These are the main things that concern me with the viability of Australia adopting nuclear power, all good points brought up by >>39533
>* we ran out of 'cheap' yellowcake two decades ago– you now have to put more energy into refining Uranium ore than you'll get back out of it– it's essentially a battery now. This is the primary reason that Johnny Howard's attempt 10 years ago to 'have a nuclear discussion' petered out.
>* too many political fuckwits think 'we should enrich it ourselves! …and get a super-secret nuke programme going like the Israelis.. which'll make Indonesia do the same..
>* there is a global enrichment exchange market… but its customers can't make money from the process.
>(Enriching ore: "$N".. reprocessing 1st time: "$5N"… reprocessing 2nd time: "$20N" .. 3rd time "nah, it's waste, chuck it". And reprocessing is only viable when there's another customer/military who want the Plutonium)
>* the geological strata might be -relatively- stable (we still get earthquakes), but there's also the water system. Sinroc is only cost-effective for medium-level waste. A billion tonnes of low-level waste is impossible to hide from the environment.
Most countries that have adopted widespread nuclear power have adopted it because they've also got a weapons program on the side that needs feeding, otherwise it's expensive and somewhat uneconomical to set up. Plus there's the fact that our biggest neighbour, Indonesia, is a major middle-power. The idea of one of their major neighbours and competitors (us) having nukes would probably unsettle them enough to want their own, particularly when they're in a region of the world already surrounded by major powers that are nuclear neighbours (China, India).
And this doesn't even start on the issue of major aquifers…people always point out 'oh, Australia is tectonically stable, it's perfectly safe for burying waste under' while neglecting to remember that we've got a lot of gigantic aquifers underneath the continent, all of which our farmers rely on for irrigation in the more arid but otherwise productive parts of the country. Pic related, Meckering Earthquake in 1968, WA. WA is on one of the oldest bits of the continent (and therefore logically the most stable) yet this sort of thing can still happen.
If we're going to dump the waste anywhere, it's going to have to be somewhere that we don't care about it potentially hitting the water table in the event of a leak. When you're on the driest inhabited continent on Earth, places like that are few and far between.
If Greenpeace weren't faggots who'd prevented the opening of Yucca Mountain in America (which as a geologist, I think is probably one of the best places there is for a nuke waste dump without spending squillions of dollars digging holes in Antarctica or the seafloor) then I'd be fully behind the idea of Australian nuclear energy. Until we have a solid idea of what to do with the waste though…yeah nah.