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Aussie politicians are too busy propping up coal and proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.
by snoxy 2y ago
Aussie politicians are too busy propping up coal and proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.
- chii 2y ago> proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables. they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments. Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.
- Gibbon1 2y agoLast time I visited this it felt to me that Australia's metro's are small and spread far apart so that a typical sized nuke plant is overkill.
- TimJRobinson 2y ago50% of Australia lives in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Having a nuclear power plant for each would make sense. Melbourne would make the most sense first as it gets a lot less sun than the others.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eru 2y agoThe South East of the country has some decent sized metro areas that aren't too far away from each other.
- preisschild 2y agoNuclear power plants, which have been successfully used for decades, are “unrealistic” now?
- pas 2y agothere has been an unfortunate "phase shift" since 1970 in the nuclear energy industry/ecosystem, mostly because the risk engineering principle/mandate called ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable), and of course reasonable does not mean profitable. (which makes sense, we want safe reactors not just "there was a safety budget, and we spent all of it" >>safe<< ones, right? sure, but the real world is stubbornly full of cost-benefit trade-offs, and apparently we crossed it somewhere during the 70s.) https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flo... "Nuclear followed the learning curve up until about 1970, when it inverted and costs started rising"
- eru 2y agoNuclear is held to a much higher safety standard (eg in terms of deaths per Joule) than any other form of electricity production. And that includes photovoltaic! Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.
- duckmysick 2y agoHow much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?
- lazide 2y agoFirst you’re going to need reliable worker safety data and population cancer rate data out of China (which makes almost all panels), which…. Good luck.
- jbsimpson 2y agoIf we had the renewables to replace the coal politicians would love it to retire in a heartbeat. The reason it’s sticking it around longer is because politicians fear the backlash from blackouts and high prices more than the backlash from the bad PR of delaying closures of coal.