'NO NUKES for the Valley’ is the declaration on the side of a trailer being driven across the Monash electorate in an effort to raise awareness about the negative impacts of nuclear energy.
Loy Yang power station is coal fired but has been proposed as one of seven sites on which to build a nuclear power station in a proposal made by the Coalition, if elected.
John Ellery and Ken Hardisty from the Communications Workers Union are the pair towing the trailer, which also features Mr Burns - an evil nuclear power plant owner from The Simpsons cartoon.
Yesterday the pair drove through Wonthaggi, Korumburra and Leongatha, looping up and down the main streets, past pre polling stations and stopping to give out bumper stickers to voters.
“It's making voters aware of the issue. The issue hasn't gone away, and they need to consider that when they vote,” said Mr Ellery, who was spreading the message across to Bairnsdale today.
John and Ken have no political affiliation and are acting in response both to community concerns around nuclear power and the dangers being highlighted by experts about having a nuclear power station close to a large population.
Particular concerns include safety issues, in regard to keeping a power station going to avoid a meltdown, health issues, a lack of jobs for locals, only being able to provide about four percent of Australia's energy requirements and using what has been dubbed as ‘yesterday’s technology’.
“Worldwide, it's gone from 20% nuclear generation down to 9%. So, the rest of the world is now stepping away from it. When you look statistically at the other power stations across the world, within the close proximity of those stations, they say, within two decades there's an extremely high number of birth defects to children. There's cancer, ongoing cancer associated just to the background radiation of the people living within those areas,” explained Ken.
Ken also mentioned that a UK study demonstrated that property values within an 80-kilometer radius of a nuclear power station generally dropped, in the first instance, by 20%.
“There is no actual justification for using nuclear compared to renewables. Also, what you look at in the costing, when they say that the costings have gone from trillions down to billions with the Dutton plan, those costings don't take into consideration the cost of getting water, the cost to the communities, the cost of all the infrastructure you need, mine rehabilitation in places where this infrastructure is,” explained John.
“The pretext of the seven power stations that they're saying they're going to build, is that they'll build them in a place where they can plug them into the grid. The actual grid in the valley with the Delburn Wind Farm generation that's going in, it's enough that the grid is actually full. There's no capacity in the grid to take on a nuclear power station. So, that's just an absolute fallacy.”
While voting for the Federal Election wraps up this Saturday, John and Ken believe the issue won't go away.
“Particularly given there's a lot of vested interests wanting to pursue this nuclear madness, and so we suspect that it’ll keep on going, and certainly a lot of the small community groups who are opposed to nuclear power will continue their struggle,” John said.