The Nuclear Option

Fear is an irrational response. One incident can prejudice people against an entire subject. For me its water skiing. When I was a kid, I heard of a guy who hit a submerged twig on a river, and wound up with a broken neck. To this day, I wouldn’t get behind a speed boat for all the adopted African kids in Hollywood. I know the chances of it actually happening to me are remote, but it’s not worth it.

The same scenario seems to have affected Australia in terms of nuclear energy. Ask the average citizen on the street what they know about nuclear power and the response will be unanimously Chernobyl and then: nuclear energy bad. That’s about the extent of it. In context though, the Chernobyl disaster happened 20 years ago, was the end product of letting under-trained and careless workers pilot a poorly designed and cheaply constructed reactor. Like giving a 3 year old a loaded shot gun. That’s the Russians for you though, you can’t trust them. While there is no question that this was a disaster of gigantic proportions, it just wouldn’t happen in a developed country like ours. The Three Mile Island reactor in the USA suffered a partial meltdown seven years prior to Chernobyl and caused no immediate radiation deaths, with the projected increase in cancer related deaths later judged to be “approximately one”.

As such, the USA currently has just over 100 operating nuclear reactors, while France generates 80% of its electricity using nuclear technology. The hurdles to nuclear energy are generally a large start-up cost, ongoing fuel costs, the storage of waste products, accident or attack and possible proliferation for nuclear weapons. Currently, Australia is uniquely placed to overcome all of these obstacles. We have a large GST-fed budget surplus, large uranium reserves, even larger tracts of uninhabited land on which to store spent fuel and are wealthy enough to build with the best and safest technology.

Its time we stopped being afraid, and strode into the 21^st century, trusting our scientists to lead the way.