AUSTRALIA PROPOSED AS A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP!

And proposed by none other than Bob Hawke, a former long-serving Australian Labor Party (Leftist) Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Greenies are going off their brains over it. A recent report below. Note that Australia has been a major uranium exporter under governments of all stripes. It might also be noted that Mr Hawke is a very smart man -- a former Rhodes scholar with a degree in economics:

"Former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke's suggestion that Australia should promote itself as a place to store the world's nuclear waste is sensible and responsible, says a nuclear expert. In a speech to Oxford University graduates in Sydney last night, Mr Hawke said Australia should accept responsibility for storing other countries' nuclear waste.

Associate Professor Bob Hunter, the national president of Scientists for Global Responsibility, today said the idea of a nuclear repository in Australia would be difficult to advance but was based on sound reasoning. "In terms of Australia's future economic potential - and that's what Bob Hawke was talking about - it makes quite a bit of sense," Prof Hunter said. "We've depended ... on digging things up and sending them somewhere else. "Having control of that process (of the use of exported uranium) and requiring that the spent fuel be returned to Australia is quite responsible. "In a moral world, we would be required to do so. If we're going to make noises about these things being so dangerous, an obvious option is to take control of the whole process and store it here."

He agreed with claims by Mr Hawke that Australia has the safest places in the world to store nuclear waste. "Australia and Canada are the two most likely spots," Prof Hunter said. "Canada has a problem in that theirs is a wet environment ... whereas ours is desert and so I would say in that sense it would seem likely his statement is correct."

Mr Hawke also suggested Australia would reap an economic windfall from accepting nuclear waste, and could spend the money on environmental programs. Prof Hunter said the costs of establishing a nuclear-waste storage facility would be high. But he said a repository may only need to be a "cube" of 10 metres by 10 metres in a geologically stable underground site. Prof Hunter said Australian agriculture was finding it difficult to compete in the global market and the government needed to consider how to "value-add" to other exports, such as uranium.

Source




Dumping irrational fears

Andrew Bolt thinks Australia is the hope of the world in nuclear waste disposal:


We need to dig this hi-tech dump of Bob Hawke's, and not just to bury nuclear waste. We need it also to bury the green unreason which has held up great ideas like this for far too long. Hear it already, the hyperventilating over this suggestion from the former Labor prime minister for a nuclear waste dump that would be worth billions. But enough, please. Green myths have too often won out over science and it's already cost us a fortune.

Where do we even start to count these losses? With, say, genetically modified food crops? Why not? Scientists agree GM crops such as canola are safe and useful. Our Gene Technology Regulator approved GM canola for use. Yet, spooked by nothing more than green believers and their technophobic dupes in the media, our state governments have banned them. Result? We're losing so many sales to GM-hip countries such as Canada that the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics this month warned these bans may cost us $3 billion over 10 years. That's gold-plated idiocy.

Or take this green superstition that we can stop global warming with wind farms. So we build huge windmills in our loveliest spots to grind out power at twice the price, but with no effect on the weather that any instrument can detect. Keep counting. Figure how much we'll pay for our failure to build the dams we need, thanks to politicians too scared to "steal" water from rivers to give to nasty humans.

Or figure, as uranium prices soar, what we've lost in sales by stopping more than three uranium mines from opening, to placate earth worshippers who think nuclear power is a crime against Nature. Keep counting. Add the millions we'll spend on taking scarce water from farmers to send it instead down the Murray to "save" the river from "dying" -- when the water in fact is as sweet now as it was 60 years ago. So deep does this new unreason run that Victoria University even offers a Bachelor of Science degree for quack non-science cures such as homeopathy (see below). Are we crazy?

Why have scientists taken this assault on their traditions so meekly? Why hasn't the Australian Academy of Science fought this rising superstition? Where has anyone been who claims to value reason? Well, it's time to fight back. Let this battle over the nuclear waste site be the Waterloo of the greens. The plan pushed this week by Hawke is not new, of course. Pangea, an international company, proposed the very same thing in 1999, figuring a waste facility would earn an astonishing $2 billion a year. Judged on the science alone, it made sense -- and still does. Around the globe, 440 nuclear reactors pump out almost a fifth of the world's electricity -- but also around 12,000 tonnes a year of nuclear waste. But no country has yet built a permanent high-level waste facility, and for 40 years spent nuclear fuel has been left at temporary sites.

THAT'S unsafe. That's also a hell of a business opportunity, with $1 million a tonne on offer to bury this stuff. As Pangea said, no one is better placed than we are to take advantage. The reason is that to store this waste safely you need a big stretch of flat land with dense rock that's been geologically stable for hundreds of millions of years. That land must also get little rain, have little ground water to disturb the waste and have nothing around that's likely to be needed for a long time. Four places fit the bill -- China's Terim Basin, southern Argentina, southern Africa and desert Australia.

But wait. Do you trust China to handle nuclear waste well? South Africa? That leaves us -- the hope of the world. The country with the place, talent and trustworthiness to handle such a vital and delicate job. .....

ENOUGH. It's time for scientists to defend good science. Time to listen to experts with answers, not mystics with vibes. Time to defend the reason that has made us rich. Time to bury the superstitions that will make us poor. You see, there aren't that many Australians and our country is not so very rich in nature's gifts, whatever our anthem says. The edge we have on the rest of the world is our brains. If we stop thinking rationally, we won't even have that. The green mystics must be defied and reason must again rule. This dump is our test. Let's start digging.




SOLAR WARMING

Jack Wheeler gets pretty scathing about Greenies and Martians. Some excerpts:

It was to be expected that in response to NASA releasing satellite photos this week showing that the ice caps on Mars have been retreating several feet per year for some time now, former vice-president Al Gore claimed this was "the inevitable result of George Bush's disastrous environmental policies and his unconscionable failure to sign the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty."

At a joint press conference held with Mr. Gore, Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) denounced the warming of Mars as "demonstrating once again George Bush's racism - Mr. Bush cares as little for the well-being of Martians as he does about African-Americans."

Democrats and enviro-loonies on space patrol aside, serious people here on earth know the NASA announcement dealt a major blow to the theory of Man-Made Global Warming (MMGW). Here's another:



Take a close look at this rock and you'll see it's a fossil: it bears the imprint of a leaf. The leaf is 50 million years old and is from Axel Heiberg Island in the High Arctic of Canada, 600 miles from the North Pole. It was given to me by a scientist working there while I was on one of my North Pole expeditions.

He explained that 50 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was warm - not just ice free, warm. The weather back then on Axel Heiberg, which is far more north than all of Siberia, was like Florida is today - with forests, including huge redwood trees, and lots of animals like alligators and turtles.

The entire earth was warm during this period known as the Eocene, which lasted some 22 million years (55-33 mya, million years ago). Al Gore probably thinks George Bush and SUVs are responsible. Clearly, according to Gore's way of "thinking," they also caused the Medieval Climactic Optimum between 1000 and 1300 AD, when farmers grew wine grapes in northern England and raised sheep and dairy cattle in Greenland.....

What the eco-fascists are most desperate to deny is that however much "global warming" is taking place, it's caused by the sun and not us. Yet the single most established correlation between earth temperatures and anything else is with sunspots. The correlation goes back over 400 years when we first got telescopes to see the sun: When sunspot activity dropped ending the Medieval Optimum, global temperatures plunged into a Little Ice Age when the Thames River in London would freeze solid. They plunged in tandem again when Charles Dickens was a young boy, so he recalled London snowstorms for his "Christmas Carol."

For 500 years, from 1400 to 1900, the northern hemisphere was cooler than average 20th century temperatures. We're finally getting back to normal with more solar activity:.....




COMPELLING EVIDENCE THAT THE EARLY HOLOCENE ARCTIC WAS MUCH WARMER THAN TODAY

Those prehistoric SUVs and power stations at work again! Below is the abstract from "Annals of Glaciology", Volume 35, Number 1, 1 January 2002, pp. 19-24(6)

Ice-core evidence for widespread Arctic glacier retreat in the Last Interglacial and the early Holocene

by Roy M. Koerner; David A. Fisher.

"An early study of the various components of the Greenland, Antarctic and Canadian Arctic ice-cap cores (Koerner,1989) suggested that during the last interglacial period, the Greenland ice sheet suffered massive retreat and Canadian ice caps melted completely. Since then, modeling has helped support this interpretation (Cuffey and Marshall, 2000). Ice-core records of stable isotopes, melt layering and chemistry from the same Canadian ice cores, and others from the Russian Arctic islands, Svalbard and Greenland are presented as evidence for a more modest, but still substantial, retreat in the early Holocene. The sections representing the first half of the Holocene in many cores have less negative delta 18O values (delta values) and a higher percentage of melt layers than recently deposited ice, suggesting that temperatures were 1.3-3.5øC warmer than today. Given that glacier balances are slightly negative today, they must have been substantially more negative during the early-Holocene thermal maximum, leading to retreat of the circumpolar ice caps. Evidence is presented to suggest that, with the exception of Academii Nauk ice cap, the ice in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard must have almost disappeared. In the Canadian Arctic, the larger Canadian ice caps retreated but survived. The cooling trend that followed this thermal maximum promoted re-expansion and new growth of most of the ice caps in the Russian Arctic islands and Svalbard".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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