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| Oh, to see these slim-waisted beauties in Australia! |
Of course we should!
And (quoting the article), it doesn't "fly in the face of everything we believe" if the "we" is those of us, led by the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have done our research and have known for a long while that nuclear power is the safest, most reliable and least carbon-emitting of all the options out there.
And as for the second para in the excerpt below, those accidents — Chernobyl, Three Mike Island and Fukushima — were all of old and unreliable technologies. (Note too that they are easy to remember because there are just those three. In 70 years).
Meantime, Generation 4 Nuclear power has solved the problems of melt-down (cannot happen), security issues and nuclear waste (one version of G4 uses existing nuclear waste as feedstock).
It's the Greens wot led scare campaigns in the seventies and constrained further development of nuclear by demanding safety measures that were orders of magnitude (between 10 and 100 times) greater than any other energy. Result: the Greens were able to say "well, safety aside, nuclear is simply too expensive". Well, yeah, because they made it so.
Despite those Greenie obstacles, we've managed to improve nuclear power technology, to the stage of Generation 4 nuclear. Clean and safe and ready to go to full-scale production.
What kills people is not radiation but fear of radiation [See]. In China alone, one million people per year die of lung diseases caused by coal dust particles. That's why China — perhaps alone on the world — is going full steam ahead with nuclear including the first batch of G4 plants.
I wish Australia would reconsider its crazy ban on nuclear and go for G4 nuclear. We are after all a member of the G4 Consortium. Instead, we are considering yet another coal-fired plant for Queensland. Crazy.
Shame on Oz and shame on the Greens who put the fear of god up the average Aussie.
By the way, when was the last time you heard of a problem with the nuclear engines running America's Navy? Answer: never. There hasn't been a single nuclear-related incident on any of these vessels in 70 years. That alone speaks volumes about the safety of nuclear power. It's got me wondering why we couldn't have some aircraft carrier-sized nuclear engine running a small city?
Meantime, Australia is performing well, according to this ABC report about a UN Report, in installing renewables, despite the non-stop criticism from the Left and despite the various problems in connections and outages that I experienced just last month in Oz.
Meantime, Australia is performing well, according to this ABC report about a UN Report, in installing renewables, despite the non-stop criticism from the Left and despite the various problems in connections and outages that I experienced just last month in Oz.
Anyway, the article is linked here.
/Snip
While it seems to fly in the face of everything we believe and have been taught about nuclear power, it may actually be the safest form of power production that we have. Ironically, the immense potency of the power of splitting an atom is simultaneously what makes nuclear weapons so dangerous as well as what makes nuclear power so safe.Despite high-profile nuclear disasters like Chernobyl in Ukraine (then the Soviet Union), Fukushima in Japan, and Three Mile Island in the United States, the deaths related to nuclear meltdowns are actually very few. In fact, climate scientists Pushker Kharecha and James Hanson discovered that overall, nuclear energy actually saves lives–their study found that up until now, nuclear power has already saved nearly two million lives that would have been lost to air pollution-related deaths from the contamination that would have been produced by other, more traditional, sources of energy.
