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

[Anne Goddard]

Excellent Post Roy :-) thank you.

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: Roy Garner 
To: maillist for Green Activists 
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 2:26 PM
Subject: [Green-Activist] Howard's nuclear solution to global warming iswedge politics


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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