some good points there. we can either retrain by choice, or wait for the industries (like tourism) to decline before we start.

As an engineer, I'm not scared by the word 'radiation' and having worked in the offshore oil and gas industry, I've got a pretty good understanding of how dangerous facilities can be made 'as safe as practical', but never perfectly safe.

i accept that countries with existing nuclear industries will probably have good reason to expand them. but the idea of starting a nuclear industry from scratch in this country when we already have a shortage of engineers is almost ridiculous.

because of the risks involved, the nuclear power industry is a highly specialised, highly regulated and highly monitored industry. after you've found and trained people to build a nuclear station, you need people to operate it and people to maintain it. then you need a whole new government agency with skills that don't exist in this country to regulate and monitor this new industry. even the materials and fabrication techniques needed in nuclear are specialised - you can't use existing engineering supply chains and standards for many components of a nuclear power station.

where on earth are we going to find people to run the universities and other training courses for all of this - there's enough demand for them already. there are no shortcuts for such a high risk industry and you have to maintain the same high level of maintenance and scrutiny from the day it is built till the day it is completely decommissioned otherwise you create an even bigger headache. that's true for both offshore oil and gas and nuclear in the UK - they have both created themselves some enormous decommissioning problems.

everytime something goes wrong in a nuclear plant, especially as it gets old, the amount of effort required to fix the problem becomes incredible. there are regular 'engineering success' stories in the UK of something breaking deep in the radioactive guts of a nuclear facility and the clever people who designed, tested and built robotics or other fancy solutions for their unique problem, each time costing a lot of time, money and resources.

if something breaks on a renewable energy plant, the consequences are pretty small. thus you don't need to monitor or regulate the industry as highly and the skills required are generic - welding, construction, fabrication etc. manufacture standard bits in the factory, take them to site, bolt them together etc - it is almost that simple. the second half of a concentrating solar power plant is steam turbines, which we already have a worldwide industry focussed on.

I have no problem with France continuing to run their nuclear reactors given the experience and skills they have. But we simply do not have enough engineers to be able to develop a new and highly specialised, high risk industry in this country. That is why I think nuclear is the wrong approach in Australia.

So we will need molten salt - but as thermal energy storage for concentrating solar power plants rather than nuclear energy reactors! :-)

We have other options better suited to our social, geographic and technical environment.