NUCLEAR POWER BECKONS AS EMISSIONS CLIMB
ADOPT CO2 FREE NUCLEAR ENERGY OR REDUCE POPULATION
Our quality of life and our population growth could not have been achieved without Fossil Fuels but scientists now say we must find an alternative power source because increasing carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal and natural gas is causing dangerous global warming. In the space of 140 yrs, world temperatures have risen by 1 degree Celsius of which 31% was due to natural variability.
Global Electricity Production
Intermittent power from Wind and Solar and could not exist without fossil fuels and government subsidies. If the scientists are right then its time to rethink Australia’s ban on nuclear power.
Nuclear energy was banned less than two decades ago in Australia, a decision that has cost the nation significant global investment and scientific collaboration on new nuclear technologies.
Nuclear power was prohibited in Australia in 1998, horse traded for the passage of legislation centralising radiation regulation. Public debate at the time, flamed by the anti-nuclear movement, centered on the replacement of the Lucas Heights reactor. The political fix
was to draw a line through the industry. After all, the need for nuclear was low – energy was affordable, abundant and with a country full of coal, and no reason to believe that would change.
Waste Dump Approved
The good news is the nuclear ban can be reversed with a single amendment to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Commonwealth).
Napandee (left) has been selected to permanently hold high-level nuclear waste and temporarily hold intermediate-level waste. However some concerned community members have likened the funding increase to “dangling a carrot” in front of the communities.
The removal of four words – ‘a nuclear power plant’ – in Section 140A(1) (b) would allow nuclear industries to be considered for development in Australia. Any nuclear projects would still have to meet Australia’s stringent environmental and safety requirements. Nuclear energy is a readily deployable, zero emissions, base load energy and it shouldn’t be excluded from Australia’s energy mix. It has met energy challenges around the world, powers more than 30 economies and been deployed at substantial scale within a decade in countries such as the UAE.
Transporting Nuclear Waste
A Nuclear port in Australia is to store High level Nuclear wastes and receive waste ships every 24 to 30 days for decades. The Nuclear Royal Commission Final Report recommends a deep sea Nuclear port in Australia to receive an average 3,000 tonnes of high level Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) waste per year throughout the first three decades of proposed operations. “In summary, the report recommends: Management, storage and disposal of waste,
Recommendation: Pursue a purpose-built waste storage and disposal facility for used nuclear fuel which s now been approved.
Nuclear power is also behind the new generation of innovative nuclear start-ups, such as Bill Gates’ TerraPower and Transatomic out of MIT.
Australia, with its educated workforce, established uranium, nuclear research and university sectors and strong nonproliferation credentials, would be a partner of choice for private venture capital-funded new nuclear.
Global investment and scientific collaboration on nuclear technologies and fuel development are just four small words away from becoming a job-creating reality in Australia.
450 Nuclear power stations are currently operating in 30 countries around the world. Nuclear-powered France has electricity prices 17 per cent below the EU average.
7 Comments
We are told that the global temperature rise and fall in the years between 1880 to 1944 was due to natural variability and the low level of carbon dioxide concentrations. Yet in the period between 1944 to 1976 there was a no warming whatsoever despite a significant rise in CO2 emissions. We were told that the planet was still warming but the missing heat had gone into the depths of the ocean.Temperatures rose sharply in 1976 and continued to rise to present day. Is it reasonable to argue that a fair portion of this warming could also be due to natural variability?
The only global warming is that which has been created by NOAA who have raised all annual temperature anomalies in all 14 years between (2001-2014) by an average of 0.07 C.You can check this out by going to the original NOAA annual climate report for each year and note how they changed the anomaly in the hottest year section in subsequent reports and increased later in the 2020 Climate at a Glance document. The anomalies in the period 2015-2016 were all altered by an average of 0.05 C.
Surprisingly, NO alterations were made in the years prior to 2000, except in 1997 when the anomaly was raised from 0.42 C to 0.52 C, which is hard to fathom given that only the recent data had to be “adjusted “. All corrections were increases.
I don’t know where you got the percentage of natural variability data from but it is true that most of the earth’s warming before 1940 was not due to fossil fuels. I sit on the fence with this global warming theory because there is no way of proving it and the explanation for the long periods of cooling and flat temperatures, while CO2 emissions were increasing, is less than convincing. My grand daughter and her school pals have lost more than a week of education by protesting in the city streets calling on the government to do more about climate change so I asked her: if we could prove that most of the global warming was due to natural causes would she still want the government to act to reduce it? Of course not was her response!!.
I had a friend who was journalist for the British magazine Queen Bee who had been assigned to cover the UN 2015 climate conference. During proceedings she sent me an email describing her astonishment that population control was not on the agenda. This is ridiculous overpopulation is not being discussed! Her theory, like that of most rational people, was that if humans were the cause of global warming then their should be less of us. There is no need to adopt nuclear energy.
“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility — just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns — providing they are not denied equal protection”…… John Holdren Chief Climate advisor to the Obama administration.
The “theory” is not going to unravel anytime soon because there is too much money and too many high profile people involved. Added to that is the Nobel prize being awarded to Gore and the IPCC. It will collapse but not for a generation.
Schellenberger, who has apologised for misleading the community about the dangers of climate change, was just an activist with no credentials, but that didn’t stop the IPCC, the Obama administration, or Time magazine from recognising him as some sort of authority. Which is not surprising when you consider that John Holdren, who favored castration to prevent overpopulation and who helped Gore with his inconvenient truth, was appointed their chief climate advisor!!
He wrote: “But as an energy expert, asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public. Time Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment”. “In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them”.