Nuclear profits could cost us dear - On Line Opinion - 7/4/2006: "Let�s not have any more deception. The deal between the Federal Government and the Chinese Government of Premier Wen Jiabao on uranium sales reveals that John Howard's crusade for democracy stops at China's border.
While the prime minister talks up global security and argues that the Iraqis must be supported in their bid for democracy, it seems Australia should be realistic and turn a blind eye to repression of human and political rights and the ambitions of a totalitarian nuclear weapons state if the price for uranium is right.
Coalition MPs, ably assisted by Labor's resources spokesman Martin Ferguson, are salivating at the prospect of driving the minerals boom with uranium sales to China. But they know that the Australian community is worried about weapons and waste.
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We have not forgotten the vicious murder of pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square of 1989. Nor do Australians take lightly the threat made by the Chinese dictatorship that it would have no reservations about using nuclear weapons if the US intervened in any dispute over Taiwan.
Then there is climate change. Conveniently, those who until last year denied that climate change was happening now say that climate change is so severe that nuclear energy is the answer and, by the way, Australia has the uranium.
It would be a neat solution to public resistance to selling uranium to a nuclear weapons state if it had any merit, but it is wrong. The Greens have been saying for almost two decades that climate change is real and urgent. But nuclear power is not the answer. It is too slow, too expensive and too dangerous, and generates waste with no safe disposal. Renewable energy wins on all counts: speed, cost, safety and effectiveness.
The government has been at pains to convince the public that "