Sunday, 15 April, 2007

ABC News online

Uranium has been a hot topic of late, but one environmental engineer believes nuclear energy does not have a justifiable place in Australia's future.

Labor will be discussing whether to abandon its long held ban on new uranium mines this weekend at the ALP's national conference, while Prime Minister John Howard has made it clear he believes nuclear power is part of the solution to Australia's future energy needs.

But Monash University's Dr Gavin Mudd, an environmental engineer who specialises in the mining sector, believes nuclear energy, which currently supplies around 17 per cent of the world's energy needs, will not have a significantly bigger role in the future.

"I think there's alternatives such as renewable technologies, there's solar thermal, there's biomass, there's now photovoltaics, there's wind," he said.

"There's a whole range of technologies combined with energy efficiency which can supply peak demands and which can meet our energy needs."

Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said last year that almost 30 new nuclear power reactors are being constructed in 11 countries including China, India, Russia and Finland, and the recently released Ziggy Switkowski report had a full page on plans for new reactors in Asia.

But Dr Mudd says the reactors being built now are replacing those that are closing down.

"Over the same time frame, a lot of reactors are going to be decommissioned in the West. There were six reactors in the West that were decommissioned on December 31, including four in the UK," he said.

"I think ultimately, they're not building new reactors in the West, they're building reactors in sort of centrally-planned economies, and the one new reactor that they've ordered in the West over the last several years in Finland is significantly behind budget and also behind time."

"I think there's real issues there that over the same time frame of which they're supposedly going to expand nuclear power, a lot of the existing ageing reactors will also be decommissioned."

Dr Mudd says the 57 per cent rise in uranium prices is puzzling.

"I don't think anyone I've seen has a good answer for why the uranium price has hit the sort of magnitude that it has," he said.

"A lot of mining industry analysts are also asking about this bubble at the moment, about what is causing this price. I don't think anyone ever predicted the price would go this high."