Tuesday 22 July 2008

Bob Hawke speaks out for nuclear power

Bob Hawke - Australia's longest serving Labor PM [1983 - 1991] believes nuclear power should remain on the table for Australia.

As reported by the ABC.

"Intellectually it's impossible to avoid this position - that you should be prepared to have it open as a possibility - but it just seems to me to be intellectually unsustainable to rule it out as a possibility," he said.

Well put.

If one is genuinely concerned about modern energy strategies in the context of carbon emissions reductions, energy security as well as adaptive responses to climate change [desalination being the principal example in Australia] - nuclear power must be part of the solution. A rational, sensible consideration of the available technologies will come to no other conclusion.

1 comment:

  1. I've just been googling on the topic of renewable baseload electricity. Outside of Iceland it's not going too well. One Australian company claimed to be close to generating continuous power for a small outback town using steam heated by deep granite. That project is undergoing many setbacks. Another Australian company operating in the US says it is able to store solar thermal energy for night time electrical generation. However their representative said recently on ABC TV they were not pursuing baseload capability. Yet these two companies are frequently cited as pioneers in their field. I wonder how long before the gloss fades from the notion of renewable baseload.

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