Anger after nuclear option placed on alternative energy survey Power lines and steaming cooling towers at Slovakia's oldest nuclear power plant. NUCLEAR power has been put on the table in a survey that asks country South Australians about their preferred alternative energy options. The survey, commissioned by Regional Development Australia, asks residents in the Yorke Peninsula and the Mid North to respond to a "community preferences survey" regarding their views on solar panels, solar farms, nuclear, household, wind turbines, wind farms, hydro, geothermal facilities, waste-to-energy/plant and biomass plants. RDA, funded by federal and state governments as well as the region's local councils, states on its website that the survey is part of a "project to determine how best to prepare the region for renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies as part of the state's climate change adaptation strategy." But Greens MLC Mark Parnell slammed the survey and said the proponents, the region's councils, had been pushing an anti-wind generation agenda. Mr Parnell said nuclear power did not have to be pushed into a survey about alternative energy. "Lumping nuclear energy in with low-carbon technologies is just wrong," he said. By the time you've taken into account the carbon emissions in the energy used to mine and process the uranium, built the reactor, operated the reactor, decommission the reactor and then store and monitor the waste for hundreds of thousands of years, ... you find that the whole of life carbon emissions really add up. What the survey should have asked is, 'Do you want a nuclear waste dump in your neighbourhood that will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years?' Or, 'How would you feel about hundreds of square kilometres of your district being rendered uninhabitable after a nuclear accident as happened at Fukushima in Japan?' Survey organiser Darien Simon of University College London (Australia) said any discussion about alternative energy should include nuclear power. "What we are trying to do by assembling that this is ask for responses on everything that is possible, so that way, if there were people who believed that nuclear needed to be reconsidered they could speak their mind," she said. We are looking at this from the perspective of what is the actual best solution, rather than predefine what is acceptable. In terms of data as a scientist, more is always better. The issue with anything that brings out strong responses whether it is wind in one area or nuclear anywhere ... the key is to get a discussion going. There have been some surprises in the survey so far which has been coming back for about a week. We were led to believe that wind power would not be popular, which we have seen in some of the responses. I won't say that nuclear has been a major surprise because we were warned that including it would open us up to the criticism by people that it had already been rejected. The 11 council areas in the region being surveyed include South Australia's prime wine areas of the Barossa and Clare valley, as well as Yorke Peninsula, Port Pirie, and Port Wakefield. Residents and businesses have until January 15 to respond to the survey, which can be found here.