Karl
Bill McLean (32)
I decided to put this in the Politics thread because it's sort of tied to things like Climate Change and is a political hot potato.
Australia currently has no nuclear facilities generating electricity, however, Australia has 23% of the world's uranium deposits. We've also got so much coal and gas etc that we've never had to exploit that resource domestically (although we're the worlds second biggest producer of Uranium) or seriously look at Nuclear Power Generation. This has good basic info about the political and social position - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Australia Resistance certainly seems to be diminishing amongst the populace, but there is distinct separation along Party Lines.
Issues include the economics, what to do with the waste, accidents and safety etc
It seems to me that :
MIT produced a good paper looking at the issues associated with the future of Nuclear Power http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/
Australia currently has no nuclear facilities generating electricity, however, Australia has 23% of the world's uranium deposits. We've also got so much coal and gas etc that we've never had to exploit that resource domestically (although we're the worlds second biggest producer of Uranium) or seriously look at Nuclear Power Generation. This has good basic info about the political and social position - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Australia Resistance certainly seems to be diminishing amongst the populace, but there is distinct separation along Party Lines.
Issues include the economics, what to do with the waste, accidents and safety etc
It seems to me that :
- it's sustainable - in that there is heaps of "fuel" to last thousands of years (or much longer if Fusion becomes viable, which it seems it will at some point)
- it reduces co2 emissions, if you think that anthropogenic co2 production is causing serious climate change
- it decreases energy dependency on imported sources (not a big issue for us I suppose but it is for other places)
- it's base load power, not intermittent
- new technology in generation (GenIII and GenIII+ and GenIII++ reactors with GenIV technology under development) and waste management deals with a lot of the concerns on safety and the environment.
MIT produced a good paper looking at the issues associated with the future of Nuclear Power http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/