Nuclear power I
David Walters (Write On, GLW #747) repeats the nuclear industry's misinformation regarding carbon dioxide emissions. Nuclear power can only reduce CO2 released from electricity generation. There are five classes of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, apart from CO2. Only 35% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity production — 65% come from transport, landfill, industrial process emissions, agricultural processes and land clearing. So nuclear power could only solve 35% of the problem at best.
There are indirect emissions at every stage of the nuclear power generation process — exploration, construction, transportation, mining and processing, disposal of wastes, reprocessing of spent fuel rods, etc. Uranium enrichment in the US (with 20% nuclear-powered electricity) releases 14 million tonnes of CO2 per annum.
Uranium is a non-renewable resource. The best estimate is that the known high-grade ores could supply the present demand for 40-50 years. If nuclear power replaced all the world's coal-fired power stations, the resources would only last about a decade.
In the US, direct subsidies to nuclear energy totalled US$115 billion between 1947 and 1999, with a further $145 billion in indirect subsidies. During the first 15 years of development, nuclear subsidies amounted to $15.30 per kWh generated. The comparable figure for wind energy was 46 cents per kWh.
The Swedes, who probably have the best system in the world for nuclear waste storage, calculate that the entire exercise to deal with the waste, the temporary storage and the deep rock laboratory, for all the fuel used by their existing reactors will cost around $12 billion.
The opponents of nuclear power know that it is too slow, too dirty, too expensive and too dangerous. Science tells us this, not ideology. Science, not ideology, should be the basis for such far-reaching decisions.
Donella Peters
Adelaide
Nuclear power II
I realise that David Walters (Write On, GLW #747) believes in, and passionately supports, nuclear power, as shown in his Left Atomics website (< http://left-A HREF=\"mailto:atomics.blogspot.com\"><atomics.blogspot.com>), but, with the greatest respect, he appears to have missed seeing the elephant in the room. Nuclear power sustains technology and opportunity for nuclear weaponry.
I think the nuclear weapons nations realised that shortly after World War II, with deliberate untruths, e.g., "too cheap to meter", to sell nuclear power to the public. Nuclear power offers a convenient plutonium supply while placing a veneer of respectability over nuclear technology. It needs to be phased out now, sooner rather than later.
Surely Walters does not favour a legacy of ever expanding nuclear waste, and the spectre of a future world awash with nuclear weapons. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty calls for nuclear weapons nations to work towards nuclear weapons elimination. Did that really happen?
Phasing out nuclear power is needed to reduce opportunity for nuclear weaponry. There are no nuclear war winners. Everyone loses.
Walters criticises renewable energy but it has advanced a long way over recent years. Given appropriate incentives and co-operation between countries, it could deliver the world's electricity needs. Energy storage is feasible and need not be confined to pumped storage.
Peter Ravine
Greenmount, WA
Tibet
Reading Dick Nichols' article 'Let Tibetans decide their future' (GLW #748), I did not find it thought provoking. I found it contradictory and at best disappointing. Does Nichols really believe that the funding and training of a resistance army by the CIA is irrelevant? How can you be so naive?
He goes on to tell us that every thinking person has to work out whether oppressed peoples have the right to self-determination. This raises the question: Are the people of Tibet oppressed? As a weird delusion, Nichols has answered this question in the affirmative. He also answers it by paying lip service to the rights that Tibetans enjoy as a national minority under the Chinese constitution.
Nichols speaks of the abominable rule of the old Tibetan aristocracy, but then tells that if progressives decide that the Tibetan struggle is not really worthy they will find allies on the right. Here, he again is only paying lip service to the fact that the Tibetan struggle is fully supported by the bourgeois media. I don't know anyone on the left who is being bamboozled by the verbal condemnation of China by the bourgeois media — unless it is Dick Nichols writing on behalf of the Socialist Alliance.
His article speaks of the Cold War strategy of "containment of communism". Here I would strongly suggest that members of the Socialist Alliance, the DSP and especially Resistance read the article "The US in the Pacific" by Hanna Middleton in the current issue of the Australian Marxist Review. This article exposes the US policy of containment of China and gives a clue as to who is really behind the disturbances in Tibet.
An independent Tibet would be simply be a vacuum that would be rapidly filled by the Americans for the purpose of establishing more military bases to threaten China and later to threaten Russia.
Ronald Barrett
Mt Druitt, NSW
2020 summit
The recent 1000-delegate, federal government-sponsored, Australia 2020 Summit ignored the acute seriousness of the climate emergency facing the world by finding no solutions to climate change but "carbon neutral new housing after 2020", and the oxymoronic "clean coal". While expert researchers have found that one in three Australian women are sexually abused as children, the Australia 2020 Summit further betrayed Australia's kids by ignoring this horrendous reality.
Australia as a whole also "looks the other way" and refuses to see the "elephant in the room" in relation to 20 horrendous genocide events with which it has been associated over the last 220 years. Australia has a continuing involvement in ongoing Aboriginal, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, biofuel and climate genocides that are overwhelmingly not reported by the mainstream media, politicians, teachers or academics.
It was reported in the Shanghai Daily recently but not by Australian or other Western media: "The annual infant death rate in occupied Afghanistan (6.2 percent) is 51 times that in occupier Australia, 38 times that in occupier US and similar to the 'annual death rate' of 10.2 percent for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War II — a war crime for which key Japanese leaders were tried and hanged."
For a detailed and comprehensive Canada-published account of Australia's secret genocide history see "La Trobe, 'Bundoora Eucalyptus' & Black Crimes of White Australia" at <http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22128/42>.
Gideon Polya
Melbourne