Letter From Australia (About Going Nuclear)

Nuclear Power Now a Hot Option 

South Australian inquiry ordered

ANDREW BOLT
Herald Sun
February 12, 2015

ALARMISTS like Jay Weatherill now finally admit nuclear power isn’t actually a terrifying mass-killing menace. 
 
Now they say we need nuclear to stop their latest terrifying mass-killing menace — global warming.
Can you believe these guys? Nuclear power has switched from our greatest threat to greatest saviour. Yet none of these hypesters has said sorry for having peddled such baseless scares.

Take Weatherill, South Australia’s Labor Premier. As a budding politician he was “­opposed to nuclear power, all elements of it”, but this week said he’d changed his mind.  Now he is calling for a royal commission to “consider what role our state can potentially play in the fuel cycle for the peaceful use of nuclear energy”.

See, Weatherill reckons a nuclear industry might help save his struggling state.  The most obvious money-spinner would be a nuclear waste facility, like one Pangea tried to sell in 1999 that would have earned us $2 billion a year.

. . . anti-nuclear protesters are shameless. When the Fukushima reactor was smashed by a tsunami in 2011 they were at it again, with Crikey’s Guy Rundle predicting “the Japanese crews (at the reactor) will ... bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media”. In fact, not one person died from the radiation and the WHO doubts any will.

It makes sense. We have the stable geology and stable government to store the world’s nuclear waste, safe from earthquakes and terrorists.  But such facts never used to count with the likes of the unapologetic Weatherill. Such alarmists instead mounted the usual scare against Pangea and ran it out of town. Pangea couldn’t even get interviews with the young Howard government.


Few have dared to defy anti-nuclear activists and their self-righteous media mates. For instance, singer Peter Garrett, later a Labor environment minister, would rant unchallenged that the nuclear industry would leave us just “a scarred wasteland”.  As Australian Conservation Foundation president, Garrett even got away with claiming the 1986 explosion at the shambolic reactor at Chernobyl — the world’s worst nuclear accident — killed “more than 30,000 people”.

Wait, said other ACF urgers, “250,000 people have died”.

No, no, insisted anti-nuclear hysteric Dr Helen Caldicott: “Nearly a million” died.

In fact, in 2005 the Chernobyl Forum, representing the worst-affected countries as well as the World Health Organisation and International Atomic Energy Agency, calculated the known deaths at 65.  It found there was actually no “clear and convincing evidence for a radiation-induced increase in general population mortality” other than thyroid cancer in children, now treatable.

But anti-nuclear protesters are shameless. When the Fukushima reactor was smashed by a tsunami in 2011 they were at it again, with Crikey’s Guy Rundle predicting “the Japanese crews (at the reactor) will ... bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media”.

In fact, not one person died from the radiation and the WHO doubts any will.

This circus of fear could have rolled on for years but for one thing: global warming. The new green scare has driven out the old.  True, this new scare is just as exaggerated, given there’s been no significant warming for 16 years, but it’s forced many old hipsters to rethink their once-fashionable anti-nuclear hype.

Weatherill himself says “a very considerable element” of his backflip was that he was “gravely concerned about the threat of climate change”.  He knows we cannot slash the emissions we’re told cause dangerous warming unless we scrap the coal and gas generators that give us electricity — and there’s no practical way we can without going nuclear.

Last December, two warmist professors, Tasmania University’s Barry Brook and Adelaide University’s Corey Bradshaw, warned that wind or solar power were simply too expensive and unreliable to save us.  No, they said in an open letter signed by 75 equally green experts: “Nuclear power ... must be deployed to replace the burning of fossil fuels, if we are to have any chance of mitigating severe climate change.”

Many of global warming’s greatest gurus have now gone nuclear, too.  Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who keeps predicting warming will kill the Great Barrier Reef, announced last year that he’d “definitely changed my position” on nuclear power, which for “too long ... has been the butt of scaremongering”.  In fact, “nuclear power can provide low-cost, carbon-free electricity improving the lives of billions of people”.

James Lovelock, inventor of the “Gaia” principle, likewise urged “my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy”.  Leading popularisers of the warming panic such as James Hansen, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas have made the same switch.

So who could be against nuclear now? Against the science? Against the planet?  Well, federal Labor leader Bill Shorten, who this week refused to back Weatherill’s royal commission.

Such boneheadness is not leadership but its craven opposite — the kind of pandering to the stupid and scared that’s left us poorer.

Surely we’re better than this. At last.