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Letter to the Whitehaven News |
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Written by Peter Wilson
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Thursday, 20 July 2006 |
Sir,
After our Prime Minister's belated recognition of reality in energy
matters, an outburst such as Marianne Bennett's was to be expected from
the anti-nuclear fundamentalists. In predicting a short life for
high-grade uranium deposits she conveniently forgets, of course, that
power reactors currently generate only about 1% of the energy
obtainable in principle from the uranium mined to fuel them. With
efficient recycling, which so-called environmentalists have always
strenuously opposed, that could be increased by some fifty-fold which
would transform every 10-year prospect into half a millennium. Even
that does not take into account the thousands if not millions of tons
of recovered and depleted uranium already purified and available for
use enriched with plutonium without need for further mining.
Of course there are genuine problems in managing nuclear energy and its consequences, especially the legacies of past operations driven by military imperatives no longer applicable. However, they need not be daunting, given the will to confront them sensibly. Many of the Greens appear more interested in perpetuating than in solving them, in promoting wildly mistaken ideas of them rather than in educating the public, and in raising objections no longer relevant rather than in facing the present situation. Where they are right is in insisting that even an abundance of energy from irreplaceable sources would not justify wasting it.
We have a common interest in protecting the earth from possibly irreversible damage. To that end we should be better employed in establishing a basis of truth that can be agreed by all but the irreconcilable bigots than in arguing over fallacies.
Peter Wilson |
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