Feeling like Nostradamus. Wrote and blogged this two years ago.
On a Uranium Dump in my back yard.
I take the SAGovernor’s speech at proclamation day as a prompt. One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. – Plato
No matter what I say objectors will object. They will prefer their own emotive interpretations of science, risk, benefit, horror and fear. There will be brash assertions of risk, safety, harm and science. None of which will have a lot of objective credibility. Unrealistic demands will be made, 100% guarantees will be sought, none of which occur in any other aspect of real life. All rationale will leave the debate to be replaced by emotive attacks. There will be attacks on me, whether I love South Australia, and whether I care anything about the people who might live close by, about whether I care for the planet. Whether I am stupid for that matter. That is their usual strategy.
It will become a battle of ideology against realism. We all love the planet, we are all greenies. We all need clean air, clean food, clean water. But ideologues who use greenwashing for political zealotry will claim the moral high ground. Killing all animals is bad, eating meat is bad, dolphins in the sink are good, hooray for bicycles, down with motor vehicles, all mining is bad, uranium mining is the devils work and radioactivity means nuclear Armageddon. Down on your knees, pray to greenpeace and end of thought process. I re-iterate I am too a greeny.
It remains a good idea to have nuclear dump in my back yard. It only needs one square kilometre of ground surface, a transport system, and stable geology. These things have already been designed. They are only prevented from going ahead by greenwash.
The uranium cycle, mining, value adding, export, reception and storage of spent fuel for future use could all easily occur here in my back yard, South Australia.
It will do for SA what oil has done for the middle east. No taxes, free medicals, free school and build wealth for the future.
I despair because I know I have not thought up any of this. It has all been said before. There are multitudes of learned scientific papers and articles.
But perhaps the time is right to open the State for business.
John Bolton