Excellently argued Geoff. Get ready for the denials.

My understanding is that the Greens don't want to sell coal to anyone.

When the whole fuel cycle is examined nuclear is safer than coal or gas. It certainly beats wood fires in huts!

As for Germany, only a madman could believe that electricity from its existing nukes is more dangerous than gas from Putin's Russia.

Some excellent points, Mr Russell.

But as you will be well aware, logic stands little chance of getting a hearing, once fear has become the only tradeable currency.

I shall watch with interest to see whether there are any responses that actually engage with the arguments you have put forward - particularly those that show the callous disregard of human life involved in the abstract decisions of taxpayer-funded jobsworths...

"...ANSO, unlike the Indian Government, isn't responsible for the tens of thousands of Indian children under the age of 5 who die every year from respiratory illnesses because their mums cook with wood... children dying because of the pollution caused be being stuck with a deadly renewable energy source ... wood, cattle dung and the like."

Not my Department, chum. Next, please.

Charles Darwin once observed a fish in an aquarium collide full-pelt with its reflection in the glass – (probably thinking it was another fish) - over and over again.

It's painful to watch leftists keep making the same mistake over and over again when it comes to sustainability.

The problem can be thought of in two steps.

If all relevant resources could be calculated in terms of money, then we'd automatically know that any alternative energy option that cost more to produce a given unit of energy, is less sustainable, because it uses more resources obviously.

The problem is that all the relevant resources cannot be calculated in terms of money, because lots of resources are not exchanged against money, such as climate or rivers. These resources, though valuable, are “externalities” to the exchange – and so their value is not included in money calculation concerning their use.

However, contrary to the fish-like persistence of the leftists, this does not necessarily indicate or justify government intervention, for two reasons.

Firstly, the fact that economic calculation omits externalities in no way reduces the utility of economic calculation, nor increases the utility of government intervention. Once we have established that a particular option is more costly, there must be a heavy onus on the interventionists to demonstrate, not just to declare, the superiority of any intervention they advocate.

Secondly, absent money calculation, the interventionists have no way of comparing the options in units of a lowest common denominator. The only other possibility is to compare the different production possibilities in terms of zillions of disparate physical quantities:- practically impossible.

Interventionists never cognise this problem, nor ever satisfy the rational standard of proof. Thinking of the problem not in scientific and falsifiable terms, but in terms of “ideology” they instead satisfy themselves with recourse to polemics.

Only after each intervention has been tried, at great money and social cost, does it turn out that the obvious was obvious: if it costs more than it produces, it’s using more natural resources, not less. It’s less sustainable, not more.

Honestly, they’re dumb as fish.

Well argued and well researched article!
Inherently correct except for the claim that the big solar array in California, doesn't generate electricity after dark?
It does exactly that, and because the Thorium fluoride salt that is heated by the solar arrays, remains both molten and white hot for days, thanks to the reacting thorium fluoride salt!
Yes it does cover many hectares, but what else would you do with desert country, farm it?
Yes it took four years to build, so also any comparable coal fired project.
Mass production and scales of economy allowed it to be rolled out for around the same money as a comparable coal fired project!
And the fuel source is forever free!
As for other renewable energies, the Indians can and should make and use biogas onsite.
Scrubbed biogas works quite well in ceramic fuel cells, and the exhaust product is mostly water vapor.
The energy coefficient at 80%, is four times better than coal, meaning the electricity is four times cheaper; than that of wholesale coal fired electricity!
Making each KW, worth around a cent per! The free hot water costs nothing!
India is currently working on cheaper than coal thorium power, said to cost less than half, given there's are far fewer transmission wires involved; where coal fired power, losses as much as half its output, or put another way, doubles its carbon output per MW delivered.
We have mega amounts of thorium, and are inherently stupid, not to be using it.
It still needs to be mined and separated out from the often also very useful companion minerals,; and I dare say, there would be a similar number of power station jobs, albeit, far fewer transmission line repair staff; and perhaps just a drum, rather than continually topped up, mountains of exponentially expensive fuel!
Rhrosty.

Geoff, while your points abut the relatively large area footprint of the solar CST plants and their high material requirements are true, you dismiss solar CST too flippantly, using selected statistics, while making exaggerated claims about the suitability and safety of of nuclear

Here's another set of figures: SolarReserve in Nevada - solar thermal with molten salt storage, capacity factor >60% (as good as some coal or nuclear plants); can generate 24 hours per day. Rated at 110 MW for up to 20 hours per day. Let's be generous and say 10 of these per GW or 96 plants to do what your 9.6 GW of nuke would do. Each plant covers 700 ha so that makes 67,200 ha; about 1/2 what you claim.

These plants are built in sunny, semi desert regions, which would minimize the need for displacement of villagers. They are air cooled and use desalinated ground water for steam production.

Your nuke plant would need a lot of water for cooling and have to be close to the coast, a lake or river, most likely high population density. Such a large plant would surely need more than 968 ha to include an adequate safety buffer.

A life of 60 - 80 years? Can you name a reactor that has lasted that long? There are others that have been closed down after < 10 years. The Shoreham plant on Long Island took 9 years to build and was never commissioned due to safety concerns.

There's no 'silver bullet' for sustainable energy. The best and most economic alternative to fossil fuels is a dispersed mix of renewable energy technologies. Costing can be found here: http://www.bree.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-technology-assessments
Nuclear is by no means the most cost effective option.

As for uranium, India, doesn't need to follow western example, but go straight to far safer Pebble reactors, which besides being virtually meltdown proof, are able to be mass produced and trucked on site, to be producing power in just weeks, rather than the twenty year lead time, the greens always spout, as one of the reasons for not preferring nuclear power.
Why, I'd venture, that small pebble reactors would cost a lot less than diesel, to install and run, as a preferred power source for really big freight forwarding shipping!
Which we as an Island nation are absolutely dependent on, for all our imports and economic life blood exports.
Were led by leaders with vision, they would build just such a fleet, and made it submersible!
We have some recently acquired expertise in this very area, and given CAD and CAC, could build them as cheaply here as anywhere, but particularly, if we used locally produced superior steel!
Instead, we use costly foreign shipping to deliver all our bulk freight!
And given that is one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, perhaps we should be doing it, and keeping the annual billions in price gouged profits right here?
Or, forward our trade goods at cost, if only to ensure, we virtually outperform all other trade dependent nations.
But only if we were led by pragmatists, instead of blinkered Ideologues, with their monosyllabic repetition of moronic mantras; like that old hoary chestnut, the government has no business in business!
And whose only real claim to fame is, they've sold almost everything of value, [or wasn't nailed down,] along with our patently purloined economic sovereignty!?
And as pragmatists like Lee Kwan Yu predicted, hell bent on becoming the poor white trash of Asia?
As sure as chickens lay eggs, if we had a pragmatic Lee Kwan Yu in charge here, [and with all our resources and natural advantages,] we wouldn't be debating whether or not we should have a nuclear powered national shipping line, we would already have one; shipping our trade goods to India!
Rhrosty

Well argued Mr Russell. The Government of India, led by Narendra Modi, is determined to improve the lives of its poorest citizens, and one key to that is nuclear power. The Government is also looking at renewables, but these can never be anything other than a small contribution to solving the problem in a nation of more than a billion people. The Modi Government wants to bring electricity to every village in the country over the next decade. It's an ambitious target, but one it is determined to meet.

Wood and other renewable combustibles burned in efficient stoves have very much less impact than when burned in open fires such as are typically used in Indian villages.
Proper ventilation is also a factor that in many cases is achievable through education.

Simple solar cookers are an alternative, especially in India where much of village lifestyle, lends itself to their use.

See,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker, which is only one of many references available.

Replacing wood fired cooking by a less polluting fuel?
How about biogas from animal and human waste? (this is already done in India successfully and they could show us a thing to two about it)

"generate about one terawatt hour of energy per year, but only during the day time" There is a thing called molten salt storage which will keep a solar plant going during the hours of darkness.

"To generate as much electrical energy as the Jaitapur project you'd need to build 77 Desert Sunlights plants and cover 123,200 hectares in concrete, steel and panels displacing god knows how many villagers. "
India is a huge Continent and 123,200 acres would be lost in it.

"How do you get stuff to those 123,200 hectares? In big trucks. In small trucks. In every kind of bloody truck."
And how do you propose to cart the material for a nuke plant plus the fuel and remove the nuke waste, by airship?

"the Fukushima evacuation"
The whole of the North of Japan is now radio active with enough to cause health problems but it is hidden from the public as is the slowly increasing radiation on the eastern seaboard of the Americas.

How do you propose to dispose of the waste?

@roses1: "Only 67,000 hectares"? At 2,300 displaced people per 1000 hectares, that's only 154,000 people to move ... or wildlife or croplands. So sure, solar can be more land-efficient by a factor of 2 (or even more), but it's fundamentally limited. Have you wondered why more people aren't building salt storage? Typically the mix is 60/40 sodium and potassium nitrate. Now, getting the tonnage of the latter isn't such a big deal, but sodium nitrate is very different. Last I looked the global production was 63,000 tonnes annually with most being mined in Chile. Of course you can make it, just build more really BIG chemical plants and get a lot more trucks to cart it from those plants to your solar farm. To replicate Australia's current electricity supply with salt storage solar farms, you'd need about 2,200 Gemasola plants and about 11 million tonnes of sodium nitrate. And that's just for Australia. Of course it's not impossible to make the stuff, like it's not impossible to cover vast areas of wildlife habitat or crop lands with concrete, steel and silicon or mirrors. It's just incredibly and unnecessarily environmentally destructive and wasteful.

@robertlepage: You didn't read the article did you? Go back and please actually read it ... and go and visit the Guarapari link ... which is to an area much more radioactive than around Fukushima. It's a tourist destination. Anybody can stroll down to the beach with their geiger counter and measure far more radiation than around Fukushima. When I told this to a so-called green-left person in Adelaide recently he just flatly said "I don't believe you". Go figure. There's youtube clips, academic papers, feature films (Pandora's Promise). What a massive conspiracy! Anti-nukes and climate change deniers are cut from the same cloth ... whenever their world view is challenged by facts, they assert a conspiracy.

@roses1: Sorry I forgot a few of your claims. 60 years? That's the design life of the AP1000 reactor (and most others). 80 is quite likely. Do you need water? Not really, but you lose a few percent with air cooling and the water requirement is true of any thermal power plant. Shoreham? It's the opening feature of GreenJacked. There were no safety problems with Shoreham, just a good legal challenge based on obsolete science, long since discredited.

@rhosty: biogas? From pigs perhaps? Pig meat is carcinogenic and causes far more cancers than multiple regular triple-meltdowns like Fukushima could ever cause. Not to mention swine flu. Remember swine flu? It killed 284,000 people in its first 12 months (http://bit.ly/QBjx5q ) and the REALLY big thing about it that was worse than seasonal flu was that 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65. How can anybody who claims to care about health and risk possibly think about eating or using pigs to produce biogas?

"Guarapari It's a tourist destination. Anybody can stroll down to the beach with their Geiger counter and measure far more radiation than around Fukushima."

And the people strolling around on the beach are there for months or years?
And there is of course a study of their health way down the track has been done?

"Anti-nukes and climate change deniers are cut from the same cloth .".
Unlike denialists who are so open minded that they would be willing to change their point of view even when confronted with concrete evidence........

There is no answer from the nuke denialists about storage and disposal of nuke waste.

It was a sad day that the atom was split.

Why not check out the prophetic warning given by Lao Russell in his book Atomic Suicide?

Please also check out the references on the nuclear industry propaganda (misinformation) machine and its relation to the "culture" of death that rules this planet: http://globalcooperative.wordpress.com

I must say I'm glad we're having this sensible debate on OLO with Geoff making the point that coal power has and is causing many millions of premature deaths (not to mention its role in global warming) and that we have to decide what alternatives to choose.

But I'm not going to lie down and accept all he is saying for nuclear and against renewables. Some of of the figures are quoted are over the top. From my own research as co-author of a 100% renewables study for WA:
Firstly solar thermal with molten salt storage (CST) would not be used for all electricity, only 20-30% of generation, which together with biomass would be used to back up wind and solar PV.
To do this for WA would take about eighteen 110 MW plants covering about 12,600 ha (about 4 wheat belt farms). To achieve the same for Australia the figure would be no more than 8 times this - say 30-40 wheat belt farms or 100 -120,000 has of semi arid or dry agricultural land, which is not much.
Also CST employs several times more people over its construction and life-time than nuclear - a big plus for villages in India.
Yes, a lot of construction would be required to transform the world's electricity generation to renewables, but this could be a 'third industrial revolution' that would stimulate economic growth.
As for your thousands of trucks, Geoff I'm not even going to go there as it would be many more truckloads of overburden, ore and radioactive waste to supply the nuclear fuel over the working life of the reactors and also trucking of radioactive concrete and materials after decommissioning.
The actual levelized cost of energy (LCOE) figures I linked to before take transport (but not decommissioning) into account. Many renewable technologies are cheaper and all are safer than nuclear.
Finally it comes down to 'which would you rather live next to - a solar/ wind farm or a nuclear reactor?' I'd take the former any day.

You are wildly off-topic, Roses1.

>>Firstly solar thermal with molten salt storage (CST) would not be used for all electricity, only 20-30% of generation<<

Mr Russell was observing the issues related to energy production in India. It seems that you are commenting on our domestic situation...

>>To do this for WA would take about eighteen 110 MW plants covering about 12,600 ha (about 4 wheat belt farms). To achieve the same for Australia the figure would be no more than 8 times this<<

This is, surely, avoiding the concerns raised by the article. Sadly, you have performed precisely as I predicted, when I said...

"I shall watch with interest to see whether there are any responses that actually engage with the arguments you have put forward - particularly those that show the callous disregard of human life involved in the abstract decisions of taxpayer-funded jobsworths"

You have avoided engaging with the discussion at all. Sometimes I hate being right.

>>As for your thousands of trucks, Geoff I'm not even going to go there<<

Presumably because trying to visualize what might be the logistics of building your solar-plus-salt facility in India, would tax your imagination to the point of meltdown. It certainly would do that to me.

So, we have heard your prepared speech on power alternatives for Australia. Would it be too much to ask you to address the topic at hand also? You certainly seem to have been involved in the basic research needed, so your views might actually help the discussion along, instead of derailing it into the siding of your pet project.

@roses1: I gave you a link to information about trucks for building solar ... you respond with an assertion about trucks required for uranium with no reference. And you won't find a reference for the simple reason that the tonnages concerned are trivial in comparison to the tonnages of material required to build solar farms. Here's a link to a great post from Ben Heard about the shipping of uranium. If it weren't for anti-nukes we could be shipping a satchel of uranium to one or two reactors to power Adelaide instead of 7000 tonnes of coal ... EVERY DAY.

http://decarbonisesa.com/energy-density-explained-using-a-satchel/

And biomass? Are you serious? Presumably wood based? If so then please think about it. Forestry is always near the top of any "dangerous industries" list. Big machines, big saws, carcinogenic dust (yes, wood dust is a class 1 carcinogen, but really its other impacts are far worse) as are the products of combustion and its impact on wildlife is literally deadly. And again, lots of really big trucks. Biomass is just renewable coal, but worse.

Geoff - Please be rigorous and honest in this debate - it is you who should have researched and provided links to the tonnages trucked to build and fuel the nuclear reactors. You would then have a valid comparison. It's certainly not going to be measured in satchels!

Similarly, lets' include uranium in the cancer comparisons - a little homework for you to look at the carcinogenicity of the thousands of tonnes of N waste still stored on or near reactor sites in populated areas, with no solution as to deal with it. Stats on cancer deaths from sawdust vs deaths from exposure to radioactivity? It's not sufficient to just support your argument with stats and not look at those for the contra-argument.

Biomass - yes I am serious. There are several bagasse-fired power stations in Qld and another example is a 50 MW woodchip fired plant in Vermont that I inspected just last week. It is located within the city of Burlington and the chimney emissions cause no problems. It has scrubbers to remove particulates and wood does not have the sulphur problem that coal has. WA could grow enough biomass on 10% of its agricultural land to generate >40% of its electricity (though I'm not advocating using it all for that).

Pericles - Yes you are right the real issue of this debate is how to provide energy for India, which I'll address in my next post.

Ben Rose

India - population 1.26 billion - 55 times Australia's population in a smaller land area. Australia's CO2e emissions per head - 17 tonnes vs 1.7 tonnes for India. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
There is also a 10 fold difference in per capita energy use .
Can all of the people in India ever be as energy/ emissions intensive as Australians? I'd say the answer is no, so we in the developed world have to first look at the biggest and cleanest source - negawatts - energy efficiency. Most of us can easily cut our energy use and emissions in half without reducing our quality of life.
(see my website www.ghgenergycalc.com.au).

Let's say India could raise their standard of living for all by trebling energy use; it wouldn't require 10 times more as the energy stats suggest.

Most of us seem to agree that to use coal to achieve this would be disastrous. So the question to be asked is 'what is the best energy mix for that country?' There is no simple answer. I accept that nuclear may need to part of the solution, particularly in densely populated nations like India. But solar CST, solar PV, wind and biomass will definitely play the major role. Nuclear has problems both real (in terms of waste disposal) and political (nobody wants to live near one). The Renewable energy sources do not have anywhere near the same problems. I bet that it would be possible to provide for India using renewables alone. The challenge would not be 55 times that in Australia, but about 18 times. It would mean lots of wind turbines, solar farms and biomass energy plantations dispersed throughout the landscape, visible to all; PV on the majority of rooftops. A vision that would take some getting used to. It will take time, a lot on money and an industrial revolution to transform energy.

Once a group of qualified people sit down and produce a plan (BZE and SEN have done this in Australia), we see it's possible. First the plan and then the political battle.

Ben Rose

Ben, you still didn't provide that link on your assertion about trucks associated with uranium transport. You made the claim, not me. I assumed it was obviously small. You can see visit WNA and look at the
process:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Mining-of-Uranium/Uranium-Mining-Overview/

But here's the short form ... mines produce ore which is milled on site and the net result is yellowcake which is shipped in trucks ... Australia's entire production of yellow cake is about 7500 tonnes ... about 187 B-Double loads of 40 tonnes. That's enough to produce ALL of our electricity ... but we export it and burn 120 Million tonnes of coal instead. You can thank the anti-nuclear movement for that. The Moree Solar Farm http://www.moreesolarfarm.com.au/Project.htm is one small solar farm and it needs 7200 B-Double truck loads of stuff. Just ONE! You can find the info in the EIS, just as I provided the EIS link to the US Desert Sunlight Project. So compare ... 187 truckloads for our entire electricity supply or 7200 to build just one small solar farm. N.B. The Moree Project has been halved since the original EIS.

P.S. Scrubbers don't remove a whole heap of pollutants, whether it's coal or biomass, the smoke is toxic in many ways, if it was clean you could just pipe it into houses as heating :). It isn't. Why worry about nuclear waste but ignore biomass waste and just piss it up into the air?

And building a nuke power station does not require thousands of tons of concrete?
I am sure the builders of all the Nukes so far would be wondering why they paid for so much.

@RobertLePage: Different comparisons yield different answers, but here's a reasonable one: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/12/06/tcase7/
Compared to a nuke, solar with storage uses 15 times more concrete, 75 times more steel and bucketloads more land ... not to mention the glass/silicon cables, smart grid, money, etc.

I am still waiting for an answer to the question of what to do with the nuclear waste and where to put it?

Sorry Robert, here's a series I did last year on BraveNewClimate about
waste.

I'm still waiting for anybody to tell me how to capture and make biomass combustion waste safe. That waste kills and sickens people daily ... thousands per day die and the sickness toll is horrific and over and above that. As far as I know, nuclear waste hasn't killed or sickened anybody for at least 50 years.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/07/29/nuclear-waste-series-p1/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/07/30/nuclear-waste-series-p2/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/07/31/nuclear-waste-series-p3/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/08/01/nuclear-waste-series-p4/

The good thing about this is that we are starting to have the essential debate on what energy technologies are best to replace coal and gas. Geoff you've pointed me to two informative websites - bravenewclimate and World Nuclear Assn; no doubt there are many other good pro-nuclear sites. Your articles are informative, if somewhat 'one-eyed'. I hope you have looked at the renewable sites I pointed to - Sustainable Energy Now, Beyond Zero Emissions and also the Government energy costing - Australian Energy Technology Assessments - on the BREE site. Another one for a biomass power station that has been running for 27 years is: https://www.burlingtonelectric.com/.../joseph-c-mcneil-generating-station

Now what is needed is AN UNBIASED WEBSITE LISTING BOTH THE PRO'S AND CONS ON THE NUCLEAR AND RENEWABLE alternatives. No hyperbole, no bias and no omissions. People need to be able to make an informed decision when they vote.

Re trucks. thanks for the 7500 tonnes of yellow cake figure. Multiply it by at least 1000 (WNA figure for average grade) and you have the ore to be moved (not including overburden) at least once. Then there's the water required and the possible flooding events causing leaks from the leaching processes, etc....... We need to have the full unbiased story for both alternatives

Re wood 'waste'. The ash is recovered and spread on agricultural land where it has a similar beneficial effect to liming.

PS I totally agree with you on the Energy Green Paper. I'd go further and say it is a one-eyed fossil crock of crap that refuses to even acknowledge the 'elephant' of global warming.

Ben, regarding 7500t. But the processing of the ore is on-site. And if the process used is insitu leaching, then there's very little extra stuff to deal with. It's nothing remotely comparable to, for example the Sydney-Moree-Sydney truck movements (about 1200km). So the point still stands ... renewables (wind+solar) use far, far, far more stuff than nuclear ... more concrete, more land, more steel, more glass, more money.

Consider the Fukushima plant for a moment. I know you can do the sums, so do them. Work out the land area required to replace the output of the 6 reactors at Daichii with Moree Solar Farm type systems. You'd have to partially level, clear, and cover in concrete and panels almost all the 20 km exclusion zone. With a rational approach to radiation, nobody would ever have had to leave that zone. The suicides and despair are a consequence of decades of fear mongering based on obsolete science.

Yes Geoff, solar farms do have a big footprint and they are materials intensive - as you say '. more concrete, more land, more steel, more glass, more money...' - but that's what industrial revolutions or for that matter mining booms are all about (try living in Perth Eastern Suburbs for the past 7 years and you'll know about swarms of trucks first hand as I do). I don't relish that aspect, but it's only during construction. It's the main reason I think this type of plant should only be for backup of the much less materials-intensive wind and PV (about 20-30% of total generation). And remember the overall emissions are very low as there's no fuel used during operation.

Re materials for solar thermal try this link :http://fossilhub.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Pihl_etal2012_ConcSolarPower_materials.pdf

Pihl et al conclude that: "With technology improvements, increase in extraction and production capacity of strategic materials and research into substitution, materials availability will not hinder CSP from replacing all of today’s fossil fueled electricity generation. The most important challenges concerning materials for CSP in the coming decades, will be to scale up nitrate salt production and develop good substitutes for silver in reflective surfaces. These issues may affect the cost of CSP on the margin, but are not particularly severe".

A table in the paper shows that current production of NaNo3 is 46 million tonnes per year.

I believe the debate should hinge on what mix is economically and politically possible. In Australia, with its world leading solar and wind resources and vast open spaces, we won't need any nuclear; for India and Europe this may not be the case.

Either way, proper planning and long term Govt policy is essential. Big nuclear is a centralized 'base generation' model with inflexible generation. Renewables are dispersed, with flexible backup for the variable wind and solar energy sources. I believe it would be difficult to marry nuclear with renewables unless small flexible reactors with ramping times of less than 1 hour are commercialized.

Another point Geoff (I sometimes check your figures!) You mentioned 2200 Gemasolar sized plants to replicate Australia's current (45,000 MW) capacity.
- Gemasolar (the first commercial CST plant) is 20 MW, so yes it would be about 2200 of those
- but current economic size is more like 110 MW, like the SolarReserve plant Nevada, currently being commissioned.
- it would require up to 410 of those to supply all generation for Australia
- if CST were only used for backup/ storage as I explained in my previous post, it would only comprise at most 30% of generation capacity - ie up to 123 plants.
- that's about 83,000 ha or less than thirty average 3000 ha wheat marginal wheat / grazing farms taken up to supply renewable backup power for the whole of Australia.
-That's about 0.18% of our arable land. Some plants could be constructed in non-arable semi-desert areas so that would be even less arable land taken up.

Ben, I'm glad you check figures, because I sometimes screw up!

But what I'm confused about is why anybody even bothers with 2200 Gemasolar or 410 SolarReserve when we have a much better energy source ... nuclear. And if you think progress has been rapid with solar, just think about Chinese SMRs rolling out of factories. Dig a hole, bury the reactor and hook up a generator. What could be easier? Comparing that with solar+salt is like comparing an iPhone or similar with something hanging on a wall in a black and white movie. Solar is just a really bad technology. Big, very eco-unfriendly and literally a waste of space.

What is it that you don't like about nuclear Ben?

Geoff - What is it I don't I like about nuclear? Here are 7:
- Firstly there's the nuclear weapon proliferation.
-Then the risks due to systems that can and have failed e.g. Fukushima - projected 5000 deaths

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16792

- The cost to our grand children of storing spent fuel. Unless of course you bury it deep in rock and waste 90% of the energy. But it still has to be shipped safely to suitable locations.

- Nuclear fission fuels are finite - up to a few hundred years; sun and wind are virtually infinite

- Nuclear as we know it is big and centralized - big corporate control and secrecy; if a disaster happens it is a big one (Fukushima, Chernobyl).

- There are no 'fail safe' electricity generation reactors in commercial operation

- Big nuclear is generally inflexible, wouldn't be suitable for backing up variable generation from dispersed wind and solar, where it needs to be ramped up and down quickly.

When they produce a small, modular, flexible reactor that has all fail safe systems (as hypothesized in the WNA link above), I will get more enthusiastic about the role of nuclear.

Rhosty waxes lyrical about smaller pebble bed reactors but it appears there is only one small prototype in operation. There are only two SMR's operating. Commonest small reactors are in ships, maybe because they are under the water line and operating our at sea most of the time? They've been working on these small reactor designs now for 60 years. Why are there no 'fail safe' models in commercial operation in place of coal and gas?

PS I have not studied the myraid types of N reactors, most conceptual and some experimental. But you and I both know its not as simple as 'Dig a hole, bury the (small modular reactor - SMR) and hook up a generator.' This sort of statement doesn't help the debate.
Scanning through:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Small-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/,
it appears that there are only two SMRs in operation and they are 200- 300 MW, not really small.

Thanks for the list Ben. But you've only dealt with one side of the balance sheet and totally ignored the 1.8 million lives that nuclear has saved. This swamps any downsides you've mentioned.

You've also totally ignored climate change. Suppose the chance of avoiding escalating climate change with renewables was X (0<X<1 ... its a probability) and with nuclear it's (0<Y<1 also a probability), then consider the size of climate catastrophes ... like 20 million displaced in the Pakistan floods of 2010. Now ask how much bigger Y has to be from X to make nuclear preferable despite your list of misgivings. Climate scale events are so big that if nuclear gives us any chance of avoiding them we should take it. Why risk the planet on the technology which failed during the oil crisis of the 70s/80s when we can use the technology which killed that crisis? Why ignore the stuff which worked and go with the stuff which didn't? If nothing else, that history shows that Y is much bigger than X.

In addition, your list of objections is really very weak. 5,000 deaths ... eventually ... when? If you look at the atomic bomb survivors ... and these are people who got a seriously big dose of radiation, far, far bigger than anybody got at Fukushima ... those receiving less than 1 Sv had a median loss of life of 2 months. Compare that risk with the change in bowel cancer rates after red meat consumption rose in Japan ... it went from 20,000 cases per year in the 70s to 112,000 cases per year by 2012. This isn't a speculated rise, it's a measure rise. It has happened. I don't know why you insist on fail-safe for nuclear but not for anything else. You don't insist on fail-safe air travel or pork or ladders.

Let me know if you want refs ... they are all in GreenJacked.

Geoff I'll summarize in my last post on this.

The optimum energy mix to replace coal and gas will come down to price and politics (public preferences).

On price, have you read the paper on the Government website I linked to in a previous post? The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for all electricity technologies - coal, gas, renewables and nuclear:

http://www.bree.gov.au/publications/australian-energy-technology-assessments.

It's essential reading for this debate.

Nuclear is not the cheapest alternative - wind and solar are.

Fukushima is an excellent example of what happens when ill-informed public fear drives policy rather than science. Closer to home anti-vaccination nutters have caused deaths here just as the radiophobic Naoto Kan killed people with the Fukushima evacuation ... aided and abetted by anti-nuclear radiophobic conspiracy nutters from around the planet. So while I recognise that public opinion will be important we have to ensure that accurate science gets presented forcefully. In the age of the internet, that's a serious problem.

As for the rationality of the decision. The so-called "levelised" cost of energy is misnamed and doesn't capture all the externalities of the various technologies. It is about marginal costs of a unit of energy. Even so, nuclear is cheaper than solar+storage and comparing nuclear to solar without storage is like comparing trucks and bicycles. So if you look at Figure 9 (p.57 of the AETA report 2013 you linked), nuclear is cheaper and with a much lower variance in possible costs than any of the solar+storage option. That's the 2020 estimate. Trying to estimate out to 2050 has all kinds of additional problems. Currently solar advocates are busily both spruiking the low cost of the technology but crying foul about cuts in subsidies ... they don't seem to see the irony :). They talk about grid parity, which is another name for "grid bludging". The proper way to compare costs is to build two houses, connect one to the grid and count the cost, power the other with solar and what ever else you need to do to give it equivalent power (24x7 on demand). When people actually do this, they pay a bucket load of money for storage and they keep paying every time they need to replace the batteries. To scale this comparison up, just plan two cities and the power supply to both.

But the really big issue not captured by LCOE and the like is speed. If you care about climate change, then speed matters. Solar at scale is just so slow to deploy.

Geoff you read the AETA graph differently to me. For 2025 I see onshore wind and solar PV being by far the cheapest, then comes large scale nuclear. SMR's are about the same as solar thermal with storage but nuclear has the lesser cost range. Biomass using waste is cheaper than either.

That is the main reason I see the only possible value of nuclear as being fueled / controllable backup to wind and solar. So if they invent a flexible, fail safe SMR then it could have application if it were not for the problems I highlight below.

You should note that neither the cost of decommissioning the N plants or ongoing waste storage or the cost of weapons proliferation is included in the LCOE figures given in AETA.

PS I stress fail safe because no solar or wind technology is going to melt down and pollute large areas as Chernobyl and Fukushima have done, due to human or machinery failure or natural disaster.