News & Views item - June 2006

 

 

Can Mr Howard Fool Enough of the People, Enough of the Time. (June 5, 2006)

    Right on cue Queensland's Premier Peter Beattie, didn't just fall into the trap he did an Asafa Powell breaking a PB to prance in.

He is reported by The Sydney Morning Herald saying the Queensland government would never jeopardise its successful coal industry and support the building of a nuclear power plant in the state.

 

"Why would we have a nuclear reactor in competition with the coal industry?" I just find it mind numbingly stupid that we would undermine one of the most important industries in this country. It's dumb with a big D and it's going to get no with a big N."

 

On February 13 this year the ABC's current affairs program Four Corners put to air The Greenhouse Mafia which was based in major part on material provided to it by Dr Guy Pearse, Speechwriter for the Environment Minister from 1997-2000 Senator Robert Hill. In essence Dr Pearse's conclusion is that a powerful group of industry lobbyists calling themselves "The Greenhouse Mafia" not only had access to confidential cabinet documents, they were responsible for the formulation of a number of them through their access to the governmental department bureaucracy.

 

Within days Dr Clive Hamilton, Chair, Climate Institute (Australia) and Executive Director of The Australia Institute, Australian National University and one of Dr Pearse's PhD supervisors, in an address given before the Australia and New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference in Adelaide significantly amplified the views expressed by Dr Pearse. Dr Hamilton singled out a group of 12 individuals which include Prime Minister John Howard, businessman Hugh Morgan and The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell as members of  "the dirty dozen". He left little to the imagination when he told the conference, "Behind the daily news reports there is a secret world of politics in Canberra, the world in which the real business is transacted. It’s a world of powerful lobbyists who use methods both subtle and brutal to advance their own interests without a care for the effects on other Australians. ...climate change policy in Canberra has for years been determined by a small group of lobbyists who happily describe themselves as the ‘greenhouse mafia’. This cabal consists of the executive directors of a handful of industry associations in

 the coal, oil, cement, aluminium, mining and electricity industries."

 

Dr Hamilton said a lot more, but you get the idea.

 

Now perhaps John Howard and the oligarchic cabinet he controls so brilliantly have had a remarkable change of heart in their overt concern for the environment and have come to embrace the concept of nuclear power as the panacea for global warming.

 

Or are we witness to a ploy of which Stephen Potter might have been proud.

  1. Fragment the political opposition by suggesting a "debate" on developing nuclear electrical generation and nuclear enrichment.

  2. Mitigate the fallout from the accusations regarding the influence of  "The Greenhouse Mafia" on Coalition environmental policy... but in such a way that in fact the rapprochement continues. In short, a stalking horse is being put into place.

  3. Nuclear power plants will not be acceptable to a majority of the voting public so the Coalition will gracefully demur.

  4. But it will have avoided any serious consideration of alternative renewable or geothermal clean sources for electricity generation thereby --

  5. Ensuring the use of coal fired electrical generating plants from which --

  6. It will be found, greenhouse gas emissions can be well controlled.

  7. To what extent that control would actually come about is of course another matter.

  8. And objective assessments of the mid and long term benefits and costs of wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and biomass will be --- overlooked or downplayed?

 

ITEMS:

 

According to Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) executive director Ian Smith:

  1. nuclear reactors, would need to be built in eastern Australia where they could be easily hooked up to the electricity grid,

  2. four or five nuclear plants would have to be built to make an atomic energy industry viable,

  3. the ANSTO report showed nuclear power was a realistic option for Australia,

  4. the (cost of) electricity produced, averaged over the lifetime of the (nuclear) power station is about the same, if not a little lower, than that of a coal-fired power station constructed at the same time,

  5. Australia, at the moment, is the highest emitter of carbon per head of any country in the world,

  6. this inquiry will decide whether Australia should contribute to reducing its high carbon emissions through nuclear (power) as one of the options, included with the other options of wind and solar.

According to the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop:

  1. Consider the following: a 500MW coal-fired power station produces almost 320,000 tonnes of toxic waste while a comparable nuclear power station produces about 20 tonnes per annum. The coal-fired facility will release into the atmosphere 4.38 million tonnes of carbon dioxide while the nuclear power station will release 87,600 tonnes. The coal waste will include 2.6 tonnes of uranium and 6.4 tonnes of thorium.
             [Note: are apples being compared with oranges regarding "toxic waste"? What sort of coal fired-fired power station is being compared to what sort of nuclear power station. What is the radioactivity and half-life of the uranium and thorium? Almost all the uranium will be 238U with a half life of 4.468×109 years, while near 100% of the thorium would be 232Th with a half life of 1.405×1010 years. In short, hardly high-level radio-active waste.
           And perhaps we ought to note that according to Professor Gittus' report (p175) "Denmarks' Nysted Offshore Wind Farm will consist of 72 wind turbines, each having a rated power of 2.2 MW." In short 227 such turbines equals a 500 MW power station, with environmental credentials superior to either coal or nuclear powered.]

  2. Currently there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation throughout the world, 30 under construction, 30 undergoing licensing and about 60 in the planning stage.
            [But in which countries is construction taking place, why, with what amount of government subsidisation, and what national manufacturing and supporting infrastructure?]
  3. Compared with practical alternatives, nuclear power makes only a small contribution to greenhouse gases.
            [And in a sentence all alternatives are dismissed as impractical. Why bother having an inquiry - Ms Bishop already knows.]
  4. the annual production of high-level radioactive waste is less than 10g a person each year.
            [As the population of France is just under 61,000,000 that comes to just under 610 tonnes of high-level radio-active waste per annum. Not exactly trivial.]

  5. Nuclear power does [not] require the extensive areas of land that are needed to produce large amounts of energy through renewable technologies such as wind or solar power.
            [Surely, it's a relative matter, Ian Smith tells us the nuclear power plants must be placed near population centres, that is not the case with distributed systems as is obtainable with wind or solar power, and of course then there is geothermal power...]

  6. The technologies already exist for disposal of the high-level radioactive wastes from nuclear power stations in deep geological formations. Projects to develop such deep repositories have already begun.
            [After all these years of producing high-level radioactive waste Ms Bishop informs us, "Projects to develop such deep repositories have already begun," And the Bush administration has begun developing a National Missile Defence. Impressive.]

  7. The cost competitiveness of new nuclear power technologies has also been demonstrated in studies conducted in Finland, the US, Japan and Britain.
            [And the assumptions made for those studies have been called into question.]

  8. Recent studies conducted on behalf of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation have shown that in Australia nuclear power could be cost competitive with coal generation, even without considering the cost of carbon emissions.
            [But the cost of nuclear waste disposal and the cost of plant decommissioning as well as details of the models used for the report have not been given and in addition the author, Professor Gittus has  an interesting comment halfway into the report, p.173.

     

            Professor Gittus also spends considerable time listing generalisations with regard to the flukiness of winds, and yet Denmark relies on wind power for ~20%  of its electricity generation and the percentage keeps growing.]

 

All things considered, to leave the terms of an enquiry into the efficacy of electricity generation by nuclear fission solely in the hands of the Coalition may in fact be the most sensible course, for that puts the onus on them to deal with "The Greenhouse Mafia".

 

And it pressures the Labor opposition to promulgate its policies (if any) with regard to alternative sources of energy.

 

 

Note added June 7:

Senior mining industry figures told The Australian they believed the inquiry was about increasing the number of uranium mines and encouraging the creation of an enrichment industry rather than ushering in nuclear power plants.

"This is classic John Howard," said a senior mining industry figure. "He wants to open up the three-mines policy and create a justification for a value-adding industry and at the same time open up the discussion about the safe storage of nuclear waste."

But he described the immediate-term prospect of nuclear power plants as a "furphy". "They are at least 25 years away," he said.