241–250 of 415 posts
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Indeed I was talking about using nuclear to provide a constant base load that you do not scale up and down. You use renewables for variable load.
But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.
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The water is closed loop right? Can’t you pump or even deliver the water by truck? (Sorry if this is really ignorant)
I'm not a Nuclear Power physicist, but you can Google up images of a whole lot of them. There's at least one common feature that you see in all of them - the giant cooling towers, often pictured emitting large white fluffy steam clouds while they're operating. They're also all on massive permanent rivers, lakes or the ocean. Pumping/Delivering water for that purpose is basically not feasible.
This is really exciting. I wish we had nuclear power here in Australia. I know I might get downvoted for this comment. But with advancement in technology and large amount nuclear fuel (Uranium deposit) available, it's a great choice. 1. Vast swathes of uninhabited land can absorb some of the risks/fears associated with a nuclear accident. With technology like this, the risks are even lower. 2. It's lot cleaner than c…
Reasons why Australia doesn't and won't have nuclear: 1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) 2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal…
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"occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it?" is an absurd way to describe the small number of incidents we've had in the past - they can all be attributed to egregious chains of human errors and/or bad planning. To quote: But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7…
What makes you think that Australia wouldn't have egregious chains of human failure or bad planning? Pretty much every country with civilian nuclear energy had some big scandals or incidents around them[1]. Humans just can't be trusted to build a 100% safe process. [1] Just to name a few: Three Mile Island (US), Sellafield (UK), Brunsbüttel (DE), Saint-Laurent (FR)
Australia absolutely would have egregious chains of human failure and bad planning.
You've only got to look at the present state of this country to see that that is how we, evidently, prefer to do things.
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I also thought we should've developed a nuclear waste industry here in South Australia. There was a 'citizen's jury' on the topic a while back but obviously public opinion swayed political action to rule it out. We have a lot of "unused" and stable land well away from population centres. I imagine transport from afar is an issue though.
Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate. Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales. So it must be monitored. For a hundred thousand years That would be us making future genera…
What's left is just fission products. Encase them in glass and bury them, and they'll be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in 300 years. Most of the radioactivity will be gone in the first few decades, since the decline is exponential.
Russia has a couple fast reactors in operation right now, and various startups are attempting new designs.
This is really exciting. I wish we had nuclear power here in Australia. I know I might get downvoted for this comment. But with advancement in technology and large amount nuclear fuel (Uranium deposit) available, it's a great choice. 1. Vast swathes of uninhabited land can absorb some of the risks/fears associated with a nuclear accident. With technology like this, the risks are even lower. 2. It's lot cleaner than c…
Reasons why Australia doesn't and won't have nuclear: 1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) 2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal…
Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah.
>(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel)
A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities.
>with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)
I went to check gov sources and it still seems to be mainly fossil fuels tho renewables are growing. What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Here our greens are pushing for gas.
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Nuclear power stations work best by the coast, rather than on rivers due to the water required for cooling, and as France discovered you can't dump hotter water back into a river and kill the wildlife when the country is "hot" - compared to Australia, a French "hot" day is 'only' 38-40C. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/07/weatherwatch-nu... So geographically, that likely means that nuclear power stations wo…
Except the ones in the article, which don't use water for cooling.
But this is a conventional issue, a gas or coal generator has similar cooling requirements.
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2. sounds an awful lot like "renewables are not a viable form of energy and require gas". One gas replacement - nuclear - needs no backup. The other - renewables - needs backup of a scale that exists only on paper. I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which…
I understand you are trying to make a general argument, but those dynamics are definitely not true of Australia. Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given…
But there is still plenty of coal production no? Here Nuclear which is the vast majority of our production is being phased out due to political pressure. Our Greens push gas plants to cover the lowdays for renewables. Which variable production source is kept in mind in South Australia in the scenario where coal is pushed out all togheter? Is there a hydro dam or so?
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Having direct involvement in the wind industry... most plan -> completion developments take 5-10 years. heck even one from 2013 still hasnt had ground broken. The main reason? NIMBYs. Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire. imagine what these retires would do if their picturesque landscape is now comprised of windfarms? and they dont have anything else to do to fill up their day?
> Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire. they imagine themselves wanting to go out to the country side to retire, but would find that living in remote places that doesn't have facilities to be poor quality life. you want to travel to the countryside for leisure - may be even for extended vacation. But you will almost always want a "home base" in a big metropolitan area for when services are needed - suc…
I'm in Australia, you can listen to them on the radio (podcasts) complaining about the noise etc.
How do we find a balance between people's right to quiet enjoyment of their homes and other factors that affect the rest of society.
The background on Canada's plans for small modular reactors (of which this is just one of three projects) can be found here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-provinc... Supposedly this is promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, but the details don't always match this rhetoric. In particular they're thinking they can use nuclear power to replace piped-in natural gas to mine the Alberta…
I really don't know enough about this to know if it's a good idea or not (it sounds like it could be quite useful) but in any case I'm very glad to see Canada doing something new in technology.