On the money, Graham. There's a lot of BS in Bowen's rhetoric. As for stalled investment, the smart money is waiting for a change in government and nuclear power investment opportunities.

SMRs can be mass produced and installed in numbers at former coal fired power stations to use the existing transmission lines. All up such transitions should be completed inside 12 months.
Alan B.

Nuclear and pumped hydro work well together in France minimising the need for gas peakers or batteries. Snowy 2 if/when built is said to store 350 GWh or 2GW X 175 hours. AEMO was suggesting Australia needs 650 GWh energy storage of various durations. Lithium batteries won't cut it; for example a solar farm may send 250 MW to the grid from say midday to 2pm as well as charging a battery. Then from say 6pm to 8pm that battery supplies 50 MW before it goes flat. The retailer will have to buy electricity from some other business to meet customer needs.

Suppose required energy storage was 1% or 3.65 days of annual electricity consumption. That would be 2732.65 GWh call it 2,700,000,000 kWh. My lithium battery cost about $700 per kWh so Australia would need to spend about $1.89 trillion on energy storage. Hence I think Eraring and Yallourn will still be with us in 2030.

Its always difficult to post a reply when authors post entitlement based posts (cake and eat it) that ignores the science completely.

We need emissions significantly reduced, that means we high emitters need a significant reduction before 2035 or so, because if we don't and go much past 2035 on this path then the tipping points will likely have been crossed and we'll lose control anyway, and 2c becomes 4c and civilisation collpases. We need a massive reecution in enrgy use, that means no privat ecars, no flying, heavily inuslated houses that dont; need massive amount sof energy to heat and cool).

Now you can deny the science all you want or bleat about all the entitlement you want but that doesn't change the laws of physics.You mention prudence, if we were prudent we'd insist on emissions cuts of 10% a year for the next decade as well as staring to managed abandonment of places like North Qld. I'd suggest starting with banning flying, then working to ban all private car ownership as we infill medium density housing, solar panels on rooves and trees and shrubs in cities to help ameliorate the heat island effect. but instead we get Nuclear Sibs that are unlikely to ever do anything. What a nonsense they are.

The choice is now stark, the incrementalism of the past 430 years has achieved nothing but increased emissions an increased temp, we've run out of time. We either collapse the economy, equitably ie staring with the wealthy, or collapse civilization, there is no longer a choice, we've left it to late.

If I and 1000s of climate scientist are wrong we'll end up with a livable more sustainable society, if you're wrong we end up with an unlivable planet.

Here's Professor Kevin Anderson's take from earlier this year, hes a Professor of Climate Change and Energy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT6NCbFrb7c&t=2s

Perhaps Valley Guy believes that Indian's and Chinese are "entitled" to have as many children or as large a population as they want- even though together they are bigger than the next 18 nations combined. If India and China reduced their population's to 300 Million people the world might stand a chance. They have known about this problem for more than 100 years but they just blame someone else. The communists still hardly acknowledge it- sadly this means more misery for the masses. Wokeism and Communism- it was never really about fixing problems but using them as a battering ram to obtain power. 100 million dead under Communism all in the name of equality.

We need emissions significantly reduced,
Valley Guy,
Pollution is the result of non-thinking & or very stupid people led by intellectual morons.

Companies such as Copenhagen Atomics, and there are a few others, are slowly but surely working to produce Small modular reactors about the size of a shipping container that will produce 100 Giga watts of power using cheap thorium and waste radioactive materials. The whole process runs on molten salt at temperatures in mid 300s. They are aiming to have a small pilot unit operating by 2028. Their process has virtually no waste and what there is only needs to be stored for 300 years. They can park one of these containers in a suburban back yard.

The first place to prove that the chemistry of the process works was ORNL in Tennessee back in the days of President Kennedy, but the Americans wanted something that produced Plutonium to make bombs and the project was abandoned. There were also some metallurgical problems with corrosion of containment vessels, but these have been sorted out.

Power from this technology will be produced continuously at cents per kilowatt hour.