Foremost among these is labour – but it is not the over-blown argument of labour cost but labour volume. At least Messel had the excuse of being a physicist, whereas Garnaut should understand that there are limitations other than energy holding back our industrial potential. Here we have a forerunner to Ross Garnaut’s economic superpower argument but based on using nuclear power as the cheap source for a massive industrial enterprise rather than sun and wind. Let us make sure that our children’s children will not be left with just holes in the ground – where Rum Jungle and Radium Hill once stood – and nothing to show for it.” The return, whether it be in pounds or dollars, will be negligible compared to the national budget and will probably do little to build Australia into a great nation. “Uranium is not just another mineral to be exported. Australians have yet to realise that in their uranium resources in nuclear energy – they may have the means at their disposal for making their nation another Canada or America of the southern hemisphere. “Unfortunately, Australians have not realised what nuclear power can mean to this country and are rapidly falling in with the deplorable view that in uranium we have a handy exportable mineral for which there exists a very ready dollar market overseas. Having noted that uranium would become a highly prized commodity and that Australia was likely to be one of the top three producers in the (Western) world, he opines: Messel’s following paragraphs are somewhat more prescient. These short paragraphs offer the conclusion that fossil fuels would have dwindled to a negligible amount by 2053 and that solar power would not be viable for hundreds of years. “Thus, in spite of the fact that nuclear energy has a number of disadvantages, such as the inherent danger of radioactivity, the difficulty of disposing of radioactive wastes, it seems that the world will – whether it likes it or not – be forced to turn more and more to nuclear energy as its major source of power.” This source of power will probably be tapped after the world’s mineable uranium resources have been depleted. The utilisation of solar energy is not as easy as many people have been lead to believe and is not likely to play a major role in supplying power for many hundreds of years. “There is little or no hope that power from wind, tides and waterfalls will take over any large fraction of our power requirements. Putnam reported that the complete world coal reserves will probably dwindle to a negligible amount within 100 years and that the oil and gas reserves will disappear in about one half of that time. The results of this survey contain the answer to the above question. Palmer Putnam has recently made a survey of world fuel reserves for the Materials Policy Commission of the U.S.A. “Before discussing the economics of nuclear power for industry, it is perhaps worthwhile to see why, in a general way, so many countries of the world are interested in nuclear energy as a source of power. Unfortunately, its opening paragraphs have not, as the saying goes, aged well. In 1953, a mere eleven years later, the newly-appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney, Harry Messel, penned a paper Nuclear Power for Australian Industry (The Australian Quarterly, vol. This resulted in the construction of the first fission reactor in 1942, developed only to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The study of nuclear reactions advanced rapidly after scientists, including Einstein, persuaded the US to develop a nuclear weapon before Germany did. The history of the nuclear industry in Australia is littered with badges. Pioneers in atomic physics, including Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, believed harnessing this power for practical purposes in the near future was unlikely. The prospect of nuclear power should be dubbed ‘The Great Distraction.’* A look at one historical text has lessons for us all in making technology predictions.Īlbert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 dates from his miraculous year of 1905, in which he published four groundbreaking papers.ĭespite its importance in calculating the energy released from nuclear reactions, scientists only realised the prospect of these reactions in the 1930s with the work of Rutherford and Chadwick.
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