The Guardian 7 June, 2006
Dingo bytes
Can you trust the private energy industry? Or, for that matter, their parliamentary representatives? Of course you can, insists the Prime Minister! He wants an inquiry into the development of nuclear power in Australia, and even uranium enrichment, which happens to be a prerequisite for development of nuclear weapons. Even though Australia exports uranium, (of which it holds the biggest deposits in the world), the nation does not have a nuclear processing industry. If we developed one, a move which Howard is clearly supporting, we’d be obliged under international conventions to accept the return of toxic nuclear waste derived from our uranium. And as other Coalition MPs have discussed, this might set a precedent for Australia to accept nuclear waste from lots of other countries — in other words, to become the world’s nuclear dump.
Talk about trusting energy salesmen! In Germany, an energy company is building the world’s first plant to liquefy carbon from trapped industrial emissions. The resultant goo is then to be buried (geosequestration). This is best done in depleted oil wells, but these are rarely close to the power plant concerned, and may in fact be thousands of kilometres away, adding huge transportation costs. Moreover, the whole process is already very expensive, and may even double the cost of production for the industry concerned. The solution? The German company is simply going to dump the stuff in the aquifer which lies beneath their plant. Environmental groups have objected that this would probably poison natural springs and other local underground water sources. But the company doesn’t seem the least bit concerned.
Dingo is very energetic this week!. Back in Australia, a report prepared for the Howard Government has concluded that nuclear energy is cost-competitive, compared with energy from power stations firing coal or gas. However, it’s now been revealed that the report’s author, Professor John Gittus, is a manager of Insurance Syndicate 1176, a division of Lloyd’s of London, which won a contract to insure Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor. The good professor also works for Serco, which (with other companies) supplies warheads for the British nuclear "deterrent", as well as providing advice on "packaging, storage and transport advice" on nuclear waste. Does anyone detect a conflict of interest? Oh, by the way, Gittus based his figures on the expected running costs of the new AP1000 reactors, none of which has actually been built yet.
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Athol Yates, a Canberra security specialist who has singled out Muslim students at Australian universities as posing a terrorist threat. He recommends that our unis should encourage these students to embrace "Australian values". Just to spread the venom a little wider, he has suggested that young Asians studying here are a potential hazard because they might bring in avian flu. His firm, the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre, is probably pretty small, but don’t let’s confuse size with the potential public influence it could have. Thus, for his astonishingly bigoted views he is this week’s Hog.