an additional 6 percent from hydroelectric power stations that were built decades ago.
“More solar energy is generated per person in Australia than in any other country.”
Solar is by far the best method of removing fossil fuels, which cause three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, from the economy.
In Australia, 99 percent of new generation capacity installed since 2015 has been solar and wind, and it is all private money. The energy market is saying very clearly that solar and wind have won the energy race and energy policies are consistent with reaching the government target of 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030.
Solar on the roof coupled with energy storage in a hot water tank, an EV battery and a home battery allows a family to ride through interruptions to gas, petrol and electricity supply and that energy resilience can apply at domestic, city, state and national levels.
Managing the balance
Balancing high levels of solar and wind energy to avoid supply interruptions is straightforward at low cost using off-the-shelf technology available from vast production lines. New transmission brings new solar and wind power into the cities and also smooths out the vagaries of local weather by transmitting solar and wind electricity to where it is needed.
For example, if it is raining in Victoria and sunny in New South Wales, then electricity can be transmitted south. Storage comprises batteries for short-term storage of a few hours and pumped hydro energy storage for hours to days.
“Together, batteries and pumped hydro solve the energy storage issues.“
Pumped hydro energy storage provides about 95 percent of global energy storage. It typically comprises two reservoirs located a few kilometres apart and with an altitude difference of between 500 and 1,000 metres.
On sunny or windy days, renewable sources like solar or wind power are used to pump water into the uphill reservoir, and during the night, the water flows back downhill through the turbine to recover the stored energy.
The same water can go up and down between the reservoirs for 100 years. Global potential pumped hydro energy storage is equivalent to two trillion electric vehicle batteries.
Australia has about 300 times more pumped hydro energy storage potential than needed to support 100 percent renewable electricity. It already has three pumped hydro systems, with two more under construction.
Globally, the world has more than 820,000 potential pumped hydro sites, which is about 200 times more than we need to support a 100 percent renewable energy system.
When eventually complete, Snowy 2.0 will provide 85 percent of energy storage in the national energy market at a cost 10 times lower than equivalent batteries and with a lifetime that is five times longer.
Myths and misconceptions
There are those — often vested interests — who throw up arguments against solar energy, regardless of what the facts say about its merits.
Here are a few:
- It takes up valuable farmland. Most of the area in solar and wind farms remains in use for agriculture. The area withdrawn from agriculture to generate all our energy from solar and wind is very small, equating to about the size of a large living room per person.
- The rural landscape can’t fit in any more solar and wind farms. Heat maps developed by researchers at the Australian National University show the vast number of good locations for solar and wind farms.
- Renewable infrastructure is a blight on the landscape. Hosts of solar and wind farms (and their neighbours) are generously compensated, while hosts of transmission lines are paid more than $200,000 per km. All the solar farms, wind farms, transmission and pumped hydro are in regional areas, which means that vast amounts of money and employment are flowing into regional areas. Solar farms are usually invisible from other properties. Open-cut roads, buildings, open-cut coal mines and gas fields are also visible in the landscape. People in cities have a far more cluttered view from their windows than rural people.
- We will run out of critical minerals. No critical minerals are required, only substitutable minerals. Solar panels require silicon for the solar cells, glass, plastic and conductors, which are made from extremely abundant materials.
- We will drown in solar panel waste. The amount of solar panel waste generated when all energy (not just electricity) comes from solar amounts to about 16 kg per person per year (mostly glass). Panel waste is a small and solvable problem.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 