JBowyer,
AIUI there is one smallish solar thermal facility (without molten salt storage) in Port Augusta now. I think that's all, unless the experimental one at Liddell's still going.

Port Augusta's well suited to building a large solar thermal plant with molten salt storage. But there seems to be an anti-pioneering attitude holding us back. Despite working well overseas, nobody wants to be the first to fund one here.

IMO the government should fund the construction of one with concessional loans, but it should receive no operating subsidy.

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doog, SA's certainly not getting rid of the interconnector. Trading electricity with Victoria is a valuable activity that benefits both states.

With Hazewood gone, SA won't buy as much electricity from Victoria, but will sell a lot more electricity to Victoria.

Molten salt Adian? Go wash your mouth out!

As every conservative or their shadows in labor, there's no such thing as molten salt, just coal or hydro!

And if we were first with anything the political masters of our political masters would go into meltdown?

Some of the things we could do with safe, clean, cheap, walk away safe, molten salt thorium nuclear power.

Make miracle cure medical isotopes and extract them from an operational reactor! Meaning their production might be doubled or better?

Maybe it'll happen when some politician needs a cure for incurable liver or brain cancer? [And sad commentary on our current crop of visionless idealogues!]

Add spent nuclear fuel and while the reaction is proceeding, without shutting down the reactor, and burn and reburn it until every scaric of energy had been very safely extracted.

And given there's heat to burn, use it to decompose water then reunite the hydrogen with Co2 to make alternative diesel and jet fuel,(done) or turn a gas turbine utilising any number of common everywhere present gases.

Those flares we see above every oil refinery are burning off wasted methane, which can instead be passed through a catalytically assisted conversion process to turn it into petrol replacing methanol. A dye added ensures that the flame is neither colorless nor odorless.

Moreover, every family makes enough biological waste, which if converted to methane in situ on site, to power the average domicile 24/7! And that would create a brand new huge long term industry needing skilled metal workers and copious steel!

Better they turn a blind eye, thunder furiously at the dispatch box about penalty rates and how to screw those with the least, to benefit further, those with the most, like say, profit repatriating tax avoiding multinationals?

It's all about the most pressing "ideological" priorities you see!? And tinkering at the edges without changing too much??
Alan B.

Taswegian. Molten fluoride salt is corrosive, be it in a solar thermal tower or walk away safe molten salt thorium reactor, unless paired with materials it doesn't react with, i.e., graphite some nuclear proof ceramics and a special metal trailed and not found wanting at Oak Ridge Tennessee, back in the 50-70's.

There's a doco on U tube with a blow by blow description of the assembly and materials used.

Kirk Sorensen, highly credentialed scientist seems to think we can run one for up to a hundred years with relatively minor maintenance. And claims he could build one for a 100 million?

How's that for a comparison with an equivalent coal fired power plant costing around 2,5 billion or your light water reactor, costing somewhere north of 5 billion? And you want a vastly more expensive one that might run using similar metals perhaps, and good for just sixty years? with the power supplied costing the average rube son 48+ PKH?

A light water reactor is almost the most inefficient moronic means available to modern science to generate power! Yet still produce materials that can be readily weaponized?

Is that why you prefer wasteful, waste producing, highly inefficient uranium? I can see you've put a lot of thought, research and study into your special subject!

Imagine if one were to walk into a showroom and take a butchers at the latest offering from detroit and say compare it with the latest from the land of the rising sun? Everything else being equal?

What are you going to choose the petrol guzzling yank tank doing around 5 miles to the gallon or the nipponese offering, doing better than 90! Cause that's the difference in coefficient between your preferred light water reactor and thorium!

Suggest you try google tech talks on U tube. And at least a dozen emminantially credentialed highly respected authorities, any one of who'll, know more than the combined knowledge of those posting here comparatively, in a total eclipse of knowledge/expertise? Like the visually impaired leading the visually impaired?
Alan B.

The ever-Green army of antediluvian knuckle draggers should thank their lucky stars they live on this Earth with the visionary Truth Teller (TT) =

me :)

Alan B.,
Solar thermal with molten salt storage has been developed for commercial operation overseas. Molten salt based nuclear reactors have not. Eventually they will be, but meanwhile your claims they're cheaper than everything else are false. They aim to be cheaper, of course, but so do many competing technologies.

BTW the molten salt used for solar thermal is completely different to the molten salt in a molten salt reactor.

And what oil refineries typically flare off isn't methane; it's sulfides. Those turn into sulfites (or SO2) when burned. That triggers asthma, but the effect unburned would be even worse. There might be a bit of methane flared too, but most methane in oil refineries is not flared.

And please learn to spell CO2 - it's really not that difficult!

We hear that the the manufacturer's setting on the wind farm turbines
was the cause of their failure.
It is said they have been changed to prevent this happening again.
Are these setting part of the protection against short circuits,
oversize voltage excursions, overloads and being off frequency caused
by other generators ?
If so fiddling with these settings, would it affect warranties ?
Are they a protection against damage ?

As far as the famous batteries are concerned, surely they are there
to enable a black restart. They are quoted as being 100 Mwatt.
Surely they mean 100 Mw/hrs. How many seconds or minutes would that supply.
They way it is being reported they are supposed to carry the load
when the wind stops one winters afternoon at 5pm !!
Rubbish !