While debate in Australia and around the world continues to grow on how best to address the vital issue of climate change, the nuclear industry has advocated that nuclear power may be a necessity. Far from being a solution however, MAPW believes that nuclear power will generate numerous additional problems to global security and human survival.

The arguments against nuclear power are many, but in brief:

• There exists a strong nexus between the use of uranium for civil purposes, like nuclear power, and those for military purposes. Because of this link, MAPW has long opposed the design, construction and commissioning of nuclear power stations, enrichment and reprocessing plants, and waste storage and disposal facilities anywhere in Australia.
• The health effects of nuclear power have not been adequately investigated across the world.
• Nuclear power is one of the most expensive means of generating electricity.
• Nuclear power is one of the most protected and heavily-subsidised industries in the world, and many cost estimates from proponents fail to take these into account. In the mid-1990s, governments worldwide were subsidising fossil fuels and nuclear power to the tune of US$250-300 billion per annum. Global subsidies for conventional (fossil fuel and nuclear) energy remain many magnitudes higher than those for more benign alternatives such as efficiency and renewables.
• Nuclear power has a high dependence on fossil fuels. Throughout the exploration and mining phases, the milling and processingthe transporting of processed ore, the building of reactors, the global movement of spent and treated fuel rods, the passage of nuclear wastes (with nowhere to go), and the final decommissioning of reactors past their use-by date, fossile fuels are extensively used.

Essential reading:

• An Illusion of Protection: the unavoidable limitations of safeguards on nuclear materials and the export of uranium to China - report from MAPW and the Australian Conservation Foundation, 2006
• MAPW policy on nuclear power and uranium mining, 1987 
• Nuclear power: no solution to climate change - 2006 report from Friends of the Earth, MAPW et al.