Uranium Mining in NSW
February 15, 2012
Of course the O’Farrell Government is right to attempt legislation to permit uranium exploration in NSW. I said this two months ago.
The Federal Government has expanded uranium mining and opened exports to India. South Australia boasts what will become the world’s largest uranium mine. The ban for NSW reflected the anti-nuclear sentiment of the 1980s and it is irrelevant today when to beat global warming we urgently need every available source of carbon-free energy.
Shooters Party MPs and the Christian Democratic Party would be well-advised to vote for this legislation on common-sense grounds.
from → News
Thoughtlines with Bob Carr 
Base-load can be done faster, cheaper and safer via true renewables.
Uranium runs out eventually and has serious side effects. The arguement for baseload nuclear is from the early 2000’s, not today. Put old thinking from the 80’s and 00’s behind us and move forward.
Solar and wind run out when the sun runs out.
So disappointed to read this 😦
The uranium/nuclear pushers are either ignorant or are obscuring the documented facts from Joe Public. Edward Cranswick, a geophysicist who studied earthquakes with the US Geophysical Society for 22 years warns of the 35 kilometre Masher Fault that runs through the Olympic Dam mine. Mr Cranswick claims that seismic events caused by mining are being censored in Australia.
Australia is supplying U to once through cooling reactors that predominate among the 439 or so reactors worldwide and the nuclear industry are resisting mandates to install cooling towers to mitigate the environmental carnage. Just one of these giant fish blending, water guzzling OTC reactors is capable of impinging and entraining up to one billion marine life annually and have done so for the last fifty years and will continue to do so.
On January 20, a state engineer with the Utah Division of Water Rights approved two AP1000 reactor applications that would allow Blue Castle Holdings to take a total of 53,600 acre-feet of water from the Green River annually for a proposed nuclear power plant. That’s more than 17 billion gallons a year, enough for a city of 100,000 households.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/dawn-stover/hot-water-the-other-global-warming.
Since the advent of nuclear energy, the global budget of Iodine-129 has increased forty fold in the hydrosphere. The nuclear industry dumps waste in the oceans with impunity. The Paducah uranium enrichment plant in the US is the largest single user of CFCs in the nation and the contaminated site is deemed the “worst/dirtiest” in the country. The nuclear industry makes a mockery of the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting CFCs. The nuclear industry dumps waste in the atmosphere with impunity.
Generation IV reactors are non-existent, however this does not prevent the nuclear pushers from bombarding the public with its non-existent “benefits.” The WNA estimates one going critical between 2020-2030. Only the deluded and duplicitous nuclear lobbyists state that Gen IV reactors can make a difference to climate change. And how many Gen IVs will operating by the year 2050? Not many. The Finnish and French Gen III AP1000 reactors were signed off in 2003 and have been under construction for at least six years,replete with woeful delays, litigation and thousands of technical flaws.
Where’s the referendum Mr Carr? ‘By the people, for the people?’ I don’t think so.
Uranium mining is also consuming vast amounts of artesian water. Would be much better used growing dates in the desert, for example, while not over-drawing the artesian basin which U mining is. Oases the have bloomed in the desert for thousands of years at the very least (living memory in Aboriginal culture) are now vanishing.
Without long-term and heavy state sponsorship and underwriting against disaster pay-outs the Nuclear industry would be dead in the water. PV and CST solar cost-curves are rapidly descending to parity with coal and beyond as Nuclear plant costs and R&D continue to rise to levels this country cannot afford.