Talk:Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant

SGHWR
The SGHWR was a steam generating heavy water reactor, and only ever existed as a prototype, at Winfrith Heath in Dorset in the UK. Had they won this tender they may well have received another from South Africa, but they never received any orders at all, and the prototype closed down some years later. Andrewa 03:23, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Nuclear weapons...
One point that should be addressed in this article would be the issue of how it relates to the potential for an Australian nuclear weapon. The ABC's 4 Corners program claimed in a recent program that the decision to pursue nuclear power was directly related to John Gorton and bureaucrat Philip Baxter's desire to give Australia the option of making nuclear weapons if it so chose. While, in normal operation, nuclear plants don't make bomb-grade plutonium, as I understand things it certainly *could have been* be operated in such a fashion. If it's a heavy water reactor, Australia wouldn't even have had to master uranium enrichment to get the bomb (but would have had to use an implosion design rather than the almost trivially easy gun bomb). --Robert Merkel 05:36, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Actually, the SGHWR did use slightly enriched fuel. You might like to read my off-this-wiki essay fool grade. Similar problems would occur with the SGHWR, whether diverting low-burnup fuel or high-burnup fuel.
 * But you're right on a few things. The SGHWR was the preferred tender. Baxter wanted to build a bomb, as did my father at one stage, or at least do some related research to keep the possibility open, and they both made informal representations to the government on that basis (that was their job) but were consistently knocked back.
 * But the ABC is dead wrong about the connection between Jervis Bay and any bomb program. As is the documentary Fortress Australia, for which my father was extensively interviewed (I attended as an observer). But he didn't say what they wanted, so they ignored him. Andrewa (talk) 21:04, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

Article currently reads in part The plan, supported by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, was for a design of reactor that could generate weapons-grade plutonium, possibly reflecting Australia's long-term post-World War II interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. Three citations are given, two are to offline sources but the third supports the claim stating The rationale for the scheme is as much military as industrial: the AAEC's preferred option is for a plant that could generate weapons-grade plutonium.

The SGHWR would be a most unsuitable design for producing plutonium for weapons. There is no online refueling, and although extracting low-burnup fuel would be easier than for a PWR that's not saying very much. But we need better sources before we can remove this IMO inaccurate claim. Andrewa (talk) 22:42, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Google maps link
The site is visible on the right hand side - here: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&z=14&ll=-35.128473,150.728559&spn=0.063178,0.072956

Does anyone know the proper wikipedia style for merging that into the main article? I couldn't find one.

Letter as a source
The following text has been added, citing an unpublished letter as a source: Organizations like the World Union for Protection of Life‎, the Ecology Action and the Society for Responsibilty in Science had tried to ward off the dangers connected with the nuclear power plant.

WP:RS says that "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy." As this is not the case here, I plan to remove the above text. Johnfos (talk) 00:11, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Done Johnfos (talk) 00:41, 6 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The text is back in for some reason, and it's now linking to a US TV station. In any case I can't see why the text is there in the first place - there is no apparent link to the power plant proposal (being dated 1972) - so have deleted it . 120.153.109.2 (talk) 02:46, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

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Requested move 25 July 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Page moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) OhKayeSierra (talk) 20:51, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant proposal → Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant – Moved without discussion to the current less concise name. Both names are accurate and unambiguous, but there is no need to specify in the title that the proposed plant was not built, any more than we need to specify there that it was in Australia or was to be an SGHWR, etc.. Such information belongs instead in the article lead, and in the categories in which it is listed. Andrewa (talk) 18:55, 25 July 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. Mdaniels5757 (talk) 17:18, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

See 06:47, 24 December 2008‎ Johnfos moved Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant to Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant proposal: only a proposal, no plant was ever built for the previous move. Andrewa (talk) 18:59, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Support for the reasons given by Andrewa. The article even begins "Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant was a proposed..." so the article is clearly not just about the proposal. Primergrey (talk) 18:40, 3 August 2020 (UTC)


 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

"The Nuclear Power Group"
The article says that the proposed work would have been done in collaboration with "the British organisation The Nuclear Power Group".

There really isn't, and as far as I can tell never has been, an substantive organisation called "The Nuclear Power Group" in Britain. I'd suspect that this name was used, during the tendering process, by a consortium of the government, government-owned, and private industry bodies that already managed nuclear power in the United Kingdom and fancied turning that into an export business. So rather than an uninformative redlink to a largely paper organisation, it would be better if the article read something like "the The Nuclear Power Group, a consortium of XXX and YYY and ZZZ". Unfortunately the ref for this section is a book, to which I don't have access. So, what or who were "The Nuclear Power Group"? -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:12, 10 March 2022 (UTC)