Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore

Sure, please adjust the numbers for when we had to evacuate cities for nuclear scares. You can do calculations in 'quality adjusted life years' or some other ways to convert deaths and injuries and the cost of evacuations. It doesn't really change any conclusions, even with very pessimistic estimates. I just picked deaths, because they are relatively easy to get clear numbers for.

And don't get me wrong: solar is mostly fine anyway. It's coal that's really obnoxious. Both in the mining and in the burning, and in the accidents. (And to a lesser degree other fossil fuels.)

Photovoltaic is great! On a purely technical level both solar and nuclear can work well, nuclear perhaps a bit better and we had the technology for longer. On a practical level, solar will win, because people fear nuclear.

All electricity generation methods have engineering challenges. Eg solar has some big problems with daily variations and seasonal ones. We can solve the former with batteries, and the latter via big cables to (sub-) tropical regions.

Wind is also great! And we've only just started tapping waves and tides, too. And geothermal.

This is still backed by Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian, isn’t it? Not mentioned in article but:

“May 2023, a consortium led by Cannon-Brookes' Grok Ventures won the bid to acquire Sun Cable,[7] with the takeover finalised on 7 September 2023. The revised plans involve supplying electricity to Darwin by 2030, and to Singapore a few years thereafter. ”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

People can point it out, no worries. Disasters happen. But it isn't fair to claim that the risks of a nuclear disaster are worse than solar one. We haven't seen what a big solar disaster looks like yet because it has been a serious contender for ~5-10 years and it takes a few decades to figure out what a disaster looks like for any given form of power generation. For solar it could easily be quite bad and impossible to design out.

We have, to date, 0 methods of generating electricity at scale that are free of catastrophic failure modes. Solar will not be free of them either, and we don't really have the data yet to figure out how they compare relevant to nuclear ones (which, on balance, are the mildest of all the tested options!). It could do well, it could do badly, but it is not entirely fair to compare a known low risk in nuclear to an unknown risk in solar.

> So you are kind of referring to mass extinction events. no?

No, I'm not. I included a wiki link to the sort of thing I think could be a problem. It doesn't mention extinction.

I don't think that's actually true. US Navy and their contracting shipyards had consistently built nuclear subs in 3 year strides for decades. One set of fuel lasts is good for 1/5th century, after that the sub needs to be cut up and refueled. It's not something that take years after years of permitting and change of plans and suspected acts of arson of unknown motivation if it's literally operated by US Army or Navy(but not NASA).

Solar power is just amateures littering compared to that.

Yup, high voltage has special challenges because even super tiny leakage currents (which are normal unless extreme precautions are taken) transmit significant power and cause extreme breakdowns rather quickly in most materials.

At very high (million+ volts) we’re talking even quantum tunneling effects producing enough current to cause material breakdowns. It’s pretty nuts.

It’s a big reason why glass and ceramic are so commonly used at those voltages as insulators - they are one of the few materials stable enough and electrically insulating enough to last long term.

Splitting things up like being discussed works when it’s possible to do so without creating even more leakage current paths, which is extremely difficult to do with sizable equipment in the million+ volt range. Folks eventually were able to do so, which is why HVDC eventually became a thing, but it is far from easy or cheap. My understanding is almost all HVDC lines run at lower voltages than their equivalent AC counterparts do as well, due to these technical limitations.

HVDC currently tends to be used for longer runs, where AC inductive losses exceed the equivalent capital costs challenges HVDC has. AC has significant inductive loss issues when run under ground or undersea.

At low voltages, those same leakage currents can’t transmit enough power to damage things or even cause measurable power losses, so don’t matter.

These effects starts being noticable in the > 1kv range, significant in the > 10kv range, quite problematic in the > 100kv range, and very difficult (maybe impossible using known material science in some scenarios) to deal with in the >= 1MV range.

Semiconductors have the added challenge that they often have noticeable leakage currents even in the low voltage ranges (even with specialized designs) and it makes it even harder.

[https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...]

Additionally, Arc faults in DC transmission infrastructure are extremely difficult to control, as unlike AC there is no zero-voltage crossing point (as there is no waveform, in general). So unlike AC, arcs are not likely to self extinguish, and require complete interruption of current flow. Which is actually a really hard problem to solve for several reasons at the power levels involved here.