"uranium quarry for the world"

[miriam_e]

Oh great! Australia looks like it will gear up uranium sales to become "the uranium quarry for the world". Morons!

Uranium makes the world even more unsafe and earns money for a very few ultra-rich people. It does very little for anybody else. Much better would be to resume our position near the forefront of research into alternative and renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

Nuclear power is just as non-renewable as petroleum. It is a limited resource.

We have been wrecking the atmosphere and climate for our children with carbon-dioxide from petroleum and coal. They are gonna really love us when we leave them with a whole lot of radioactive problems too. Our generation will go down in history as the biggest screw-ups of all time.

Nobody has yet worked out a truly safe way to store radioactive waste. Bear in mind that it never actually becomes safe. Its half-life of 250,000 4.5 billion years means that it takes that long to become just half as deadly!! (Our Earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old.) This is a problem we can't just ignore.

Short sighted greed!

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

As long as Qld and WA maintain the rage (or Labor Governments) we'll be fine, but I have doubt about that. The Chinese can make economic life very difficult for us if they want.

I find this new safeguard deal with the Chinese a joke. While I'm sure they'll abide by it to the letter, all it means in essence is that it frees up existing uranium under contract from Canada/Niger/wherever to diversion into their weapons program.

*sigh*

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Interesting point you make about the safeguards in the contracts being worthless. It hadn't occurred to me that they could happily abide by the agreement and just use other uranium for weapons.

*ugh*

It all sucks so badly.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this for a long time.
Working on the fringes of the industry, all of this push was really recognised by industry about two years, maybe as far back as 2002.

Which is why the Australian Stock Market is enjoying a uranium float boom.
Still down?

In the last 12 months more than $90 million in new money has been pumped into onshore Australian uranium exploration - in new floats alone. And those are just the ones I recognise going through the AFR's list.

To say nothing of existing companies who have dusted off old data from the 1960s and 1970s.

One of Australia's best performing companies right now, Paladin Resources (ASX:PDN) has gone from a 2c/share dreadful and last I heard tipped $5/share pretty much in that time (although they will be mining in Namibi.

The kind of money we're talking about, the promise of jobs, buys a lot of influence in the hallowed halls of Labor Houses around the nation.

We will see Labor bellyflop on this one so fast we'll all get whiplash.

I mean, we've aready seen Howard strip the NT of its right to restrict uranium mines, haven't we? And SA Labor are warm to the idea.

Gah!

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

What annoys me about the money frenzy around uranium (apart from the moral bankruptcy of making money from endangering your children) is that mining isn't Australia's biggest income earner.

Tourism is.
But what is the value to old boy network and the stock market of millions of little mom & pop businesses?
Grrr.

My feeling is that the stock market is a way of making people think they have a hand in the country while reinforcing the same old structures that lead to corrupt concentration of power. Its attraction is the same one used by other forms of gambling: enticing people with the lure of money for nothing.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

250,000 years. Jesus. That's just crazy. I mean... Christianity is only, what, 2000 years old? It's like the Mummy's Curse, only with extra limbs and a cleft palate.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Ooopsie. I made a little mistake.

The uranium 235 that is used in nuclear reactors and weapons has a half life of 704 million years. In nuclear reactions it gets turned mostly into uranium 238, also called depleted uranium (the stuff the US has been littering the middle east with in the form of armor piercing shells), which has a half life of 4.5 billion years (about the age of the Earth), so it a problem effectively forever as far as humans are concerned. Uranium 234, which is very rare (0.0055% of all uranium) is of no use. It is the one that decays fast... if you could call a half life of quarter of a million years fast. That is the one I erroneously quoted.

Of course the scum who want radioactive weapons have their eyes fixed on plutonium. It is much more dangerous than uranium it takes incredibly small amounts to be a danger to life. It has a half life of 24,000 years.

It angers me that the people spending our money on energy options for the future and who are supposed to have the best information available so disregard the dangers. Why spend vast amounts of money on such a dangerous solution which begs for malcontents to target?

We are surrounded by low level energy that would be perfect if we could just cut back on our insane overconsumption of power. There are ways to drastically cut our energy use while improving our quality of life, boosting new businesses, having a permanent energy future and not fouling our nest.

LCD screens for our computers, hybrid vehicles, solar cells wherever possible, passive solar heating and cooling, fluorescent lights now and OLED lighting in the longer term.

The centralised options of having one big nuclear or coal power plant is not a good idea. Isn't it weird that the same people who think that concentrating all our eggs in one basket like that are the same ones who are always whining about terrorists? You'd think they would realise that such centralisation is the most insecure way to do things. But nope. What the hell are they thinking? Oddly it also conflicts directly with their cherished market-driven economics. Lots of small generation systems competing to deliver the goods would appear to be more idealogically suited to them, but no. They always opt for the one that requires a single massive investment and an expensive and oppressive security system to safeguard it.

They must be blind.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

I daresay behind closed doors or away from a camera it's a very different game with very different personalities in play. And yeah, makes no sense to me either.

My one hope for the future of mankind with regards to our having done this is that they can eventually round up all our radioactive crap and just blast it into space.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Firing it off into the sun has been seriously proposed as a solution. But it is only useful as a way of cleaning up what we have already done. Ongoing nuclear waste production becomes even more uneconomic if such a method is factored in (and it is already barely profitable -- no US reactor has turned a profit in decades).

I agree that getting it off the planet would be a good idea, though there is the danger of an in-flight accident high in the atmosphere spreading radioactive material far and wide.

Another possibility is to get it down into the molten magma below the crust of our planet. Of course that risks it coming up again in a radioactive volcano, so it isn't as good a solution as it first seems.

One of the worst solutions I've heard is that some radioactive waste disposal companies are simply dumping it in drums into the deep ocean trenches. The drums are unlikely to last more than a decade ( I believe they've already been doing this for more than a decade) and then the stuff starts leaking out into the food chain.

These are the sort of problems we expose ourselves to with nuclear power. The people in power airily wave their hands and give bland assurances, but the problems are real and will already haunt us for millions of generations... should humanity survive that long.