Australian Politics

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics The key purpose of this policy is NOT to build nuclear power plants. It is to block solar/wind, storage and pumped hydro and to drain all investment in them. Investors will hold off funding renewables because nuclear is coming (in 15 years or more). In the meantime Gina will be selling coal as fast as she can to all the aging inefficient coal plants in the country.

The NEM is 5,000 kilometres long, from Cairns to Hobart and from Sydney to Adelaide. Renewable power anywhere along that line will feed the grid. So the wind not blowing anywhere between Cains and Hobart is ludicrous. What we need is much more solar/wind attached to the NEM so local shortages can be smoothed out. Baseload is last century thinking. This century is all about distributed power generation. Why have one power station with 4 boilers when for the same money you can have 20 wind farms each with 50-80 wind turbines and no single point of failure.

Dutton's position here as many have pointed out is to stall and not actually to build nuclear.

I think nuclear has a place as we need to move the world off carbon ASAP (That place basically being India and China where there is a lot of dirty coal that needs to be shutdown ASAP).

If we really wanted to do something nuclear I'd suggest working on building modular reactors that we can build in factories and deploy to places where its harder for renewables to make sense, that said i'd wager a better financial proposition would be to invest in alternative renewables, say more tidal technology. If we want to support the pacific being able to provide tidal power generation seems like an easy win, that also provides significant political influence (which waned under the last conservative government).

Now if i was a National i'd be pushing for lots of renewables in the country, all that construction and those jobs supporting the new infrastructure, and yet they don't...

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics I don’t believe it’s an honest policy though. Sure, some zealots in the party and their supporters at Sky News etc. truly believe it can happen, but most of them probably realise it’s hogwash. So I have to assume that the point is (if they were elected, God forbid) to spend a good decade delaying closure of coal plants and scrapping as much renewable transition as possible until they finally “find out” that the economics don’t make sense. Probably some good consultancy money for mates in the meantime…

Seems cynical, I know, but I just can’t believe they are acting in good faith. As you say, it’s just too dumb…

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics

What would »grid scale solar & storage« cost, and how long would it take?

This is the competition:

1. Nuclear power plants
2. Storage of the same scale, filled by solar of the same scale

No one in the whole world has ever built (2). There is no mature industry, and no technology even matching the only grid scale storage we have so far (pumped hydro).

For (1), there are several international players with established designs.

I wouldn't stop either one.

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics Given the accelerating collapse of ecosystems globally, developing nations barely have a shot at evolving the energy sector, let alone industrialized nations that easily keep renewables and nuclear at a 10% market share.

Whether you do a deep-dive into #6thMassExtinction or not, we're in one.

People seem to be under the impression that solar power is the cheapest source of power while strictly true it is only so under a very specific set of circumstances.

Firstly storage is out of the question. Outside of pumped storage chemical storage is the best option and it has many drawbacks. Batteries are inefficient to begin with and the materials used are hazardous to the environment and human health and are of limited recyclability. In addition the resources needed for these batteries are a leading cause of slavery globally.

Solar panels under the right circumstances can be cheap but depending on the time of day, weather and location are only that efficient for 5 hours a day. Notably the power is not available when needed as solar panels produce little to no power either side of peak sun and obviously none at night. In addition there are some elements of a solar panel that are not readily recyclable making them a not infinite and environmentally hazardous resource. In addition the cost of recycling is not factored into the cost calculations.

More important to this conversation is what makes nuclear so expensive. The short answer is the QA is not cost efficient because so few plants are built and none of them use the same parts, there is noneconomy of scale. Another problem is that the assessments made on solar panel efficiency are made on the peak of what is possible with today's tech whereas most nuclear facilities are 20 years old or older. So the comparison is being made between plants designed 30 years ago and the best solar has to offer right now. Nuclear has arguably progressed the most out of all power generation over that time while the fundamental concept remains the same things such as modular designs, reactors that recycle their waste materials and designs capable of providing heat for industrial purposes make the cost drop dramatically eclipsing the cost effectiveness of every other energy source by a wide margin.

In the past hysteria has created a negative public perception of nuclear that persists to this day. The waste is considered a large problem but in reality all global nuclear waste could fit in an Olympic swimming pool. This waste could theoretically be recycled and used as fissile material in another reactor thereby reducing it to a fraction of that size and render its hazardousness to essentially nothing.

The question then becomes if nuclear is so overwhelmingly dominant in its efficiency and cost effectiveness then why is it not used? Why is there this campaign of solar instead? and why not wind or something else?

The answer is simple: solar panels are the only renewable energy source that relies on highly comoditizable materials and because of its operating hours requires even more commoditizable materials to store for ready use.

If you take a look at the people present at these solar events, sponsoring organisations, etc they are they same big energy providers including hydrocarbon providers that are seeking to shift their business into the solar model, the most profitable renewable model.

Nuclear energy on the other hand is globally mainly managed as a state resource. The government owns it and provides power as a public utility which cuts out corporate profits.