The Nuclear debate
One positive I can see from the Greens having power in the Senate come July and a member in the House, is that their insane policies will now come under more public scrutiny.
Senator Scott Ludlam is feeling the poorly after just a tiny bit of scrutiny as he opines on Nuclear Energy.
It is hard to identify where in the mainstream media this debate will be given a chance to develop beyond the juvenile anti-Greens spitting contest we’ve witnessed during the past 48 hours.Poor diddams…get used to it Scott. Keep on submitting article like this one and you’ll get plenty more anti-Greens spitting He claims
*it is 40s technology – demonstrably wrong; *wastes a paragraph pointing out that 16 g of plutonium will reduce a city to ashes which has nothing to do with the debate; *claims the nuclear industry is military based which it isn’t, and *that these hybridised weapons plants [are] generating a shrinking fraction of electricity across the world. There was a slight downturn in 2009 mainly due to Japan closing the large Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan following the Niigata-Chuetsu-Oki earthquake. However, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency there are currently 27 nuclear plants under construction.Scott mentions the astronomical liabilities of reactor accidents but there really hasn’t been too many accidents. The Three Mile Island partial core melt down resulted in radiation within a ten mile radius being equal to a chest X ray; no one died at the time and no one has proved conclusively that cancers increased in the area over the following years. The biggest outcome from The TMI accident is that it enhanced the credibility of anti-nuclear groups, who had predicted an accident, and triggered protests around the world. A lot of noise and colour but no health problems.
As an American friend once explained: In the US, more people have died in the Senator Kennedy’s car than have been killed by Nuclear accidents.Chernobyl, built by the people who brought you the Trabant car is more of an example of what is wrong with communism rather than Nuclear reactors. We do need a debate on Nuclear energy and I welcome Scott’s input. It underlines the fact the the Greens-Marxist answer to the worlds problems have no basis in accuracy or fact.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/?ss=business%3Aenergy
A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare. It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima.