[LINK] Should Australia consider nuclear electricity?

[David]

On 2021-11-24 16:06, Karl Auer wrote:

> It is pollyanna-ish to think that we can create, store, transport and "dispose of" nuclear waste safely for a period *longer than all of recorded human history*. Yet that is exactly what nuclear-power apologists do all the time - they gloss over the issue of waste management.

Yes, and very similar arguments apply to "carbon capture and storage" technologies which are cost-competitive with the usual zero-footprint technologies, whatever Scott Morrison thinks.  There's a good reason why the banks won't fund coal projects.

In any case, there are many other reasons why nuclear power at this point in our development is dangerous.  Here are some of them:

(a)	The eastern electric-power grid will need to be re-engineered and that will require different control-systems models, especially if it has to coexist with vastly cheaper green-power generation.

(b)	Large nuclear power plants (and don't forget we need two reactors, one to take over when the other is down) will greatly distort energy costs when green power has almost zero "fuel" cost.

(c)	A nuclear power industry needs a whole substructure of supporting industries, technology, nuclear engineers and plant operators, not to mention specialised education, which we don't have.

(d)	It also needs a social licence, and we don't have that either.

(e)	It's an attractive target in the event of war, or even internal sabotage.  And any nuclear event on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukashima would also destroy Australia's reputation for clean agriculture.

(f)	The world doesn't have enough high-grade uranium to make nuclear generation economically attractive unless safe & cost-effective breeder reactors are developed.

(g)	Some western countries are not deploying nuclear any more, and Germany has a program to decommission nuclear power plants I believe.  So are we going to persist with obsolete nuclear technology, drive up the cost of our exports, and generally crap on Australia's own reputation just as the rest of the world is getting out of it?  Why does that remind me of the endless arguments in the Coalition about coal?  Or electric cars?  Or just about any other improvement in human life.

Large grid-scale nuclear power is a technology whose time has come and is now going.  The current agitation sounds to me as though the nuclear industry, realising it's in decline, is trying to market technology to a gullible government who it seems will believe almost anything.  Look at carbon capture & storage...

> When the nuclear brigade get permission to put a nuclear reactor and/or a nuclear waste dump in Mossman, I'll listen.

Do you mean Mosman in Sydney?  A beautiful place!

David Lochrin