The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.

2 points

The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn’t really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.

Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.

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8 points

The time for nuclear was decades ago.

Now it’s being pushed by fossil fuel shills, who’d love nothing more than a gratuitously expensive 20 year boondoggle to let them have free reign over power generation for all that time, and to simultaneously nix any green plans with “but the nuclear is on its way!”

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2 points

Who would have thought a political appointment is political.

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4 points

For a country with a huge amount of land and shore, that makes sense for them. But some form of nuclear (uranium fission, thorium fission, fusion?!) continues to be an important part of the world’s weaning off of fossil fuels

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10 points

The alternative for base load is batteries, not wind and solar renewables, since they are intermittent. We don’t have a good idea yet of just how expensive massive grid storage is yet, but the lead time would definitely be shorter.

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8 points

We do though. The cost is really land and rust. Iron oxide batteries are cheap and long lasting but low power density. Perfect for grid storage in a lot of places.

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4 points
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Drill a hole and a deper hole and pump/turbine water between them.

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2 points

No way. Far too expensive.

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3 points

That’s really really expensive unless you already have natural upper and lower reservoirs.

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5 points
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It is? More than batteries?

Im surprised.

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5 points

The alternative to base load is load shifting, just move most loads to when enough power is available. Or in other words, base load is a thing because big power plants like nuclear and coal are slow and someone’s gotta use that power at all times.

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2 points

Load shifting is the destruction of economic value, because it means people are making choices that aren’t optimal for their own lives.

Time is often written off in economic considerations, but that’s unwise because time is the most limited resource people have.

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1 point

Most work is done when the sun is shining. Appliances can be remote controlled or automated. Studies have show that only 10% of energy consumption has to be „smart“ to cut off 90% of the duck curve. The rest can be done with batteries and other storage.

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