64
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
64 points (94.4% liked)
Australia
3620 readers
107 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EsBiC9HjyQ
fwiw Sabine has a history of commenting outside of her area of expertise and having some very bad takes.
She's an astrophysicist. Listen to her closely when she's talking about what's going on in space. But her comments on other subjects such as climate, trans rights, and, yes, nuclear energy, should be taken as those of a random interested layperson. Maybe they're right from time to time, but they don't deserve any special consideration.
In that video, for example, she herself admits to ignoring the planning stage, and she's only talking about countries that already have large nuclear industries. Australia has no nuclear expertise to begin with, so it's guaranteed to take a lot longer for us than it does in places like Germany and America. And even then she ends up admitting it's at least twice as expensive as alternative options. She tries to downplay this by making a joke about astrophysics and orders of magnitude, but here on Earth that's a big difference, and that's in the best case.
I think it's a well balanced and well researched video. I don't think she concludes that nuclear is a clear winner. And in our case it may not make sense. But both sides are guilty of cherry picking facts to fit their narrative.
The only reason I can think of to go nuclear is if renewables can't meet our power needs. I think it's a hard problem for the grid to manage distributed power generation in such varying amounts. Sometimes the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow enough. Can batteries fill the gaps? I hope so. But I wouldn't be opposed to a small bet on nuclear at the same time.
@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here's an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/
Where's RedFlow based? Brisbane.
An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.
And where is one of the world's largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.
The Coalition's policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.
Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.
Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.
And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.
@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath This type of “small bet” would cost 10x more than the same bet on batteries and grid upgrades. The nuclear option is nothing more than a massive carbon tax, except this time it’s a nuclear tax, and it’s funding the nuclear instead of reducing it.
Every time someone proposes to spend NBN levels of money, or multiples of NBNs, ask yourself what the coalition would say if they were against it.
I think you misunderstood me. The small bet I was referring to is not the coalition's plan. It would be more money to research next generation reactors.
@DavidDoesLemmy oh just research? I can't see any harm in running experiments if they're for thorium or fusion. But the real billions need to be spent now, on batteries & factories for batteries. We can be a big player exporting these ... this decade! If we had the courage.
Whats the link?