Green Power schemes offer electricity generated by recently constructed renewable energy sources to customers for a higher price than ordinary electricity. This study examines the place of Green Power in the electricity supply industry and among policies to counter global warming, the demand and supply characteristics of Green Power, its effectiveness and measures which could increase its sales. Although growing rapidly, Green Power sales are less than 0.5% of total electricity sales in Australia. The wide variation in market penetration between jurisdictions and between countries for Green Power, the discrepancies between stated willingness-to-pay surveys and actual sales and the low awareness of Green Power found by surveys indicate that Green Power sales could be increased by appropriate marketing and government policies. A sample of 250 pooled time series and cross sectional observations was used to estimate a statistically significant elasticity of demand for residential customers for Green Power with respect to price of -0.96. Green Power schemes appear not to be necessarily loss-making activities for retailers. There has been ample generating capacity for Green Power to meet the growing sales to customers to date. The most cost effective means to increase sales was found to be advertising campaigns such as the campaign in Victoria in 2005. It was also found that full tax deductibility of the Green Power premium to residential customers, an exemption of the Green Power premium from the Goods and Services Tax and a tax rebate for Green Power are probably less cost-effective for promoting sales than direct government purchase of Green Power in terms of cost of policy per unit of increased sales. Green Power plays a small but important role as one amongst a number of climate change policies and the potential of this role is yet to be fully realised.

The nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in 1986 is described and a summary of its immediate effects on people and the environment outlined. Then there is a summary of the important parts of the literature on diseases and deaths resulting from radiation and mortalities to date and the way mortality data became increasingly conservative over the years is discussed. Today, there is still uncertainty about future mortalities due to long latency periods for many cancers. However, cancer deaths in Chernobyl-affected regions are expected to be similar to non-Chernobyl controls. The major literature on environmental effects on wild species, forests, water and agricultural land are then reported with a brief discussion of remediation work and current trends. Finally, contemporary perceptions of the Chernobyl accident are described in the context of the popular anti-nuclear sentiment that prevailed in 1986, the immense publicity surrounding the accident and the natural tendency of people to exaggerate prospects of unlikely, yet extreme, events.

This thesis describes the development of a bioeconomic model for estimation of the optimal level of exploitation for banana prawns ('Penaeus merguiensis') in the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is part of the Northern Prawn Fishery in Australia. The model is used to identify optimal levels of effort and catch to achieve sustainable and profitable exploitation. The main contribution of this work is the combination of methods used to model the fishery, which differs from other prawn fisheries in several respects, including their life and migration cycle and their aggregating behaviour. A stage-population matrix is developed to represent population growth and recruitment. The model is calibrated based on 18 years of daily catch data from logbooks and evolutionary algorithms are used to estimate unobservable parameters and to optimise management of the fishery.