The importance of nuclear energy for Australia.(Science)

THE COMMONWEALTH government is to be complimented on its recently released energy policy document. It is pragmatic and follows the line of informed realism in its advocacy for the continuing use of Australia's conventional fuels. It is a challenge to radical greens and coercive utopian alternative energy enthusiasts to re-examine the technical and fiscal bases of their technologies and to cease the worship of a flawed Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, is an elegant city blending in a pristine environment with hills, streams, pine forests and manicured gardens and parklands. Here the buildings, shrines, rocks and paths exhibit the responsible environmental stewardship of human beings over many centuries.

Light and air-conditioning for the modern International Convention Centre is obtained from an electricity grid supplied partly from a network of fifty-four nuclear power stations. The greenhouse gas emissions saved by the use of this network and the uranium fuel cycle is around 287,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. This is about the same as Australia's total emission.

A significant amount of the uranium fuel used in Japan comes from Australia. In fact, for every twenty-five tonnes of uranium exported from South Australian and Northern Territory mines, Japan averts around one million tonnes of carbon dioxide emission.

The desirable environmental impact of nuclear energy in respect of the greenhouse gas problem is so great that it is difficult to envisage the eventual binding observance of the Kyoto Protocol without a global acceptance of nuclear technology in national energy policies. It is for this reason that a comprehensive Australian energy policy must not neglect the domestic use of nuclear power.

Delegates from the developed countries attending Kyoto understood that behind the alarming growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the mechanism of population growth and energy usage in the developing countries. The United Nations anticipates that the present world population of 5.5 billion will rise to 8.5 billion by the year 2025. Of this increase some 2.8 billion will be in developing countries which already account for 75 per cent of the world's population. About this time it is estimated that China's greenhouse emission will be around four times greater than that of all industrialised countries together in 1990!

It is likely that even with a modest growth in its economy, by 2005 China's annual demand on primary energy will be equivalent to 1.5 billion tonnes of standard coal and 1400 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Its present carbon dioxide emission per unit of GNP is around 6000 tonnes per US dollar one of the worst in the world. And China is one of the countries which will not sign the Kyoto Protocol.