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Banned in every state and every territory in Australia. Late-term abortion? Euthanasia? Advising those confused about their sexual identity to give it some thought? Well, yes, the latter is banned in every state or soon will be. But I’m really talking about nuclear energy. Apart from individual state prohibitions, nuclear energy is not permitted under two federal Acts. The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998 and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Incidentally, I wonder, who was prime minister in 1998 and 1999?
These two Acts “expressly prohibit the approval, licensing, construction, or operation of a nuclear fuel fabrication plant; a nuclear power plant; an enrichment plant; or a reprocessing facility.” Passing strange, you might think, when Australia holds almost one-third of the world’s proven uranium reserves and exports around 7,000 tonnes per year, representing about 10 per cent of the global supply. Stranger still when, as part of the AUKUS joint defence deal with the UK and US, we intend buying and making nuclear subs. Apparently it is one thing to own a nuclear plant powering a sub just off the coast. Another to have one on dry land to keep the lights on. Hypocrisy and politics are not unusual bedfellows.
The Libs and Nats have recently been making noises about bringing nuclear in from the cold. Nothing too definite and unequivocal mind. After all, it was the same parties in government which banned it; even if it was part of a weak-kneed trade-off to get parliamentary support for a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. However, the Labor government is dismissive. It’s the most expensive form of energy, it says, and then goes on to ask, and flamboyantly so, exactly where nuclear plants would be put? This scares the pants off the Coalition; knowing that suggesting actual locations would bring down the ire of local populations ginned up by activists. Stalemate.
In the circumstances, why are the Coalition parties even talking about the possibility of talking about nuclear energy? It’s a hopeless gesture. It is, but then, again what other strategy do they have? They have signed on to net zero by 2050. They’ve been part of subsiding wind and solar energy. They are totally and completely complicit in ruining Australia’s international competitive advantage in generating cheap and reliable energy. They are complicit in burdening industry, small business, middle-income people, the poor and needy, with soaring power bills. They haven’t been opposing; they’ve been in league. That was then, now they rightly suspect that the whole green-energy house of cards is soon enough about to fall. And they need an escape hatch. We favoured considering nuclear which would have saved us, they can say in their pathetically abject wretchedness.
No one side of politics whether in Australia, in the UK, in Europe, in North America could have got away with vandalising cheap and reliable energy without the support of the other side. In exactly the same way, the grotesque response to COVID could not have occurred without the concurrence of both sides. Equal measures of idiocy and despotism ensue when adversarial politics dies.
I admit that at one point, I favoured nuclear energy. No longer. For some countries fine, but certainly not for Australia with our abundance of high quality coal and natural gas. Arguing for nuclear cedes the preposterous premise that we face a climate crisis. And the “proof” of the premise. A revolving door of baseless claims of untoward extreme weather events when, in fact, there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of such events. The world is growing greener and more productive as we speak. And for those in colder climes maybe pleasantly warmer, though I doubt Alaskans have noticed.
It’s all a beat up, as was Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb in the late 1960s; the dire predictions of resource depletion by the Club of Rome in the early 1970s, and the terrors of incipient global cooling in the mid-1970s. These scares have all been gazumped by global warming, aka climate change, aka the climate crisis. The confected Covid scare provided respite from the climate scare for a couple of years before most people, except the most suggestible and gullible, lost interest. Never mind, back to the scary climate crisis. “The climate time-bomb is ticking.” So the UN’s honcho António Guterres recently claimed. Rest assured. It will never go off. However, if the climate cultists have their way, it’s going to continue ticking. It’s their key to power and enrichment.
Here we are in the Lucky Country sitting on plentiful, affordable and accessible hydrocarbon energy. Yet, apparently, the only option being mooted to its replacement by ruinous renewable energy is nuclear energy. No, the only rational path is to dig and drill for coal, gas and oil. Unfortunately, irrationality rules the day on both sides of politics; just to a somewhat different degree.
“Arguing for nuclear cedes the preposterous premise that we face a climate crisis.
Agreed, Peter. The loonies ruling our roost will see this as a given. Unless, by some miracle, we get a benevolent dictatorship that status quo will maintain.
As to your other point:
“No, the only rational path is to dig and drill for coal, gas and oil. Unfortunately, irrationality rules the day on both sides of politics; just to a somewhat different degree.”
We’re already doing the digging and drilling for our vast reserves of inground hydrocarbons. The crime against Australians perpetrated by our goofy green sycophant governments is that we sell our plentious energy bounty cheaply to countries like China and India who are rational, and are sensibly doing with our energy what we should have been doing all along.
Summed up nicely SJ. Any un-looney person recognises that logicality requires you to acknowledge that if fossil fuels are the devil incarnate for one’s own country and the planet, then under no circumstance should that country pursue, or be allowed to export such ‘dangerous’ minerals, to any other country, with sanctions applying for breach. However such rationality never sees the light of day with the powers that be, in Western countries. They’re interested in money and power.
So the cold hard irrational reality may mean nuclear, as it seems these small reactors can be built in a short time when the inevitable blackouts occur, otherwise it’s back to the cave – thanks leftie nutters.
In 1995 I walked up beside a glacier in NZ to have a look. It was not too far to walk. Less than ten years ago thought my daughter and her mother would also like a look and I took a look at the glacier information online and discovered the walk was now three km.
Quadrant needs to begin to believe the science and accept that in 4576 Bangkok, Amsterdam, Shanghai and Bangladesh will be visited by tourists using submersibles.
Quadrant accepts all the political science behind your global warming.
Good scientific research is based on factual truth. Do you have any truth or evidence to support the claim that tourists would want to visit those hell-holes in the year 4576.
Accepting fairy tales as solid empirical science is a deadly sin and not a Quadrant value.
Personally I regard the God bit as the ultimate fairy tale. The year 4576 is when humans have been produced on planet Maxwell 01 when the Maxwell Empire is seeding the Universe with Earth life. On Earth sea levels have risen 20m. You might want to know that by 6026 it has gone up the full 60m. You are just ignoring the evidence from Greenland that we are causing a problem. It will be helped if we stop the human plague as then less electricity will be needed.
Evidence from Greenland? Really? Your last assertion assumes all ice, including the East Antarctica sheet (which is much bigger than the rest of them) melts. It is *not* scientific to make that assertion at all. You’d need to disrupt the Antarctic current and instead circulate water from the Antarctic to the equator to do that. Almost certainly won’t happen.
And since you’re focusing on Greenland: if the Greenland ice sheet melted completely (and that’s a big if), the sea level rise would be 7 metres. Not 20!
The big risks of climate change are things like shifting rainfall patterns. You don’t need to invent ridiculous and highly unlikely scenarios. There are clowns around who like to peddle the 300degreeC line because that’s what Venus has. I hope you don’t go to that sort of folly?
Google results in a NASA link that indicates Greenland ice has lost 273.0 billion metric tons per year since 2002. They also mention Antarctica. All ice has not melted until 6026 as Nicole on Maxwell 02 mentions in her diary.
maxpart27, I have not read Nicole’s diary, it must be entertaining. But just putting Nicole aside for a moment, I do read Hydrology for the simple reason of reality and the balanced water system that we all live in on planet Earth. In our Earth-Atmosphere system, water is the only substance to exist in one of three states, either solid, liquid or gas. The water cycle creates for the continuous circulation of water through these states about Earth’s surface. The same balanced water system and likewise the same volume of water that exists today has existed on Earth since well before Adam & Eve.
By simple thermodynamics when ice melts due to heat then a liquid and gas are resultants. Conversely both liquid and gas can be cooled sufficiently to form a solid (ice) again. Nothing is lost, the volume of water in the system remains the same. When ice does melt then evaporation due to heat is also occurring on the ocean surface. Remembering water evaporates quicker than ice, you can prove this by boiling a litre of water in one kettle alongside a kilogram of ice in another kettle at the same time and measuring the time each kettle takes to reach boiling point. Hence sea levels do not instantly rise because of ice melts. Due to many other dynamic forces such as astronomical gravity, thermodynamics, sea currents etc ocean sea levels will always have basins and bulges, that is just nature and the beauty of God.
Another little thing to know is that due to the tilt of the Earth and the rotation of Earth the movement of atmospheric air remains generally within its own hemisphere and moreso within its own temperature zone – Equatorial Lat 0 to 30deg, Temperate Lat 30 to 60deg and then Polar 60 to 90deg zones. Hence air (gas, clouds, volcanic ash, nuclear fallout etc) in the northern or southern hemisphere stays in its original hemisphere.
I’m telling you this because man did not create the balanced water system. God did. So please get to know God and then take your concerns to him. When you understand God then your worries will reduce and relax fearmongering will not drown you.
You do know I hope that sea level has been 120 m lower as when the Aborigines walked here and 70 m higher. It is not static. Likewise the continents have gone walkabout since the Earth was formed. Nothing to do with your God, just nature.
Given that we have a seam of coal on the East coast running from about Wilson’s Prom to Cape York and we have a “known” gas reserve to last for the next 43 years there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to start building nuclear power plants. WA has places as in “Collie” with large coal reserves. One wonders if anyone has done a cost study, the IPPC springs to mind, if they have the time from more pressing matters of course, to do a cost analysis from getting permits to mine the ore, to process the ore, to build a nuclear power plant, to operate using the ore, decommission the thing, and allow for the fact that an accident may make the site unavailable for a century or so against all the above costs for a coal powered power station. Coal fired power plants rarely blow up and if one does work can start on a rebuild on the same land almost immediately. Cost savings by going nuclear are mentioned but I remember being transfered from Sydney to France in 1990 and the cost of electricity in Sydney was loose change compared to about AUD $100 a week in Paris supplied by nuclear power generated electricity. ceiling lights were unheard of except in the kitchen, mostly standard lamps were used and all either had flouro tubes or quartz halogen bulbs to save electricity costs. Our home was brand spanking new with all the mod cons so goodness knows what an older home would cost to run. Of course the IPPC could do a cost analysis on tidal powered generators projected ahead to 4576. In the early fifties when I was a kid, I read about a French experiment on tidal power so chased one site down in France where they used a tidal creek to generate power. The locals told me that it had fallen into disuse just after it was built for it didn’t work!
>”WA has places as in “Collie” with large coal reserves.” [quote from B O’H above]
Normally I leave geoscientifically illiterate statements on Resource/Reserve issues to just go deady-bones. There’s not much point in refuting them since no one cares about these issues except geologists, engineers and those who fund them..
However, the Collie Basin is quite topical and lies at the heart of WA’s current threat of power losses.
“Reserve” is a properly defined metric which takes into account all aspects of geology, engineering, marketing and increasingly ESG parameters (although these are elasticised beyond rational thought). An essential component is the trade-off between mining costs vs marketable sales revenue.
Collie Basin “reserves” have finally gone nova in that relationship – the wrong way. A large set of sub-optimal resources remain but the mining costs way overshadow any domestic sales revenue that is permissable by political forces. The WA Govt may yet subsidise Collie costs with tax revenue from the Pilbara.
Ianl, my wife is a recently retired geophysical engineer of some note and I draw my knowledge on matters geophysical and geological from her. OK mate.
I think it is strategically misguided to directly oppose the climate change ideology. Better, in my view, to apply a blowtorch to the flimsy claims that renewables alone can secure a reliable, affordable, abundant, and low-emissions energy system. Point out the sprawling renewables, transmission, and storage infrastructures and their costs, in money and environmental impact. Contest the austere, miserabilist, demand-managed, and highly regulated future of the renewables-only zealots. Nuclear power, the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has proven to work on a large scale, is a way to disrupt the renewables-only trajectory we are currently on. That is a necessary first step.
Well said Peter, as always bringing fundamental logic to ideological claptrap. However I am afraid that socialism has now subsumed the Western human soul to the point of no return.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/socialism_means_a_descent_into_death.html
Oh don’t worry, those other scares resurface from time to time. Remember “peak oil” about 15 years ago? This was absolutely certain and anyone who disagreed was also a “denier” or “ignorant” or a “tool of the oil industry” and what have you.
Even the coming ice age got a run in the early 2000’s with claims global warming would trigger the next ice age – this was seriously promoted. And policies for lower population are still running, even as they seek ever higher immigration to reverse its effects.
We are running the experiment, no amount of bleating on my part will change the direction we are heading it has way to much momentum.
A catastrophist cousin of mine once said “We will win in the end” She is right. I just didn’t believe her at the time, nobody is that stupid I thought, then the price of darkness Bowen started talking when I realized its all over.
Until the lights go out, until those that are dependent on machines to live die and starvation is on our door no one will change the path.
So I prepare my home, and my way of life for the coming apocalypse, none of which has anything to do with AGW and everything to do with virtue-signaling loons who are swapping what works for what sounds good.
A pox on them.
*Prince of darkness Bowen
When the trade unions have finally sold us out to the CCP, I can just imagine the look on their faces when their new overlords don’t put them in charge of the rest of us but ship them off to fill the millions of empty ’tofu-dregs’ apartments in China.
Then issue edicts to our hard working tradies to begin construction of gigantic mines, powered by hundreds of coal and gas fired generators.
Of course no one will know, it won’t be reported, you’ll be left wondering at the sharp increase in Chinese tourism and smog.
PS:”Arguing for nuclear cedes the preposterous premise that we face a climate crisis. And the “proof” of the premise. A revolving door of baseless claims of untoward extreme weather events, etc.”
Add another preposterous premise: that the political classes – incl. the UN – can conjure up a Goldilocks climate – for everyone, everywhere and forever – merely by promulgating a Net Zero fantasy and redistributing wealth from the energy/gas sectors to the pay for their global RE experiment.
“CC” is truly the gift that keeps on giving: at least until the alarmist climate modellers driving it are exposed as having no more credibility than the readers of entrails in ancient Rome.
Yes, Alice – does every continent get a thermostat ? What a joke they are promulgating! And the third world is in on the ruse as either money or free immigration to the first world is their goal.
RB – “price of darkness ” works well too , for that is what it will cost us . Also your first post I totally agree with. The climate hoax is the biggest lie ever foisted on humanity, and they are too invested in it to change course .The plandemic BTW fit hand – in- glove with the goal of enslavement and control. They know how much they can get away with – a lot !!
Too expensive to build, too expensive storage after use ( lightly radiated materials, clothing etc. ) sensutive to not impossible attacks, if something goes wrong – area doomed forever.
Go gas and coal. Add biogas, .
Hydrogen (powdered) fuel seems to be coming soon, for cars at least. But also as batteries/storage.
Small modular nuclear systems – why such a rush, it may or may not work.