In the wake of the release Professor Garnaut's draft report, Stateline WA ran a well timed piece in which I was interviewed on the nuclear industry's unsightly scramble for a place at the climate change table. The piece used clips from ‘Climate of Hope', a film I produced last year that reviews the nuclear fuel chain and exposes the nuclear industry's reliance on fossil fuels. The renewable energy stats I quoted in the film are already out of date - the wind industry installed ten times more capacity worldwide than nuclear power in 2007.

In the United States, the supposed source of inspiration for the resurgence in nuclear reactors, no new nuclear construction was initiated in 2007, though one reactor was restarted after a 22-year shutdown, and construction resumed on a reactor that had been stalled since 1988. According to US nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio, Wall Street has yet to be sold on new nuclear investments in the United States. Moody's, a credit rating agency, has stated that it "believes that many of the current expectations regarding new nuclear generation are overly ambitious," raising questions about the industry's cost estimates and its schedule for bringing the next U.S. nuclear reactor online. Moody's concerns seem well placed. By the end of 2007, new nuclear plant cost estimates for identical Westinghouse-designed nuclear plants had soared, more than doubling to $12-18 billion

In a world facing dangerous climate change, we simply can't afford the fossil/nuclear habit, especially when we have the know-how and technology to provide long term clean energy and transport in our cities and regions.