Thread: Australia - nuclear weapon capable state?

Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, and a couple others are more than capable of producing nuclear weapons. They've made the choice they they don't want to have them.

Even environmentalists are starting to come aorund to the fact that Nuclear might be the only viable alternative to fossil fuels. The reaosn is that anything else has to have a backup.

Solar power doesn't work at night, as has been pointed out. Wind turbines don't work when it isn't windy. Hydroelectric only works if you can have massive dams and there are environmental implications of flooding valleys as most countries have already experienced.

The costs of the backups often mean that "free" enrergy is as expensive as the polluting kind. Oh nd of course the backups are the polluting kind.

The problem with Nuclear energy is that if my coal power station "goes bad" then i get a fire or some such that affects a reasonably localised area.

If my nuclear plant goes bad i could have a direct connection between my power plant and the earth's molten core in an alarmingky short period of time. Most people wouldn't welcome a volcano in Kent spewing molten rock over the golf courses. Obviously i would be safe, i live on a hill . Even if it doesn't melt down i have potentially a radioctive cloud that irradiates massive areas of land. Chernobyl radiotion affected sheep in Wales. for example. The areas around Chernobyl are still lethal and will be for decades. We don't know how many people are going to die because of that one incident.

And that is when it goes wrong. When it goes right you have very dangerous
waste material. Yes 95% of a nuclear power plant's waste can be reprocessed. but there aren't many places that can do it. So to get the waste from the nuclear plant to the reprocessing plant requires long and potentially risky overland / oversea journeys.

And then you have to deal with the 5%.

Personally i believe the future currently lies with Nuclear Fission (isn't it about time for another Cold Fusion story to hit the press?) the problem is that the commies are not the only ones who are politically driven. The US had 3 mile island, and that revealed the whole political brinkmanship played between the contractors and the fact that the designs of the plants where, essentially, flawed but allowed to go ahead through politics.

And this is the problem. For such important and costly and time intensive projects, politics comes into play. Nimbyism fuels the politics as well, which doesn't help.

At some point we are going to have to address the fact that that the fossil fuels will run out, and on the way to running out they are contributing to clmate change. Then we have to be sensible and say that "i love being able to use my nice powerful computer, and my nice broadband internet connection, at night and to do this i have to understand i might need to live within 100 miles of a nuclear power station. And that i should get off the backs of the people trying to build the thing so that they can build safe versions and address the nuclear waste processing issues without moaning about the fact that it costs so much and is going to take so long." Because otherwise you will have another Chernobyl or 3 mile island.