"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

[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.