great article by Miranda Devine
FUKUSHIMA is the world's best advertisement for nuclear energy.
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The Japanese nuclear power complex is like a Tonka Truck. It's so tough that you can put it through a magnitude 9 earthquake and a 14m tsunami and it's still standing, with no armageddon in sight.
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After a couple of nail-biting weeks and hyperventilating headlines, valiant power plant workers - the "nuclear samurai" - are making "slow and steady progress" to bring the emergency under control.
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Yesterday they managed to restore power to all six crippled reactors.
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The only fatalities at the plant have been by traditional means, such as falling debris, not from radiation.
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And, while not dismissing the gravity of contamination in the food chain, atomic energy authorities have pronounced it harmless to human health.
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Nuclear energy was set its toughest test on the northeast coast of Japan, and it passed.
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And the rebounding Nikkei on Tuesday shows that investors, initially spooked by nuclear hyperbole, have been reassured by the improving situation at Fukushima.
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Of course just the words "nuclear" and "emergency" are enough to put the fear of God into anyone.
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And, sure enough, opinion polls show that the popularity of nuclear energy has plummeted in the wake of the Fukushima emergency - from about 43 per cent to 35 per cent, according to the latest Essential poll this week.
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But when you think about it, Fukushima shows how resilient even a 40-year-old, inadequately maintained nuclear plant can be.
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And, in the scheme of things, with more than 20,000 people dead in the rest of Japan and a massive rebuilding operation still to come, what are a few millisieverts of radiation between friends?
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The only people really put at risk were the firefighters and power plant workers at the site, more than 20 of whom have been injured - one with broken legs. Several more workers were reported to have been injured yesterday.
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It's true that as each day passes, as they battle to get the reactors under control, these workers are being exposed to levels of radiation with potential future health effects.
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A sign of the ongoing hazards came yesterday afternoon when the plant was evacuated again after radiation levels spiked dangerously.
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There are lessons to be learned from Fukushima, for sure, and questions, especially, to be asked of the Tokyo Electric Company, whose chequered safety and regulatory history and slapdash housekeeping appears to have exacerbated problems at the ageing plant.
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It was already on notice from Japan's atomic energy watchdog before the earthquake.
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The company reportedly has a history of falsifying maintenance records and in 2002 admitted to an "inadequate safety culture".
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It had also stored used fuel rods on site, many more than it was designed to contain safely.
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These spent rods were uncovered during the earthquake-tsunami crisis and now pose the greatest ongoing radiation hazard.
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The UN's atomic watchdog, the IAEA, is also under pressure to be more pro-active rather than relying on individual countries to monitor their own nuclear safety.
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But, for all that, now we can see that the threat of Fukushima was overblown.
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So how does any self-respecting green continue to oppose nuclear power in a country with 40 per cent of the world's accessible uranium reserves?
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Australia, of all places, should be at the vanguard of atomic energy and research.
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In fact, there has been talk among engineers of Australia becoming the world's primary nuclear storage facility, since we can cheaply and safely store nuclear waste underground thanks to our very stable geology and abundant remote potential storage areas.
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The peace bonus is that we would ship out the uranium and ship the waste back in, and at the same time account for input and output to ensure that nothing is being diverted into nuclear weaponry. Thus Australia can do its duty as a good global citizen, and make some money along the way.
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It's a win/win.
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Yet Australia's Greens continue to reject nuclear energy out of hand and indulge in a dishonest fantasy of wind farms and solar panels as a power panacea.
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Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday visited a wind farm at Bungendore, near Canberra, to promote her edict that Australia must produce 20 per cent of its power from renewables by 2020.
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She didn't mention the fact that wind is the most inefficient and expensive way to reduce carbon emissions. Nor did she acknowledge that the rush to wind farms has caused untold misery to people all over country NSW and Victoria who find themselves with whirring 150m tall structures looming over their homes.
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Nor that wind cannot replace coal because it is not reliable enough to provide the baseload, ever-available power we need.
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Only nuclear can do that.
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One famous greenie, the Guardian's George Monbiot, has seen the light. On Monday he published an article titled: "How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power."
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"You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power," he wrote.
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"You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology."
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Hats off to Monbiot. But he is in the minority.
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Bob Brown's Greens remain opposed to nuclear energy, as they are to another source of clean power, hydro-electricity, because they don't like dams.
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But it is time for them to stand up and be counted on nuclear energy.
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If carbon dioxide emissions are as lethal as they claim, then surely the risks of nuclear power will pale by comparison.
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As the only form of baseload energy with virtually zero carbon emissions, nuclear is the only solution for those, like the Prime Minister, who claim a "low-carbon" world is necessary to prevent climate catastrophe. (Well, there is one other solution, which BlueScope Steel chairman Graham Kraehe suggested sarcastically this week while criticising Gillard's carbon tax at the National Press Club. We could stop exporting coal and wreck our economy.)
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The truth is, greens who oppose nuclear energy don't really care about carbon dioxide emissions or global warming. They know the hype is just a means to an end.
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They want us to reduce our consumption of power and change our way of life. They want to stall progress, and have everyone live like Wombles.
