* conservatives and their pro-nuclear for Australia attitudes: I've always had the feeling that countries with snowy, freezing winters were ones where going completely renewable was going to be the biggest challenge, because they have weak and not many hours of sunshine in winter, and it's not always windy when it snows. I therefore completely understand a strong "nuclear must be in the mix" approach there (in, say, Britain and parts of North America.)
But Australia? We've got enormous amounts of marginally useful (or useless) land in the centre of the county, and a climate whereby huge parts of it are sunny during winter, and with still fairly lengthy daylight hours as well. Who freaking cares if there were a solar farm a 100km by 100 km near Birdsville? If transmission issues are solved, my hunch is that we're about the most suited nation in the world for gigantic scale solar - with a friendlier geography for building it than places like the Sahara, I would guess too. (Too much hilly, moving sand there.)
Yes, there are energy storage issues, but with nuclear there are huge costs and slow construction, decommissioning costs, and few people who want to live next door to one. Why?: because events like Fukushima show us that when they go wrong, they go really wrong and completely upend the lives of tens of thousands of people. 53,000 people are still displaced by Fukushima. And this:
Along with cleaning the nuclear residues and enabling those displaced to return to their homes, the Japanese government aims to dismantle the Fukushima plant, a process that is expected to take at least 30 years and the cost for which could reach 20 trillion yen ($180.2 billion).Extraordinary.
Renewables just do not carry anything like that financial and humanitarian risk - especially when you have a country where virtually no one is going to freeze to death if power fails in the depths of winter. And let's face it - the technology for useful amounts of household energy creation and storage already exists. I would prefer to see every new house built mandated to have either solar power and/or a fuel cell and a Tesla battery before I would want a nuclear power station within 50km of me.
* This November in Brisbane is far, far from normal. So many bushes and plants in my yard are dropping leaves massively to try to cope with the dry and heat: it's really unclear how many are going to survive. The rainwater tank is nearly dry, and given the cost of tap water now, most residents prefer to hope for the best instead of spending hundreds of dollars on keeping a green lawn or a bush alive.
We should have had heavy rain with storms throughout SE Queensland by now: instead it has been extremely patchy, and everyone is fearing a really dry summer that is going to kill off gardens in much the same way the last drought started to.
I must admit, though, that native plants are showing the hardiest resolve in getting through this.
We need rain, badly.
8 comments:
Nukes are a no go.
Takes way too long to build.
New solar PV is 1/4 of the costs on Nukes going to 1/3 by 2025. Wind is getting there as well.
Nukes also only good for baseload power. This is no go when the private sector owns the assets. They want dispatchable power.
Nukes MUST have a price on carbon to get anywhere near competitive but again New Solar and wind beat it pointlessly
Climate emergency but but but no nukes
this is how I know you lot are insincere and just want us to wear hairshirts for the sake of it
solar and wind are ridiculously impractical and over estimated technologies
"Climate emergency but but but no nukes"
Yeah, way to open a response to a post in which I said I could always understand how nuclear may be important to some parts of the world. Does going conservative in middle age mean losing the ability to nuance anything?
As I wrote before - Bill Gates isn't right about everything, otherwise condoms would be more popular than they are.
(And Tulsi is a Russian asset. She may as well join the GOP, or get a job on Fox GOP State News - and be done with.)
Obviously Soony cannot read.
Let us make it very simple for Soony.
Nukes is 3 times the cost of new Solar PV now and by 2025 is likely to be 4 times the cost.
It takes forever to build the nuke station perhaps if lucky half the time of a coal one which is 8-10 years.
It is only good for baseload power no good for dispatchable power.
Even with a price on carbon which any economically literate person would support it is still nowhere near either solar PV or wind.
got it? good
Look we know that thorium nuclear is basically unlimited energy for thousands of years. With molten salts its very safe but we have a corrosion problem to overcome. When you have technical problems like this its just a time factor. If you go about it slowly and methodically you will get it right and then thats no worries for cheap energy for as far as the eye can see.
So what's the problem? The problem is you leftists take your ideas pretty much straight from the oligarchy. They want to deny us energy and keep us enslaved? They have you boys as the third stage goose-steppers. You don't think. When you do you snap back into line very quickly. I've seen Homer almost look like he was thinking and listening .... and then you see that snap-back and you wonder "what the fuck just happened?"
5 days a fortnight at minimum wage. Thats what we need for unemployed people like myself. Building check dams and other water retention features to rehydrate the land. And of course the fuel control that I've mentioned before. We have more to work with then the poorer Africans. Yet they are making a fist of this undertaking and I don't think we are for the most part.
My hats off to these Ethiopians. But what has gone wrong with us here in Australia? Why can we not produce water rich landscapes followed by carbon rich soils? Why instead are we standing around whining about the hydro-carbon industry, if carbon internment is what is wanted? If water retention landscapes, and carbon-rich soil development, is the solution to floods, droughts, and fires, then what is all this dysfunctional whining about?
We might have to consider that the Ethiopian gene pool has been improved by extreme stress. And that the white rich leftist gene pool may have become fundamentally degenerate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BXQntQBgA0
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