Open Thread 2

Barry, you should think of the potential energy of high mountains, there you have instant emission free electricity.

You get all energy needed for humankind for tens of thousands of years with The Mountain Energy.

Also… dropping rocks from the moon down earth’s gravitational well should release quite a bit of energy at the bottom…

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RE: NPP beauty contests

DPA, German Press Agency, carries a story today as below.
A photo of the blonde winner was included, in black bikini in front of various NPP towers

Salient points:

– Rosatom has been running the Miss Atom contest for 6 years.
– Masha Poshtarenko is in IT at a research reacter on the Volga; 95-69-97.
– a Rosatom spokesman said the idea is to show that normal people, indeed even pretty women work in the industry
– her prize is a week on Cuba
– a Russian Internet blogger wrote that he keeps his bedside lamp on 10 minutes longer to ensure that the girls keep their jobs

Note:
—The question arises of whether such atomic beauty contests in the West would be giving a hostage to PC fortune?

Russland kürt die “Miss Atom”

(dpa) – In Russlands üppiger Natur posieren die Schönheiten des Landes gern am Wolga-Strand, in den Wäldern Sibiriens oder an der Schwarzmeerküste. Die blonde Mascha Poschtarenko (23) hat dagegen als Kulisse ihre Arbeitsstelle gewählt – ein Atomkraftwerk im Gebiet Twer bei Moskau.

Die Computerspezialistin stellt ihren Charme bei einer landesweiten Wahl zur “Miss Atom” in den Dienst der Branche. Weil die Atomindustrie auch 23 Jahre nach der Katastrophe von Tschernobyl nicht den besten Ruf hat, sollen liebreizende Kolleginnen wie Mascha dringend benötigte Spezialisten anlocken.

Rechtzeitig zum Internationalen Frauentag verkündete die nationale Atomholding Rosatom auf ihrer Website nun das Ergebnis der Miss-Wahl. Die Siegerin, eine 25-jährige Angestellte eines Forschungsreaktors an der Wolga, hatte mit ihrem branchenkompatiblen Lebensmotto (“Ich lebe energiegeladen”) und ihren Maßen (95-69-97) geworben. Als Geschenk darf sie nun für eine Woche die Energiewirtschaft in der Provinzstadt Dimitrowgrad gegen die Kraft der Sonne auf Kuba eintauschen.

Die Organisatoren der bereits zum sechsten Mal durchgeführten “Miss Atom”-Wahl werten die große Resonanz in den Medien als Erfolg. Seit der Katastrophe von Tschernobyl geisterten “so viele falsche Vorstellungen über unsere Branche” in den Köpfen der Mitbürger herum, sagt Ilja Platonow. “Der Wettbewerb zeigt doch, dass hier ganz normale Leute und sogar ziemlich hübsche Mädchen arbeiten.” Doch auch ohne die AKW-Schönheiten stehen die Russen mehrheitlich hinter der Kernkraft.

Im Internet schrieb ein Blogger dazu, sein Nachttischlämpchen brenne täglich zehn Minuten länger, um den Arbeitsplatz der Mädels zu sichern.

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Best wishes to everyone for 2010. This blog is a little billabong of sanity
where people actually weigh evidence in a river of irrationality where people
adopt a team/football/tribal approach to beliefs.

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Season 4 Dr Who – that would be Patrick Troughton? I prefer Tom Baker. (I try to ignore rumours that they revived it minus the wobbliness.)

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@ Peter Lalor

Maaaate, have a beer and a lie down !!!

(Personally I recommend a malty well hopped brew, not that mexican horse urine that passes for beer :)

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Peter Lalor: You are right of course, BNC isn’t permanently isolated from
the main river. China is a thug of a country, but that doesn’t mean it is
stupid and it is wisely investing in a range of technologies. If it transpires
that NPP doesn’t scale well and solar thermal does, then I am confident
that many at BNC will switch allegiances, despite currently betting
that this won’t be how it turns out.

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“You know who else liked to give speeches? HITLER!’

That was way out of line man. I don’t like it ether when I see smoke coming up from the Kennedy shrine, but that was a bit too much.

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40C = 104F here in supposedly cool SW Tasmania. Since there are no decent land masses between here and Antarctica that leaves few migration options for cold seeking species. If it’s going to get worse then I’d say some iconic plants and animals won’t be able to adapt, not sure about humans. No doubt Liberal Senators have their air cons on full blast since coal fired electricity is our friend. When we have to form a breeding colony in Antarctica the senators can be our genetic starting material.

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YOUR ALL WELCOME TO COME HERE, MONTREAL QUEBEC, CURRENT TEMP -6C, FOR A BIT OF A COOLER

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What happens when NZ gets too hot? I think we should geo-engineer an island the size of France at about Latitude 55 South in the Southern Ocean. The pygmy possums and sub-alpine rain forest plants will get a reprieve. Corals won’t bleach. We’ll all be climate refugees and boat people so that should prevent squabbling about who arrived first. We won’t need desal unless there is a Venus typing warming scenario.

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From Know nukes @ Yahoo Groups:

Helen Caldicott ignored at Copenhagen

“The nuclear power industry is wicked. The nuclear
power industry was formed by the bomb makers – it’s the same thing.
Nuclear power plants are bomb factories – they make plutonium. Two
hundred and fifty kilos a year of plutonium that lasts for 250,000
years. You need five kilos to make a nuclear bomb. Any country that has
a nuclear power plant has a bomb factory.

If the Second World War were fought today in
Europe, none of you would be here; Europe would be a radioactive
wasteland because all the nuclear power plants would melt down like
Chernobyl…”

…Dr. Caldicott was a Cassandra crying out at the Copenhagen conference
with little or no attention from the major government and media players
there…

From Nobel Laureate to Nobody. I couldn’t be more pleased

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Boiled down to its fundamentals the fear of nuclear energy has its roots in the fear of radiation. Invisible, silent, and thus undetectable by human senses, it is the bogeyman of all things atomic. Fear feeds on ignorance. When X rays and nuclear phenomena were discovered at the end of the last century, they were seen as great benefits to medicine—the near-magic sight of the living skeleton, and the first means to palliate and cure cancer. But sure enough, there was a dark side also, and too much radiation means a lingering death. But even sunlight, (also in fact a form of radiation,) can kill with too much exposure.

High-level Waste from the used fuel, while only 3% of the volume of all radwaste, it holds 95% of the radioactivity. It contains the highly-radioactive fission products and some heavy elements with long-lived radioactivity. If the used fuel is reprocessed, the separated waste is vitrified by incorporating it into borosilicate (Pyrex) glass for eventual disposal deep underground.

While this material is dangerous, the dangers are well known, the volumes are small, and the processes and procedures of safely disposing of it are well known and proven. Nuclear power is the only energy industry which takes full responsibility for all its wastes, and costs this into the product. When I see other fuels doing the same thing – and that includes gas – we’ll talk, until then va donc !

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John Newlands, on December 31st, 2009 at 20.32 — Think Antarctic Pennisula. Already constructed for you. :|

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http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml
Latest report on 2009, and the last decade, from the BOM.

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@Peter Lalor

The less said about les Habs these days the better, having won Lord Stanley’s Cup almost one year out of every four in the past century, they are celebrating the club’s centennial year by consistently preforming below .500. The current squad is an embarrassment to the uniforms.

1.) The first quote of mine you chose to take out of context was preceded by the lines:

“As for the Australian example, leaving aside for the moment that this country is a well established, responsible democracy, and that it experienced a very real threat of invasion during the Second World War, and can certainly be trusted with nuclear weapons, as well as having a legitimate reason at one point for wanting them, it still doesn’t show how any country with a nuclear weapon capability used their civil sector to make one.”

I hardly think that shows contempt for democracy, and at worst it is only speculative of the motivations of the people in the Australian federal government at the time.

I have written elsewhere, (the latest essay in my blog) that several countries examined the question of obtaining nuclear weapons in the Fifties. Many, including Australia and Sweden very seriously, and understandably, given those countries experiences during the Second World War. In fact one could make a convincing argument that those governments would have been derelict in their duty to their nations had they not.

Within that context some politicians at the time, it would seem, confounded the technologies of nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and acted accordingly in some cases with policy ramifications that have lasted to the present. Perhaps I should have used the word ‘ignorant’ rather than ‘stupid’ to describe this.

In most cases, having given the issue due consideration, those countries chose not to build weapons, ether because of the expense, or because nuclear weapons were a poor strategic fit for them, or because of other valid reasons. Canada, for example accepted so-called ‘dual-key’ arrangements with the US, wherein we were armed with American devices that were deployed in both in our NORAD and NATO partnerships. Australia apparently chose not to participate in the dual key system although they were invited.

Nevertheless it stands as fact that no weapons program was ever a direct spin-off of a power program which was the thrust of the passage in question.

I would direct you to my essay on proliferation for a more detailed treatment of the subject, rather than repeat myself at length here.

2.) I could respond by asking if would you care to live in the flood-plain of a major hydro-electric dam, or next to the waste pond of a large coal burning power plant, however I will only point out that these can and have caused more deaths per megawatt-hour generated than nuclear power.

“So assuming you concede that 1. fallout 2. bad uranium mining practices are risky, do I get the impression that you refuse to accept that there is any other NPP-related risk to people at all?’

Fallout is the result of the detonation of a nuclear or thermonuclear device close to the ground, where radioactive debris is lofted into the atmosphere by the force of the explosion. The term itself cannot be used to describe a potential loss of containment due to an aircraft strike on a NPP. Even a hot core of a working reactor is producing only a tiny fraction of the energy released by a nuclear weapon, and modeling shows that even in an ideal strike by conventional military weapons on a NPP, the amount of material released, and its dispersion would be very limited.

As for uranium mining I wrote in the comments of a latter thread:

Unfortunately uranium has been mined in the past, as well as many other minerals, with poor attention paid to miner’s health. This is as much due to the fact that it is an activity with a long history, as it is due to the fact that it was carried out underground by humans deemed disposable by other members of society.

Conditions, awareness and technology have improved, and continue to improve in this sector and as a consequence it is difficult to get a clear picture of what the actual risks today are. However it remains a job that is hard and dangerous, but no more so that winning any of the other materials we use.

I might add that coal mining and oil drilling are not considered safe jobs ether, yet very rarely do we hear calls for the elimination of those fuels for that reason alone. It also might be the time to point out that most of the ruckus around the health hazards of uranium mining comes from North American native groups that have realized that they sold mining rights to the uranium on their land for much less than they could have and are now fighting a rearguard action to recover some more money.

As far as other potential risks from NPPs they are well within the risks we accept in several other technical domains. Aircraft overfly cities, railroads pull long drags of tankers cars full of extremely dangerous and volatile chemicals through populated areas and most countries set a very low bar for licensing people to drive automobiles at lethal speeds on the highways shared by everyone else. Within this context the risks from a NPP are minimal.

The question of radioactive half-life and danger is probably the most misunderstood aspects of the whole nuclear issue. The bottom line, (and I think we have covered this before on this site) is that the longer the half-life of a radioisotope, the less radiative flux it is producing per unit time. Consequently the hazards of radioisotopes with very long half-lives are minimal and without exception, nuclear waste containing such material will be near or below background levels within a reasonable period.

As for Lovelock’s central heating idea, even though I am sure he was illustrating a point, I would not be so much concerned with such an arrangement on safety grounds, as I would be for the waste of good fuel that should be reprocessed.

3.) The quote about Caldicott was taken from an entry at Know nukes @ Yahoo Groups, and I attributed it to that place at the beginning of the comment you saw it in. On reflection it would be somewhat inappropriate had it come from me, however it was made by an antinuclear commenter who no doubt sees the parallel with Cassandra better from his (or hers) perspective.

– DV8 –

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There’s an interesting analysis of polling data up at Possum’s Pollytics, measuring the effect of global warming scepticism on support for a CPRS. Basically, for every percentage point increase in global warming scepticism, there’s an equal decrease in support for a CPRS. ie sceptics don’t support the CPRS. Its a bit of a truism, but the correlation turns up as a direct 1:1 relationship. Possum’s commentary is interesting:

Around nine and a half points of the 12 point growth in disapproval levels of the CPRS legislation can be explained by the from growing global warming scepticism in Australia.

In a political nutshell – Labor is losing the ground war on generic global warming opinion in this country.

..
The battle for climate change policy will not be won or lost on the public battlefield of the detail of carbon abatement policy, it will be won or lost on the size of the majority that believe in the weight of evidence of climate science. It will be won or lost on the numbers of people that the government can convince to believe in the data.

Global warming scepticism has more than doubled (13% -> 31%) since 2006, and its growing. So if the political strategy is develop a policy on global warming, we’re going backwards fast, and a much more effective response to the sceptics is critical. Its just not looking good. And its not just party political Labor thats losing the war, its everyone who believes that this is an issue that matters. With a bloc of sceptics of that size, which is still trending up, I just can’t see any effective CPRS on the horizon. With the utter debacle at Copenhagen the issue has lost all momentum. There’s nothing more than 5% emissions reductions / niche renewable deployments / talk of efficiency / greenwashing / denialism ahead, at least for a time, now.

So what to do? I think the political debate needs to move to pure energy policy – how do we create an energy infrastructure that will sustain us through peak oil / peak gas? Global warming has been the prominent energy story, but I’ve heard very little about peak oil. Instead of asking politicians ‘what will you do to cut co2 emissions’, maybe we should be asking, ‘what is your plan for when the oil and gas run out’? I might have missed it, but I just haven’t heard this discussion in the polly-sphere. Asking questions like,

– how will we power personal transport, in 5, 10 years time
– how will we power small commercial transport (builders, plumbers, florists etc.)
– how will we power road transport?
– how will we power heavy industry?
– how will we power agriculture, food transport, food storage
– how will we power our desalination plants?
– what will declining oil do to job security?
– how will declining oil limit the quality of employment available? For you? For your kids?
– how will declining oil affect your super?
– how will our fossil fuel powered economy stand up to competition from neighbours, India in particular, who are cutting the tether to fossil fuels and building a nuclear economy?
– etc.

These issues are much more immediate and more easily apprehended by an electorate that substantially doesn’t trust climate modelling and doesn’t want to suffer inconvenience now to avoid possible future catastrophe. That fossil fuels are diminishing is just not in question in the same way global warming is. The rhetoric of energy security, water security, food security has bipartisan appeal. The nature of the problem is not polarized along left/right liberal/conservative lines. The politics is in the implementation of solutions, which will of course be polarized, but at least can be dealt with in objective debate. This is where there is the possibility of getting some traction.

If debate around energy leads us to nuclear power, we will have achieved a better climate change outcome by mistake than emissions control legislation will achieve by design.

Sorry for the blather. Great cartoon, Barry.

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I’d like to expand on my last post, and this time I’ll try not to play fast and loose with complex conceptual systems like Platonism.

I think most people would agree that any pursuit of an ideal that unintentionally produces tangible harm is nevertheless unethical. One could also argue, by rough analogy, and in the broader sense sanctioned by the concept of “ethos,” that any pursuit of an alleged “social good” that ignores more urgent or substantial social needs likewise verges on the unethical, especially when the alleged good is uncertain and poorly established in relation to obvious needs.

A classic case (again, as discussed by Stewart Brand and other pro-science environmentalists) would be the traditional opposition to genetically modified foods on the part of environmental organizations such as FoE and Greenpeace. Though the science on this subject may be “unsettled” (as is the case for most issues analyzed by science), the preponderance of scientific evidence, as well as the consensus amongst experts in the field, clearly suggest that genetically modified crops are not nearly as dangerous as many environmentalists claim, not even potentially. In fact, many supporters of genetically modified crops have pointed out to environmentalists, to little avail, that such crops might actually be better for the biosphere (e.g., enabling no-till farming and thus reducing soil erosion and its attendant contribution to CO2 levels in the atmosphere).

But where environmentalists really cross an ethical line is in their well-documented interventions to keep genetically modified crops out of African nations even when these nations are stricken by famine. Many an observer has argued that, to whatever extent environmentalists succeeded in keeping GM crops from reaching famine victims, they bear responsibility for the resulting, completely avoidable deaths, many of them suffered by children. Which brings me to my original point: Even if anti-GM environmentalists could demonstrate that GM crops pose a significant threat, which they have not, they would have to weigh that threat against the immediate and reasonably predictable risk of starvation, which apparently they did not.

How is one to deal with this kind of idealism pushed to the extreme? How does one counter idealism that refuses to relativize and weight risk, or prioritize the pursuit of social good?

Here’s another example from my own “backyard,” Nevada, which has resoundingly declared “NIMBY” with respect to the Yucca Mountain Project. I will concede that we have a right to be angry about the political string-pulling that led to the siting of this “proposed repository” in our state, but the environmentalists who oppose the Project seriously claim to be concerned about potential radiological consequences 10,000 years in the future. They are actually worried that, millennia from now, radionuclides will leak from the waste canisters, percolate through the mountain, and contaminate the water table. Never mind the implications of the time frame; we are talking about a water table used by virtually no one, and that dead ends in Death Valley, and that happens to be under the very same land that was used to conduct around 900 atomic bomb tests, above and below ground (the Nevada Test Site).

Now, it is true that one can come up with theoretical objections and point out imperfections in the plan, but all the while, the environmentalists virtually ignore the immediate problems everywhere around them. There was no outcry on the part of environmentalists, for example, when a train tanker car carrying chlorine broke free and careened down the tracks in downtown Las Vegas at 35 mph. There was no call for a moratorium on such shipments, no discussion of the potential and immediate loss of life that could result from a release of easily aerosolized chlorine in a heavily populated area. But tell them that a heavily shielded 50-ton cask full of metal and ceramic (spent fuel rods) will be transported via train through northern Nevada, and they start frothing about “Mobile Chernobyls” and “Glow Trains.” Likewise, when a truck carrying ammonium nitrate crashes and spills its contents at a busy intersection, and then leaks fuel all over it, no one bats an eyelash. But raise the remote possibility of terrorists firing an RPG at a nuclear waste transportation cask, and it’s “pandelirium” amongst the environmentalists (to quote Jeff Foxworthy). The sad part is, you could have gone to that very intersection and asked a bystander if he or she felt threatened by the proposed repository 90 miles away, and there, only several yards away from a potential catastrophe, they would have said “yes.” And so would say the typical Nevadan chain-smoking in front of a slot machine, or abusing Las Vegas’ already endangered water supply, or driving around in their mega-SUV, or voicing uncritical enthusiasm for a risky solar project. Mention Yucca Mountain, however, and suddenly every Nevadan is an “environmentalist.”

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@Darrin Sideman

An interesting and accurate analysis of what seems to be going on in this debate. I too have long railed against the inherent hypocrisy of the antinuclear movement’s practice of fixating on the assumed risks of nuclear technology while ignoring the far greater ones presented by the chemical industry, among others.

However I think you are letting these groups off the hook too easily by implying that their error is largely philosophical. I believe that one must separate the rhetoric out and examine the motivations that are driving them. When that is done, it can clearly be seen that crypto-Platonism is not what is underpinning this movement, but that they are simple propagandists, using standard manipulative techniques.

The thing is that with few exception, none of the people at the forefront of the antinuclear movement, and most of the apologists for it that are regular commenters, in forums like this one are stupid. It’s not that they cannot follow the pronuclear arguments, or even that they cannot see the flaws in their own. No they are driven by other agendas, and use the tools of propaganda to generate support among the unsophisticated and those lacking knowledge of the subject.

That is often why I advise against debate with these types in public – in general they stand to gain, having their ideas gain credibility simply by being seen to be taken seriously by nuclear supporters. I have come to the conclusion that we must accentuate the positive aspects of nuclear technology and avoid confrontation. The public is slowly being won over to the advantages of nuclear power more or less on its own, and can be trusted to weight the facts themselves.

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Are there any BNC readers in the vicinity of Sydney who would be interested in a tour of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor?

Its seems to me at this point of the discussion it would be helpful to get a bit hands on. I’m not associated with ANSTO at all, but I’ll organize a tour with them if there’s any interest.

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I also would like to tour the Lucas Heights facility. I’m in Canberra, so I’d have to make various arrangements to get there, sort things out with work and so forth.

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Sounds good to me, Peter. So now it’s a question of when the tour can be scheduled.

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Count me in for a tour … weekends are best …

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barry, et al:

has bnc responded to the RMI Lovins piece?

It’s filled with falsehoods.

http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-07_NuclearSameOldStory

if you have something, I’d like to share it with some friends.

gm

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Uh, Gregory Meyerson… I don’t speak for BNC or anyone else here, I’m just a lay-observer (work in IT, studied natural medicine, welder by trade), but … your friends might want to start with, well _everything_ in this blog. The TCASE series would be a good place to start https://bravenewclimate.com/category/tcase-series/

Why would that Lovins’ piece, specifically, deserve a response? All of his claims have been refuted many times over by any number of people equally, or more so, qualified to have an opinion.

I’m just totally blown away by what I _didn’t_ know about nuclear, and how it compares to scaled-up renewables (in existing real world installations), and that I’ve been basing my opinion on misinformation for the past decade.

I’m so glad an Adelaide Uni student friend of mine said “you should check out this blog.” That was two months ago. 10 years of ill informed opinion changed, totally changed, in 2 months.

The word ideologue comes to mind when I attempt to talk about any of this to my anti-nuclear friends. Zealot works well too.

Sorry if I’m carrying on. I’m just still totally shocked I could be so ignorant. I feel like I need a support group for ‘recovering anti-nukes.’ I’d love to come out to the debate tonight but I work evenings.

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hi adam:

ditto on your sentiments. I think Lovins needs a response for the same reason Jim Green needs one and Jacobsen.

People believe this stuff; Lovins Lovins Lovins oh my.

btw, one of these friends of mine (an evolutionary biologist working on scenarios for global solar) read Barry’s response to Jacobsen and thought J’s fictional scenario for nuclear ghgs based on periodic nuke bombs was right on the money! Lambasted barry for trivializing the proliferation issue (I’m beginning to think the proliferation issue is largely a diversion). I’m trying to get him to post here.

His response took my breath away. disoriented me for a whole day. Then I responded (in further comments he gave credence to planes cracking open containment domes, releasing godzilla from his cage etc. etc., practiced the usual double standards etc etc by failing then to incorporate attacks on natural gas refineries every 10 years in his assessment of wind–I’m joking of course).

My question could be answered with yet another reference to appropriate pieces here, all of which I’ve read, several more than once. But, damn, I forget a lot.

Here’s another question for people: there’s a nation article advocating for the midwest massive combined heat and power, turning ohio’s rust belt into plentiful green energy.

How does chp sequester carbon? what are the limits of chp? I think Monbiot had some worthwhile things to say about this but I’d be interested in what people here say.

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also:

any other critiques of smith/van leeuwen in addition to the NEI one cited in the hypocrisies post?

is this study in fact considered ridiculous?

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“any other critiques of smith/van leeuwen in addition to the NEI one cited in the hypocrisies post?

is this study in fact considered ridiculous?”

The Storm van Leeuwen and Smith piece (aka as the Strawman van Der Luddite anti-nuclear propaganda) has been debunked several times.

For detailed critiques of the Storm van Leeuwen and Smith studies see: UIC, Energy Analysis of Power Systems, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper No. 57, UIC, Melbourne, 2006, http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm

Another one by physicists at Melbourne University available online at, http://www.nuclearinfo.net NuclearpowerTheBenefitsOfNuclearPower

Then there is: Critical note on the estimation by Storm van Leeuwen J.W. and Smith P. of the energy uses and corresponding CO2 emissions from the complete nuclear energy chain – by Roberto Dones, a LCA researcher at the Paul Scherrer Institute, in Switzerland:

Click to access Critical%20note%20GHG%20PSI.pdf

While the hyperbole of Storm van Leeuwen and Smith and sheer scale of their exaggeration makes ad hominem attacks attractive, pointing out that they are solar power proponents who conducted their initial study at the behest of the ideologically anti-nuclear Green parties of the European Parliament on the other hand is only the truth

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gregory meyerson,

The UK White Paper http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file43006.pdf looked at the Leeuwen and Smith studies. Their conclusions are clear see, for example, paragraphs: 2.12, 2.13, 2.17-2.20, on pp48-51).

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Greg,

Have you read the papers about solar power listed on the “Renewables Limits” tab?

Solar Power Realities
Solar Power Realities – Addendum
Emission Cuts Realities

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> I actually think I”m making some headway with my solar advocate.

One by one ..

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John: I’m not making the headway I thought.

Have people seen this Jim Green page on IFRs?

http://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/nfc/power/ifr

seems to me that without demonstration projects for Gen four, we simply won’t convince the renewables people and they will continue to assert that renewables can handle all our energy needs.

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The antinuclear movement will try and leverage whatever hot-button item they think will get them an audience, and then they will flog it without pause. Obviously FoE Australia thinks that the proliferation issue, is the one they can make the most headway on, and they will not engage in any real dialog on the subject.

One of the effects of having rational environmentalists revisiting the nuclear topic, and giving it their support, is that the only ones left on the other side are going to be the doctrinaire and the ideologues, who see this as a personal battle. They have become irrational as they see what they thought was the truth crumbling out from under their platforms. They have thrown their lot in with renewable energy in a last ditch hope that it will keep nuclear at bay, and thus they will never have to face the fact they were dead wrong.

It’s egos we are fighting now from that side, at least among the rank-and-file of the movement. I still contend the much of the leadership are sock-puppets of fossil-interests.

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