Garrett said that soon after he took his seat as a Labor party member in Australia's Federal Parliament, rattling many of its supporters, for whom opposition to nuclear power and the enforced closure or curbing of existing Australian uranium mines had been an unchallenged policy position for decades.
Uranium source
While this was going on, the Australian government confirmed it had been in high level negotiations with China for several months over requests by Beijing for future access to the country's major uranium mines.
Australia has 41 percent of the world's proven reserves of uranium, of which 38 percent is inside the Olympic Dam copper mine in South Australia.
The talks with China are said to be progressing well, with most of the discussion now being related to the safeguards both nations would wish to put in place to prevent the diversion of uranium into the nuclear weapons programs of rogue states or even terrorist organizations.
However the coal industry isn't taking the Australian move toward a nuclear option lightly. It is lobbying politicians on the merits of expanding the export of uranium to boost the national economy, rather than actually using it in Australia in place of coal.
The strategy of the coal industry, supported by research funding from the Australian government, is to extend the economic life of coal far into the future by developing "clean" coal burning processes in which the carbon dioxide emissions are turned into a liquid that can be piped into deep and supposedly stable underground reservoirs instead of allowed to escape into the atmosphere.
But those who are leaning to the nuclear option in turn ask whether unproven clean coal technology will actually prove more costly, and perhaps even more dangerous to the environment, than uranium fired power stations.
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