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Nuclear power too expensive and slow to be part of Australia’s plans to reach net zero, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
28 points (96.7% liked)
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Time is in the essence. We do not have time to build all these fancy,expensive and mostly experimental stuff. Planet will be already cooked by the time they a ready. There are lots of good potential technologies around. From hight altitude wind, to ocean current turbines, to orbital solar. Problem is none of them is ready for production.
There is are two well tested green technologies capable to provide stable power. Hydro and nuclear. We do not have place to build more hydro in Australia. Nuclear is only option.
Keep burning coal due to radiophobia is just stupid. And we will not get anything else in time.
I'm not against Nuclear, go for it.
It's not cost competitive, so I don't think the government should be subsidizing it, but I say we reduce the laws banning it to merely enforcing strong environmental protections (as we should on all things).
Let's say we did that today.
Let's assume you already have a site picked out and ready to go, and that no protestors are going to stop the build.
It'll still be 10 years before it turns on and produces it's first watt: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
I'd be curious if you can find a source with a shorter build time quote, so link us.
In the meantime under this proposal, the existing coal plants are still going to shut down.
With the nuclear not ready to plug the gap.
So either the government pays for the construction of more coal (because no investment company or bank will touch it), or more renewables + storage is going to go in.
In fact, within a year we'd have some new solar and wind producing power, more in year 2, more in year 3 etc.
By the time the Nuclear plant passes it's shakedown tests, we probably don't need it anymore.
I've got strong opinions about which tech we should be going for based on ecological reasons, but the fact we are going to wind and solar + storage is based on pragmatic economic reasons.
Also, ANU has identified over 3000 promising sites for pumped hydro in Australia.
Some of them could probably be straight hydro I assume.
I'm not against those either, let's go!