I hate to say this Geoff, but the technically illiterate dunderheads in both government and oppositions on all our parliaments, as well as the unwashed multitudes, just don't understand realities. If we had any sense we would have followed Frances' example many years ago and built atomic power stations. It is actually too late to start this, because some of our aging coal fired power stations will have closed down before any atomic stations could be built to replace them. On top of that, renewables will still be insufficient to meet our growing demand for power. The bottom line is that in the short term we are going to have blackouts in periods of high demand and the country's manufacturing industries are going to wear the pain.

David

VK3AUU,
Blackouts used to be a common occurrence. Now they're rare. We're getting more storage as well as more renewables, so supply problems are unlikely.

As for technically illiterate dunderheads, look no further than Geoff who doesn't understand the difference between efficiency and capacity factor!

Whats this "Industry will bear the cost" nonsense? We will bear the cost in no jobs, low pay jobs and higher costs for everything!
Aiden when we get Brown outs and Black outs who will you blame? I guarantee it won't be your sleazy, corrupt politicians or the Greens and their idiot influence?
We need GIANT brown coal plants. Offer a world wide tender, legislation as Andrews did in Victoria ramming through his overhead rail to ensure no one delays and lets get on with it!
Of course the future is many more smaller nuclear plants across Australia which will be the future of power generation. What we will get is the same rubbish as we have now. Power doubling in price, erratic supply until a catastrophe occurs and then, maybe, common sense.

The prognostications of 91 eminent climate scientists are hardly dogma Geoffy. Nor their peer-reviewed findings.

And supported by mountains of evidence like unprecedented ice melts that includes a now melting tundra and an arctic sea completely free of summer ice along the Alaskan coastline. Never ever witnessed in living memory.

And record-breaking heatwaves and drought here at home and during a waning phase of the sun, which should have heralded a mini ice age, rather than what we've just lived through!

Can't begin to imagine how much worse it could get when the sun as it will, returns to its next waxing phase and the joint starts to warm up again it has done for all of recorded history!

Won't have to worry about fuel then as our coal fields will virtually melt releasing veritable tons of free methane we only need capture and use as a primary energy source as our tyres melt on melting bitumen as we commute to our places of work study or play.

Footy matches will need to be cancelled due to the mercy law as winter temps cross 50C?

As for tennis? Our courts will be places where we cook breakfast/bacon and eggs as the courts will be more than hot enough!

I just don't see the problem. If we can't mine thermal coal, we can instead mine uranium-thorium lithium and graphene and export much of that.

We are having this problem now because of diabolically dumb policies and subsequent privatization etc. That has prevented us from getting into the 19th century. Given we are still locked into 18th-century power provision because we have lots and lots of coal.

Which could be cooked to release the entire methane content that would then be able to power every conventional engine and all power delivery, with an immediate reduction in CO2 production of around 40%?

And pocket the current 26 billion plus we spend annually on fully imported fossil fuel!
TBC. Alan B.

This debate is again full of mountains of misinformation. the first being it takes too long to build nuclear power stations. And propaganda rent asunder by the six months construction of a modest nuclear power station in Iceland. Not all that long ago.

The only real problem with traditional nuclear power is their operating pressure requirements of around 150 atmospheres or above! And the fact that solid fuel always expands inside the seven inches thick, steel reactor vessel. Radiation can be completely contained behind a water jacket and concrete walls.

MSR doesn't need to operate at any more than normal atmospheres. Moreover, given fluoride salt doesn't boil until around 1400C and the highest operating temp of MSR ever recorded has been 1200C! Means, they're inherently safe. And cheaper to build than any current clean coal on any drawing board.

If we wanted to build a few, we have a tried and tested FUJI 350 MW to use as the template for paralleled or in series, reactors? Mass produced inside factories and rolled out as one a month or better? Deployed where we want power, be it the tip of Cape York or the dusty outback?

Thorium is fertile, not fissile yet can be used in a reactor after it's converted to U233. Produces far less waste, which is far less toxic and eminently suitable as long lif space batteries that burn up with reentry.

Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium and we have so much of it, need so little to power our entire energy service provision we can never ever run out of it! Therefore ought to qualify as sustainable carbon-free energy.

As for coal? It's not the electricity market's fault that some producer and pollies haven't got enough nouse to get out and reinvest in cleaner cheaper safe options. As any other sane an rational being would when confronted with the mounting evidence!

Let's de-privatise if only to gain control of a current price gouged market and decide on logic's rational, where we should be heading. What we've now is not working!
Alan B.

Alan B, I disagree, the current power industry is working perfectly! Close half the production every couple of years and double prices! Perfect! Profits double!
Or did you mean efficient for the people who pay? If so, private needs another lesson in efficiency, First wind fall profits tax of 94% or forty per cent of turnover (Whichever is the greater). Then tender out new power stations at best pricing offered but no incumbents can tender.
This would gut the current companies and get us cheaper pricing. Or we can build our own small nuclear and or large coal plants.
The pollies have to get up the current corruption and ensure the incumbents are punished very, very severely! No one would give cheek after having their testicles cut off and shoved down their throats believe me.

Alan B.,
WTF are you on about? There is no nuclear power in Iceland!

Though molten salt reactors have great potential, there are still technical problems that need to be overcome before they're suitable for commercial use.

____________________________________________________________________________________

JBowyer,
>Aiden when we get Brown outs and Black outs who will you blame?
IF we ever get brownouts again, we should blame AEMO, as they'd be failing in their duty to prevent them.

As for blackouts, we should blame whoever's responsible, and do whatever we reasonably can to ensure they don't happen again.

One thing's for sure: we should base any blame on the actual cause, not your delusion that there's too little dispatchable generation capacity to ensure a reliable supply.

>We need GIANT brown coal plants
...like a hole in the head!

You complain about the cost of electricity then hypocritically call for something that would make it much more expensive (as well as far more polluting).

JB. My twin goals are carbon-free energy and the lowest energy prices in the world. Clearly, there are vested interests commenting here who have a renewables barrow to push, and if those renewables could produce power for as little as 2 cents or less per KwH. I'd be first to back them!

Whatever the "market" will bear is the woolly thinking of folk who've never done it tough, never stood in a dole queue, let alone queued for a meal in a soup kitchen. Never suffered from heat stroke because the cost of running the now obligatory air conditioner was beyond their budget.

As for Nuclear power, being built in just six months?

Go on Utube Thorium V greens) and listen to the evidence of the contractors who installed it in Iceland. And conventional enriched uranium Adian.

Adian seems to be some sort of green acolyte, here to obfuscate and misinform as he advocates for his renewables. Almost as if he ha some economic skin in this game with phrases like, whatever the market will bear?

And clearly doesn't give a tinker's dam if our manufacturing sector is completely offshored or thousands of cancer suffers die unnecessary deaths as Bismuth 213 is withheld or made ridiculously expensive.

He just doesn't get, we've had a safe working model of MSR technology for over fifty years and all while we endured Three-mile Island meltdown the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima incident. All of which would have been prevented if they were MSR! NO QUESTION!

If we de-privatised this industry, we could remove all the vested interests from this debate and just crack with what is proven as the cheapest cleanest safest option. And if that causes some green acolytes to go into nuclear meltdown? The rest of us can learn to live with the outcome.

Adian is not here to contribute to this debate but shut it down if any of us advocate for MSR thorium or nuclear energy.
Alan B.

Alan B.,
I couldn't find any video of that title there. But there are plenty of sources that say Iceland gets practically all (>99.9%) of its power from renewables. Could you have mistaken a small research reactor for a nuclear power station?

By the time thorium MSRs are able to produce power for 2c/kWh, it's likely renewables will be producing power for less.

Yes, it was a small conventional reactor. And built from a standard design, in six months Adian.

As to whether or not it produces power? Don't know. And they have geothermal and Hydro.

Just making the point. if there is a standard design with all the bugs worked out, i.e., the FUI 350 MW?

Then we should just crack on build one run it for around seven years as we make bismuth 213 and cheap power few can match. Then with our prototype fully functional, us it as a template to build dozens as factory built mass-produced models that can be trucked and assembled where they're needed.

And as walk away safe nuclear reactors making the worlds cheapest, cleanest safest energy. And 24/7. Whether the sun shines or the wind blows! And for less than 2 cents per KwH! If you don't believe that? Take it up with Economist, Professor Robert Hargreaves!

[I'd sooner believe Robert Hargreaves, Ivy league Professor and economist, than you and your alleged expertise on matters of economy/price per KwH.]

. Several of them could be tasked as waste burners. And even completely burn weapons-grade plutonium. Unless you'd rather we leave it in the weapons or watch the piles of nuclear waste grow and grow, more and more carbon is added to the atmosphere, even as climate change threatens the human race with extinction a well as all life on planet earth. You want?
Alan B.

The Death of Homo Economicus (Peter Fleming): And your power bill...

… Leaders of industry enjoy a state-funded socialism because they understand that pure capitalism is a mere impossible abstraction that is meant for the masses to toil with, out there beyond the perimeter.”

And how true is his reality. While the Industry socialists get on with making themselves wealthier, (and obscenely wealthy bankers “glee-clubs”, meet in comfortably air conditioned and centrally heated towers), the plebs are divided up into neat little groups of have and have-nots, to argue over a power bill.

Hillary Clinton ain't dead yet.

Alan B.,
Research reactors are much cheaper and simpler than nuclear power stations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_reactor

Australia already has one in operation at Lucas Heights, and producing medical isotopes is one of its functions - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pool_Australian_lightwater_reactor

There is NOT a standard design of MSR with all the bugs worked out. The embrittlement problem still hasn't been solved. I've no doubt it will be, but it will take time.

Please understand that I'm not here to shut down honest debate. What I'm here to shut down are lies. Endlessly repeating your claims about MSRs and thorium power won't make them true. There's a good reason why they're not used already: the technology has not been adequately developed yet. Yes, that's partly due to a conspiracy decades ago, but there's no remaining conspiracy.

And your appeal to authority is just another sign of intellectual dishonesty. Robert Hargreaves is not here; I'm arguing with you, not him. Lots of people involved with the development of a technology have optimistic projections of what it will eventually be capable of, and they're not always right. But more importantly, even if the 2c/kWh prediction is correct, it will take decades to get it down to that price. And UIVMM that figure is the baseload generation cost, not the overall generation cost let alone what consumers would actually pay.

That the Sydney Opera house has been used as a billboard many times before by left whinge activists, and commercial entities such as Vivid seems to elude the posters on OLO.

So the problem seems not to be that the SOH is used as a billboard, but that it is for gambling.