Tim Blair: Go atomic and nuke the cranky Labor left
The great struggle of our leftist friends is to present themselves as placid and normal when in fact they’re an absolute cyclone of perverse moral justifications and self-destructive pathologies.
Opinion
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There are many sensible reasons for Peter Dutton and his Coalition allies to keep pushing for nuclear power.
As is well established, nuclear energy is extremely safe, relatively easy to create in abundance and completely environmentally friendly.
That last point is important if Dutton aims to drag the squishier Libs over to his side of the atomic argument (or he and the party’s rationalist wing could just jettison those fancyboy urban Turnbull types entirely … but that’s another argument for another day).
But two of the best reasons for conservatives to support nuclear energy would still apply even if no commercial nuclear reactors were ever to be built on Australian soil.
As a branding exercise, being pro-nuclear puts a party on the right side of science. It indicates that a party is not beholden to ridiculous Boomer-era superstitions about scary uranium.
Being pro-nuclear tells the electorate that your assessment of atomic energy isn’t swayed by childhood exposure to anti-nuke propaganda.
A pro-nuclear party has typically encountered anti-nuke propaganda – such as 1979’s dire cinematic fright-fest The China Syndrome – and since moved on from there, in large part due to simply growing up.
As well, those in the pro-nuclear camp are obviously able to calculate risk and reward, and to draw lessons from history. For example:
Reward: Nuclear energy produces nearly three trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) of power worldwide every year.
A European Nuclear Society comparison puts that in an easily understood context: one kilogram of coal can generate eight kWh of energy. One kilogram of mineral oil can generate 12 kWh of energy. But just one kilogram of uranium-235 can generate 24,000,000 kWh of energy – and does so without the carbon dioxide by-products of coal or oil.
Risk: History’s four worst nuclear energy incidents occurred at Windscale in the UK in 1957, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011.
In those incidents a total of about 30 people died of nuclear-related causes. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. All of them died at Chernobyl.
Lesson: Don’t let commies near anything big and burny. Those people are idiots.
Aside from that, go for it. You know what is far deadlier than nuclear power? Lithium-ion batteries.
Two people died last week in a lithium-ion battery blaze in Lake Macquarie.
According to data collated by Australian emergency responder advisory firm EV Firesafe, 36 people were killed worldwide by similar battery disasters in just the first half of last year.
That’s more people dead in six months than have been killed by nuclear energy since the first commercial reactor fired up in Britain 68 years ago.
Brand-wise then, pro-nuclear is where you want to be. The second reason for occupying that space is because it puts your opponents in the anti-nuclear crazy camp.
It makes them defend the superstitious and irrational, and it turns all their arguments into desperate pursuits of even the tiniest slivers of supportive evidence.
Look at Chris Bowen, our Energy Minister. The poor bloke has become such a frantic cherry picker that he could get seasonal work in Young.
On Sunday he rejected Coalition claims that Ontario in Canada had low power bills relative to Australia because of its nuclear plants.
“What Mr Dutton doesn’t tell you,” Bowen said on the ABC’s Insiders, “is the Ontario state government subsidises energy bills in Ontario by $6 billion Canadian dollars a year.”
But there’s more to the story, which is the usual case with Bowen.
Ontario’s energy subsidies, as summarised by Canada’s CBC News, were introduced because “green energy contracts” signed by previous eco-governments “locked the province into paying wind- and solar-power producers above-market prices for generating electricity”.
Nothing to do with nuclear, then. So much for Bowen’s Insiders line that “when you put scrutiny” on pro-nuclear arguments “they crumble like a Sao in a blender”.
Beyond nuclear issues, it is a good idea in general to provoke Labor and the left in ways that expose their peculiar beliefs.
The great struggle of our leftist friends is to present themselves as placid and normal when in fact they’re an absolute cyclone of perverse moral justifications and self-destructive pathologies.
Nuclear energy triggers leftists. So did October 7, which exposed a hateful anti-Jewish leftist core.
Sam Kerr’s technicolour cab ride provoked an ongoing leftist race riot over the meaning of whiteness.
Keep teasing. It reveals them.
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