[Green-Activist] Howard's nuclear solution to global warming is wedge politics

[Roy Garner]

Howard's nuclear solution to global warming is wedge politics

Activists must beware that Prime Minister Howard is practising wedge 
politics with environmentalists in his debate "we had to have" on the 
nuclear solution to greenhouse—the latest manifestation of his 
"democratic dictatorship".  It is a strategy calculated to bamboozle 
and divide his opposition.

The debate is an old one—that nuclear power, properly harnessed, is 
clean and green, and of course, peaceful.  Even the ALP's Martin 
Ferguson is talking the inevitability of a nuclear solution, if you can 
judge from Channel 9's Sunday panel discussion 
http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/article_2007.asp, 
which also included several so-called environmentalists for nuclear 
power.

The problem with this debate is that, by steering in the direction of 
nuclear, it is assumed that we should be talking about the relative 
dangers of uranium versus fossil fuel, with a focus on new-generation 
technology bypassing the dangers of 20th century nuclear power plants, 
and offering us a radical reduction in greenhouse gasses in place of 
Chernobyl meltdowns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster.

Serious-minded "practical" politicians and commentators, tinkering at 
the margins of the debate, and anxious to hang out their environmental 
credentials, are busying themselves with what is essentially a 
rear-guard action: insistence on adherence to the nuclear test-ban 
treaty, which means no trade in uranium to non-signatory countries, 
because of the real danger that, under the guise of nuclear power for 
peaceful purposes, they will be covertly making weapons-grade 
plutonium.

So this is a double shift in focus—first, away from a serious 
consideration of alternative power sources: solar, wind, wave, hydrogen 
fuel cell, etc.; and second, away from the nuclear alternative—thorium 
oxide—which proponents claim is far safer than uranium.

Dr Reza Hashemi-Nezhad, senior research scientist in High Energy in 
Sydney University's School of Physics, told ABC Television's Lateline 
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1616273.htm in April, that 
thorium oxide was a safer, more abundant alternative source of nuclear 
power.

Hashemi-Nezhad claims the metal is safe enough to hold in one's hand 
and does not produce greenhouse gasses.

What should interest anti-nuclear campaigners is the claim that 
thorium, unlike uranium, has no dangerous by-products that can be 
turned into weapons. Howard's great debate favours only the uranium 
miners, with dollar signs replacing the familiar radioactive danger 
symbol under which several generations of anti-nuclear activists have 
mobilised.

Hasemi-Nezad further claims that a thorium reactor could be used to 
incinerate plutonium stockpiles, and that the waste "would only remain 
radioactive for 500 years, not the tens of thousands that uranium 
by-products remain active."

Hasemi-Nezhad's project couples a particle accelerator with a nuclear 
reactor to start a chain reaction, and can be simply switched off in 
the event of an accident. Hasemi-Nezad has received support from Greg 
Copley, A/CEO of Future Directions International 
http://www.futuredirections.org.au/default.asp?ModuleId=1, a 
Perth-based think tank that has the Governor General as its patron.  
Copley says the thorium option was bypassed in the 1950s because of the 
uranium reactors' capability of producing fissionable materials 
suitable for nuclear weapons.

But Ian Low, President of Australian Conservation Foundation 
http://www.acfonline.org.au/, sees the thorium proposal as "hype"—that 
although "It's true that the period of danger of radioactive waste from 
thorium reactors, if the design can be worked up and proven, would be 
hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years... we're 
still talking about very long lifetimes."

Because there has been, so far, a deafening silence on the question of 
thorium as an alternative to uranium, one must be suspicious that 
Howard's great debate concerns only the nuclear options—the uranium 
miners versus the thorium reactor proponents, not nuclear versus 
alternative sources of energy.  Interestingly, not one proponent of 
thorium was represented in the Channel 9 Sunday panel discussion.

Some in Labor have allowed themselves to be seduced by this strategy, 
and to this extent Howard has already won part of the debate.

If we are to be forced into this debate, then the thorium option must 
be given serious consideration.  But any truly objective appraisal of 
the alternatives, I suggest, would see uranium stay in the ground, and 
make it possible for us to help the energy needs of countries now 
regarded with suspicion and worse—threatening a widening of the ruinous 
commitment to the so-called "war against terrorism", which is war 
against the environment.



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