April 1st or Environment Day?

The green movement is in top gear as part of their annual "scare the kids day" but this year's effort would be more appropriate for the first of April. A good example of the material being produced is "Uneconomic Power" by Steve Shallhorn, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific (Inc), on http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4512

The best insight into the feeble "greenpeace" collective wit is provided by the sentence;"In the event of a nuclear accident the costs are usually borne by others, often individuals who lose their livelihood and or their health".

Note how it starts in the conditional sense, the (remote) possibility of a nuclear accident, shifts to a generalised statement of presumed fact like, "costs are usually borne by others", and finishes with implied specific facts like "individuals lose their livelihoods and their health", all within a single sentence.

For the record, no accidents have taken place for more than 20 years, no costs have been borne by others and no-one has lost their livelihood or their health. But eco-bimbos have minds that routinely fuse hypothetical possibilities with actual recorded facts, treating them all as equally validated certainties. And the rest of the article is no exception.

The investment funds that might flow into "alternate energy", if the entire engineering/science community took a long Prozac holiday, morphs into an actual flow of investment that the nuclear industry will then capture. The fact is, the investment sector has a long and justified distrust of people who merge imagined potential with recorded results. And they avoid them, as they have done to date with "blow job energy".

There is, in contrast, an existing and potential supply of investment funds for nuclear energy. So the notion that this money would be switched from the alternate sector is pure fantasy.

Similar morphing of fact and projection was exhibited by Actor, Jack Thompson, who came out on world environment day to state that Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Chernobyl were nothing compared to global warming. Again, we have a projection of potential future mortality being compared with actual mortality as if both were detailed, proven and specific fact.

One aspect of the nuclear debate that will never get specific detail from the Greens is the issue of the actual discounted cost of long term storage. Even at 7% interest per annum, the net present value (NPV) of a dollar per year for 50 years is only $13.80 while the NPV over 60 years is still only $14.04. The extra decade of 1 dollar outlays can be paid for today with only 24 cents while the price for additional decades in perpetuity becomes infinitely smaller and smaller.
So any price charged for that service that is over and above that multiple is ALL PROFIT. And only greenfarce appears yet to learn that things rarely get done at all unless they can be done for a profit. Australia can manage this problem better than anyone else so our profit begins long before other nations costs are covered.

And lets not forget the "we don't want to live on a toxic dump" crowd who seriously suggest that there will be some sort of "nuke change", where people move from the cities to retire to a townhouse overlooking the nuke dump in the central desert.

Lets get this clear, SOLIDS DON'T LEAK! If the stuff is down a shaft in solid rock and the annual rainfall is only 100mm then the incidence of percolation of even 1mm below a depth of 1 metre is effectively zero. And if the shaft is sealed then it will need someone to go right out of their way, with some very conspicuous, noisy and expensive equipment, to get radiated. Ditto for theft.

It is an absolute disgrace the way the greens seek to imply that nuclear waste storage would be similar to your local urban rubbish tip located in the Great Artesian Basin. But that is par for the course for the bimboscenti.

First posted by Perseus, Friday, 2 June 2006 12:55:12 PM