Nuclear power debate

Press, 26 August 1978, Page 15

Nuclear power debate

Ground for Concern. Edited by Mary Elliott. Penguin. 216 pp., notes and appendices. $4.95. (Reviewed by lan Blair) The anti-nuclear movement in Australia has commissioned 12 people with technical qualifications to contest justification for mining that country’s abundant uranium resources. The thesis in the book is that by declining to mine and sell uranium, Australia will be in the van of a purported moral crusade to impede further development of nuclear power. The group’s opposition to mining is also linked with the plea that the schemes will be detrimental to sacred Aboriginal sites (the existence or importance of which most people seem to be previously aware of). The Fox Royal Commission report (1977), while endorsing aborigine ownership of these lands, found that opposition to uranium mining on the Ranger (Northern Territory) site should not be allowed to prevail. The uranium issue as interestingly described is incidental, however, in the book to employment of an opportunity to discourse on the well-known Friends of the Earth attitude to nuclear power in general — reactors and hardware, safety, and waste disposal. Walter Patterson presented these matters better in his 1976 book. There is no recognition of evidence in

the Australian book that radiation discharges from existing commercial power reactors are minimal; that safety records of nuclear power stations in North America and Western Europe exceed other major industrial plant; that research and plans for disposal of high-level radio active waste in the United States are promising. Non-nuclear alternatives as power sources are loosely advocated with no admission of the environmental consequences if water resources, coal, geothermal resources, or extensive plantings for biomass, are exploited to the necessary levels to provide any nation’s energy requirements. One contributor submits that nuclear power (there are more than 200 major installations at work now throughout the world) is being developed only through the instrumentality of a multinational connection of vested interests However the chapter on the politics of nuclear power is well presented. More attention to the facts of the economics of nuclear power would have improved the balance in the book.

Uranium mining is a party political issue in Australia. The voters there deserve to be well advised and informed in making their decision, but the tendentious and incomplete presentation in this book does not do justice to both sides of the controversy.