Armed with the findings of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, South Australian Labor Premier Jay Weatherill is pressing ahead with plans to import as much as a third of the world's high-level nuclear reactor waste and store it in the state's outback.
There are compelling reasons to reject it. The project, it now emerges, could go ahead only over resistance from Indigenous traditional landowners, some of whom took part in the Lizard Bites Back convergence in early July.
Renfrey Clarke
In the plans of governments in Adelaide and Canberra, South Australia is to become the country鈥檚 鈥渘uclear waste dump state鈥.
Most South Australians remain sceptical. And among the state鈥檚 Aboriginal population 鈥 on whose ancestral lands the dumps would be located 鈥 opposition to the scheme is rock-solid.
鈥淚t鈥檚 very simple and easy to understand,鈥 Aboriginal activist Regina McKenzie told 91自拍论坛 Weekly on May 24. 鈥淣o means no!鈥
In the plans of governments in Adelaide and Canberra, South Australia is to become the country's 鈥渘uclear waste dump state鈥.
As South Australia's economy continues to tank, local business leaders and the state Labor government have snatched at the nuclear option.
Leading the hopes for salvation is a proposal for a giant underground waste dump to store some of the world's spent reactor fuel.
As a sagging economy cruelled their electoral chances, right-wing parliamentarians and power-brokers in the South Australian Labor Party decided in late 2014 that it was time to ditch a once fiercely-defended point of policy. The party's remaining opposition to the nuclear fuel cycle would have to go.
Labor Premier Jay Weatherill soon came on board, and by March last year the state's Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission was under way.
If modern industrial capitalism were a person, he or she would be on suicide watch. The system that has brought us quantum physics and reality television, modern medicine and the columns of Andrew Bolt is set on a course which, by all the best reckoning, points directly to its doing itself in.
If capitalism goes on 鈥 everything goes. Climate, coastlines, most living species, food supplies, the great bulk of humanity. And certainly, the preconditions for advanced civilisation, perhaps forever.
To get elected, wait until the existing government makes itself unelectable. Say as little as you can about your real policies. Smile, and present a small target.
Those were the perspectives of South Australia鈥檚 Liberal opposition in the run-up to the state elections on March 15. The key Liberal slogan, outside polling places throughout the state, was 鈥淎 Fresh Start鈥. A start to what, specifically? Voters weren鈥檛 supposed to ask.
First there was climate denial. But the mocking laughter of the informed public 鈥 along with the indignation of the scientists 鈥 finally reached the energy-company boardrooms.
So now instead we get the non sequitur. That鈥檚 Latin for 鈥渋t doesn鈥檛 follow鈥. Rather than lying outright, the fossil-fuel chiefs make nakedly contradictory statements and count on us not to notice.
Outside the city of Port Augusta in South Australia, the firm Alinta Energy runs the ageing brown coal-fired Northern power station. Environmentalists and local campaigners want the plant replaced with state-of-the-art solar power generation.
Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester University, said on October 29 last year: 鈥淭oday, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2掳C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.鈥
Anderson is one of Britain鈥檚 most eminent climate scientists. He is also deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Tyndall Centre senior research fellow and Manchester University reader Alice Bows-Larkin was more blunt in a November interview: 鈥淲e need bottom-up and top-down action. We need change at all levels.鈥
For anyone who knows the science, it鈥檚 settled 鈥 fossil fuels need to be banished fast from our energy mix. But how do we achieve it? Can we rely on renewable sources such as wind and solar? Or must humanity turn to nuclear power?
That鈥檚 a controversy that has bubbled away for years among people who all accept the dangers of global warming. Now, from the energy sector in China, there鈥檚 hard new evidence bearing on this debate.
The experience in China shows that as a way of quickly replacing greenhouse-polluting fuels, renewable energy wins against nuclear, hands down.
鈥淚t鈥檚 move over Olympic Dam with a massive shale oil find confirmed for Linc Energy in South Australia, which sent its share price into orbit,鈥 the ABC鈥檚 The Business said on January 29, exulting at a big discovery of unconventional oil and gas near the remote town of Coober Pedy, 800 kilometres north-west of Adelaide.
As the fossil fuel lobby tells it, natural gas 鈥 in chemical terms, almost all methane 鈥 is clean and green. Burn it in a modern power plant, and per unit of electricity produced, only about half as much carbon dioxide is sent up the exhaust stack compared to good-quality coal.
That鈥檚 like saying you鈥檙e making progress if you get off heroin onto amphetamines. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel. Even if the sums worked the way the gas corporations suggest, a wholesale switch to gas would put off climate disaster only by a few decades.
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