6 ms·

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

by whh 3mo ago

tuna74 3mo ago
Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?
- echelon 3mo ago
  Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile? Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case. We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
  - SugarReflex 3mo ago
    Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)
    - davewasthere 3mo ago
      One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine. I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like. If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station. But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
      - fc417fc802 3mo ago
        I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km. To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
  - eqvinox 3mo ago
    Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.
    - MostlyStable 3mo ago
      The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.
      - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
        It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant. I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
      - qlte 3mo ago
        Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable. PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year. I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
        throwaway69123 3mo ago
        when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
  - dalyons 3mo ago
    Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
  - rgmerk 3mo ago
    If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.
- protocolture 3mo ago
  I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind. Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out. Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed. Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it. Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics. Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
  - LearnYouALisp 3mo ago
    > Nuke should push coal and gas out. Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?
rgmerk 3mo ago
You pay for it. There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most. Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks. Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia. If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
- stinkbeetle 3mo ago
  A biogas turbine for the last few percent of demand?? Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns). If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing. Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything. Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda. This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

by whh 3mo ago

Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.

tuna74 3mo ago

Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?

echelon 3mo ago
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile? Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case. We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
- SugarReflex 3mo ago
  Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)
  - davewasthere 3mo ago
    One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine. I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like. If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station. But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
    - fc417fc802 3mo ago
      I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km. To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
- eqvinox 3mo ago
  Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.
  - MostlyStable 3mo ago
    The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.
    - amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
      It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant. I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
    - qlte 3mo ago
      Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable. PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year. I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
      - throwaway69123 3mo ago
        when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
- dalyons 3mo ago
  Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
- rgmerk 3mo ago
  If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.
protocolture 3mo ago
I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind. Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out. Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed. Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it. Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics. Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
- LearnYouALisp 3mo ago
  > Nuke should push coal and gas out. Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?

rgmerk 3mo ago

You pay for it. There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most. Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks. Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia. If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.

stinkbeetle 3mo ago
A biogas turbine for the last few percent of demand?? Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns). If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing. Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything. Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda. This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.