For one it wasn't an impressive report as it was full of negatives. The media is the one that is pulling the positives out and twisting the negatives around to favor Howard.

Yes, he has spent years running, successfully, multicorporations and this only highlights his uncanny ability to achieve. Don't forget, running a country is like running a business. People will say that businesses forget about the people but this is not true, a successful business includes the people and looks after their staff, especially in a country where it is hard to find good staff with low unemployment figures and high non english speaking immigration.

Howards not aloud to have any friends?

It's strange how the media attacked him in Telstra. Ziggy focused on Research within Telstra which was an investment for Telstra in competition with privatisation of the communications sector.

Yes, he was paying shareholders out of anticipated massive profits which are now starting to come to light. He kept Telstra competitive and leaders in the Mobile and Broadband areas. If Telstra was doing so bad do you think they would have had Telstra 3 share listings?

The media ruthlessly got behind the attack on Ziggy the same way they tarnish him by making out that he is 100% behind the feasability of Nuclear Energy in Australia. I wonder what he did to earn the bashing from the media? Yes, his friend Howard is probably his protector but that is how the elite work.

We tend to run in circles made up of classes. Most of Howards friends would be influential people, that's the world we live in. It's who you know not what you know... and the same be said of Ziggy.

Can you really imagine Howard or Ziggy having a brickies labourer over for dinner and a chat on nuclear physics or economics etc?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/PM-denies-conspiracy-over-nuke-reactor/2007/02/28/1172338635234.html

The government denies there is anything sinister about the fact it launched a review into the pros and cons of nuclear power around the same time a Liberal powerbroker set up a nuclear energy company.

Prime Minister John Howard admitted in parliament to knowing that former Liberal Party treasurer Ron Walker was setting up the company, which was registered just days before the establishment of the nuclear taskforce.

Mr Howard refused to elaborate on the issue on Tuesday night as he headed into a function organised by the Menzies Research Centre.

Mr Walker and fellow businessmen Robert Champion de Crespigny and Hugh Morgan registered Australian Nuclear Energy (ANE) Pty Ltd on June 1 last year, five days before Mr Howard set up his prime ministerial taskforce.

ANE was forced to deny newspaper reports that it was planning to build Australia's first nuclear power station in either Victoria or South Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Nuclear-power-a-cleaner-energy-source/2007/02/28/1172338630687.html

If Australians were serious about tackling global warming then embracing nuclear power was a logical next step, the man who headed the government's nuclear taskforce said.

Prime Minister John Howard admitted on Tuesday knowing that Liberal powerbroker Ron Walker was setting up a nuclear energy company around the same time he announced the taskforce, headed by former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski.

"If as the direction of the mood is at the moment and we decide that global warming is a serious international and local matter and we in Australia are going to do something about it and therefore progressively deploy cleaner and cleaner source sources of energy ... then it's a very small step to accept there are very few other alternative for clean energy generation," he said.

"At the top of the list is nuclear."

What else are you going to use for base load power?

Of course technologies are going to operate side by side. It not just flipping a switch.

How important is global warming to you. All generation of power will have a detrimental effect on the environment directly and indirectly and all the environmental inputs and outputs need to be weighed up

Nuclear is a proven base load power source and the waste products are more easily sequestered than our current power source

/scary music "We haven't got much time"

Neither of those has been commercially tested for supplying the base load power requirements of major cities, that's not saying they couldn't be eventually, but at this point in time nuclear is our best option for supply and saving the world from global warming given the time frame to avert disaster.

It goes against the grain of the traditional environmentalist because anti-nukes has been their form of revenue over some of the last 30 years, but with the realisation that pumping gases from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere has a profound buildup effect, the best we can do is to get more bang for our buck while shrinking and containing the waste product.

Renewable energies are capable of supplying base load power.
Google "Pinnacle battery", yet another novel Aussie invention that has mostly been lost/stolen.

There are also solar towers, a town called whitecliffs in west NSW has has only solar power for well over a decade. More reliably than city power.
Hot rocks is used overseas reliably.

The Coal industry has a LOT of political leverage.

By focussing on assisting the current system we have with renewables, I believe that would be ample.



In the real world though, I see nuclear power with assistance from renewables eventually.
Which is a pity.

Not too mention the detrimental environmental aspects of battery manufacture and disposal...

Hi IQSRLOW,

Flow batteries last pretty much forever. They are used with a wind mill plant in Tassie.

Flow batteries are also scaleable. ie add more fluid resevoirs for more capacity to store more electrical energy .

The aussie company (Pinnacle) got caught up with a canadian company.  
Canada has no sembalance of company law.  They are pirates.
Possibly the worst deal I have ever seen an aussie  company make. They are idiots.