Oz could have 25 nuclear power plants by 2050

[Dead_Parrot]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3874094a12,00.html

As many as 25 nuclear power plants could be built in Australia by 2050, producing one-third of the country's power and slowing the growth of greenhouse emissions, at a cost of more than $A75 billion ($NZ86.3b).

They might be built in areas that house coal-fired power stations, such as the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. But a nuclear industry would be cost-effective only if a price was put on carbon dioxide emissions, forcing up the cost of electricity produced from coal, a taskforce has told the Australian Government.

"If you don't impose a cost on carbon then investment in nuclear power could not proceed and should not proceed," said the chairman of the taskforce, the former Telstra boss and nuclear physicist Ziggy Switkowski.

And the response from the left-wing leader, Kim Beazley?

"If John Howard is re-elected, we will go down an inexorable course for 25 nuclear reactors … and tens of thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste. If the Labor Party is elected we will go down the path of clean coal and renewables."

Way to save the planet, Kim. Guess you haven't seen the bush-fires, droughts or suicides that are sweeping your country, you total dipshit. How're those reefs doing?

I'm glad I don't live in Australia - I'd have to vote for either Bush Lite or The Man of Doom...

(edit - see #4)

[NNadir]

1. Well, at least she's stating the realities.

It's nuclear or coal.

It's not like she's lying and pretending that renewables are enough.

John Howard may be wrong about everything else, but he is right about nuclear power. Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reason.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. Clean Coal is a lie, and Nuclear creates poison that lasts thousands of years

that's a tough choice. :shrug:

[Dead_Parrot]

3. "Nuclear poison" is contained

As NNadir points out {frequently} no-one has ever died from nuclear waste. On the other hand, fossil fuel waste kills 2,000,000 people per year, not including suicides from dried-up aussie farmers: This should not really be a dilemma.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

7. well, they're having an awfully hard time finding places to dump it...

and the 'stored' waste from Trojan sits right above a fault line. Somehow, that doesn't make me feel safe.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Whereas dumping CO2 is easy...

...just stick into the atmosphere. :-(

I don't know the details of Trojan, but it might be a bad idea. Some technologies - like synrock - wouldn't really care, since it's got the radioactivity per kg of normal granite, but a once-used-fuel-rod-in-a-cask might be a bad idea.

But that is just the US way of doing things: I don't argue against cars because the H2 Hummer is a bag of shit - the Prius is fairly sane. Likewise, the US approach to nuclear power is a crock of shit, but there are over 6 billion other people on the planet with more sense. You just need to talk to them.

A lot of what the US calls "nuclear waste" is perfectly good fuel - it just needs reprocessing. That requires thought and a commitment to the future, though...

[Viva_La_Revolution]

12. I never said coal was good

it's just as bad in different ways.

see post #11

[NNadir]

5. It's not hard at all, if you're rational.

It happens that coal creates "poison" that is eternal and not "poison" that is (allegedly) dangerous for thousands of years.

The products of nuclear reactions are subject to equilibrium, meaning that at a given power level there is a maximal amount that can accumulate. Coal is subject to no such restriction since unlike so called "nuclear waste," coal waste is not destroyed as it is formed.

Coal has been killing people continuously and is killing people right now. It would be hard to identify anyone killed by nuclear operations in this country in the last 4 decades.

No one in the United States has ever been killed by the malfunction of a commercial nuclear power plant, and no one has ever been killed by the storage of so called "dangerous" nuclear waste. People are routinely killed by the normal operations of coal plants and coal waste - especially in the form of particulates - cause tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cancers each year.

It's a no brainer.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Bonus question... How many Polish miners are trapped underground?

-It's in the last 24 hours,
-They are coal miners,
-No-one gives a fuck

[NNadir]

22. It would seem that there were 15, and they are all likely dead.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/22/poland.mine.ap/index.html

At least the President of Poland is cancelling his foreign trips, state visits. He's on the scene, comforting the relatives.

In our country a major city was being destroyed, and thousands were killed and our President wouldn't cancel a political fund raising trip to a resort in San Diego. He did fly over the destroyed city on his way back and look out the window of his plane.

As international news, though, this is probably the last we'll hear of these miners. I still can't find out if they ever recovered the bodies of those 65 Mexicans who were killed in the mines in February of this year.

In this country we have lost close to 500 miners since 1993:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/lab_coa_min_fat-labor-coal-mining-fatalities

Last year in China, over 3,000 coal miners were killed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4476928.stm. To be frank, I don't recall all that many reports on the events.

If any of these miners were Navajos who mined uranium in the 1950's we'd hear about them all the time, even if there were just six of them.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

11. sorry . I don't buy it.

Coal is bad, yes. Nuclear waste is worse in the long run.


CONSERVE CONSERVE CONSERVE and instead of spending billions on one nuke plant, invest it in renewables.

Oregon gets more than 65% of it's electricity from Hydropower, and the people voted in 1980 for a moratorium on the construction of nuclear power plants in the state.

Trojan was finally shut down in 93 after several incidents. There are 34 concrete containers still there storing the waste. The plant was only in operation for 16 years.
PGE customers are still paying for that little boondoggle.

[NNadir]

18. Well, like I said, it's not hard if your rational.

If your irrational though, it's more difficult.

How many coal plants in the world have been shut by moratoria when they kill, which they do every time they operate? Are these continuous killings not considered "incidents?"

You are concerned about Trojan's thirty four containers. How many people have been injured by them? How many coal plants can operate for 16 years and still keep all of their "waste" on site in 34 containers that do nothing but sit there? How many coal plants can claim that no one has been injured by their waste?

What happened at Trojan was silly and certainly doesn't reflect the nuclear industry as a whole. Part of what happened there was a paen to ignorance, and should not be used to justify more ignorance.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

19. I never advocated for coal

I advocate for renewables and conservation.

[NNadir]

21. So does everyone else on the planet. The trouble is that such advocacy

produces very little energy.

Since everybody is for what you're for, and have been so for many, many decades, and it isn't happening, there could be some problem with what you are for, no?

Climate change is real. Pretend "solutions" won't work. Reliance on pretend is the same as doing nothing.

Now where you live, in Oregon, they have huge hydroelectric resources. In 2003 Oregon produced 340 trillion BTUs of energy via hydroelectric means. On the other hand, Oregon produced 214 trillion BTU's of energy from burning natural gas, natural gas being an unacceptably dangerous fuel because of global climate change. (When you burn natural gas in Oregon it kills people in Mali who don't care about Oregon's needs.) In 2003, Oregon produced 44 trillion BTU's of energy from coal, coal being an unacceptably dangerous fuel that whenever it is burned, threatens the lives of every, man, woman and child on the planet. In 2003, Oregon produced 42.7 trillion BTUs of energy by burning biomass, presumably wood, which they also have a lot of in Oregon. In 2003, Oregon produced just under 17 trillion BTU's from solar, geothermal, wind and imported electricity. Since Oregon is one of the most thermally active states around, this is not really great performance.

In 2003 Oregon consumed 369 trillion BTU's of petroleum products.

I would be happy to debate the point of whether or not it was abysmally stupid to blow up the Trojan Nuclear plant if Oregon was really not burning coal, oil, and natural gas - which kill every time they are used, or if Oregon really was meeting its need via productive appeal to conservation and renewables. However the appeal is wishful thinking. Oregon is not meeting its needs through conservation and renewables, in spite of being one of the best endowed states (for renewable resources) there is. You have hydroelectric potential, you have geothermal potential, you have wind potential. In your eastern deserts I presume you have sun, if not on the coast. Therefore I submit there is something very, very questionable about what you have said.

The Trojan nuclear power plant was a poor performer with real design problems. It sucked as a reactor - 90% of the reactors operating on the planet performed better - but it still produced 12% of Oregon's electricity when it operated. Even though it was one of the world's worst reactors, it was still better than all of the oil, gas, and petroleum facilities in Oregon and in the rest of the world. That says everything. Chernobyl excepted, the worst reactor is better and safer than the best fossil fuel facilities.

In fact though - and again I am only speaking of processes that would appeal to rational people - even if the Trojan nuclear plant had experienced a failure resulting in fatalities, and it didn't - this would not necessarily have implications about the wisdom of installing nuclear facilities in Australia. It is not generally regarded as reasonable or logical to observe a special case and make a pronouncement about the general case. We are taught in introductory logic courses that the statement "Some A is B" does not imply that every case of "A" implies "B." The average nuclear plant in the United States has a capacity of utilization of better than 90%, the highest performance for all types of all other electrical generating plants in our country. Not one nuclear power plant in the United States is known to have caused a fatality outside of its property, and that includes the historical Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. Therefore even though you have produced a single case of a marginal reactor, I can produce (around the world) over 400 cases of spectacular performers. The Australians, if they were to build reactors certainly would have lots of positive examples to emulate. They could ask the French for advice, for instance. (If I were building a nuclear industry from scratch, I would certainly practice my French.) I don't think the Australians, if they build nuclear plants, will built another Trojan, and there is no reason that they should do so.

[Odin2005]

29. We need both nuclear AND renewables.

Some places will be better served by nuclear power, other places would be better served by wind, hydro, or solar; BOTH are needed.

And coal IS worse in the long run, anyone who denies that has no brain. If I had to choose between a 5% increase in the rate of people getting cancer and billions of people dying because of global warming I'll pick the former.

[buddysmellgood]

9. How about cleaner coal. It's not a lie. It just won't happen without accounting for carbon.

http://www.e4engineering.com/Articles/297015/Siemens+cell+passes+test.htm

[Viva_La_Revolution]

13. think they can manage to stop destroying mountains to get to it?

:(

[buddysmellgood]

15. No.

[Saynt]

4. Um... the woman of doom?

Who's that?

Kim Beazley is a man.

And although he's in the Labor party he belongs to the Labor right.

So left-winger (though possibly in economic policies) is hardly the way to describe the current leadership of either the Labor or Liberal parties.

Which is silly considering their names.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. My bad...

...I confess to knowing fuck-all about Aussie politics, and assumed he was a she.

But I'll stand by the "left-wing" description. (mind you, compared to Howard, Ghengis Khan is "left-wing"...)

[nealmhughes]

14. I worked in navy nuclear power for six years and in commercial operations for eight.

The post-TMI safety backups of backups and common sense (such as not allowing the radwaste building blow its relief valves and vent outside...) are making nuclear power safer and safer.

I know that the radiation I got, even after a couple of "emergency" Reactor Compartment entries (emergency entry really means "rapid") and for extended time during outages were minimal -- less than had I lived in Denver for the same amount of time. Most of it was alpha or beta. The gamma emitters are fairly well shielded by lead at the hot spots.

The one disadvantage is, of course, spent fuel. Once it goes into the water now, it never comes out. The dry rad waste is mostly just rags and expended filter media, etc. The liquid is reprocessed into CPW (controlled pure water).

The new technology of vitrification needs to be explored. That involves the spent fuel being turned into glass with lead and other shielding materials intersperced into the glass itself. It is a great idea. Now, where do we put the glass?

Location is paramount in siting a plant, of course. One needs an available heat sink (river, reservoir or ocean bay) just as one does a coal plant for condensation. Cooling towers are much, much less effective than are direct water condensation.

But given that nuclear power gives off no greenhouse gases, nor even affects more than a few hundred acres per plant, allowing wildlife to flourish in the vicinity and even at the intakes and outflows, I prefer it to combustion of any sort. Of course, solar, tidal, micro-hydro cascading low head high flow turbines, and wind are superior, but France is doing a great job with their plants.

I know that people throw up Chernobyl, and TMI, but Chernobyl was basicly a bomb factory that made elecricity as a byproduct, and TMI's operational problems have been solved. Given our other choices, where else can one get 800MW at one place with minimal transmission losses? France and Finland have announced giant 1600 MW PWRs in the coming and Ontario Power is to build a dozen large plants and finish 2 on Lake Huron to cut down on coal emissions...

[Porcupine]

16. Does it ever occur to anybody that "more power"= more problems

in the long run. Nuclear powered trawlers would quickly exhaust the oceans of what is left. Nuclear powered cities would have little incentive to conserve or restrict sprawl patterns.

Right NOW we have too many humans using too much stuff. Simply swapping to a CO2 neutral power program will do nothing for hundreds of other environmental problems that desperately need to be addressed.

Conservation on the other hand becomes a habit. Being able to see your power supply and meet the guy who services the unit might start people thinking that they are actually dependant on the environment for services.

Right now Australia could completely change it's CO2 profile and there would still be an environmental disaster threatening the stability of the country.

Give it a think.

[YankeyMCC]

17. Yes

in the same way that more energy efficient cars and machines can actually lead to More consumption of power and thus more pollution and impact on the ecology.

I still think things like improved CAFE standards and promoting the development and use of efficient machines is important, but you're absolutely right this crisis must be faced not by a simple pursuit for more energy but also by a maturing of our society where we manage ourselves in relation to the world ecology in a much more wise and informed way.

This isn't naive optimism, many ancient native cultures lived in this way with their environment. We now, as a global society with more power technology, need to take a few lessons from our past and find a new sustainable method of maintaining a society that is acceptable to us.

[phantom power]

20. Speaking for myself, I don't view nuclear energy as being about "more power."

At least, not in my lifetime. For the next century, non-fossil energy of any kind is going to be about survival. And probably not the survival of everybody. There will almost certainly be fewer humans alive 100 years from now than there are now. It probably won't be thru voluntary birth control programs, either.

[Odin2005]

30. "Does it ever occur to anybody that "more power"= more problems"

The correct way of saying it would be "more power from DIRTY sources = more problems. Ideally, if we had some enegy source that is perfectly clean (like fusion) energy conservation wouldn't really be an issue, we'd be drowning in an endless supply of clean energy.

[jpak]

23. Looks like OZ has two choices

Nuclear and old school coal.

or

Renewables, conservation and "clean" coal.

Those 25 nuclear power will reduce Oz's GHG emissions by 8-18% by 2050????

Doesn't sound like a very good investment of $100+ billion (decomissioning and spent fuel costs added to the cost of the reactors).

PV, solar thermal, wind, wave and geothermal energy systems would be cheaper - could be deployed more rapidly than 25 nuclear power plants - and would not require large quantities of water for cooling.

And just where is this new uranium going to be mined and the spent fuel dumped???

Aboriginal lands???

John Howard: pro-Iraq war, pro-uranium for India and China and pro-nuclear for OZ...

Anybody know someone else that fits that description???

[Dead_Parrot]

25. There's a third option...

Stick the baseload on nuke, use some of that aussie sun for the peak, and tie in some wind and wave to cooking up a transport fuel (DME, hydrogen, whatever's in vogue this week). If there's any left after powering the desalination plants they are going to need, that is...

[phantom power]

26. And a fourth option...

run it all on nukes. Off-peak, use the extra capacity to manufacture H2, scrub atmospheric CO2, and produce DME.

But solar, wind, et al, are all good.

[jpak]

32. Fifth option

All renewables - no coal, no nukes...

:)

[Odin2005]

33. I prefer the 4 realistic options, thank you.

:P

[kestrel91316]

24. How ya gonna cool them things without any f---in' WATER????

[NNadir]

27. Um...well...let's see...wait...don't tell me...hmmm...hold on a minute...

...I guess Australia, like Austria, must be landlocked. Both countries have names that start with the same four letters.

[kestrel91316]

28. They better plan on putting each and every one of them on the coast,

because their SURFACE water (you know, RIVERS) has just about vanished.

[NickB79]

31. Well, since almost all the population of Australia lives near the coast

That is the logical place to put them in the first place. No point in building 1000 MW reactors in the middle of the Aussie outback, is there?