According to ABC Online, New South Wales Premier Bob Carr has called for a debate on the benefits and risks of nuclear power as an alternative energy source.
"The world's got to debate whether uranium-derived power is more dangerous than coal," he said.
"Coal is looking very dangerous - there ought to be a debate."
Mr Carr says a new energy source needs to be found because alternative power sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen are not yet viable options.
"You could have a wind farm across all of outback New South Wales," he said. "It'd kill every kookaburra but it wouldn't provide the base-load [power] we need."
The aboriginals may have been living with U238 but this is exactly what you do not want to discuss. They did not live with radioactive FISSION products. It is not the radioactivity so much but the danger that the radioactive elements will be incorporated into the human body to do great damage. You are deliberatly confusing U238 and nuclear fission products to try to make the radioactilty more benign when you know full well it is the strontium-90 that is like calcium in bones and Iodine-131 that is taken into the thyroid that are the main problems.
Ionizing radiation from these isotopes,close to human tissues, do damage to DNA and can cause increased cancer and thyroid problems.
Greeny rules, as you term them, are to prevent harm to humans from people who do not care and only care about money and personel power.
Again as you well, and do the Greens, know that unless you stand in Martin Place a lot you will not get a harmful dose of radiation from granite. It is quite another thing to have the same radiation in your thyroid gland with atoms of Iodine-131 in the T3 and T4 hormones destroying your thyroid and giving you Hashimotos. The costs are not obvious - once your thyroid is ineffective you have to have artificial thyroid all your life and suffer quite bad symptoms even with them.
And you are also correct some radiation is OK when it is controlled and known. How would you know that there is Stontium-90 in the milk your kids are drinking? I am sure the nuclear plant operators would move heaven and hell to explain away contamination and be dragged kicking and screaming into compensation cases.
Ender
Uranium 238 is radioactive, with a long half life. I suggest you go to Martin PLace in Sydney, go to the old Commonwealth Bank Building and see how much radioactivity is coming off the granite.
Under Greeny rules granite would not be mined.
Strange world we live in, isn't. Some radioactivity is ok, others not.
I refuse to waffle here as Aaron has a better waffle degree than I have on this matter.
And of course mining tails dumps are not really known to be upstream, downstream, overstream or for that matter understream of the human food chain.
Actually the NT Aboriginals having been living with the nuclear effects of Jabiluka for 40,000 years, so they say. Any evidence for pollution in their food chain? (chain - misplaced metaphor - since when did tribal humans living at the subsistence level, have the means to invent chains in the first place).
We need another noun to replace chain !
Ender, your efforts here would qualify you for this important task.
No Loius your eyes must be playing up on you again that is the definition of CONSERVATIVE.
And you can swim all you like in U238 water as long as it is not radioactive as Uranium is very insoluble in the human body. The problem is with the fission products, most specifically radioactive isotopes of elements that are in the same column of the periodic table or the same as elements in the human body. Examples of these are strontium 90 which replaces some of the atoms of calcium in bones of growing children and increases the chance of cancer or radioactive isotopes of iodine that can cause thyroid diseases.
These isotopes can leach out of even the best waste dumps and get into the groundwater where they become part of the food chain.
Conservationist - noun, a person unwilling to adapt to changing circumstances called life. Also frightened of future because it is unknown.
And I forgot to mention I went wading and swimming in the main costean at Yeelirrie - uranium in the water - and nothing happened to me, no two heads or other wierd things.
Of course the immersion in the U238 water could explain my politics.
Entirely serious. Manure and dead horses, as bad as they might be, did not and could not affect the world climate.
Unsustainable economics that fails to take into account limited, instead of infinite, resources are doomed to change the climate of our spaceship in possibly dramatic and totally unpredicateble ways.
Is Ender serious?? Manure and dead horses were a huge problem, not to mention a source of disease, disease-carrying insects and stench.
We only need to look at the 3rd world to see what kind of "sustainable" existance the greens and their apologists have in mind for us.