the emotions of past decades - French atoll tests, nuclear accidents (1979 Three Mile Island) - then later ones, all contributed to a manic anti nuclear debate and now, sort of embedded culture. Then toss in that John Howard's government banned nuclear - and, it's a very difficult political web to untangle.
But, it just gets worse. Even if Oz in some how magically decided to reverse the nuclear ban, then even more magically decided to go for nuclear philosophically with enough political capital to do so - economically, nuclear power just probably wouldn't stack up for Oz.
But, there would be a nuclear business model that would stack up - a model for power generation that included selling permanent nuclear waste storage as the way to fund it - indeed, my guess is it would be an economic blockbuster --------------------- but,
that's yet almost another unscalable political mountain to climb.
Now, even if all of that lot actually happened by some sort of political magic - the problem is, that it could not possibly happen rapidly - it would be a political process that lasted years - perhaps a couple of decades - which, in todays rate of technological growth - probably means that by the time Oz made any magic decisions -------------- the decisions would be irrelevant - as far as power generation goes. (although the waste storage business will go on for a long long long long time.)
so, to me - on nuclear power - I think the boat, for Oz, has long long left the dock.
