Slashdot Mirror

The parent post is correct, but Greenpeace does not dictate government policy in Australia.

Australia has 31% of the world's uranium reservers (the world's largest) and has in recent years declined production slightly (probably due to Germany's and Japan's 'efforts' that increase greenhouse gas emissions across Europe and Japan). Australia does not use nuclear power for energy generation or for military use or for icebreakers or any use other than ANSTO (small research lab that produces radioisotopes for medical use).

Australia could have gone nuclear ages ago, but didn't. Similarly to how it cut space research and plans to build rocket launch platforms, it is a country of little physics achievements that haven't been done by overseas people. The problem is that is also a county full of coal, and with other countries running out of coal, it might well be the place for coal globally over the next 50 years if policy doesn't change domestically.

Already the highest greehouse gas emitting OECD country in the world in the future if the coal extractions can be seen large from space (like tar pits in Canada) then it might become the biggest contributing country to global warming on a global scale indirectly (due to use of its coal and nonuse of uranium, not to mention thorium).

There are pious canons that Green Warriors take as unquestionable dogma, in regard to Nuclear Energy. Firstly, nuclear opponents state that nuclear energy is “... more expensive than conventional or alternative power sources...” Fortunately, in The Age, 28/04/2005, there appears an article by Lesley KEMENY containing favourable quantitative costings of nuclear power versus other sources – including waste disposal & decommissioning, see http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/Going-nuclear-its-the-new-green/2005/04/27/1114462096097.html The companion opinion article on 28/04/05, by Peter GARRETT, was starkly revealed as only that - unjustified opinion. Secondly it is asserted that there are no adequate technologies “... in place to safely quarantine radioactive waste ...” This is abysmal luddite ignorance, and for better information, one should now consult the ABC news article on-line at: http://www.abc.net.au/ news/newsitems/200504/sl 346616.htm Also see: http://velocity.ansto.gov.au/velocity/ans0008/article_03.asp. These internet articles report on 25-year old Australian SYNROC technology, invented by Ted RINGWOOD, which more than matches any safety requirement for disposing nuclear waste. This technology can store the entire world’s current annual nuclear waste in a small 20metre cube, unharvestable by terrorists, buried underneath any stable Australian geology, (a mere nothing) for eons. A portable or permanent SYNROC plant set beside every reactor can immobiise its waste into a deep rock-steady mass, avoiding the necessity to transport any unstable waste overland or water. Thirdly, there is raised the spectre of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These were mainly political disasters, not so much as technical ones. The Luddites of this world should remember that - “The cure for BAD technology is not NO technology, but BETTER technology”. No one is going back to living in caves as some kind of halcyon rebirth! Even greenies need electricity and computers and transport to distribute their views. Yes, recyclable energy is environmentally attractive, but it can’t be developed quickly enough to cure the crises which confront our energy hungry populations. Only nuclear technology can get there in time, and one better nuclear technology is the High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR), which can be explored at: http://www.iaea.org/inis/aws/htgr/topics/article 04.html This reactor is intrinsically stable, and cannot “go critical” - any loss of moderator gas just causes the nuclear fires to snuff out like a candle. Fourthly, in terms of “the risk of terrorists attacking reactors”, such reactors can be buried deep underground, to minimise nuclear leakage from any militant attack. Though one notes that every kind of above ground power plant is equally vulnerable to attack, it is granted that radio-active isotopes need special protection against dispersal. Fifthly, other letter writers have expressed concern about “Nuclear Mining” – a separate topic to nuclear energy to be sure – but not so distant that it can’t be solved in one further paragraph. The concern is about Australia shipping Uranium ore to countries with poor supervisory & management schemes which might allow U238 to be diverted into a weapons program. Solution? Don’t ship the U238, refined or not, but ship the energy it represents. We know Northern Australia has abundant ore bodies of Uranium and Aluminium. So build the nuclear reactor(s) close to the Uranium ore deposits (reduced transit risks), bring the Aluminium bauxite to the reactor (which outputs abundant electricity), and smelt the bauxite into pure Alumium metal, now b

You mean other than the fact that they're like 100x more expensive than nuclear?

I'm an Australian.. we have one experimental nuclear reactor, 20 MW. It uses about 30 kg of uranium a year. It's used for research.. but not into power reactors. The majority of Australians are afraid of nuclear power. If you ask people on the street why they don't want nuclear power, they'll all say the same, we don't want to have to deal with the nuclear waste. Of course, this doesn't stop us from selling shitloads of uranium. The international community has threatened to prohibit the sale of Australian uranium because we don't store the spent rods, but we do reprocess them. This has non-proliferation consequences. That threat prompted the National Repository/Store Project.. but in 2004 Scrooge McJohnny Howard killed that as he did to every other infrastructure project.

Nuclear is the only option for affordable and ecological responsible power.

http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html

"We want google to block images of our site, but let's have the public come thru for a tour anyway" http://www.ansto.gov.au/info/tour/index.html dumb, dumb, dumb.

Just use the website of The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) !

Rigth Here!

Tsk tsk ;)

Until the Australian government made this complaint, I didn't know that Australia had any nuclear reactors, or that they had only one.

However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website.

And they also have a good number of technical pages on their HIFAR nuclear reactor, which actually looks more than a gas tank than a nuclear reactor. They could always put up some camouflage netting and disguise it so it isn't so noticable from space.

Until the Australian government made this complaint, I didn't know that Australia had any nuclear reactors, or that they had only one.

However, after doing a Google search, I find that that they actually have a concise list of nuclear facilities in a government website.

And they also have a good number of technical pages on their HIFAR nuclear reactor, which actually looks more than a gas tank than a nuclear reactor. They could always put up some camouflage netting and disguise it so it isn't so noticable from space.

Not to mention that they also have Aerial photos on the site too.

http://www.ansto.gov.au/info/00images.html

Here's the HIFAR reactor's website, with information:

http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html

They have a convenient "how to get to ANSTO" page here (so terrorists can just side step the whole Google earth lookup thing):

http://www.ansto.gov.au/ansto/dir.html

Here's the HIFAR reactor's website, with information:

http://www.ansto.gov.au/natfac/hifar.html

They have a convenient "how to get to ANSTO" page here (so terrorists can just side step the whole Google earth lookup thing):

http://www.ansto.gov.au/ansto/dir.html

SYNROC was developed at the ANU in Canberra. I work there at the moment and have heard various tales about it's acceptance (or lack of) by the American government/economy. The story goes both ways, either the American's are stupid or the Aussies attempted to charge too much for the technology.

Anyone wanting to participate in reasonable discussions with anyone about the safety of nuclear energy *must* read about SYNROC and understand how it works. It would effectively _solve_ the nuclear waste "problem" for good. Exciting stuff!

http://www.uic.com.au/nip21.htm

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf58.htm

http://www.ansto.gov.au/info/press/pr9.html

Actually, they dated the shroud, called it a fake, called the Church frauds and patted themselves on the back.

Oh, bull. Why would they call the Church frauds, when the Church hadn't been able to perform conclusive tests before either? (Never mind that the first documented appearance of the Shroud is in the 14th century; what was it doing for 1300 years, and how the hell did it get to Italy?)

In a later, unrelated case they had multiple artifacts from a site that dated differently when the scientists felt it wasn't possible. Hence they further analysed their results and samples and discovered the bioplastic.

Some time after that, someone when back and realized that the sample from the shroud had enough of this bioplastic to put the age back into the range suggested by the Church's records.

Two problems with that scenario:

1. The half-life of C14 is about 5730 years; for a 2000-year interval, the decay can be considered roughly linear. To cut a radiocarbon date to 1/3 of its true age, you'd have to add roughly 2x the mass of the original. There is no way that this "bioplastic" coating, if it exists, could have been so heavy as to have changed the apparent age that far.

   (The "bioplastic" hypothesis is bogus on other grounds, too. Any organisms consuming the material of the Shroud would acquire its radiocarbon date, and the whole "bioplastic" issue seems to have originated with the dating of an artifact made of jade, which contains no carbon itself, by radiocarbon dating of materials added after carving.)

2. The first documented appearance of the Shroud is in 1357. There is no 2000 year old paper trail of its provenance. (You lied.)

Well, they might not want to let scientist cut the thing to shreds

And they haven't had to, for some time. Years ago the only way to radiocarbon-date something was to burn it to CO2, put the CO2 in a tank in a heavily shielded container and use a scintillation counter to measure the radioactivity from the remaining C-14. Because the C-14 measurement was from decays, this took a large mass of material to give a useful signal. Today the measurement is direct counting of C-12 vs. C-14 atoms, and milligram quantities are sufficient.

They already have enough smug folks (like you might see here) pointing to finding that have be found invalid already and they trust their paper trail.

You keep hyping this non-existent paper trail; the 12 radiocarbon dates are consistent with the first record of the Shroud's existence... in 1357.

Isn't it easier just to believe that the claims of authenticity are false, and that people are clinging to it because of what they want to be true?

If that's what you want to believe, sure. You don't need scientists for that.

But if you believe the radiocarbon dates of 12 samples, none of which are older than 800 years, you're just being cynical? Excuse me if I imagine you putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" (Incidentally, the historian.net piece has many suspect statements; how would the Shroud get a coating of calcium carbonate when it is composed of cellulose? All of the hedging appears to be excuses for the Shroud not appearing to be as old as the Christians who believe it to be Christ's burial cloth want it to be. Oh, let us not forget: excuses for the Shroud's keepers to keep bringing in pilgrims and their contributions. I'm sure that the Shroud is a very lucrative relic and its value would be destroyed by an admission that it isn't so important.)

I think they worked from a single sample where they normally would

Now, the first study was commissioned by an environmental group, so factor that in. However, if accurate, that's comparable to the number of people who die in car accidents each year in the US (about 40,000).

I toured Australia's only reactor facility, in Sydney, recently and was told in detail about a similar product ANSTO invented years ago called 'Synroc'

It sounds very similar to this innovation to my untrained eye.

Of course it's heavily patented...

1. It has loads of space
2. It has not many people to provide for
3. It has tons and tons of uranium.

And with regard to Lucas Heights, be thankful that they are builidng a new research reactor and shutting down the old (nearly 50 years old) one. The exisiting reactor is a copy of the British DIDO reactor that ran at Harwell.

This link is informative about the Lucas Heights reactor.

I'm a little biased, being a neutron scattering scientist (and chemist).

My main reason for the use of nuclear power is to free up all that oil and gas that could be put to better use as chemical feedstock - where do you think that the starting materials for most pharmaceuticals come from for instance. That and all the plastic bits in your computer.

Nobel
--
Double helping of fission chips please!

Anyway, local industry is happy - they were never even remotely in the running for the Government tenders. Now it's up to the individual govt departments as to when and if to outsource.

Short form is, when the US has finished with its current President, can we please have him? He seems to have a clue, and we won't let him near any female interns with big hair. You can keep Dubs and Chainsaw tho - we have enough people like that running the country already :-)