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  "description": "New Zealand is a freeloading nuclear hypocrite.",
  "path": "/nuclear-free-spare-me/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-10T02:30:36.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "The strangest thing"
  ],
  "textContent": "Show me a moraliser and I’ll show you a hypocrite. That goes for everything from the televangelist railing against ‘sodomy’ while surreptitiously sodomising rent boys in his hotel room (‘It was just research, honest!’) to celebrities pontificating about climate change from the luxury of their private jets. And it goes double, triple even, for New Zealand’s self-righteous, moralising ‘nuclear free zone’.\n\nThe issue has come to the fore again with **Christopher Luxon** ’s recent knock on the head to **Chris Penk** over nuclear propulsion. Penk tried to make the point that nuclear propulsion isn’t the same as having nuclear weapons. _Nuh-uh_ , says Luxon. Luxon said he was “very proud of our nuclear-free position, and it ain’t changing while I’m prime minister”.\n\nExcept that New Zealand _isn’t_ “nuclear-free”, you pontificating prat. New Zealand is not just nuclear free-loading, hiding behind the American nuclear aegis, but it’s quite happy to nuclear free-load wherever it can get away with it. University of Auckland brags about its nuclear medicine programme, for instance. Do New Zealanders think the isotopes for that come from rubbing a couple of tiki together at Matariki?\n\nNew Zealand sources its isotopes from reactors in Turkey, the Netherlands and Australia. The isotopes are fission by-products from nuclear reactors. So, apparently it’s OK for Turks and Dutchmen to live under the shadow of the wicked nuclear demons, just so long as New Zealanders can get their vital medical scans and still hold their noses in the air about their “nuclear-free” status.\n\n> The strangest thing about the “nuclear-free” policy is how little New Zealanders know about what it actually covers. It is less than most believe.\n>\n> Yes, the 1987 Act – the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act – prohibits nuclear explosive devices. And true, it bars nuclear-powered ships from entering New Zealand’s internal waters. But it does not include a general ban on civilian reactors on land. Neither does it ban radioactive isotopes for medical use.\n>\n> These four potential uses of nuclear technology are different. Still, Wellington treats them as a single, moral, antinuclear commitment. The political system has spent nearly four decades arranging itself around the pretence.\n>\n> Yet, this posture – that all nuclear technology is bad – does not make much sense. A ban on nuclear weapons is a clear moral position, and New Zealand is entitled to it. But that same principle cannot be applied to other uses of nuclear technology.\n\nA nuclear reactor on a ship or submarine is essentially nothing more than a heat source. A hell of a way to boil water, perhaps, but that’s exactly what it does. It makes steam, which drives the turbines, which power the vessel.\n\nOh, but you saw that show on the telly, _Chernobyl_? Well, American and British nuclear navies have run for more than 60 years without a single reactor accident or a release of radioactivity that harmed public health or the environment.\n\n> American nuclear-powered warships call routinely at Yokosuka in Japan and Busan in South Korea, to no one’s evident alarm. Even Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles distinguish propulsion from weapons. Wellington does not.\n\nIn keeping with the rampant hypocrisy around the issue, Luxon dodged the question of turning away vessels that will regularly call in at Australian ports from next year. Luxon blithered that Australia won’t have its own home-built nuclear submarines till the mid-2040s, which is true, but we _will_ be buying some from America long before then. Yet, New Zealand will close its ports to its closest ally’s vessels.\n\n> More absurd still is that most people assume the policy bans civilian energy. It does not. The act contains no operative ban on land-based civilian reactors. **David Seymour** , ACT leader and deputy prime minister, said as much when he suggested civilian nuclear “should be considered again”. That was after a winter in which wholesale electricity reached record highs and several large industrial users had to idle production.\n>\n> Luxon, meanwhile, in his interview distanced himself from even the thought of nuclear energy and insisted that New Zealand needed “a decent energy strategy”, as though the two were incompatible.\n\nIf New Zealand truly believed that everything nuclear was wicked, it would not use the output of other countries’ reactors. But, as we’ve seen, it willingly does. Without other countries running nuclear reactors, Kiwis would have to do without such things as bone scans or cardiac stress tests. But the isotopes used in nuclear medicine decay within 60 hours, so the products of nuclear reactors overseas are flown into New Zealand almost daily. But none of the anti-nuclear pontificators seem willing to mention that.\n\n> Maybe it is because naming it would raise the awkward question about why a reactor across the Tasman is acceptable for sick New Zealanders to rely on, while a reactor at home would be beyond the pale.\n\nNew Zealand wants the medical benefits, the defence umbrella and the moral high ground. It can’t have all three without looking like the freeloading hypocrite it is.\n\n* * *\n\n💡\n\n****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.****",
  "title": "‘Nuclear Free’? Spare Me",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-10T02:30:35.749Z"
}