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Online chatter goes nuclear

Marcus Kuczynski

by Marcus Kuczynski

21 Mar 05:35am

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Filed under: Fukushima, Internet, Japan, Media, Nuclear Disaster

24 comments

While Japan 2011 will be remembered for the tragic earthquake and tsunami that swept a destructive path through coastal communities, it will also go down in history as a date with destiny on the nuclear energy debate following the fallout from the Fukushima reactor emergency.

Shock and panic in Japan has tipped the balance away from nuclear energy here at home. Photo: News.com.au

Fears surrounding the ongoing crisis at the Japanese nuclear plant have seen it described as the “New Chernobyl”.

The immediate scale of the disaster may not be as dire as Chernobyl but, like the Ukrainian accident, its potential to set back for years the proliferation of nuclear energy as an alternative to carbon-based sources of power is equally as significant.

Although a radiation cloud is unlikely to reach Australia, the shock waves from the Fukushima emergency have tipped the balance of public opinion away from a nuclear energy future in our own backyard.

This trend has been particularly noticeable in online news forums.

Nick of Brisbane, commenting on News.com.au, was one of those who was prepared to admit he had changed his mind on the issue. “I was all for nuclear energy in Australia but I certainly don’t support it any longer. It’s time that we looked really hard (and spent loads of money) at developing a new renewable and readily accessible energy source for all of mankind. It should also be free.”

Tractorboy of Adelaide, in a post to AdelaideNow, echoed a question no doubt many Australians were pondering. “Despite the benefits of nuclear power, do we really want this in Australia? Power stations exploding is not a good look for the nuclear industry, despite the inevitable spin that the spruikers of nuclear power will put on this.”

And yes, there were those who remained stoically unconvinced of the warning the Fukushima disaster posed.

One of the best known proponents of nuclear power, Ziggy Switkowski, admitted last week that the crisis in Japan would make Australians apprehensive about adopting the energy source in the immediate aftermath, but had no doubts Australia would go down that track in the future.

A number of commenters, such as Jerome on ABC Online, even blamed the media for exaggerating the situation in Japan. “There is more fear and more hype coming from the media than the actual reality of the situation … It seems very unlikely we will see a catastrophic failure like Chernobyl. The scale of destruction that has affected Japan is beyond anything the world has ever seen in recorded history and, although very badly damaged, the reactors have only released small amounts of radiation. So far this is a testament to how safe these reactors can be.”

James of Mulgrave, posting on the Herald Sun, argued newer reactors than the ones at Fukushima offered a higher level of safety.  “While what is happening in Japan with the reactors is not good, it must be kept in mind that the reactors are 40 years old, and as anybody knows, when you buy something you usually can’t ‘upgrade’ it to the latest model easily ... Any reactors built these days would meet new standards, and be immeasurably better than what they have in Japan.”

Others, such as Jonathan on ABC Online, believed because Australia was not prone to earthquakes like Japan the risk of a nuclear disaster was lower.  “I’m not opposed to nuclear energy per se. I wouldn’t object to a reactor in Australia, for example. But having them in earthquake-prone areas such as Japan has always seemed to me to be tempting fate.”

However, as Angela of Sydney pointed out on SBS Online, accidents can happen anywhere. “Nuclear reactors are never totally safe due to the possibility of mechanical breakdown and human error. When you add natural disasters it is a recipe for potential disaster. Describing nuclear power as ‘clean’ energy is ludicrous. Apart from radiation discharges, leaks and accidents there is no solution in the world to deal with the long-term, extremely dirty nuclear waste which no one understandably wants.”

Taking into account the risks of nuclear power, the push to reduce our consumption of carbon-based resources and the lower yield from renewable sources, it seems our energy options remain limited.

Henry, writing on AdelaideNow, considered these consequences and offered a possible solution. “Burn coal and you pollute the atmosphere. Go nuclear and you risk disaster. Go solar and you pollute in manufacture and eventual disposal of relatively inefficient technology. Nothing in life it seems is free. Maybe we just need to learn to use less more efficiently.”

In any case, with the debate over a proposed carbon tax hotting up, consideration of the nuclear alternative is sure to be never too far away.

Most commented

24 comments

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    • acotrel says:

      05:00am | 21/03/11

      Is Ziggy Switkowsky an expert?  You couldn’t call his leadership of Telstra dynamic, and as a nuclear physicist he obviously had ideas of leading the nuclear industry in Australia? When he led Telstra the change away from the old PMG mindset never happened, and their middle management remains useless and self-serving to this day! And then we ended up with Sol Trujillo.  - He’d be good in charge of a string of reactors?

      Reply

    • Joan says:

      06:18am | 21/03/11

      All the chicken littles and lemmings out in force ..... the world will come to an end if you go nuclear .... the world will come to an end if coal fired power stations continue….lets all go back to the cave and feel safe.. the panic merchants at large. In an era with an abudance of information the irrational fear factor alive and strong and is no dfferent to that in any primitive age.

      Reply

    • Vaunted says:

      09:17am | 21/03/11

      Death toll from ‘disastrous’ nuclear radiation? Zero, maybe two. Death toll from tsunami, perhaps 25,000. Given the respective coverage, what does that say about political activism in our media, or at the very least, the propensity for publishing and promoting sensationalist hype? The media have a great deal to answer for, in promoting misinformation and spreading panic not just in the tragic events in Japan, but also the numerous and unlikely catastrophic scenarios expounded by climate activists. It seems our journalists are complete suckers for any Hollywood conspiracy-disaster-alien-invasion scenario that happens to spring up.

    • Kika says:

      11:29am | 21/03/11

      Vaunted - death from radiation takes a bit longer than an instant death from a 10 metre high wall of water. It depends on how you were exposed to the radiation. I believe it takes roughly 12 months for the first cancers to get you (if you live close by or where exposed greatly, longer if it’s slowly ingested)... don’t forget the DNA damage as well. That’s harder to diagnose in the short term. Blood cell damage, blistering within a few weeks, and if you’re exposed to a lot very quickly the damage is a lot more instantaneous.

      Yeah sure. Like the Engineers going in are all prepared to die and were given the Samurai speech. They haven’t put in the young guys in case they get sick and die prematurely. It’s the older engineers doing the work because they are prepared to die to fix the problem. yeah, 1-2 deaths. There will be more.

      The problem Joan isn’t the fact we are fearful of ‘information’, it’s because humans are too stupid to plan for or do anything beyond our immediate needs. Where there are nuclear reactors, there will be meltdowns. There will be waste that has a half life of thousands upon thousands of years. What’s your plan with the waste? Use Thorium right? Radon gas doesn’t do anything to humans either hey.

    • Richard says:

      06:39am | 21/03/11

      You know what, I doubt it. In fact I think the uranium miners might bounce back sharply on the stock market today, because all that apocalyptic nuclear panic we had last week was mightily over done.

      China and India both are going to continue to pursue nuclear solutions for their voracious energy demands as part of the mix (which also includes burning vast amounts of coal mind you), and to be honest they are really the only ones who count any more. Sheer weight of numbers you see.

      But when it comes down to it, what other choice is there? You can’t have it both ways~ either you try to reduce carbon emissions, which necessarily entails nuclear, or you eschew nuclear because of its inherent risks and so you’re stuck with coal…

      There is no alternative. Windmills and mirror farms and such like are pie in the sky non-solutions. They are all show and no go. They might try and pander to the impressionable greens voters and impractical lady voters by pretending that solar/wind etc can work, but at the end of the day, we are going to need power, lots of it, on demand, whenever it is needed, and that simply means we have only two options, coal or nuclear.

      I prefer coal, obviously, because my earliest memories of reading National Geographic at age 5 in the aftermath of Chernobyl impressioned me with a deep fear of nuclear disaster. Probably irrational, I know, but even still, I won’t be anywhere near Tokyo anytime soon, not on your life bud.

      So in Australia, I think we should use the abundant coal we have access to. Thus I refuse to support the Greens policy to shut down the coal industry. We need it. And gas is no solution, do you know how environmentally destructive fracking is to extract the gas in the first place? (violating farmers property rights in the process I might add). No, its coal or stone age as far as I see it, and I for one don’t want our society to start regressing.

      Reply

    • Beck of Kenso says:

      08:00am | 21/03/11

      There are always alternatives. The govt is just too much in the pockets of big business that we don’t get to find out about viable alternatives. There are some amazing things out there, such as paint which can generate solar powered energy, or we could research thorium as an alternative to uranium, because it is less radioactive, more abundant in the earth’s crust and thus easier to mine, and has a significantly smaller half-life than uranium. I think we need to stop using old technology and look to create new jobs in new fields by researching new options.

      And I don’t believe the Greens policy is to shut down the coal industry. That would not be possible, for so many reasons. Their policy is to keep mining at the level it currently is, or reduce it slightly so that we can have a policy of sustainable mining. Surely it’s better to have an industry that will be viable for the long term, rather than just digging up all the coal we have in the shortest amount of time and then wondering what happened to all those mining jobs? Never mind that mining only makes up 4% of employment… but that’s another discussion entirely.

    • Richard says:

      02:45pm | 21/03/11

      Yeah but dude~~ we need new electricity generating infrastructure like NOW. I mean, we needed it 5 years ago, but we didn’t get it, and now that power prices are sky-rocketing, with no reprieve in sight, the situation is getting really desperate.. We don’t have the luxury to do nothing and wait researching thorium. We can’t sit back and rely super high tech power-making paint to get magically mass produced all of a sudden. We need new power stations to start getting built this year.

      So there are 3 options, nuclear, coal or gas. Nuclear is a no-no. There is tri-partisan political opposition to its use in Australia, and that was even before the recent Japanese disaster. Its not going to happen, no way no how.

      Then there is gas. The whole idea of the carbon tax in reality is to make gas plants a viable option. Well I say that but actually the idea of the carbon tax is to make coal plants less viable so that gas becomes relatively more viable by default.

      My beef with that is: to extract the gas, companies are poisoning the great artesian underground water basin, and destroying farmers’ livelihood’s in the process, the very same farmers who don’t even get a choice on whether or not they can lock the gate on their own property and keep the environmental villains out. Its an unjust and highly short-sighted practice, and in my opinion it has to stop.

      So in my view, considering that we need new power plants and we need the right now, as in ASAP; the best, cheapest, safest, least polluting and most sensible option is to use our abundant coal. I mean we ship enough of it off to China and Japan and Korea and India for them to burn anyway, if we burn a little bit more of it ourselves its not going to make too much of a difference.

      I know its not ideal, but we can’t just refuse to take any action unless everything is absolutely perfect: we live in an imperfect world, but we just have to do the best we can in the situation we’re in with whatever resources we’ve got.

      If Gillard wants her government to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of pensioners from freezing in winter and from heat-stroke in summer, because they can’t afford to pay for the ever increasing cost of electricity to run their heaters and air conditioners, because no one has invested in new power generating infrastructure for year after year after year, she should continue obstruct to the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

      If Gillard and Labor want blood on their hands, I suggest they continue to follow the exact course they’ve set for themselves and don’t deviate one bit. By all means, keep pandering to the Greens and ignoring common sense, but only if they want to go down in history as the Australian government directly responsible for the highest all-time number of deaths of their own citizens.

    • Rick says:

      03:43pm | 21/03/11

      Richard .........What a rant!.........and why will Gilard and the labor gov. have blood on their hands?

    • Steve of Cornubia says:

      09:30am | 21/03/11

      If the situation at the damaged nuclear plants continues to improve, then I believe, if anything, that nuclear energy will come out of this looking even better than before.

      If you strip away all the sensationalist reporting and the hyperventilated screeching from anti-nuclear types, then I reckon things went pretty well considering the size of the earthquake and tsunami.

      That a relatively old design of plant could come though all that without a major loss of life is something the engineers involved should be proud of, and the improvements in design that will be incorporated into new plants as a result will serve to make nuclear even more popular.

      The Green movement has yet to accept that nuclear energy is the only low-emmissions technology that could provide the immense and uninterrupted power requirements of our modern world. However, I think the rest of us are getting there.

      Reply

    • Vince says:

      10:12am | 21/03/11

      Wow, Steve, blow that trumpet!  You’re a regular Dizzy Gillespie.  You know what would have made nuclear energy look “even better” than that?  If it hadn’t happened in the first place.  That would probably have made nuclear energy look really quite safe.

    • Sherlock says:

      10:12am | 21/03/11

      I agree

      If you can point to nuclear power plants having the safeguards to make it through an 8.9 earthquake and a tsunami. It’s going to be hard to argue against on the grounds of safety

    • Vince says:

      11:06am | 21/03/11

      I don’t know if you guys are trolling or what, but how anyone can possibly see this as a “win” for the nuclear industry is beyond me.  Even Ziggy doesn’t agree with you.

    • Kika says:

      11:17am | 21/03/11

      Low emissions my donkey! Uninterrupted? Bwaa haaa haa haa.I am falling off my chair in laughter.

      I’m sure they are saying the same thing in Japan right now! Low emissions. and no interruptions. Hahaha.

      There are some reports that people who live in an immediate area of a nuclear power plant have higher rates of cancer - particularly in children.
      We are all skeptical about living near those gigantic power lines because of suspected links to childhood leukaemia, so why on earth would a nuclear reactor be any more or less safer?

      The world is gone. Humans have these gigantic brains yet we can’t do a single thing right with them. Short term solutions for my immediate needs who cares what happens tomorrow, next year, next decade, next millenia.  We think we’re so evolved yet we’re not that far off the evolutionary chain and thought process of a chimp

      CHIMP - “Hmmm if I put this stick in this ant nest, the ants will climb on and I will get the ants… yummm… OW OW they’re biting me!!! Why is this happening?”“
      HUMAN - “Hmmm… if we use nuclear power our energy needs are solved! Oh no! A meltdown! I never saw that happening ever!”

    • L. says:

      01:13pm | 21/03/11

      “You know what would have made nuclear energy look “even better” than that?  If it hadn’t happened in the first place.  That would probably have made nuclear energy look really quite safe. “

      You mean like it didn’t to the other **54** nuke power plants in Japan?

      But we won’t mention those, will we..?

    • Just the Facts Ma'am says:

      11:31am | 21/03/11

      Less cancer or congenital heart malformations after being exposed to low dose radiation a must read, real life data: http://bit.ly/gbUu2I

      ABSTRACT
      An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan.
      Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life:
      5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180
      buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They
      unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv?a
      ?collective dose? of 4,000 person-Sv.
      Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer
      mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per
      100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital
      heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per
      1,000 children under age 19.
      The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general
      population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per
      100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and
      hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital
      malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and
      income distributions of these persons are the same as for the
      general population, it appears that significant beneficial health
      effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure.

      Reply

    • rick says:

      03:49pm | 21/03/11

      Statisticly that sounds great unless your one of the seven…........which you should have been

    • the pieman says:

      11:58am | 21/03/11

      Some of the greenie brainwashed folk that are totally against nuclear power should remove their pink goggles and do some real investigation into the actual accountable deaths accountable to generating nuclear power.
      Find the actual deaths attributed in the last 50 years for nuclear; then do the same math on the equal amount of power generated by coal/mining included; you will find that nuclear is a clear winner very few at all and this accounts for all private cases as well.

      Here we go again; old unkie boone has to sort you out again.
      You have been hoodwinked again by the stinkin greens- who dont want YOU in this world at all!

      Reply

    • Unkie Crockett says:

      12:18pm | 21/03/11

      In a 2006 report, the UN’s World Health Organization estimated the worst nuclear power plant accident in history — the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine — was responsible for up to 9,000 cancer-related deaths for those living in the most affected areas.

      Greenpeace estimated the death toll at 93,000 cancer-related deaths and 200,000 deaths in all when other diseases related to the disaster were factored in.
      unkie boone - more like unkie buffoon.

    • Vince says:

      12:30pm | 21/03/11

      Pieman, I am no greenie brainwashed, anti-nuke type.  In fact, I was leaning towards supporting Nuclear as an option for Australia before this incident happened.  What has caused me to do a double take is not the incident so much as the ridiculous one-eyed denial of reality which has eminated from the pro-nuke camp from people such as yourself.  It causes me a great deal of worry that the proponents of Nuclear for Australia cannot even admit or even seem to understand the dangers which Nuclear represents, as evidenced by this recent incident.  Credibility - 0%. It does not assist you, to quote ridiculous irrelevant statistics about how many deaths have occurred thus far.  The point is what could happen, not what has.  Do you understand?

    • Rick says:

      03:56pm | 21/03/11

      a pitty you weren’t one of them

    • Rick says:

      04:02pm | 21/03/11

      Bring on a nuclear future…........and we need the bomb so we can drop it on those stinking greeny whale lov’n tree huggers….......and we’ll ride it all the way down…....YEEEEEEEHAAAAAA

    • Erick says:

      04:26pm | 21/03/11

      @Rick - And greenies wonder why nobody takes them seriously. raspberry

 
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