Electric Vehicles etc

Freediver

I can go full Karen
Well let's discuss externalities then. It doesn't count the cost of carbon emissions, climate mitigation, network upgrades, economic loss of life, waste disposal for all types of generation etc etc etc. Not discussing the cost of disposal in an argument about the cost of power is just cheating. Of course there are other costs involved in the other techs but these are incomparable to the cost of disposing of nuclear waste.

So according to the IPCC if we don't drastically cut carbon emissions we're fucked. Imagine if we had spent the last 20 years displacing coal and gas fired generation with something else. The reason we haven't is people like yourself who don't understand the issues but make very loud points

We could also close all the remaining nuclear plants, but we can't because we can't afford the extra carbon. Note these are older, less efficient and more unsafe plants. We can't close nuclear plants because we don't own any other than a piddly little one that is more about producing medical and industrial isotopes

In the last 20 years wind, solar and batteries have become orders of magnitude cheaper. So why aren't all our needs met by these sources? Because networks. If you think nuclear plants are expensive, networks are unimaginably more so. Especially upgrading switch gear for distributed generation and reliability for intermittent sources. Remember this when we are bitching about energy prices inflating much faster than CPI for the next 30 years. Can you tell me the cost of upgrading the network or the cost of a reactor ecause my understanding was that upgrading the network was cheaper. The piddly little OPAL reactor cost near as much as it would cost for any state to upgrade their network ($400 000 000 in early naughties dollars)

Despite nuclear having the biggest crises it's killed the fewest people by a few orders of magnitude. The worst source is coal, but there are plenty of people who die in solar factories and installing wind farms. More people would have died from nuclear accidents and associated ilnesses than have ever died building a wind farm or working in a solar factory.

Then we have waste. The best way to deal with nuclear waste is to recycle it in breeder reactors. Then encase the final waste product in epoxy concrete and then bury or place near a continental subversion zone. Given that we can't mass collect CO2 effectively or deal with the laminate products from solar and wind farms, I would say that dealing with nuclear waste has a more finite time horizon. Do you mean FBR which produce transuranic waste products or a TBR which doesn't run on nuclear waste.
Then you talk about a geological time scale for disposal which is pointless. It would take longer than any current country has existed to go under and mean placing it in a geologically unstable area.
Its a lot easier to deal with laminates than stuff that wants to give you cancer. Its argued that the cost of recycling PV cells is higher than the value of the materials but that ceases to be an argument when compared to the cost of nuclear waste disposal.
It should be added that the cost of recycling panels comes down as more are retired and it's not far of that they will have a value and be sought after.




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Oddjob

Merry fucking Xmas to you assholes
I'll start once again by saying I can provide name date references if you can be bothered reading them.

Disposal costs are externalities, just like climate change costs, economic loss of life costs etc etc. These are all costs that are external to the financial marginal cost of supplying the energy. Sure the costs come in different forms but economists attempt to make them equivalent for anlaysis. By no means am I saying that nuclear waste disposal is costless, but it is finite and we can measure it. The cost of not managing climate change is not finite, we have estimates and they start many times larger than nuclear waste disposal. NB the end goal is to displace coal and gas from the energy mix and supplement other renewables not replace them.

I'm pretty sure that I pointed out that I worked at the coal face with a few different power companies to try and reduce emissions. My wife has an environmental management masters from Harvard and works to try and get public private partnerships up. So we're not clueless bystanders.

Australia only has one reactor, but globally nuclear forms 10% of supply and this is much higher in some countries. Regarding shutting them down, see what's happening in Germany as they keep extending the life of their reactors in order to shut down their lignite power plants and keep the lights on during winter. Korea and Japan have backflipped on shutting their reactors as they have realised that they would have to replace nuclear with gas and coal to get by.

The total cost of network capex in NSW between 2009-14 was $15bn, and that was just to improve reliability. I haven't looked at the ABS statistics for the total country since then but I'm sure it's been a lot more, and it will be a lot more again to deal with intermittant and distributed sources. $400m would not buy a transmission line these days or come even close to upgrading all of the substations in Sydney to allow distributed generation. The proven cost of a Korean APR1400 is somewhere between $6-10 billion per reactor depending on PPP of the country building the reactor. NB the cost has dropped a little as the koreans got better at building them, similar to the french in the 70 and 80s.

Au contraire! See this and this for a discussion of the deaths by energy source. I remember when the WHO analysis came out 10 years ago and was shocked that the world was happy to bumble along with coal. NB the number for wind and solar was a lot worse 10 years ago, and the table below includes all excess deaths from Fukushima and Chernobyl.

5-Bar-chart-–-What-is-the-safest-form-of-energy.png


If the goal is waste reduction then it would be a FBR to reduce the volume of waste by up to 100 times. The waste left over if encased in epoxy concrete would essentially be inert and almost impossible to extract or disperse. The question then becomes how to protect life forms from the radiation. The simplest way would be to bury at the bottom of mining shafts or oil and gas wells that are unlikely to be exposed in the next few million years.

The comparison to laminates is that we essentially bury them. Recycling solar panels and wind blades is possible but not economic and carries it's own risks from the heavy metals in the panels and silicosis from the fibreglass. All of this pales in comparison to the problem of trying to extract CO2 out of the atmosphere. It can be done but it's energy intensive, and we need to do fuckloads of it.

And this is my point, nuclear is superior to coal and gas and would supplement wind and solar, and we need all the help we can get.
 
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Haakon

Keeps on digging
Thats all fine, and I agree we need all the help we can get. But at the end of the day, it cheaper to go solar and wind then it is nukes and its a lot faster to get online.

Speed is important and has its own value and nukes are just too slow to get built and online. And cost is important because every dollar spent on less bang for buck nukes is not spent on faster and better bang for buck renewables, hence nukes delay mitigation and extend fossils.

If nukes could be rolled out faster and cheaper than renewables, I'd be happy to ignore the waste problem (how much has Finland spent on their repository...?) given the stakes. But its just not.

I cant remember what AEMO has projected for costs of the required grid upgrades - maybe someone can read the ISP and remind me. But as a rule im not a fan of the argument that nukes are cheap because they don't need grid upgrades... And also not the grid upgrades of the gold-plating era was fraught and over priced for a bunch of silly reasons that are not reflective of future costs if done properly.
 

Freediver

I can go full Karen
The Author of that OWID piece has used a figure of 433 deaths from Chernobyl. WHO say 4000 but are criticised by those who wrote the papers this is based on as being too low.
It also doesn't factor in land left uninhabitable.
With the Fukishima deaths a lot of people who would have died from the disaster were already dead from the tsunami. The stats got a lucky break there
The hydro figures are screwed by 1 incident at a dam that was built during China's great leap forward by people with no experience in dam building. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
You have presented a good argument against fossil fuels but that was preaching to the choir.
You won't convince me on nukes with current tech.
You especially won't convince me on FBR because there truly is no way of making the byproducts safe, despite what you're trying to assert. Plutonium, which is one of the byproducts has a half life of 20000 years. That means it will take 20000 years to be half as radioactive as it is today.
 

Oddjob

Merry fucking Xmas to you assholes
Thats all fine, and I agree we need all the help we can get. But at the end of the day, it cheaper to go solar and wind then it is nukes and its a lot faster to get online.

Speed is important and has its own value and nukes are just too slow to get built and online. And cost is important because every dollar spent on less bang for buck nukes is not spent on faster and better bang for buck renewables, hence nukes delay mitigation and extend fossils.

If nukes could be rolled out faster and cheaper than renewables, I'd be happy to ignore the waste problem (how much has Finland spent on their repository...?) given the stakes. But its just not.

I cant remember what AEMO has projected for costs of the required grid upgrades - maybe someone can read the ISP and remind me. But as a rule im not a fan of the argument that nukes are cheap because they don't need grid upgrades... And also not the grid upgrades of the gold-plating era was fraught and over priced for a bunch of silly reasons that are not reflective of future costs if done properly.
I don't see it as a binary argument. Solar, wind, hydro and nuclear all have different pluses and minuses.

I remember talking to Andrew Charlton (an Australian negotiator at Copenhagen) and he said it wasn't a case of choosing a few options. "We need to pull every single lever, now!".

The Author of that OWID piece has used a figure of 433 deaths from Chernobyl. WHO say 4000 but are criticised by those who wrote the papers this is based on as being too low.
It also doesn't factor in land left uninhabitable.
With the Fukishima deaths a lot of people who would have died from the disaster were already dead from the tsunami. The stats got a lucky break there
The hydro figures are screwed by 1 incident at a dam that was built during China's great leap forward by people with no experience in dam building. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
You have presented a good argument against fossil fuels but that was preaching to the choir.
You won't convince me on nukes with current tech.
You especially won't convince me on FBR because there truly is no way of making the byproducts safe, despite what you're trying to assert. Plutonium, which is one of the byproducts has a half life of 20000 years. That means it will take 20000 years to be half as radioactive as it is today.
I'm not trying to convince you that nuclear waste is great. I'm just saying it can be managed.

We haven't got feasible management yet for CO2 that has already been emitted. And solar, wind and hydro is not enough to supplant fossil fuel by itself. We can supplant fossil fuel with nuclear.

It would have been better if this process started 40 years ago, but even if we start now it will accelerate the closure of the remaining coal and gas plants.


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mark22

Likes Dirt
It’s not that simple. A national grid with appropriate transmission capacity and flexibility is the key.
Building large solar and wind farms around the country are starting to impact on communities and forests with the need for new HV transmission lines to be built to connect these plants to the grid.

Wind farms a best built in suitable conditions the same as Solar farms which are mostly not serviced by appropriate infrastructure.

It's one of those things that sound great unless you're impacted by 22,000kw lines or don't like thousands of trees permanently cleared underneath them.
I generate twice as much power I consume with a PV system but none of it at night and I've grown attached to my lights and TV, batteries are a pipe dream at the moment as @ozzybmx points out.
To be realistic It's coal for years ahead or maybe even nuclear.
 

ozzybmx

taking a shit with my boobs out
I generate twice as much power I consume with a PV system but none of it at night and I've grown attached to my lights and TV, batteries are a pipe dream at the moment as @ozzybmx points out.
To be realistic It's coal for years ahead or maybe even nuclear.
100% its tree hugger dreaming ! I'm done with this conversation as I've been living this green-fluffing for over 15yrs, solar and wind are an intermittent load and will lead to blackouts.

Batteries also need to be charged again after depletion. My last comment on this is nobody is ever going to pay for this and no politician will ever commit election suicide by shutting down a power plant and blacking out a state in Australia.

Back to EV's ;)
 

Dales Cannon

lightbrain about 4pm
Staff member
100% its tree hugger dreaming ! I'm done with this conversation as I've been living this green-fluffing for over 15yrs, solar and wind are an intermittent load and will lead to blackouts.

Batteries also need to be charged again after depletion. My last comment on this is nobody is ever going to pay for this and no politician will ever commit election suicide by shutting down a power plant and blacking out a state in Australia.

Back to EV's ;)
eV?
 

Haakon

Keeps on digging
100% its tree hugger dreaming ! I'm done with this conversation as I've been living this green-fluffing for over 15yrs, solar and wind are an intermittent load and will lead to blackouts.

Batteries also need to be charged again after depletion. My last comment on this is nobody is ever going to pay for this and no politician will ever commit election suicide by shutting down a power plant and blacking out a state in Australia.

Back to EV's ;)
I'm quite surprised someone working in the industry has such a view of the system. I really do urge you to read the ISP and understand what it means, i think you will find it interesting and hopefully illuminating.
 

Oddjob

Merry fucking Xmas to you assholes
I'm quite surprised someone working in the industry has such a view of the system. I really do urge you to read the ISP and understand what it means, i think you will find it interesting and hopefully illuminating.
He's not alone. This is an interesting podcast on fusion and the journalist has been watching the energy market for a long time and believes that you need 'firm generation' such as fission and then fusion to support other renewables.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/58gKXUIeLnKUEOPXUya5cm?si=MEEEqfg0TTKqzIl2w9RM4w

I hope that the old joke about fusion being 30 years away and always will be, is wrong.

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Oddjob

Merry fucking Xmas to you assholes
Hence the second Bass Link.

Seriously, just read the bloody thing. You guys are acting like no one has thought of this stuff.
I've read it and I simply don't believe it. The original Basslink has been an operational and financial basket case. I'm not confident that Basslink 2.0 will work out any better.

There won't be enough storage and synchronisation capacity to deal with more than one interconnect going down. If that's the case SA falling over could lead to a domino effect across the NEM. To avoid this we will end up with a bunch of small OCGT and peaking diesel plants being built at the last minute. This will be less efficient than a single larger CCGT or I don't know a Korean APR1400.

If we get lower runoff in the Snowys and Tasmania as predicted by the IPCC and CSIRO then, their storage capacity will be severely limited.

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