Future Of Nuclear Power Faces Intense Scrutiny

The crisis could hurt the Australian uranium industry.

THE partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the United States in 1979 stopped the growth of the world's nuclear power industry in its tracks.
Then the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine presented the industry with another roadblock.

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But come the turn of the century, along came growing global concerns about carbon pollution and global warming.
The role that nuclear power, with its near-zero emissions, could play in replacing coal-fired power stations fuelled talk of a renaissance for the industry. Given the world's 442 existing reactors are to be joined by 65 new reactors currently under construction, talk of a renaissance was fair enough.
But with the world now watching Japan struggling to control nuclear reactions at two if its northern power plants damaged by Friday's earthquake and tsunami, questions about the industry's future are again being asked. Will the industry again go into a multi-decade retreat as it did after Three Mile Island?
While Australia is not a nuclear power producer, it is intimately involved in the nuclear power cycle thanks to its uranium exports. Among others that the local industry supplies is Tokyo Electric Power Co, the owner of the power plants that have given sceptics of the industry's safety performance new ammunition.
Australia's four uranium mines (Ranger, Olympic Dam, Four Mile and the new Honeymoon mine) supply about 20 per cent of the uranium consumed by the world's nuclear plants.
At their current combined annual production rate of more than 10,000 tonnes of uranium, more than 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gases that would otherwise be emitted each year by fossil-fuelled power stations is said to be avoided.
That ''contribution'' to fighting global warming is set to grow with the planned tripling of uranium production at BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam, and the development of its Yeelirrie deposit in Western Australia, also home to the proposed Cameco development of the Kintyre deposit.
Whether the crisis in Japan - an earthquake in July 2007 knocked out the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata prefecture - forces those plans to be altered remains to be seen.
What is known is that a combination of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the collapse of the Soviet Union drove uranium prices to a low of $US7 a pound in the early 1990s, a level below the cost of production. The price is currently $US66.50 a pound.
Beyond its role as a major supplier to overseas nuclear power stations, Australia itself has warmed to the prospect of pursuing a nuclear power path to help tackle global warming concerns.
Only last month former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke said the ALP should have a serious debate about nuclear power in Australia.
Mr Hawke's said it was a fact that ''if we want as clean as possible an environment, the generation of electricity by nuclear power stations is going to be an increasingly positive feature of that''. His comments backed a call by Resources Minister Martin Ferguson for a shift in the party's uranium policy.
The ALP's long-held opposition to uranium mining, and by extension the nuclear power industry, has been whittled away in recent years. The ALP effectively embraced uranium mining at its national conference in 2007. And last year Queensland Premier Anna Bligh called for a debate on nuclear power at this year's conference, even if uranium mining in the state is currently banned.