Thinking out loud

Various things going through my mind:

*   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.