Twisting the facts is not the answer

Prime Minister John Howard called for a national debate on nuclear power.  But first he wanted the facts.

Some time back, that wise senator from New York state, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said:  "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts".

The Prime Minister has got it right and no more so than in assessing Helen Caldicott's contribution with her latest book on nuclear power, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else.

This is a shrill, cantankerous and ranting work.  In it, Caldicott plays the family great aunt cackling interminably over the personality failures of her lively nephews and nieces.

Caldicott's method is to kick off with a spectacular but completely wrong attempt at a knock-out blow on each phase of the nuclear cycle.

On mining, for instance, Caldicott makes the amazing assertion that to extract low-grade uranium ore much more energy is used in winning the yellowcake than burning it.

Evidence?  She provides the example of mining granite that yields four grams of uranium per tonne of rock and requires 30 times the energy to mine and mill than it ultimately yields from a reactor.

But a quick look at the energy input and output at Ranger, where grades are 2000 grams per tonne of rock shows the energy output is a return of 1000 times the mining and milling energy and 60 times more than the energy input including all processes before and after burning the fuel in a reactor.

On power generation she quotes the real cost of nuclear power at US$0.14 per kilowatt-hour from the New Scientist magazine.  But the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation report Introducing Nuclear Power to Australia might get to half that value.  It is only when reactor plant life is 15 years, as opposed to 30 or more years and the discount rate has moved to 15 per cent that Caldicott's quoted electricity cost emerges.

On nuclear disasters, she says that the plaintiffs in the Three Mile Island suits against the plant owner settled when they could no longer afford to continue.

In fact, in June 1996 District Court judge Sylvia Rambo dismissed the lawsuit granting summary judgement in favour of the defendants.

Finally, in presenting renewable energy as the answer, she shows how much wind energy is available on the planet but shows no understanding of the impact of its intermittent behaviour when wind farms generate electricity.

How the book will be received by the public and how it might influence opinion is uncertain.  For those with some knowledge of the subject it will be assessed on its merits.  But, worringly like the treatment of literature and language in secondary schools, teachers might take the book as an important and unquestioned text.

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