beyond nuclear | scott ludlam

Slow Burn

Uranium investors and nuclear advocates in Australia are hopeful that life has returned to normal. Day by day, Fukushima is fading from the headlines, and every other week it seems the uranium industry holds a conference to provide mutual reassurance that the “sideshow” in Japan, as one uranium executive put it, will not derail the industry’s ambitious expansion plans. As the AUSIMM Conference program earnestly notes “Certainly, the magnitude of the natural disasters in Japan, Australia and New Zealand remind us of the power of Nature. Natural events such as these, while so unfortunate and so tragic in their

6 June 2011

An open letter to uranium investors

Dear potential investor, As you consider the wide range of places to put your hard earned cash as the Australian economy stages its tentative recovery, there are a couple of things to keep in mind about the uranium boom.

12 October 2010

What future for nuclear?

Judging from the extraordinary outpouring of editorial anguish over the Australian Greens’ cautionary uranium mining policies, it seems we might have hit a nerve. Ranging from simple name calling to paranoid hysteria, one thing missing has been any analysis – any at all – of why we believe the nuclear industry should be phased out.

17 September 2010

Government lights fuse on radwaste campaign

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed ‘solution’ to our sixty year radioactive waste legacy has lit the fuse on a major confrontation between the Australian Government and everyone else.

16 April 2010

Going Nuclear? What’s so scary?

Isn’t it interesting that anyone who asks where the Liberal Party’s nuclear power stations will be constructed, is immediately accused of running a scare campaign?

8 December 2009

A fortnight in the red room

The September sittings opened and closed with unplanned symmetry. Opened with a line in the desert sand drawn by Aboriginal elders refusing any further compromise with the uranium miners. Closed with the tabling of a meticulous two hundred page manifesto for the rapid abolition of nuclear weapons, signed by the ALP, the Greens and the Coalition.

25 September 2009

Zero Nuclear Weapons

August 6th is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. I’ve just spent four days in a city where the memories are not only fresh, but engraved in stone, protected in world heritage-listed monuments, and taught urgently to young and old, local and foreign alike. The Japanese have a word for the survivors of the twin atomic attacks on August 6 and 9, 1945. They call them Hibakusha, those for whom nuclear weapons signify something other than peace marches.

6 August 2009

Despair and Defiance

spend a couple of hours with the people responsible for the health and integrity of country threatened by a radioactive waste dump and the issue takes on a crystal clarity. this written in a rage on the way back to canberra from darwin…

12 June 2009

Orizuru: Peace Ambassadors and Spinifex Hills

The sky is white today. The sea has turned slate grey, and the deep swells rocking the Mona Lisa slowly from side to side are ripped with white foam. We have been out of sight of land for only two days since leaving behind the lonely outflung arms of Aotearoa, and our world has contracted to the swaying confines of this long white liner. Some time around sunrise tomorrow the coastline of New South Wales will come into view and my brief sojourn with the Peace Boat will be over.

10 February 2009