Nuclear power debate taken out of our hands
We need clean power but the option to turn to nuclear has been drowned out by the howls of the latte sippers, writes Mike O’Connor.
Mike O'Connor
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Mick de Brenni has shown he has been quick to grasp the complex technical issues inherent in being the state’s Energy Minister with his contribution to the renewed debate on nuclear energy.
Queenslanders, he said, had “emphatically rejected nuclear power time and time again” and “manufacturing and resources companies are investing in cheaper, cleaner energy to grow jobs in Queensland by investing in renewables, not old fashioned, dangerous options.”
Nuclear energy, then, is old fashioned and Queenslanders don’t want any part of it. I can’t recall being asked how I felt about it but never mind, because Minister de Brenni is the full bottle on all matters nuclear.
Then there’s the issue of the several hundred million tonnes of uranium ore lying around the state worth around $10 billion that no one is allowed to dig up because mining it is banned. But isn’t Australia the third largest exporter of uranium in the world? Correct, but the stuff we sell overseas is mined by those misguided South Australians and Northern Territorians who haven’t had the good sense to crawl into bed with the Greens and ban the extraction of uranium which as everyone knows, can cause you to glow in the dark if you come within a stubby’s throw of it.
That dreadful Campbell Newman, Beelzebub incarnate to the Labor faithful, overturned the Queensland ban in 2012 in a bid to create jobs and generate income that could be used to build schools and hospitals.
What was he thinking, the poor misguided fool? Sanity, thankfully, prevailed with the arrival of the Palaszczuk government which quickly reintroduced the ban, ensuring that the uranium would stay safely in the ground while the South Australians and Territorians shovelled away to their hearts’ content and sold the stuff to the US, Japan, China and the European Union.
Queensland will have the last laugh when the state of South Australia lights up the night sky with an eerie glow.
We could, perhaps, have a rational debate on the relative merits of nuclear energy as, clad in a cloak woven from 100 per cent pure fantasy, we plod onwards towards the shimmering mirage of net zero emissions by 2050.
We could, but not while we have an Energy Minister who thinks that nuclear power plants are old fashioned and windmills of the type which attracted the ire of Don Quixote are state of the art.
Nuclear power! What next? Daylight saving, nude bathing? Not as long as Premier Palaszczuk, hand resting on the red button tagged Border Closure and clutching an empty envelope marked Health Advice, occupies the big chair and keeps Queenslanders safe from such madness.
The mention of nuclear energy immediately conjures up images of Chernobyl and Fukushima. One was caused by shoddy Russian construction and another by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami.
There have been three nuclear mishaps, the third being Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, in the history of nuclear power plants over 18,500 cumulative reactor years and it presently supplies 10 per cent of the world’s electricity from around 450 reactors. In the US, it generates 20 per cent of that nation’s power and in Canada, 15 per cent.
Successive federal governments have feigned hearing loss whenever the N word has been uttered and left in place a prohibition on nuclear power plants that dates back to 1998 when electricity was cheap and coal had not been demonised.
Small, modular power plants are now available that would provide reliable base load electricity when thanks to huge, wasteful and ultimately unsustainable government subsidies to renewable power sources, the last of our coal fired power stations closes.
Should the sun not shine nor the wind blow on that day, we’ll have to grab a book and go and sit by a window because there won’t be much else to do.
The states, led mainly by people possessed of an intellectual depth measured in microns and whose vision extends as far as the next opinion poll, are unlikely to lobby for change as their singular aim is to hang onto their job. It’s up to the federal government to move forward, ignore the howls of outrage from the latte sippers and seriously investigate the feasibility of nuclear power.
It won’t get any help from the Labor Party with Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, demonstrating the trademark timidity, saying he opposes nuclear energy so the Morrison government will have to go it alone.
“She’ll be right, mate” is the standard response to any criticism of our energy policy. It is an illusion as misleading as Don Quixote’s windmills.
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