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Climate change might be bad news on many fronts, but in Australia it has revived the flagging fortunes of one former outsider of the energy sector ‑ nuclear.
The uranium industry and its supporters are marketing nuclear energy as the only way to tackle climate change and preserve the economy.
As Erica Vowles reports, concern over how to reduce Australia's high rate of CO2 emissions have revived an idea that many thought was dead and buried.
“When it comes to the nuclear fuel cycle and climate change, we've come from a position where a year ago you couldn't have a discussion about the nuclear fuel cycle in Australia constructively. It was literally a toxic subject. Where as today people are prepared to engage, argue and offer alternative views but it is a discussion that is more fact based.”
Dr Ziggy Switkowski headed a government requested inquiry into nuclear energy for Australia.
A nuclear scientist himself, he believes it's a cleaner alternative to fossil fuel, because it produces much less green house gases than coal- generated energy.
It will therefore combat climate change and keep the furnaces of the economy burning.
Ian Hore Lacy, the head of communications for the World Nuclear Association insists massive reductions in CO2 emissions are achievable.
“Looking at the whole fuel cycle not just the reactor itself which is zero, it emits only about two percent of the CO2 emissions from the coal fired operation and that's a big difference. If it's a 1000 megawatt you're talking about the nuclear option saving you about seven million tones of CO2 per year.”
He says that when comparing coal and nuclear power plants, a 98 percent reduction in CO2 emissions is possible.
That includes the amount of pollution generated by digging the uranium out of the ground and moving it to the power plant.
But Steve Campbell at Greenpeace says Ian is not seeing the full picture.
“Unfortunately those figures don't stack up. The fuel cycle, the mining of uranium, the enrichment, the transportation, the burning of the fuel and then the management of the waste, for centuries, is far more than two percent of what is emitted from a coal-fired powered station. Its probably much more like 50 percent.”
And there are other vital issues he says that are being ignored.
“The costs to build new nuclear power reactors are huge and the timelines are very bad and it takes decades to get approvals and to get them built and so on when we need to be acting much faster than that. And we need to be investing far more in energy efficiency and renewable energy.”
Surveys show the Australian public is broadly against nuclear power plants.
Safety concerns mean no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back-yard.
And then there is the unsolved waste question.
“The nuclear industry still hasn’t discovered, or decided or figured out what to do with waste and so that’s a huge issue.”
But Ian Hore Lacy insists the nuclear industry has been dealing with these problems for 50 years.
He argues that the technology exists to safety bury the waste underground.
However the method has not been used anywhere in the world.
But Ian Hore Lacy still maintains that with the immediate and serious impact of global warming, nuclear energy must be taken seriously.
Electricity accounts for close to 40 percent of Australia's green house gas emissions.
While Greenpeace’s Steven Campbell admits that going nuclear could see Australia could achieve a 20 percent reduction in the output of CO2, he remains unconvinced.
“The biggest problem now is that really, we have about 10 years to react, globally to the problem of global warming. We need to start to bring down our emissions very very rapidly. It this country, we are never going to get a nuclear reactor built for 15 - 20 years. And we need to start taking the actions we can take now in order to bring our emissions and that means efficiency and renewable energy. Our studies show that in Australia we could get 20 percent reductions in emissions just by implementing stringent efficiency standards.”
