Opinions
New Zealand, after all, stands as bulwark and bastion against nuclear power, an adherent of a green orthodoxy that declares much of the rest of the planet dangerously deluded. We have the solitary virtue of being able to proclaim nuclear power is anathema; so much so that nearly three decades on there is little political will to challenge the accepted wisdom.
Yet, the time has come to utter the unutterable and look afresh at nuclear energy, even if the unpalatable message is, to some minds, made even worse by the fact that it was delivered by US President George W Bush.
In Sydney for the Apec summit, Mr Bush agreed with Australian Prime Minister John Howard nuclear power was a key to cutting greenhouse emissions. It is ironic that the New Zealand Government should have rushed to subscribe to all that is meant by the Kyoto protocol only to find it conflicts with a principle it holds just as dearly. Being clean and green (which is what has justified being nuclear-free) becomes an illusion unless nuclear power generation is contemplated.
Opposition to nuclear energy takes its strength from fear that it is inimical to human life, yet that fails to explain why nearly 450 commercial reactors today provide more than 16 per cent of the world's energy, that nuclear waste-disposal methods have vastly improved and that for more than 50 years there have been only two major accidents. It is dishonest to wave the shroud of Chernobyl when coal-fired power generation is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year - not just the 6000-20,000 Chinese coalminers smothered annually but in air pollution of the kind produced by the Chelsea Power Station, which during the Great Smog of 1952 helped kill as many as 10,000 Londoners.
Adding to the heresy this week was former uranium miner Alan Eggers, who told the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in Christchurch it was time New Zealanders debated nuclear energy as a "clean" power source. And he is right.
No one is shoving nukes down our throats; but we need to be able to confront the demons and talk about it rationally if we are to accept global warming can be arrested only by limiting greenhouse gases which make up New Zealand's "carbon footprint".
Our release of carbon from 1990 to 2004 they rose by more than 50 per cent, Mr Eggers said. The OECD average was 28 per cent. He also pointed out that a nuclear power plant north of Auckland would solve that city's power problems as well as the fight over pylons.
The passionate advocacy of wind and solar power cannot change the fact that they are in their infancy and incapable of providing most of our power needs. Neither can the environmental activist's vision of a world in which all live simpler lives without the need for so much power be anything but a fantasy which no developing nation would ever take seriously.
The reality is that without our being allowed to discuss all power generation options, the eco-activist's dystopian vision of New Zealand risks coming true.
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