…Like other responsible countries in the world, Australia has little interest in seeing the spread of enrichment capacities. Insisting on its own right to do so may open Australia up to charges that it really did have ulterior motives with its embrace of nuclear energy, unless Australia could somehow get itself chosen as one of the locations where internationally controlled and endorsed enrichment was to take place.
Yet if Australia is looking to offer its services to the world as a good nuclear energy citizen, it should look no further than the need for international depositories for long-term waste. Australia is an old, vast and stable continent and there is hardly anywhere else in the world that is a less-bad choice for such a facility. But this would require even more political leadership and courage than would be needed if Australia were to take a serious step towards nuclear power generation.
Robert Ayson is a senior fellow at ANU, and chief investigator for an Australian Research Council project on Australia’s nuclear choices.
via Nuclear energy – neither a monster nor a panacea | theage.com.au.
It is extremely dishonest for someone who is in the industry to claim – or to present a one-sided argument that could be interpreted as a claim – that the only thing to worry about with nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation is the ability to enrich uranium. A by-product of running nuclear reactors is plutonium. Some of the plutonium isotopes produced in nuclear reactors can be used to make nuclear weapons. Enrichment is expensive and difficult compared to removing plutonium from nuclear wastes.
On the ABC program Catalyst a few weeks ago they had a segment about minerals that could store uranium and proposed that could be relevant for dealing with wastes from nuclear reactors. Uranium is not the real problem. Depleted uranium is used for many things including as a ballast in some airplanes and ships. It is used in armaments and armour piercing weapons. Whether these are suitable uses of depleted uranium is another topic altogether. The wastes from nuclear reactors are wastes because they are different kinds of elements as a result of being in a nuclear reactor. Some of these new elements are radioactive with short half-lives. In a nuclear reactor atoms of one element are changed into the atoms of other elements. The new elements as a result of a nuclear reaction have a reduced amount of nuclear binding energy to hold them together. The difference between the energy in the nuclear fuel and the resultant wastes of a reaction is the energy that is released in a nuclear reactor. The point is that what goes into a nuclear reactor is not the same as the wastes that are removed. Some of the wastes, such as plutonium, can also be used to make nuclear weapons.
With a depository there are many problems. Only one of the problems is the transportation of high level radioactive wastes to the site. You can have any number of self-serving professionals make all the promises in the world that the systems they are engineering are safe and nothing could ever go wrong. The companies involved could set up highly funded public relations units to lull the public. All that does not mean the transportation and burying of the wastes will be safe. Dumbing down the topic of nuclear power to the point of spooning out mass media baby food is dishonest.
