CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
For years, Noosa-based ‘centrist voter’ Dean McCafferty has begged people to educate themselves on the truth about nuclear power.
This contrarian approach to Australia’s climate crisis is on brand for Dean, who has also spent the last ten years telling anyone who will listen that cryptocurrency will eventually replace the Australian dollar.
And with a population that is increasingly invested in wind and hydro, Dean has always said he will only vote for a party that is willing to take nuclear power seriously.
Late last year, Dean finally found his political home, when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton published a half-page press release detailing the Liberal Party’s plan to spend close to a trillion dollars on a nuclear power transition that will be funded entirely by the tax-payer before being handed over to the private sector to operate.
Dean says he ‘doesn’t agree with a lot of Liberal Party policies’ – but they are the only ones making sense when it comes to energy – and anyone with a brain should support them in this pursuit.
And as Australia experiences more and more climate-change aided natural disasters, Dean says the only option is a half century roll out of nuclear power plants located in between major cities and prime farming land.
“Nuclear is the only true renewable” says the self-professed expert in this deeply stigmatised alternative energy.
When it comes to the alarmist naysayers, Dean scoffs, before confidently declaring that they are all misinformed.
“There has been leaps and bounds in technology since Chernobyl” he says.
“That was a Soviet era disaster”
But what about Australia’s track recording of building underwhelming tech infrastructure. Like the internationally ridiculed copper wire NBN? Or the famous 2016 online census crash?
Dean says we could be world leaders in this field, if Australians took the technolgy seriously.
When asked about the far more technologically advanced nation of Japan playing host to their own 2011 nuclear disaster, Dean insists that wouldn’t happen in Australia.
“The only reason Fukushima happened is because of a literal earthquake. That says nothing about the technology”
But what about the unexpected Category 2 Cyclone that looked as though it was going to tear through the Sunshine Coast hinterland last week? Would that have damaged Peter Dutton’s proposed Nuclear Power Plant at Tarong.
Dean goes silent.
“The technology has changed” he responds, with robotlike recall.
“Just trust me bro”
“The technology has changed”
