good oil on nuclear
Good oil on nuclear Want the good oil on a clean, safe power source? Try asking Peter Garrett. It seems his mind is changing. 22apr05
PETER Garrett never did have the facts to back his horror stories about nuclear power.
So why this amazement that Labor's rocker MP now says that, um, er, maybe nuclear power is worth considering after all? "Open debate on this issue is welcome," he told the Sydney Institute this month, after years of closing not just debate but a whole uranium mine at Jabiluka.
It seems Garrett realises that if we want the base-load power that keeps our lights on and factories turning, we'll need more than wind or sun. But if we also want to slash the greenhouse gasses burped by our coal-fired plants, the only power clean enough is nuclear, which Garrett opposed so passionately.
The song was all wrong. No, we can't have both the power and the passion.
But the real lesson from his speech isn't that nuclear is no gonna-getcha monster, despite all Garrett's former chanting and singing:
In the wind, the ashes fly
The poison crown, the charcoal ground . . .
It's that here's yet another eco-warrior having trouble believing his old myths. Indeed, a whole ommm of them are finding their woolly green faith unraveling, snagging on sharp facts. And it's not just Garrett who's left naked. How can they sleep when their cheeks are burning?
Take Aidan Bruford, the ACT chief minister's environment adviser, who was caught last week spraying anti-John Howard graffiti.
Not only had this environment expert defaced the urban environment, but he'd used spray cans with a propellant that adds to the greenhouse gasses we're told are stifling the world.
But does he truly believe the global warming scare, anyway? Does anyone?
I wonder, after watching green delegates jet in to a big conference the Bracks Government hosted this month to "address climate change and reduce . . . greenhouse gas emissions".
In they all flew, those experts from America, Britain, Germany and Niue -- all on aircraft which belch out these very gases they claim to want to cut.
At least they were ashamed enough to promise to make good their damage by sending "energy efficient bulbs to the tourist industry in Jamaica". But I doubt it's Jamaica that's dim.
SENATOR Bob Brown should be wild, given his Greens insist on "decreasing the dependence on air travel", through things like "the expansion of teleconferencing", because "air transport causes considerable environmental damage and is also less fuel efficient by a large factor particularly to (sic) transport by rail or sea".
But Brown, too, has had a bad attack of gas.
When he helped the Greens in Canada last week campaign for a new voting system, guess how he did it. By teleconferencing? By travelling to Vancouver by ship and train? Or by, yes, catching another of those flatulent aircraft?
Of course, hypocrisy is nothing new -- and is, in fact, a much overrated vice.
But green gurus are more vulnerable to it than most because they have so few solid facts to chain down their airy opinions. That's why we see those opinions drift so in the breeze.
Few have had their opinions drift so far as has Garrett, symbol of the incredible lightness of being green. On his very first day as a Labor candidate last year, he dropped his long opposition to the joint spy station at Pine Gap, but his new stand on nuclear power exposes him more cruelly.
Only three years ago, as chairman of the Australian Conservation Foundation, he gave a speech claiming "15 years after the accident (at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor) some 30,000 people have lost their lives".
That's the kind of scaremongering that's made Garrett's "open debate" near impossible -- that's made too many people think nuclear power stations are evil, even though they safely generate 20 per cent of the world's power.
From which liar did Garrett get his boo! figure of 30,000 dead? Does he have the guts to admit the true known toll is fewer than 50?
Want proof, Peter? Read Health effects of the Chernobyl accident: Results of 15-year follow-up studies -- the official summary of a conference in Kiev of experts from several United Nations bodies, the World Health Organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
It lists the total known dead: ". . . 28 died during the first three months after the accident. In later years 14 additional deaths, attributable to a variety of medical conditions, have occurred."
What's more, "there is no significant increase of leukemia in adults or children living on contaminated territories." There was more thyroid cancer among children, but this is curable.
More scare talk: In his speech, Garrett also claimed Aboriginal elder Yami Lester "was blinded by the (nuclear) tests" at Maralinga -- but a royal commission and every medical study since has failed to find one clear case of illness caused by those blasts.
Did Garrett care? On he went in his speech: "The need for a solid anti-nuclear policy from Labor has never been greater . . . So powerful is this (nuclear) technology, so profoundly life threatening, that it seems to contradict a more primary human impulse for survival . . ."
Just three years on and Garrett shows how little he believes that now with his call for a debate on nuclear power, even if he still says the wastes are a menace.
The green myths, so dangerous to reason and humanity, are crumbling. Facts, we now dare hope, may again become sacred, giving ballast to the giddy.
