Tim Blair: Atomic fear a chicken game unfit for Aussies

Cowardice is probably too strong a word. Let’s just say instead that a significant number of Australians have in recent times converted to a chicken-based neurological threat assessment system over nuclear energy, writes Tim Blair.

Cowardice is probably too strong a word.

Let’s just say instead that a significant number of Australians have in recent times obviously converted to a chicken-based neurological threat assessment system.

This isn’t a merely local issue. Rather, what we are looking at here is a matter of global realignment.

It should concern us deeply as a nation that we have become more frightened and panic prone than even the French.

Yes, the French, fairly or otherwise long held to be international symbols of spinelessness.

The Simpsons mocked the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. Formerly funny satire site The Onion once referred to Paris’s celebrated Arc de Capitulation, a monument that will stand forever – or “at least until it is hammered into rubble by a foreign conqueror”.

Such slurs should now be rightfully directed at us, for unlike the French, we Australians are spooked by even the basic idea of nuclear energy.

No people on earth are more scared than Australians of safe, clean, tested and reliable nuclear power. Picture ChatGPT

Lord only knows how we’d cope with the reality. Picture half the nation’s workforce staffing red-hot help lines in-between suffering trauma meltdowns themselves.

By comparison, the French – allegedly so timid and meek – have absolutely blitzed the entire nuclear issue. They aren’t alarmed by nuclear energy today and they weren’t alarmed decades earlier.

Back in 1998, British-born, US-based journalist Jon Palfreman visited France to see how the country’s latest nuclear facility was coming along.

“Civaux in southwestern France is a stereotypical rural French village with a square, a church and a small school,” Palfreman reported for the American PBS network.

“On a typical day, Monsieur Rambault, the baker, is up before dawn turning out baguettes and croissants. Shortly after, teacher Rene Barc opens the small school.

“There is a blacksmith, a hairdresser, a post office, a general store and a couple of bars.”

It all sounds lovely. Until we hit the next line, which is certain to distress nervous Australians. Trigger warning.

Cooling towers at the Bugey Nuclear Power Plant in Bugey in the Saint-Vulbas commune, eastern France. Picture: AFP

“But overlooking the picturesque hamlet are two giant cooling towers from a nuclear plant, still under construction, a half-mile away … the Civaux nuclear power plant comes on line sometime in the next 12 months.”

Oh no! Surely everybody was irradiated and killed! Or else they bunged on such a hissy fit that the plant was stopped on account of it endangering local baguette farms or mimes hanging out at the escargot hatchery.

Nope. Possibly to Palfreman’s surprise, the locals adored it.

“In France,” he wrote, “nuclear energy is accepted, even popular. Everybody I spoke to in Civaux loves the fact their region was chosen.

“The nuclear plant has brought jobs and prosperity to the area. Nobody I spoke to, nobody, expressed any fear.

“From the village schoolteacher, Rene Barc, to the patron of the Cafe de Sport bar, Valerie Turbeau, any traces of doubt they might have had have faded as they have come to know plant workers, visited the reactor site and thought about the benefits of being part of France’s nuclear energy effort.”

A view of the Spent Fuel Dry Storage of the Krsko Nuclear Power Plant in Krsko, southeast Slovenia, ahead of the first scheduled regular maintenance outage of the plant's extended operating period. Picture: AFP

That was 26 years ago. The Civaux plant presently employs some 1300 people and churns out loads of delicious high-grade zero-carbon non-lame sparkles every single day.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, by the way, the plant is “flexible in operation according to the needs of the grid operator” and can ramp up “from 30 per cent to 95 per cent of full power in only 30 minutes”.

Well, how about that. It recharges faster than your average EV.

Keep in mind that line about nobody in Civaux expressing any fear about a nuclear facility in their backyard. A report in The Sunday Telegraph noted the opposite when it came to proposed nuclear sites in NSW and Victoria.

“Coalition sources said focus group research carried out in the Hunter Valley in NSW and the Latrobe Valley in Victoria in recent weeks found hostility to the proposed polices,” the piece revealed.

“It found that while voters were aware of the general arguments for nuclear power, they were hostile to plans for reactors in their own areas.”

Dear God. Just consider for a moment how far we have fallen.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Hunter Valley, and am not unfamiliar with Victoria’s Latrobe region. Fine people. Honest people. Strong and straightforward people.

But, now they reject something not only useful but also completely harmless. They don’t want their area spoiled by something that won’t spoil their area at all.

Perhaps a study tour is required.

Perhaps we should send a delicate delegation from the Hunter to Civaux, so they could meet and be consoled by croissant jockeys, beret babies, truffle wranglers and other rugged French bruisers.

It would be quite the spectacle, wouldn’t it, planting some fearful Australians in a Civaux cafe with a couple of nuclear cooling towers just 800m away.

I am available for hand-holding.