Advocating nuclear power as an answer to global warming is analogous to prescribing smoking for weight loss.
Nuclear reactors do not stand alone but rely on a massive industrial infrastructure using fossil fuel and other global warming gases.
Renewable energy that is readily available, cheaper than nuclear and coal, and can rapidly avert global warming must be immediately implemented by global governments.
Robert Stone is rightly concerned about global warming (The Age, October 4) so I refer him to an excellent study, Carbon Free Nuclear Free http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/ demonstrating that the US could achieve this by about 2030.
Advertisement
Let's examine the Fukushima disaster – Australia's uranium fuelled the reactors.
On March 11, 2011, three reactors were online when a massive earthquake disrupted their power supply, drowned the auxiliary diesel generators in the basements, and submerged pumps supplying each with 3.79 million litres of cooling water a minute.
Within hours, the intensely hot radioactive cores in units 1, 2 and 3 had started to melt while the zirconium metal cladding on the uranium fuel rods reacted with water generating hydrogen which forcefully exploded in buildings of 1, 2, 3 and 4, releasing huge amounts of radioactive elements into the air. And 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water – a total of 245,000 tonnes – has been leaking into the Pacific daily since the accident. Three molten cores, each weighing more than 100 tonnes melted their way through 15 centimetres of steel in the reactor vessels, now rest on concrete floors of the severely cracked containment buildings.
Each core contains as much radiation as that released by 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs with more than 200 different radioactive elements, lasting seconds to millions of years.