The following table is from today's article in the Australian summarising the Switkowski report. It compares the safety record of various electricity generation industries, but drastically skews the results in favour of nuclear. For example, the figure for coal includes the entire industry, which presumably includes mining where a lot of accidents have traditionally occured (and still do in many parts of the world). The deaths from nuclear power only include Chernobyl, and only include staff that died within four months. Are we to believe that there has not been a single death anywhere in the world from mining, refining and transporting uranium? The article mentions that 5000 more people may die prematurely as a result of Chernobyl alone, which would make it more dangerous than most of the other technologies, but conveniently leaves any reasonable statistic out of the table. For other industries, both figures are given where the statistics could be interpretted differently. See the 'fine print' at the bottom for more info.

               no. accidents  direct deaths  direct deaths per GWe/year
Coal          1221             25107             0.876
Oil              397              20853             0.436
Coal*          177               7090             0.690          
Natural gas  125               1978             0.093
LPG             105               3921             3.536  
Hydro            11             29938             4.265
Hydro**        10               3938             0.561
Nuclear           1                   31***       0.006

*excludes China
**excludes the Banqiao dam accident
***only includes Chernobyl staff who died within 4 months

Nuclear power should be the last resort, not the first. If after several years of massive research and investment in solar/wind/tidal power it is truly discovered that these are unsuitable then perhaps we might move towards nuclear.

Of course no such discovery will be made. The mining and oil companies know this full well and are doing everything in their power to suppress renewable technology both in the laboratory and the media.

The fact that without checking out the facts the Lying Rodent went straight to nuclear goes to show his political cowardice, intellectual laziness and irrevocably reactionary cast of thought.

If any of you are thinking of voting for him next election I have a profound and simple message for you.

Don't.

Switkowski has no right being lazy in his report.  I remember looking up figures a few months back and there were so many accidents in Japan at their nuclear processing plants.  Switkowski would have been paid possibly a $1 million or more to mislead us and it's disgusting the way this government pays and employs their mates to get the results they want to deceive the people.

How much are our politicians being paid by the conglomerates behind the proposed NP plants?

I saw an interesting doco on SBS Monday night. I think it put the Chernobyl deaths at 52 - mostly from the cleanup crew, and a few thyroid cancers in children. Apparently there was radioactive iodine fallout which ended up in the food chain and in the cows milk, then in the thyroid glands of children. I might have some of those details wrong though.

The big point was that apart from that there was no measurable increase in cancer among the general population. Before Chernobyl, most of our knowledge was based on the aftermath of the bombs in Japan. Extrapolating from that to low doses they still expected a significant increase in cancer rates from Chernobyl, but it didn't happen. Maybe there is some kind of threshhold below which our bodies can deal with the radiation, but if you go above that then the cancer rate skyrockets.

You get brain damaged kids anywhere, and in Russia that passes for standard health care for the mentally ill.

Got any contact details for him? PM me if you do.

Yep, thanks for that.

Enviro - maybe on paper Ziggy sounds like the best man for the job of compiling a Nuclear Report for the Howard government - but morally he isn't.  He is a capitalist and buddy of Howards for a start.

He is biased - that's obvious and his wages are paid by this Federal Government.  He has spent years running multicorporations and it's quite apparent where his interests lie.

Yes he can compile a feasible enough sounding nuclear report to impress his bosses - but it doesn't mean that he has been  honest.