Nuclear is not the bogeyman it's made out to be. Just think rationally

It's about the future scope and shape of nuclear power.

Clearly, the National Party have made up their mind.

Sussan Ley is right to stick with her commitment to a decent policy process for the Liberal Party.

It's a new party room and they're not so much entitled to have their say as they are obligated to give the option of nuclear their best attention.

Embarrassingly, we've just had a national election where the issue was treated like a flat beer. No one wanted anything to do with it.

The then Coalition both bravely and wisely, in my opinion, backed going nuclear.

And then went silent. The government just said no. There you have it. That wasn't a debate.

Our media haven't done any better.

For an issue that's topical internationally, we get given little information.

It's almost as if nuclear is some type of horror story of which we should not speak.

But ... if you travel to France, Japan, the USA, Canada, Spain Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Switzerland and plenty more, you're travelling happily in a country using nuclear power.

It's no big bogeyman there.

We love a bogeyman.

Whenever we talk about a nuclear waste facility there's media hype and public concern.

And yet we have lived quite happily walking around our hospitals and warehouses for decades where this stuff has sat awaiting safer storage.

Perhaps our media are deliberately keeping us in the dark. Back in the Fraser years, the then energy minister Sir John Carrick thought the Liberals should have bumper stickers made which read "Let the bastards freeze in the dark".

That was when Helen Caldicott was scaring the pants off everyone about nuclear power. Odd that her legacy has been an enormous focus on fossil fuels when we could have gone cleaner and greener with nuclear. Our failure to have a proper, reasoned, and calm debate over nuclear power is almost inexplicable.

You might say accidents like Fukushima had a chilling effect.

But only a few people were killed directly from that accident, and indirectly, just over 2000.

To put that in perspective, every two years, we kill more people directly on our roads. And yet we don't blink an eye. Incidentally, it was a 40-year-old plant.

Technology moves on. The first mobile phone in 1973 weighed 2 kilograms.

Commercial availability was in the early '80s.

Now everyone's got one, and they weigh 250 grams or less.

Reactors are heading the same way. Small modular reactors will soon be commonplace and, like mobile phones, relatively cheap.

The world's future energy supply is one of our biggest global challenges.

Rising energy use is inextricably linked to bringing billions of people out of poverty.

If we want that to keep happening, we need more energy.

Our challenge, therefore, is to provide not just for today but for much higher levels of energy in the future.

What we see in the narrow, short-sighted political debate is frankly embarrassing.

It's all very well to march around sanctimoniously preaching the benefits of solar and wind energy or of electric vehicles. There's a lot more to be resolved.

First up, how about a policy that ensures we only buy equipment where the minerals used in manufacture have been ethically mined?

That means children and communities are safe from exploitation physically and monetarily.

Then, a policy that ensures the safe disposal of the used product in what isn't haphazard, poorly regulated landfill.

Just imagine how many solar panels, wind turbines and electric batteries there are globally.

Now, imagine the size of the landfill needed to get rid of it all. They don't last forever. Where do you think they're going?

Our current policy settings must look laughable to the international community. Think about it.

We're opposed to nuclear power, but we shovel uranium around the world like it's tinsel.

We portray coal as the devil of all demons but sell it to the greatest CO2 emitters.

Gas is considered so evil that in one state, you can no longer install gas ovens. But we sell gas to anyone who's happy to pay.

I'm not opposed to selling these things. It's selling them, but shunning them here that I think is stupid.

This is against a backdrop where, because our share of emissions is so tiny, whatever we do makes a negligible impact globally.

Yes, our government wants to demonstrate we are a good international citizen.

My guess is when our ministers assert that we are good international citizens doing our share, the countries to whom they speak must wonder what kind of jungle juice they're drinking.

"Yeah sure, you make no real difference to world emissions at home but you make a mozza facilitating emissions other countries," they must think.

The environmental impact of renewables hasn't, in my view, been given enough attention.

In addition to questions over both the mining needed to build the panels, turbines and batteries and the safe disposal of the end product, there are other serious questions.

Consider the stupidity of covering prime agricultural land with solar panels.

We've got factory and car park roofs, bus stop shelters and so on to spare, and yet some bright sparks haven't figured out that agricultural land should be last in the list.

We ignore invertebrates because when we think of animals, bugs and reptiles don't come first to mind.

In fact they make up somewhere between 90 and 95 per cent of the animal kingdom. Many live underground.

Yet we go along and cover great swathes of the earth and don't even think of the environmental impact of doing that.

The top soil gets less light, less moisture, less stirring up and less fertilising by small- and medium-sized animals that once trod across them.

Do we think just because invertebrates aren't at the forefront of our minds that they don't play a very important role environmentally?

Ninety per cent of the animal kingdom must have a role, so we shouldn't just blindly go covering the land on and under which so many live.

Small changes can make a big difference. Just consider the tremendous and wonderful flow-on effects of reintroducing wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. Then imagine what covering the earth in solar panels is doing.

History is laden with knee-jerk reaction solutions.

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Remember when we got rid of paper bags at supermarkets because we were cutting down too many trees? Plastic was the answer.

Now we grow trees to make paper and have realised the hazards of plastic.

Across the globe, various species have been introduced to curtail a problem and then become the problem themselves.

Think carp in our rivers and the unlovable cane toad, for starters. We just need to recognise that the first solution we think of is often not the right one.

Sadly, the wind-turbine, solar-panel people have shut their mind to the option of nuclear.

London to a brick, they feel little to no concern about the benefits of nuclear medicine.

We have an irrational fear not shared by so many developed countries. Does our leadership ever wonder why so many advanced developed countries are using nuclear?

Does anyone wonder why Bill Gates is investigating and investing in the development of small modular reactors?

Tony Blair's recent intervention calling for a more pragmatic approach to climate change policy has been ridiculed by many who see him as out of touch.

He was described as someone who sees the world from jets and flash hotels and who should care more for the underdeveloped world.

Of course, our attention should focus there. They want the same advantages abundant energy has given the rest of the world.

That's the point. Are we on the right track to providing them with that energy without harming the planet?

There's a risk in sticking stupidly to policies and agendas set at international conferences.

You get sucked in to believing that achieving the bureaucratically set goal is an achievement in itself.

The real achievement will be in plenty of cleaner and greener power.

A source of power that can lift more out of poverty. We should look to nuclear for that.