Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  29^th of November 2012

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Australia: Expand generation capacity with nuclear power!

Australians must adopt nuclear power to ramp up our baseload power production for a secure and growing future economy.

Despite recent declines in electricity consumption (actually a sign of an economy in collapse rather than much lauded energy efficiency) our electricity generation infrastructure struggles to supply power during peak periods. Increased generation capacity is urgently required to significantly exceed current peak demand and allow a generating surplus for new industry and a projected growing population.

Nuclear power must be adopted along with new coal-fired power plants and the expensive, inefficient and intermittent wind and solar power should be left as a big mistake in the history books.

There are now 436 nuclear reactors operational in 30 nations around the world, producing 2,518 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year. There are currently 62 reactors under construction—26 in China alone. In addition, 44 nations are now either planning to build or have proposed to build another 484 reactors. China alone has 51 planned reactors and another 120 proposed reactors and is also planning to build 363 new coal-fired power plants.

Australia is sitting on top of the biggest reserves of uranium and thorium in the world—enough to power the entire world for at least tens of thousands of years. However, both Labor and the Liberal/National Coalition have no policy for the domestic use of nuclear power. Furthermore, their bipartisan support of carbon dioxide emission reduction shows that they have no serious plan to expand cheap baseload power for the future.

In addition to new coal-fired power plants which should be built at coal deposits, nuclear power plants can be built at any location due to the low cost of transporting the energy dense fuel. Nuclear power also offers many benefits that are not possible with carbon-based fuels.

Small modular units can power small towns and floating reactors can provide power and desalinated water for coastal cities.

The French have an underwater reactor program called Flexblue. A cylindrical unit 100 metres in length and 12 to 15 metres in diameter can be located on the seabed near a centre of power demand. Inside would be a small nuclear power reactor and steam generators, turbines and a generator to produce 50 to 250 MWe.

Renowned nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller’s proposal for a molten salt thorium reactor is now a talking point among scientists with a growing interest in thorium fuel. According to Teller, such a plant, constructed 10 metres underground, could “operate for up to 200 years with no transport of fissile material to the reactor or of waste from the reactor during this period.”

Nuclear power will importantly open up a whole new ‘isotope economy’ where we’ll use science to incorporate the 3,000 odd isotopes on the Periodic Table into our economy—we can separate, exquisitely fine tune subatomic processes and generate various species of atoms as raw materials for industrial production.

Nuclear power’s safety record is second to none. Even with older 1970s technology, not one person died from a radiation overdose after the Fukushima accident in Japan. Sadly, the Tõhoku earthquake and tsunami claimed 16,000 lives, yet the anti-nuclear mainstream media has a morbid obsession over Fukushima.

Join the CEC to support a nuclear powered future.