Paul Anderson writes: Somebody must get the message throughout that nuclear energy will not be carbon-free, not by a good distance. The carbon prices — assume concrete, fancy metals, unique engineering — are all paid upfront earlier than a single watt is generated. Which is precisely what we don’t want — instant carbon prices and a promise of compensatory technology someday sooner or later.
We are able to set up carbon-free technology gear proper now and provide that energy pronto; wind and photo voltaic already dominate the electrical energy market by advantage of their low, low value.
Nuclear is sophisticated, soiled and costly. Like politics.
Greg Eaton writes: Ian Lowe is true, the horse bolted 60 years in the past for nuclear energy in Australia. We had been too small a home inhabitants then to even use a small share of such energy economically. As of late to make use of nuclear energy in present confirmed designs would break the bank and likewise require upgrades to our energy grids.
It will be less expensive, and with a a lot, a lot earlier implementation, to place this huge funding behind a number of correctly designed, comparatively small, distributed power storage techniques, which might then require little grid enlargement and make renewable (and GHG) targets possible and certain attainable in our lifetime.
Peter Lengthy writes: Thanks for declaring the folly of Peter Dutton’s nuclear “coverage”. It’s a basic useless cat, designed (as you level out) to distract us from the true motion that’s wanted. It’s a seductively silly coverage, however please don’t get sucked in and waste too many column inches on it. That’s actually what it’s about — don’t fall for it.
Philip White writes: When you imagine a latest Newspoll, you would possibly assume 55% of Australians assist small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). This is perhaps significant if small modular reactors really existed, however they don’t. There are a few tremendous costly “small reactors” working unreliably in authoritarian nations, however there isn’t a “modular” manufacturing, so there are not any economies of scale. Essentially the most promising SMR plan (NuScale) just lately received cancelled as a result of it was uneconomic.
So the 55% was only a operate of the deceptive nature of the query requested. When you requested a professional query, only a few would assist it, as identified by Professor John Quiggin of the College of Queensland.