The only safe
nuclear reaction
is to say no!

Sure they are scruffy and unemployed. But they've peddled their bicycles all the way from Melbourne to join the protest at Jabiluka.
Lots of people regard uranium mining and the nuclear fuel cycle as a dodgy proposition - a poor choice of technology to follow on from our massive depletion of fossil fuels this century. Others see nuclear energy as desirable or at least inevitable.
One thing is for sure. There are legitimate concerns surrounding the mining and export of uranium. No other form of mining has attracted so many protests from so many people for so many years.
It is too easy to write-off the Jabiluka demonstration as just a bunch of no-hoper, unemployable greenies protesting for a living.
Perhaps it's true that many of the protesters are unemployed. A lot of them certainly don't look like representatives of the wider community.
But it is because of their unemployment, or between-employment, that they're able to be there and many others are not.
If all the people in full-time employment, or with children or other responsibilities, who oppose uranium mining were able to get up to Jabiluka, you would not even notice a few greenies on bikes. They would be swallowed up in the crowd.
The mining of uranium raises many questions about the direction of Australia's economic priorities. Mines in national parks, or culturally and environmentally sensitive parts of the country seem, for many people, to be completely unnecessary.
We need continuing development for our economic well-being but not if the cost outweighs the benefits.
Jabiluka will not create many jobs.
The uranium ore it produces will not earn the country much in the way of royalties.
We're not talking bulk-tonnage here. There will be no superships packed to the deck like iron ore or coal carriers. After all the digging, crushing, refining and so on they'll end up with a whole stack of drums of 'yellow cake'.
It is horrible stuff. You wouldn't want it to fall off the back of the truck in your street. It's not as bad though compared to how deadly it becomes as it is refined on its way to becoming compressed fuel rods.
It might be timely to recap on how nuclear power is made.
Uranium atoms are unstable and are in a continual state of unrest. Spread widely apart, as they occur naturally, they pose little threat to living creatures. But back in the lab of Einstein & Co., minds far greater than ours were ticking away.
"What if we make the uranium so concentrated, a chain reaction starts and the whole lot goes ballistic?"
Then you have the atomic bomb. Grab a handful of full strength uranium in each hand and clap 'em together.
"BOOM"! One flash and you're ash.
Nuclear power reactors use controlled nuclear fission to allow the uranium to become really cheesed off and deadly hot without actually blowing up. The heat is used to make steam which spins a turbine attached to a generator and "hey presto", flick-of-the-switch civilisation is preserved.
Of course every now and again you get a meltdown and the reactor become a concrete shrine for future generations to deal with.
Essentially the whole nuclear fuel industry is a poxy business. Uranium ore goes in at one end and highly radioactive plutonium, very nasty stuff, comes out at the other end.
Someone has to mind this plutonium for thousands of years. They can't lose any of it (it might be used by some cretin to make nuclear bombs), they can't become exposed to it (terrible cancers are likely) and it must be absolutely isolated from the environment (it mustn't melt its way down into the ground or leach into the soil and get into the water table).
Thousands of years in 'Security Self Storage'. Who pays for that? Our children of course - several hundred generations of them!
"Thankyou dad, thanks mom; I hope that electric toothbrush you needed way back in the 20th and 21st centuries brought you joy. Coz it's no fun looking after your crappy waste."
There are environmentalists overseas who believe that the countries producing the uranium should, as part of the deal, take back and 'guard' the waste.
In a 'full-steam-ahead' nuclear future, when there's a nuke on every block, especially to our north where our neighbours will need all the power they can get, Australia might look just the ticket for a waste dump.
Our coal will be gone, iron ore just a trickle, top soil blowing around the stumpy over-salinated trees and not a bank or a post office left for thousands upon thousand of square kilometres.
What a great dump it'll be.