I read in The Melbourne Times last week about Martin Ferguson's
aggressive tactics at a recent Darebin climate change forum, and his
disparagement of the low numbers attending. It's a pity, because I don't mind
the former unionist and political street-fighter who's always up for a
rhetorical punch-up. Unfortunately, on the issue of uranium and climate
change, Martin Ferguson is just plain wrong.
Despite unconvincing assertions to the contrary, he's long been
pro-nuclear, and is even singled out for special mention by Ian Lowe in
Reaction Time, the latest Quarterly Essay, which thoroughly debunks nuclear
energy as a solution to future energy demands and climate change (see
especially page 67).
I particularly remember a forum on uranium mining held at Northcote
Town Hall back in June 2006, where Ferguson's main line seemed to be that,
regardless of any change to Labor's three-mines policy (now history
following the ditching of this limit at the ALP's national conference in
April this year), Australia would be the biggest producer/exporter of
uranium by 2013 anyway. As if that were somehow a licence to throw out
consideration of a policy change to phase out uranium mining and make
the world a safer place.
Some of my recent reading has now coalesced around an ALP policy that
would eschew the use of nuclear power in Australia, but allow nuclear
risk to be exported around the world to countries subject to insufficient
nuclear safeguards, accidents, terrorism and the uncertainties of
their own geo-political squabbles.
First, there's the eloquent science of Reaction Time making plain the
risks of a nuclear 'solution' to climate change that is uneconomic, slow
and dangerous in contrast with a diversity of safe, renewable and
timely alternatives. Unlike Martin Ferguson, Lowe dodges none of the issues
and, as one who supported nuclear energy early in his scientific
career, is prepared to take the nuclear lobby's best shot and show it
falling drastically short.
Next is Cormac McCarthy's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road.
Anyone who has not read the book might question the inclusion of
fiction to support the anti-nuclear cause. But the novel's imagining of a
post-apocalypse America shows the truth of a suggested but unacknowledged
nuclear war, drawn out over the alternately debased and heroic lives of
the last survivors of an irrevocably damaged planet. McCarthy's
profound imagining should be shared by everyone who makes decisions that
literally affect the fate of the earth.
Bringing McCarthy's imagining firmly back to reality, however, is a
real-life scenario of how the nuclear dominoes might actually begin to
fall.
The ABC News website reports that four senior officers have recently
been fired from the USAF following the prohibited transfer in August of
six nuclear-armed cruise missiles on the wing of a B-52 bomber flying
between bases across America.
No doubt each of the missiles far exceeded the explosive power of the
A-bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second
World War, yet the missiles were flown over America's domestic rooftops
uncontrolled by clearly fallible procedures. More alarming still was the
news that permission to handle nuclear weapons was withdrawn from 65
USAF personnel. How many actually have permission, and what is shown by
the scope for error that entails?
Yet Martin Ferguson thinks it's OK to export uranium that will be
enriched by the same processes that can be carried further to produce
weapons-grade material. It's OK to provide uranium for energy purposes that
might allow the diversion of part of a country's total stores of the
radioactive ore to weapons programs. It's OK to poison the world with
nuclear waste that, once released, can't be put back in its atomic bottle.
Martin, as one of your Batman constituents, I'm asking you why it's OK.
Thanks for your kind comment. Martin Ferguson holds the safest federal ALP seat in Australia, and may feel unobliged to respond because of his margin.
However, I am hoping he will be prompted by coverage on this site, and the inclusion in this week's edition of The Melbourne Times (a local, large circulation weekly) of my letter on this issue.
I wrote the letter in response to Ferguson's earlier comments in the paper highlighting the low attendance at a recent Darebin forum on climate change. I find it difficult to believe that anyone would equate small numbers with low public concern about this issue. I wish Ferguson would forget such petty diversions and answer the questions that so obviously challenge him.
Needless to say, the Coalition's policy is even worse on climate change, and they not only support uranium mining but are arguing for nuclear power in Australia. Unfortunately for Ferguson, to say that an opponent's policy is worse is no defence. His answers need to go beyond that to the fundamental problems of uranium mining and the export of nuclear risk overseas.
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