The Australian Greens want to stop all uranium exploration, close all of Australia’s existing uranium mines, oh, and while they’re at it, they’d also like a nuclear free world.
Guess what: It’s not going to happen. It’s bad policy, naive politics, and exhibits an undergraduate response to federal politics which is unbecoming in a party soon to hold the balance of power in the Senate.
Added to that, it’s a stance which assumes that the debate about the utility of nuclear power for climate change reduction is over, and that it’s been found wanting. This is far from the case.
Green commentators around the world are split on whether nuclear should be part of the mix when it comes to climate change mitigation on of the Greens’ key concerns mind you.
The Greens may take some succour from the situation in Belgium, where a law to phase out nuclear power is in force. It will be quite the challenge, what with the country’s seven nuclear reactors providing more than half of the country’s power.
Elsewhere the situation is a little more grim, from a Greens’ perspective. Globally, according to the World Nuclear Association, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation. There are another 59 under construction, 149 planned and a further 344 at a more distant level of planning.
It’s safe to say, that as far as nuclear energy production goes, the genie is out of the bottle.
The world is rushing headlong into a nuclear renaissance whether the case for climate change reduction stacks up or not. And the Greens want us to forgo billions in export earnings each year because nuclear weapons are bad? Please…
The fact that nuclear weapons are ``bad’’ is exactly the reason Australians should be mining uranium.
Personally I would rather that the lion’s share of the world’s uranium is produced by two of the world’s most stable and regulated democracies in the world Australia and Canada than pretty much any of the other jurisdictions in the world where uranium deposits exist.
Shut down all of our mines and Kazakhstan, Namibia and Russia round out the top three.
No offence but I have more faith in Australian companies and officials regulating where our uranium ends up than those in any of those three countries.
And then there’s the small matter of Olympic Dam - the world’s single largest uranium resource, situated in the South Australian outback. Trouble is, the uranium is tangled up with copper and gold, and there’s no way to mine the three minerals separately.
Any move to phase out uranium mining would involve shutting down one of Australia’s largest mines, which could soon be expanded into the largest mine in the world, creating more than 10,000 new jobs and generating billions of dollars in export revenues for a mine life estimated to be more than 100 years.
And don’t forget, while we’re phasing out our uranium industry, according to the Greens, we’ll also be working on a way to develop radio-isotopes for nuclear medicine without using nuclear reactors. A significant task in itself, one would have thought.
The Greens are in a position to drive real change in Australian policy, consistent with their own views and those of their voting bloc. Putting forth naive, extreme policy positions which have no chance of translating into legislation or policy change is a waste of their potential influence. If they continue to do this, they may find that the historic surge in voter support for them exhibited at the last federal election begins to wane.
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