The Forum > Article Comments > Paying twice, and more – why renewables are a luxury good > Comments
Paying twice, and more – why renewables are a luxury good : Comments
By Graham Young, published 21/9/2017But renewables are in fact more expensive, and if you want to cure high prices, the last thing you would do is dose up on the problem.
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Simply put, a good businessman knows when to cut his losses and get out!
Renewables to get cheaper? Really? Don't these folk read? Wages inflation in China is or was running at around 30% P.A.?
I fail to see how one extrapolates cheaper prices from that?
And GENUINE environmentalists would likely go ape or ballistic or both if they saw the mountain of toxic waste these alleged renewables are creating?
Yes there's a place for the things. My roof is covered in solar panels and Bass Strait, with its roaring forties and no reticulated power? Absolutely tailor made for a shiny new wind farm connected to pumped hydro? Minus any subsidies!
If these things are so cheap, take away the taxpayer funded subsidies and allow them to compete on an open market, with all comers!
If we truly want to decarb the economy, without wrecking it or adding mountains of permanent toxic waste to China's industrial provinces?
Then there really is only one choice! And that choice is, CHEAPER THAN COAL. thorium! No it's not untested or hypothetical! Just a threat to all other power and energy producers, given thorium gram for gram, is the most energy dense material on the planet and abundant as lead!
And if used in, walk away safe, molten salt reactors, one can according to Professor Hargreaves, expect the median price of power from the generator, to be as low as a quoted %1.98PKH?
If you want to compare apples with apples coal fired power put more nuclear waste/rads into the environment in a year than safely operated nuclear power!
Had Chernobyl or Fukushima, been operated as walk away safe, molten salt thorium reactors? Neither would have been in the news except for how well they survived and how little they cost to own or operate.
As with any relatively new technology, all the real costs are upfront in the development phase. And in the case of molten salt operating at normal atmospheric pressures, with the most energy dense material in the world, those costs are insignificant. TBC.
Alan B.