mac,

It's loaded rhetoric like that that's a big part of the problem. Are you so anti-SA that you regard SA as a toxic waste dump just because there's a toxic waste dump in SA?

If no, please refrain from making the dishonest claim that building a nuclear waste storage facility would turn the state into a nuclear rubbish dump.

(And if you are so anti SA that you think the state's already a toxic waste dump, what reason have you to oppose a nuclear waste dump here too?)

Also, what reason have you to doubt that the average person in SA would benefit substantially from it? Have you failed to notice how the state's being held back because of the government's inability or unwillingness to fund things?

Hear, hear and well said Adian!

At some point, we will need to find and use something beside finite fossil fuel! And well before we run out of the stuff!

The best carbon free alternative, will be cheaper than coal, cleaner than coal and safer than coal, thorium!

The truly wise will reinvent the economy so it works for us, rather than at present the reverse, where the average rube is little more than a numbered slave?

With ultracheap, extremely abundant, clean, safe, energy at our beck and call, we can make the deserts bloom and turn seawater into liquid fuel for as long as we need to!

Even export significant amounts to the world, along with the massive new food surplus.

Cooperative capitalism will ensure we are as competitive as we can be, while maintaining a good living standard and returned affordable housing! Thanks to doable decentralization!

We can halve the cost of living and doing business, just by eliminating middlemen profit takers and accompanying sharp practise, as Tesla has done!

Resisted by the parasitical drone class, who think money works?

Cooperative capitalism would deal most of these parasites out! All while handing fair and equitable shares to the doers?

And bound to be misrepresented as communism or worse as unearned income streams dry up and Wall street and the sharks, drones, tax avoiding leaners, (George Orwell's Pigs) who've lived off the blood sweat and tears enterprise and endevour of other folk, the doers, become little more than an unpalatable memory.

If not the blind leading the blind, we are governed by folk in bed, it would seem, with the status quo?

Unfortunately we need a bloodless revolution that in effect, tells the ruling class, the can't do folk, who are like rabbits frozen in the headlights, when asked for meaningful action! Need to get out of the way, or follow the (hijacked) Democrats!

Action that simply stops leaving folks (whole states) behind, to serve the interests of debt laden tax avoiders? Sometimes euphemistically referred to as (big) business (as usual)!

Don't just do something, stand there!
Alan B.

Aidan,

"Are you so anti-SA that you regard SA as a toxic waste dump just because there's a toxic waste dump in SA?"

Talk about shallow rhetoric.

Listen to the podcast "Follow the Money -- Nuclear Dumps", which discusses what a barking mad scheme it is.

or this,

http://www.tai.org.au/sites/defualt/files/P222A%20Digging%20for%20answers%20-%20SA%20Nuclear%20Royal%20Commission%20Submission%20FINAL.pdf

I'm not anti-SA, just pro Australia.

mac,

You were the one using shallow rhetoric. Regardless of whether SA should build such a facility, claiming it would turn the state into a nuclear waste dump is fundamentally dishonest, and seems to indicate that you're ignoring the facts and appealing to the emotions of the ignorant.

I do not have sufficient information to determine whether it's worth building, but there certainly doesn't seem to be any good reason to rule it out yet. As for the document you linked to, it uses Australian costs for electricity generation. I agree that the economic case for nuclear power in Australia is weak, but that's not the point. Consider somewhere like England: not sufficiently sunny for solar power to be its main energy source, and nowhere near enough sites for wind turbines to meet the demand. It's already having to resort to offshore wind, which is much more expensive.

The case for nuclear energy is compelling, if it is thorium based!

After removed any possibility of any of it winding up in a thermonuclear device, safely store it for 300 years!

And given abundant clean safe carbon free energy, make all our catalytically created liquid fuel requirements, from seawater!

One 300 MW thorium molten salt reactor able to produce around 120,000 barrels of ready to use liquid fuel per day!

And use some of the energy to desalinate copious water using the new deionization method that separates out the salt and other unwanted elements on the fly from the flowsheet! And for around quarter of the energy requirement of traditional desal! All while processing it to 95% potable!

And the cost of that energy component reduced from 24 to 3 cents or less, per K.H.!?BLOOMING DESERTS!

The good news doesn't end there, given a molten salt reactor, produces medical isotopes that can be removed from the operational reactor, while it's lighting a million homes!

Meaning these medical miracles can be extended to the masses, rather than remain the medical miracle cures, only millionaires can afford!

SEEN death sentence liver cancer clear of all tumors in just hours!

We don't want that and you mustn't have it! End of story!

Why? Because it includes the word, nuclear! And nuclear always means bombs, hiroshima, chernobyl, fukushima, and mushroom clouds dotting the sky!

#1, A molten salt reactor can't melt down, given this safest of all peaceful use nuclear reactors operates in a molten state and is walk away safe!

#2, Thorium power is old fifties technology abandoned because it couldn't be used to make a bomb or plutonium!

#3, But it can be safely used as a slow breeder reactor to burn and reburn nuclear waste including plutonium until it is completely de weaponized!

IS THAT NOT A GOAL WORTH PURSUING?

Even were the only priority, let alone save the planet, end want and war, stabilize then start to reduce population numbers; and on the back of good science, not unfathomable ignorance coupled to irrational fear and loathing!
Alan B.

Apologies, my most recent post does not compute as Robby the Robinson's robot, would have repeated. But only because of dumbing down word limits. Sorry Graham.

And the need to edit my comment to fit the editorial imperative!

Store waste for just 300 years!?

WE ALL KNOW WE NEED TO STORE THIS TOXIC POISON FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS!

Not true! It can be burnt and burnt again and again, in a slow breeder reactor, to.
#1 extract all the remaining unused energy component! EVEN WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM!

#2 Be paid billions to do it!

#3 Which reduces the half life to 300 years.

Why, even (NO, NO, NEVER NO MORE) Chis or Mac could safely manage that much? Reducing the volume by 95%, which is what occurs as the extractable energy is removed!

Means, over a hundred years from now, we could maybe put a ton or two in a capsule and use a really big rail gun to fire it, from the top of Kosciuszko into mercury? And repeat the gunnery detail a couple of hundred years after that and another hundred years on? You get the picture?

I don't believe the inhabitants of mercury would ever object? But wait with mouths wide open?

Repeating, for what we are about to receive, etc? And, a long time between feeds, why are we waiting, mine will be cold!

Who called the cook a bar steward? Who called the bar steward a cook? Eh Mac?
Alan B.