this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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"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."

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[–] Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 months ago (14 children)

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.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 9 points 5 months ago (9 children)

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.

  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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...)
[–] gumnut@aussie.zone 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nuclear: to maintain baseline power (as opposed to peak power) for emergency scenarios.

That’s an incredibly expensive emergency power supply. If you can’t operate a nuclear plant 24/7 it’s going to take a veeeeerry long time to pay off the massive capital investment.

And that’s the crux of the issue. These plants won’t be supplying baseload. By the time they get built we will have twice as much rooftop solar, and lots more utility wind and solar. There will be very little room for them to operate at a spot price that earns them money.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago

Nuclear plants have really really long spin up/down cycles so when it's on, it's on for a while. It's not like solar, gas, wind where you can just stop it on a whim. So if you go nuclear, it's already running for a long time, and if they're running for a really long time they're also essentially running as baseload production.

As for the cost for emergency power, yeah it'd be great if it's cheaper. But the worse the emergency becomes, the less the cost matters. If I had to choose between coal or nuclear for emergency power, I'd probably choose both. Coal (which can be started and stopped quickly) just to cover the spin up time for the nuclear power, then nuclear for the rest of the emergency (and during spin down as whatever the emergency was is in the process of being resolved).

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