No I wont Geoff, because I fear I will be disadvantaged or targeted by climate change bigots, determined to make me pay in some way for speaking my mind. This debate has given me no confidence at all that I can rely on those on the Proponent side to respect the right of others to hold their own opinions. Just look at the behaviour of Ian and Adam, and to some extent yourself in expressing slurs against your detractors.

Geoff, I have been very honest, I made a single account and made it blatantly obvious is was me when i posted to demonstrate my point which you had dismissed. I invited the moderators to delete said account afterwards. According to u (which I don't really believe but hey) our say has been investigating he possibilities of fake accounts in which case I accomplished my goal. I am tired of your uninformed and self righteous attitude, you make statements about how 'even a simple reader or uranium chemistry' and yet you have shown many times at u have never read more widely than nuclearfreeplanet.org I meanwhile have written a number of papers examining the causes and effects, particular health related issues, of Chernobyl whilst at uni and received high distinctions for each of them.

I was not aware GetUp! had decided to recommend Daniel Wilson's question, can you provide a link Bob L the anonymous one? Will you reveal your true identity before the voting ends?

Thanks to all those proud and sensible Australians who have asked righteous questions for the Age to put to our government, and particularly here, those questioning the blatant hypocrisy of the governement in condemning CO2 produced in Australia while condoning CO2 produced elsewhere. Please contnue to give this question your full support as I have done. We have done well and even if the proponents and GetUp manage to get Daniel Wilsons attempt to chill free speech over this far more worthy question we will still have made our point to the Age that they should report on the other side of the debate, this is people power in action - Thank you all

Oh, and Geoff not one of the GetUp crowd currently trying to crowd out critics have voted more than once, not one of them right?

Russell, you have used bogus accounts to boost your votes - how many exactly? Don't take your readers to be fools. They know plutonium is evil. Even a simple reading of Uranium chemistry would immediately show just how easily Uranium fluorides are vapourized out of a mixture. Nuclear is dead, it's just a question of how and where to bury it. Harry's question must surely sink out of the top 10 in the remaining hours.

No Geoff, you are the one who is wrong. Deploying thorium reactors will decrease, not increase risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. Kick-starting these reactors with plutonium can consume existing stocks of that weapons-capable material. Using thorium fuel reduces the need for U-235 enrichment plants, which can make weapons material as well as power reactor fuel. True, Thorium reactors do produce U-232 and U-233 but they do not produce plutonium isotopes, which represent the greatest proliferation risk, nor do they require them for use. As you say, thorium cannot initiate a nuclear chain reaction but once it has been initiated requires no further input of uranium or plutonium material to continue. Furthermore with regards to uranium production "A commercial reactor will make just enough uranium to sustain power generation. Diverting any would stop the reactor, alerting authorities to a breach. Certainly terrorists could not steal uranium-233 dissolved in a molten salt solution along with lethally radioactive fission products inside a sealed reactor....Skilled engineers would need to modify the radioactive reactor’s fluorination equipment to separate uranium from the fuel salt. U-233 produced in an LFTR is a poor choice for nuclear weapons because the neutrons that produce U-233 also produces 0.13 percent contaminating U-232, whose decay products emit 2.6 mega-electron volt, penetrating gamma radiation. That would be hazardous to weapons builders and obvious to detection monitors." (hargraves and Moir, 2010, Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactor, American Scientist).

Wrong again Bob. Thorium is a great strategic threat. Read why: U-233 is fissile, like U-235 -- it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – ‘so these are really U-233 reactors,’ This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).

Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium’s superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. But thorium-232 is "fertile". When thorium-232 is blended with a fissile material such as plutonium, that blend (called MOX fuel) can be used to run a nuclear reactor. It's the plutonium that keeps the chain reaction going. And while that is happening, the thorium-232 atoms absorb neutrons and are changed into uranium-233 (U-233) atoms. Now U-233 is a man-made isotope of uranium; it does not exist in nature. And U-233 is fissile, like U-235 -- it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. So thorium-232 "breeds" the man-made fissile material U-233, in much the same way that U-238 "breeds" the man-made fissile material plutonium. Uranium-233 is a severe proliferation hazard because (1) it is an immediately weapons-usable material with a smaller critical mass than pure U-235, (2) it is 100% enriched when produced in a thorium matrix and therefore immediately weapons-usable. The United States first tested U-233 as part of a bomb core in Operation Teapot in 1955. The idea behind "thorium fuel" is to reprocess the irradiated thorium-plutonium blend to extract the uranium-233, then made a new blend of thorium-and-uranium-233, run it through the reactor, thereby producing even more U-233, reprocess that spent fuel again, and continue in this way as long as possible. The idea of using thorium for reactors is an old one. It has not been adopted before now because it poses very serious proliferation problems. It presupposes reprocessing of irradiated fuel -- first to get the plutonium needed to start the process going, then to get the uranium-233 which allows the process to continue. Without reprocessing, and the handling of immediately weapons-usable materials such as plutonium and uranium-233, thorium "fuel" is not possible. AECL tried to get this elaborate process going in Canada back in 1977. The nuclear scientists involved had in fact been dreaming about it since the early 1940s (back in the days of the WWII "Montreal Laboratory").

Geoff, I should be careful if I were you, I am on balance a Labor voter, I am a progressive, I believe in equity, and improving the human condition. I am currently a very dissaffected Progressive, because the climate-change hysteria and taxes actually are counterproductive to my progressive, socially responsible ideals, using food for fuel is immoral, limiting CO2 emission limits food sources and deoxygenates the atmosphere, the tax hurts the pooest people because compensation can hope to cover only 1/2 the real costs,I love the environment, and dont want to see 100 square km solar farms or wind farms scaring the landscape, I don't want to see the great artesian basin putrified by chemicals injected to get cleaner CO2 friendly Natural gas out . The pensioners freeze and die in their houses in winter because they can't afford heating. These are the things I care about, and I am waiting for Labor to start caring about them again. Julia was too right that Labor have lost their way, they are still in the wilderness.

I want to make one last observation on "Green Bias" in scientific funding. When the world was developing nuclear technologies, Thorium fast breeder reactors were being developed along side uranium and plutonium technologies. As the cold war progressed the funding for Uranium based technologies driven largely by weapons research quickly ensured that Thorium technology researchers jumped camp over to the Uranium camp. After all you can't make weapons from Thorium.Thorium as a fuel was abandoned because of the funding bias, and Thorium technology that existed in the sixties is now practically lost. Where would we be now if the funding bias had not been applied? Well we would have much safer Nuclear Power, incapable of going critical, short lived waste and much less toxic, maybe this bias has set us back 50 years in energy technology. The same thing happens here, the government takes your money, they try to pick winners throwing away money on Wind, and Solar, technologies that have insurmountable obstacles (like the need for a blowing wind or a cloudless sky). What then happens to that Nuclear breakthrough that finally solves the toxicity issues, and creates safe waste free nuclear power - do we ever get to that, given no money is ever thrown at that "Dirty" technology, or is that line of research abandoned like Thorium in the 60s as researchers chase funding for Solar and Wind that may never acheive maturity.