"Peter Dutton has called a press conference for 10am, so it is all official – nuclear is go.
The Coalition teleconference meeting has wrapped up, and the seven sites have been named and it is as we thought: Collie in Western Australia, Mt Piper and Liddell in New South Wales, Callide and Tarong in Queensland, Northern Energy in South Australia and Loy Yang in Victoria."
"There are already issues being identified with the sites – first, the sites would need to be purchased from private operators. There will need to be some pretty major changes to legislation, both state and federally. The Queensland LNP, as recently as yesterday, said it would not lift the nuclear ban for the state, which is a problem given two Queensland reactor sites have been identified by Dutton’s team.
Tarong in Queensland is a particular issue as it doesn’t have a secure water source. In 2006, then-premier Peter Beattie had to propose a waste water pipeline as a last ditch measure to save the plant during a drought."
What’s with the LNP and spending eye watering amounts of taxpayer money on obsolete technology? First it was with communications infrastructure and now they want to do the same thing with energy apparently.
Nitpick: Nuclear isn’t obsolete, it’s as modern as the design you choose.
Nuclear isn’t a replacement for renewables (like the coalition tries to suggest), and it isn’t evil (like an internal faction in the greens tries to suggest).
We need:
- Renewables: for the best power production we can produce (when available)
- Energy Storage: to store excess renewable power for when it’s not available
- Nuclear: to maintain baseline power (as opposed to peak power) for emergency scenarios.
Sidenote: Since whenever anyone suggests that nuclear isn’t to be abhorred whenever it’s brought up, here are the 3 common things brought up so no one has to ask it.
- Risk of meltdowns
- Modern designs are meltdown-proof with passive safety built in (as opposed to active safety where you need to keep providing power to keep things safe like Fukushima). You can fly a plane into a modern nuclear reactor and the reaction just stops.
- Nuclear proliferation
- We have our own large amount of uranium on the continent. We don’t need to encourage others to mine and sell it, and we don’t need to sell it overseas ourselves.
- Nuclear waste
- It’s common practice today to simply recycle nuclear waste as nuclear fuel. That way you get many more uses out of with less overall fuel that needs to be produced. By the end of it you have a kind of nuclear waste concentrate that burns itself out much quicker (meaning you only need to store it for about 100 years as opposed to 1000s of years). Also, that concentrate itself can be used in things like betavoltaics (think weak but long lasting batteries in things were you don’t want to have to replace the batteries, e.g. pacemakers, smoke detectors, scientific sensors, etc…)
Nuclear is dead, my friend. I’d encourage you to take look at the cost curves of solar, wind and storage. They have come down an absolutely insane amount over the last decade and are predicted to come down another insane amount over the next half decade or so (about when your first reactor might be able to come online).
Just to give you an idea we’re talking about around a 90% cost reduction for both solar and batteries and something like 45% for wind. It’s crazy, but it’s already happened. If you’re interested I’d suggest taking a look at RethinkX’s work. It’s lead by Tony Seba who predicted these cost declines already back in 2010. Doesn’t guarantee that he’s right, but it is looking like the trend is going to continue.
There are also pretty profound implications for a 100% solar, wind and storage system as well that are pretty incredible. I don’t think anything else makes sense in comparison.
EDIT: Here’s a direct link to the report if you’re interested in reading it.
