THE WAY TO GO

On many many occasions those who have insisted that there is an inextricable link between nuclear power and nuclear weaponry and that this is a serious thing have never gotten the publicity they deserve. All the time trust; trust that no state will use their resources to achieve nuclear weaponry by stealth. is all we have between those who haven’t got the bomb yet. and trust is all we have between those who have. There is no other deterrent than trust and the love we have for the human species and indeed for all of life on earth. Unfortunately brought down by evolution we have in our genes and used by ideologies the desire for disastrous confrontation to resolve problems. Spare plutonium and fissionable unaccountable material floating around the world is not a good mix in this situation. But sixty-eight tones of plutonium destined to be for weaponry has had a strop placed on it both by Russia and the United States. That’s only the accounted amount. More is floating around and it’s this stray unaccountable amount, together with yet unprocessed fissionable material, which causes greatest concern. There are still countries that are nuclear weapon states that will not sign up to the NPT and there are countries that want nuclear technology and we in Australia have a pro-nuclear lobby gaining strength believing that nuclear technology is the answer to global warming. There will be lots of countries in the world and through Asia developing nuclear reactors and some of them will want to have nuclear weaponry and the more nuclear material floats around the world the greater the chance of disaster. Nuclear reactors are very safe and there would have to be multiple things to go wrong for present generation reactors to melt down. I am a ‘not in my back yard’ person though even so. To sum this up:
1 We don’t have the genes as a result of evolution and as a result of ideology encouragement to resist using nuclear weaponry to resolve confrontations.
2 More nuclear material floating around as a result of civil projects means a greater risk of disaster through states wanting a nuclear weapons program too.
3 There is only one way to mitigate against this and that is to encourage the use renewable energy and not go anymore into nuclear energy.
4 Solar thermal with storage, wind, wave, and geothermal are just some of the many renewable energy systems to produce base power and all the power we need.