17 September 2024

The risks of nuclear power

Michael Edesess questions the “mistaken conventional wisdom about nuclear energy”, arguing that nuclear is pretty safe. In 2021, Thomas Wellock, historian of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, produced Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, the sixth in a series of authorised volumes. The historian/journalist Daniel Ford, reviewing Wellock’s work, writes: “In 1982, I wrote… about the risk of another major accident following the one at Three Mile Island… The numbers suggested that another major nuclear accident would come due in about three years. The Chernobyl disaster occurred roughly on schedule, four years later, in 1986....

3 September 2024

Deaths in Gaza

The Australian Government, and the parliament as a whole, has failed to loudly and clearly condemn the “indiscriminate retaliatory behaviour of the Israel Defence Force”. It has also “failed to make any statement..about the deaths of 40,000 Palestinians”. A recent study reported in The Lancet did not arrive at a precise figure for Gaza, but estimates “around 186,000 deaths were attributable to Israeli actions since October 2023, and “most of these were not attributable to bombardment or execution”. The Lancet authors based their figures on indirect deaths observed in other conflict zones: “In recent conflicts, such indirect...