About time. How else are we going to charge up those Teslas at midnight without hitting climate runaway?

www.smh.com.au/world/europe/boris-johnson-goes-nuclear-on-britain-s-energy-needs-pledges-eight-new-plants-20220408-p5abuy.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true


And what is it with diesels? Europe has declared war on the smelly old things and now under 10% of new cars are sold there with diesel power. In Australia they keep rising, currently 40% of new cars!.

Agreed. We should too. Clean safe new reactors like thorium. The dated arguments from the greenies are crap.
Cheaper power - tons of it - can provide more desalination plants for a nation that is getting very short of water. Imagine if we didn't have to be waterwise, power was much cheaper and had bugger all emissions. Industry could go nuts, make us a real world player.

So long as we can then send the nuclear waste into space on one of Elons rockets
There's no phukers out there

If Australia could get over this nuclear waste phobia we could generate a tidy little income charging to look after the whole world's nuclear waste. Fence off 50 km by 50 km of geologically stable desert and bury it. We've got the technology. www.aumanufacturing.com.au/how-synroc-s-science-push-failed-as-the-panacea-for-nuclear-waste

In fact if you made the fence cat and fox proof as well as people proof it would become a wildlife haven for rare desert wildlife. As we've see with the Chernobyl exclusion zone..

Might even get some new species out there,
like a 2 headed kangaroo.

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Ian K said..
If Australia could get over this nuclear waste phobia we could generate a tidy little income charging to look after the whole world's nuclear waste. Fence off 50 km by 50 km of geologically stable desert and bury it. We've got the technology. www.aumanufacturing.com.au/how-synroc-s-science-push-failed-as-the-panacea-for-nuclear-waste

In fact if you made the fence cat and fox proof as well as people proof it would become a wildlife haven for rare desert wildlife. As we've see with the Chernobyl exclusion zone..

I agree
Last time WA offered to bury it, the screams from the NIMBY crowd was ridiculous.
I don't think they had any idea how far 2000km is from civilisation, and how far down 1500m of solid rock with no groundwater etc really is.
Or the stat that every single person in Australia will require the benefits of nuclear medicine in their life.
Nor that you can now walk around most of Chernobyl with just a normal face mask.

Agghhhh 3 Mile Island aagghhhh Chernobyl aaaghhhhhh 3 eyed fish on the Simpsons....
Science, whats that. OMG dihydrogen oxide killing people now....

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lotofwind said..
Might even get some new species out there,
like a 2 headed kangaroo.

Sure, cos speciation due to mutation has only ever occurred around nuclear reactors

You do realize that the big bright thing in the sky is a nuclear reactor, right?

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Kamikuza said..

lotofwind said..
Might even get some new species out there,
like a 2 headed kangaroo.

Sure, cos speciation due to mutation has only ever occurred around nuclear reactors

You do realize that the big bright thing in the sky is a nuclear reactor, right?

It's a moon, silly.

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Kamikuza said..>> You do realize that the big bright thing in the sky is a nuclear reactor, right?

Yes but that's not a fission reactor, it's fusion. A huge amount of time and money is being spent trying to make a commercial fusion reactor, but it will be a while yet before that happens. Then we won't need uranium, or have to bury waste.

Uranium...? You should always bury waste from uranus though

Tip for school holidays / Easter camping.

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Ian K said..
About time. How else are we going to charge up those Teslas at midnight without hitting climate runaway?

www.smh.com.au/world/europe/boris-johnson-goes-nuclear-on-britain-s-energy-needs-pledges-eight-new-plants-20220408-p5abuy.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true


And what is it with diesels? Europe has declared war on the smelly old things and now under 10% of new cars are sold there with diesel power. In Australia they keep rising, currently 40% of new cars!.

Sorry Ian can't agree and neither can most of the business community. It's just very expensive power per Kw and that's why wind and solar is king. Base load is the argument for a poorly designed grid system with all its generation at one end and the customer at the other. Decentralised power and grid is the way most countries moving towards. How's the UK going in decommissioning their old N Power station ATM? Last call was $5B and rising. Electric cars will help in smoothing the Duck Curve and powering homes at night. Change is coming, might be good or world's end. Our choice

If it doesn't stack up economically against wind, solar and batteries fair enough. What's the relative environmental impact of nuclear vs letting Twiggy loose to cover the countryside with solar panels and turbines? Britain has plenty of wind but it appears anti=turbine sentiment was a factor in going nuclear.

The economics of nuclear can't be that bad. There's 51 under construction. They'd have run them past economists wouldn't have they?
pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionReactorsByCountry.aspx

Solar and wind needs storage, and the proponents conveniently forget the expensive of mining the rare (ish) minerals to make massive banks of storage - with finite life.
All 'renewable' sources have conveniently omitted some facts and only show generation cost - not relevant ancillaries like storage and replacement of storage over time.

Solar covers so much land we need for food. Wind affects wildlife. etc.

Here's a converted renewables guy... after years trying, so I'd say he knows better than most of us

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decrepit said..

Kamikuza said..>> You do realize that the big bright thing in the sky is a nuclear reactor, right?

Yes but that's not a fission reactor, it's fusion. A huge amount of time and money is being spent trying to make a commercial fusion reactor, but it will be a while yet before that happens. Then we won't need uranium, or have to bury waste.

Yes quite. It's a good thing it doesn't generate any radiation that makes it to the earth's surface then isn't it.

Psst... where do you think the stuff that becomes nuclear waste comes from originally?

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kato said..

How's the UK going in decommissioning their old N Power station ATM? Last call was $5B and rising.

When did you see only $5B?

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nuclear-sites-costing-taxpayers-astronomical-sums-say-mps

"The NDA's most recent estimate is that it will cost current and future generations of UK taxpayers ?132bn to decommission the civil nuclear sites, with the work not being completed for another 120 years."

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Mr Milk said..
When did you see only $5B?

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nuclear-sites-costing-taxpayers-astronomical-sums-say-mps

"The NDA's most recent estimate is that it will cost current and future generations of UK taxpayers ?132bn to decommission the civil nuclear sites, with the work not being completed for another 120 years."

Haven't we had this discussion before? They factor the costs of decommission into the generation costs paid by users, and bank it for the rainy day. I'm surprised The Guardian forgot that bit ho ho ho

And 120 years of guaranteed work. Fantastic! Nothing of that scale since the great stone works of Europe.

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Mr Milk said..

kato said..

How's the UK going in decommissioning their old N Power station ATM? Last call was $5B and rising.

When did you see only $5B?

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/uks-nuclear-sites-costing-taxpayers-astronomical-sums-say-mps

"The NDA's most recent estimate is that it will cost current and future generations of UK taxpayers ?132bn to decommission the civil nuclear sites, with the work not being completed for another 120 years."

$5B was for one

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Mark _australia said..
Solar and wind needs storage, and the proponents conveniently forget the expensive of mining the rare (ish) minerals to make massive banks of storage - with finite life.
All 'renewable' sources have conveniently omitted some facts and only show generation cost - not relevant ancillaries like storage and replacement of storage over time.

Solar covers so much land we need for food. Wind affects wildlife. etc.

Here's a converted renewables guy... after years trying, so I'd say he knows better than most of us

Solar does not have to cover highly productive land. It does get built in good land sometimes because the grid is there so it's convenient.
I have read that farmers in more marginal land in central west NSW find that it has been a good thing for their livestock during drought because the grazing is better round the panels.
Storage does not have to be in batteries or hydro. Ammonia is being actively worked on as a storage and transport medium in Japan and Australia. Its easier to handle than pure H2 or LNG.

www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/h2-and-nh3-the-perfect-marriage-in-a-carbon-free-society/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20the%20round%2Dtrip%20efficiency,of%209%2D22%10.

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Kamikuza said..
Psst... where do you think the stuff that becomes nuclear waste comes from originally?

The stuff dug out of the ground was un-enriched, that's a very different material to the stuff being put back in.

What gets done is a mixture of economics and irrational politics driven by the non-expert masses. How much extra Co2 is floating around up there due to the emotional masses demanding Germany shut down perfectly good nuclear power plants?

Who knows what numbers to believe? This is a bit of what wikipedia has to say.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
The cost of replacing Germany's nuclear power generation with renewable energy has been officially estimated by the German Ministry of Economics at about ?0.01/kWh (about ?55 billion for the next decade), on top of the ?13 billion per year already devoted to subsidizing renewables. However, unofficial estimates of the ministry, and of the Rhenish-Westphalian Institute for Economic Research (RWI), German Energy Agency (DENA), Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV), and the government-owned development bank (KfW), put the cost several times higher, at about ?250 billion ($340 B) over the next decade.[70][71]In March 2013, the administrative court for the German state of Hesse ruled that a three-month closure imposed by the government on RWE's Biblis A and B reactors as an immediate response to ****ushima Daiichi accident was illegal.[72]

Germany pushed pretty hard and made France close one of their nuclear power stations near the border.
France is looking at starting up some of the ones that have been closed down recently.

"nuclear waste takes 1,000 years to degrade" says guy who rides a 10 foot Mal that will take 1,000 years to degrade.

You can always just burn the board. Do it in a hot furnace and it's clean.

This group, spun out of MIT, have got an interesting idea for how to keep using old coal burning power stations.

www.quaise.energy/

"In the United States, solar energy costs $0.12 per kilowatt-hour while nuclear energy costs $0.02 per kilowatt-hour. "

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bjw said..
"nuclear waste takes 1,000 years to degrade" says guy who rides a 10 foot Mal that will take 1,000 years to degrade.

The oil reserves sat under ground for 100 million years before they degraded to a state where they could be pumped out of the ground and converted to mals. 1,000 years is just a blip on this planet's history.

Interesting is to learn that none of nuclear power plants was ever build to withstand even traditional explosive device attack. With plenty of heat seeking portable missles handed freely to population without any control the country running nuclear power plants is at risk this day . Maybe that is main reason for European countries racing to shut down all nuclear plants now even if some may still have plenty of life.

11years after the meltdown, is it safe yet to live near ****ushima?
Decommissioning the plant and clean up is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars and last 30-40 years.
And this was a " Safe " facility built to withstand typhoons, bombings, earth quacks and tsunamis. Epic fail.

I guarantee the few saying "yes" to going nuclear would be the first to protest and have a whinge if it was being built near them.

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decrepit said..

Kamikuza said..
Psst... where do you think the stuff that becomes nuclear waste comes from originally?

The stuff dug out of the ground was un-enriched, that's a very different material to the stuff being put back in.

You got more of the stuff in the same place but it's still the same stuff, post-enrichment. After it's been through the reactor... well, we deal with far more toxic chemicals without blinking an eyelid. What's the problem again?

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lotofwind said..
11years after the meltdown, is it safe yet to live near ****ushima?
Decommissioning the plant and clean up is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars and last 30-40 years.
And this was a " Safe " facility built to withstand typhoons, bombings, earth quacks and tsunamis. Epic fail.

I guarantee the few saying "yes" to going nuclear would be the first to protest and have a whinge if it was being built near them.

Yes. People have returned to the town closest to the affected power station (Daiichi) in 2019.
Decommissioning is budgeted for in the cost of power to the public*. The workers all have jobs-for-life anyway, and there's a new industry for even more jobs
It was built to withstand a certain level of disaster**. They suffered no damage from the "earth quack" despite ground acceleration being more than 20% over maximum design specs, but the tsunami was greater than predictions. As a failure, it was reasonably successful.

I'm fine with it -- live near nuclear power stations already. As a disaster, the ****ushima event has been relatively benign


*Tepco is a private company and is paying the bulk of the decommissioning costs, which will be completed in under 13 years. (Just found the figure)

**upgrade work and evaluations were going on, based on earthquake and tsunami data from the region covering the past 900 years. This was literally a once-in-a-millenium event.

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Kamikuza said..

lotofwind said..
11years after the meltdown, is it safe yet to live near ****ushima?
Decommissioning the plant and clean up is estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars and last 30-40 years.
And this was a " Safe " facility built to withstand typhoons, bombings, earth quacks and tsunamis. Epic fail.

I guarantee the few saying "yes" to going nuclear would be the first to protest and have a whinge if it was being built near them.

Yes. People have returned to the town closest to the affected power station (Daiichi) in 2019.
Decommissioning is budgeted for in the cost of power to the public*. The workers all have jobs-for-life anyway, and there's a new industry for even more jobs
It was built to withstand a certain level of disaster**. They suffered no damage from the "earth quack" despite ground acceleration being more than 20% over maximum design specs, but the tsunami was greater than predictions. As a failure, it was reasonably successful.

I'm fine with it -- live near nuclear power stations already. As a disaster, the ****ushima event has been relatively benign


*Tepco is a private company and is paying the bulk of the decommissioning costs, which will be completed in under 13 years. (Just found the figure)

**upgrade work and evaluations were going on, based on earthquake and tsunami data from the region covering the past 900 years. This was literally a once-in-a-millenium event.

It's been 11 years and they are still tidying up. 13 more years till it's completed is unrealistic optimism. The government and Tepco are not to be trusted.

If a tsunami of that scale hit Newcastle how long would it take to clean up the ash tailings that get washed out of those giant ponds ? How would you stop the pollution being carried north to the great reef ?

If an earthquake beyond 1 in 500 level hit the three gorges dams in China and the first catastrophically breached how many millions would die in the subsequent flood ?

There is a risk with everything. If the risk acceptance with anything that has 'nuclear' in the title is zero, then why is the same not applied to anything else ?

How much will the clean up for that tailings dam failure in Brazil cost ? Or that big one in Canada back in 2008 ? The fines alone will be getting up there.