Coalition Policy still Pro Nuclear ?

[stui magpie]

[HAL]

For you I will consider it.

[Tannin]

[Tannin]

And the other elephant, an even bigger one than geothermal, is efficiency. We waste colossal amounts of power, probably three-quarters of what we produce is just pissed up against the waste wall. Simply by getting serious about cutting back on waste, we can get three-quarters of the way from where we are now to the renewable future. Best of all, it is cheap. By far the cheapest renewable option, and in many cases even cheaper than ugly, dangerous options like coal-fired thermal. It's a no brainer.

[pietillidie]

Yep, between the various green energies mentioned above, the direction is a no-brainer. The carbon tax is necessary, though it's a poor cousin to the far more rational ETS.

[Nick - Pie Man]

[Tannin]

Not as easy as that, Nick, for several reasons.

(1) Cost. Regardless of all other factors, nuclear power costs 2 to 3 times more than competing technologies. Right now, the leading competitors (i.e., cheapest and easiest) are coal and gas-fired fossil thermal. Obviously, these are the very ones we have to get rid of if we don't want to destroy the planet with uncontrolled climate change. So the real competitors for nuclear power are the renewables - in rough order of significance, improved efficiency ('cause a watt saved is a watt earned), geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, and tidal. Nuclear is much dearer than improved efficiency (2 to 5 times dearer) but somewhere around the same price as large-scale renewable at present. Over time, however, this can be expected to change as the renewable sector develops greater scale and new technology. The nuclear industry has already been working on a large scale and trying hard to find the best technologies for 50+ years - in other words, we can expect much greater cost reductions in (e.g.) solar over the short to medium term than we can in nuclear. So, in the medium term (our lifetimes, say) nuclear will remain uncompetitive cost-wise. In the long to very long term, major technological breakthroughs may provide us with excellent quasi-nuclear power generation, notably through fusion power. We don't even know if this is actually practicable yet, let alone know exactly how to do it, but we are certainly working on it. Think 30-50 years, absolute best case, worst case never.

(2) People go into the deserts all the time. You'd be amazed how many people you run into in the deep outback. More grey nomads than grey kangaroos! Not to mention graziers, mining workers, Aboriginal people, scientists, and so on.

(3) Transmission losses (which is really cost again). The further you have to transmit power, the more of it is lost along the way. Good (think expensive) design can reduce transmission losses, but never, ever eliminate them. In the end, there is no getting around the fact that losses along any wire are proportional to the square of the current. Basic physics doesn't like remote power stations much! Further cost is added by the expense of remote construction (it costs more to build the same house a long way away), and the expense of building and maintaining high-tech transmission equipment.

(4) Safety. A bad nuclear accident is NOT a local event. Depending on the wind direction, we could have serious fallout in Sydney, Perth, Darwin, or Melbourne from a plant somewhere in Central Australia. Hell, right now they are facing a possibility of having to evacuate Tokyo because of a plant more than 100 kilometres away. Fallout from Chernobyl significantly impacted western Europe more than 1000 kilometres away.

Bottom line: it would be much cheaper and more effective (and safer too) to spend about half as much money on a mix of renewable technologies - efficiency, geothermal, wind, tidal, and so on.

[stui magpie]

Hang on, I've been doing a bit of reading into this geothermal energy.

Apart from being quite limited in it's availability, it's also apparently reasonably inefficient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy

All the arguments about location, apply here. You don't get to pick and choose where you put it, it depends where the hot rocks are.

Seems very limited. Maybe we should just put more research into cold fusion?

[pietillidie]

I haven't had time to read this yet, but this looks like a serious study pointing in the right direction:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf

It would be good to read this and then a critique of it from elsewhere. Hopefully get time soon

[Magpie Jack]

Unfortunately things seem to be getting worse in Japan with the upgrading of the disaster from a 4 to a 5. Events are still unfolding but it does seem to be a defining moment for the future as far as Nuclear Power Plants go. Germany has already stated they are going to faze theirs out completely and with their engineering expertise I reckon you will see huge advancements in alternative technology in the next decade. It's hard to imagine either side of politics in Aus embracing a Nuclear Power Plant now.

[Tannin]

Stui, I'd make several points which, taken together, pretty much overrule your doubts about geothermal.

1: efficiency isn't really an issue when you get something for nothing in the first place. Where the source is 100% renewable (which geothermal energy is), even if you can only economically extract 1% of thhe available energy at a given site, that is still a win.

2: There is plenty of hot rock - and entire planet full of it, in fact! There is hot rock underneath your feet right now - and I don't have to know where on Earth you are to be able to say that with 100% confidence. Obviously, it isn't always easy to get at or exploit, but considering the total world research end engineering investment in geothermal energy to date ($sweetfarrkall in the scheme of things), especially as compared to the starkly incredible sums we have already pissed up against the research wall of safe nuclear power generation, I don't think we can even think about dismissing it. The hot rock is there. Which is easier? Drilling a deeper hole? Or digging up the 965,000 Chernobyl victims and bringing them back to life?

3: remote locations are not nearly as much an issue as they are with nuclear stations. There are two reasons for this: (a) efficiency is a non-issue. With nuclear (or coal for that matter) we have to pay for the fuel we waste. Not so with geothermal. (b) We don't have to maintain a huge, high-tech, mega-complex plant out in the middle of nowhere, nor do we have to construct it. We just have to drill some holes and maintain some relatively simple machinery at the top of them - i.e., do much the same sort of thing the oil industry has been doing as routine for over a century.

I'm not saying geothermal is easy, but it offers such a huge benefit for zero risk and (as compared to nuclear in particular) very low total cost that to ignore it would be plain old-fashioned stupid.

[stui magpie]

^

OK, Apply all the same logic to solar energy and it kicks geothermal energy's arse. the only place geothermal wins is the "Always On" bit.

You're obviously a fan of geothermal but I think you're making it seem a bit too easy and ignoring a few points.

[stui magpie]

Wasn't so good I needed to say it twice.

[Tannin]

Apply the same logic to solar energy and it kicks geothermal energy's arse. the only place geothermal wins is the "Always On" bit.

But the "always on" bit is crucial. Only geothermal and biomass can offer that. Solar, wind, tide - all good things, but none of them can provide power when it is needed.

You're obviously a fan of geothermal but I think you're making it seem a bit too easy and ignoring a few points.

To a certain extent, yes. But it doesn't have to be easy to be a winner, because it is pretty much the only game there in town. Nothing much else does baseload, so even if it's quite hard, it is a priority area and we need to spend what it takes to do the R&D.


but you're only getting access to the heat source for free. you still have to build the plant, pipe in the water, trap the steam, use the steam to turn a turbine

Agreed.


Tidal power, you stick a turbine in the water and let nature do it's work.

Yep. But where are you going to put it? I have never looked in any detail at tidal power, but my understanding is that you need some pretty specific - and in the Australian context quite rare - geological features for it to deliver enough power to be more than a tiny sideshow. I should imagine, for example, that the Port Phillip Rip would be good - but are we seriously going to fine even a fraction of the power Melbourne uses there? I doubt it. And there aren't many other spots along the coastline. Half a dozen, maybe.

Solar, you lay out the panels and have a beer while the batteries charge up.

Nope. The cost of the batteries is hopelessly out of court at present. Not even close to practicable. Molten salt is being experimented with (it stores heat pretty well) but it's still too dear. More research required!

geothermal is a nuclear or coal fired plant, without the nukes or coal. I'd like to see us get away from having to boil water to create steam to turn a turbine and get to creating electricity with as few moving parts

Absolutely!

Geothermal might have the smallest environmental footprint

Probably, though I hadn't thought of that until you pointed it out. Solar is the other very good one. Wind isn't so much an environmental issue as a cost and fairness issue (as presently implemented it victimises country people so that city people can have a bigger plasma TV) but that can be overcome with good planning.

One thing we haven't mentioned is the synergy between renewables - hot days have high power demand, and (generally) good solar performance. When the change comes through, the wind generators kick in. And so on. But you still need a reliable baseload.