Sadly, have to agree with most of this.
Alan B.

"It was just a boring time".

And this bloke has added to the boredom with his sermons.

Dear Mr Compton,

Thank You for your article and expressed thoughts.
I am glad that you're not completely down-hearted
and do see some light at the end of the tunnel.
It's not all doom and gloom though as far as I
can see. Yes, some dreadful things did happen -
but hopefully we shall learn from them and move on
towards a better future. Hopefully we shall find
solutions that suit us and we will correct the
current mess that we're in. We must deal with
the things that you mentioned in order to move
forward as a free, fair, and vibrant society.

I have no doubt that we can find the solutions that
suit us, provided we do not succumb to the siren
calls of demagogues, charlatans, and ideologues.

I believe that the best years for our country are
still in front of us.

With Trump in the White House, a boring year was the best we could have realistically hoped for.

Oh Everald-Smetherald

As you get bitter, swisted and decrepit at "87", you're sure to be bored.

I found the theatre of the attempted Dutton-Abbott takeover of Turnbull's government to be most stimulating.

The last minute save by blokey-chokey ScoMo topped it off.

But sadly the loss of the pert, svelte, feisty, fit, comely, on-the-ball, answer to my fantasies, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was the main casualty of the year.

Enjoy http://youtu.be/3F2spCoYN90?t=35s

Thank you for raising my shared hope, Everald, when you wrote:
"My hope is that, over the next decade, we will see the demise of the Liberals, Labor Nationals and Greens and their replacement by two new Parties.
One must be CENTRE RIGHT, without any arch conservatives and without the support of corrupt public companies and those who are wealthy enough to buy favours.
The other must be CENTRE LEFT, without Trade Union involvement.
Both must have no ideologues in their ranks, just efficient managers of the economy and compassionate leaders of a cohesive society."

The time is past for old ideas and motives to dominate our policy making - we need fresh, imaginative representative who remain answerable to us for every decision. They're out there - we just have to give then the job by electing them.

Very true ttbn

As an admitted "Elder" of some church, 87 year old Everald should enjoy his last few years of dotage with four 20 year olds.

Preferably female.

He should always look on the bright side of life http://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M?t=15s

plantagenet,

We can see that you don't let anyone
dull over your sparkle.

"There are other depressing issues we could talk about such as Australia's appallingly inept Energy policies and our childish denial of climate change …"

By unquestionably accepting climate change ideology and subsidisation of weather-dependent, inefficient, part-time renewables at the expense of low-cost, reliable, coal-fired baseload power, the author evidently aspires to ever-higher electricity prices, decreasing supply reliability, more frequent blackouts, increasing deindustrialisation, and consequent loss of thousands of jobs -- hardly the way to advance Australia.

Thanks Foxy

And a very Merry Christmas to you and all.

Here's a Yuletide ditty I picked up - from the dark Northern Winter http://youtu.be/89k5cLsnx4Q

Cheers

Pete

Here is my optimistic fantasy, and by the brilliant Charlie Chaplin to boot.

Merry Christmas to all.

Enjoy

http://youtu.be/ibVpDhW6kD

Oops sorry try this

http://youtu.be/ibVpDhW6kDQ

Raycom,
The reverse is the case - see http://reneweconomy.com.au/csiro-aemo-study-says-wind-solar-and-storage-clearly-cheaper-than-coal-45724/

If you want to read the study itself, that's at http://www.csiro.au/~/media/News-releases/2018/Annual-update-finds-renewables-are-cheapest-new-build-power/GenCost2018.pdf

Dear Pete,

Wishing You and Yours a magical Christmas.
Enjoy every moment. And a Peaceful, Healthy,
and Happy New Year 2019!

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE! AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2019!

Raycom, sorry mate, but Adian is right. Renewables are cheaper than coal, however, MSR thorium is vastly cheaper and no, not new technology but trialled between the fifties and the seventies, culminating in a four or five-year trial, without accident or incident. Other than a sampling mechanical failure, thanks to inadequate cables on sampling buckets. Which were replaced with more robust stainless steel?

In his book, thorium cheaper than coal, ivy league professor, economist Robert Hargraves estimates thorium fired power could retail from the private sector for less than 2 cents per KwH.

Compare a 350 MW light water reactor with an operational life of 30 years and a similar capacity MSR thorium. The FUGI 350?

The conventional reactor will require 2551 tons of enriched uranium over its operational lifetime. And burn fuel as rare as platinum. And from that 2551 tons of enriched and expensive fuel, create at least 2550 tons of highly toxic nuclear waste.

Conversely, The MSR thorium (extrapolated from Oak Ridge) will burn just one ton of fuel during the same period in a walk away safe reactor, and create during the same time frame, less than 1% waste of far less toxic material eminently suitable for long life space batteries.

Thorium is at least four times more abundant than thorium and is the most energy dense material on the planet!

Moreover, with a half-life of 15 billion years, longer than the expected life of the universe. Something we can never ever run out of!
Alan B.

A lot of cloud-dwelling dreamers, will tell us our future energy will be hydrogen? Maybe, but at what cost?

I mean the cheapest way to create hydrogen is by the catalytic cracking of the water molecule and yes the heat generated in a truly massive solar thermal plant could supply that raw heat. And the water molecule cracking plant, just as massive, if we are to produce enough for all household use and most transport options.

The build cost equally massive and enough one could suggest sufficient for half a dozen new, new coal, coal-fired power plants.

A simpler solution would cook coal to release the methane content and use that instead. And delivered to the households industry and gas stations of Australia via a national gas grid, built by the public purse and retained by it to limit price gouging profiteering!

Most household and industrial use would be via methane consuming ceramic fuel cells and available without any significant transmission loss from the coal facility and the users. Given the reaction in the cell is chemical rather than combustion, the exhaust product, mostly pristine water vapour.

Electrification and batteries would limit the transport options that relied exclusively on compressed methane gas

Even there the CO2 emissions would be reduced by as much as 40% The refuelling stops more frequent and no bad thing for long haul, heavy road traffic.
Alan B.

Alan B wrote: "Thorium is at least four times more abundant than thorium"

That may be true but then again thorium is 4 times more abundant again.

Alan B wrote: "a walk away safe reactor"

"After shutdown [of the Oak Ridge MSR reactor] , the salt was believed to be in long-term safe storage. At low temperatures, radiolysis can free fluorine from the salt. As a countermeasure, the salt was annually reheated to about 150 °C until 1989. But beginning in the mid-1980s, there was concern that radioactivity was migrating through the system. Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine gas — the environment above the solidified salt was approximately one atmosphere of fluorine. The ensuing decontamination and decommissioning project was called "the most technically challenging" activity assigned to Bechtel Jacobs under its environmental management contract with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Operations organization. In 2003, the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million, with decommissioning expected to be completed in 2009. Removal of uranium from the salt was finally complete in March 2008, however still leaving the salt with the fission products in the tanks."

Walk away safe?....more like run away safe.

Thanks for that Mhaze, and the second thorium should be read as uranium! Not as corrected by the auto correct, to thorium. I take it you're not critiquing me for being partially sighted!?

You might have seen I'm not averse to coal-fired power, just our means of distributing it!

If it is cooked to extract pure methane and that methane distributed via a publicly owned and operated Gas pipeline grid, then the normal transmission and distribution losses would be almost entirely eliminated. The resulting coke still useful for several industrial applications, Blacklamp for the tyre industry and a possible source of manmade graphene?

Installing methane consuming ceramic fuel cells to convert this lighter than air, gas would eliminate the noisy diesels and double the energy coefficient which at 80% for the latter combination 4 times better than conventional coal-fired power.

And possibly also stretch our cal fired reserves from an estimated 700 years to 2800, and power prices a quarter of current examples. and indeed far-far lower than the best most efficient renewable.

Methane is also a reductant and therefore act to prevent internal oxidation in the pipeline. Maintenance could be contracted to specialist competing employee-owned co-ops to contain costs.

And all doable, but, inferior in my view to MSR thorium, given this would likely be the heat source used to cook coal and extract the methane, given the cost and impracticality of solar thermal to provide 24/7 heat/around the clock production?

Merry Christmass to one and all.
Alan B.

Walk away safe as an operational reactor!

Fluorine is very corrosive unless intelligently managed by experienced industrial chemists, not Nuclear physicists totally ignorant of this completely foreign to them, unpressurised process.

Florine just does not react with the graphite core at the heart of MSR. The addition of adequate beryllium to the molten medium prevents most corrosion to the metal parts, and because it's unpressurised but rather operates at, site normal, atmospheric pressures!

Any crack that allows leakage exposes the molten medium to the outside air, where the salt solidifies at around 400C and therefore self-sealing.

One would expect some corrosion after all the funding pulled by that paragon of virtue President Nixon.

And corrosion to be expected along with other probs, with the forced shutdown and therefore, lack of complimentary routine maintenance.

Also required is adjacent complimentary reprocessing that includes saturation with bubbled hydrogen purging, followed by electrolysis.

If allowed to run till the end of normal operational life and then the salt drained to fluorine safe containers, not any more of a problem than for safely stored raw fluorine salt!

All the alleged probs with Oak Ridge the result of the premature shutdown caused by the pulling of comparatively modest funding!

. Advise you restrict yourself to your knowledge base rather than the mountains of misleading misinformation one can find in various links, pertaining to thorium, placed by Russian oil oligarchs and advocates for current and far-far more dangerous, traditional nuclear industry?

Suggest you read, investigative prize-winning Journalist and science writer Ricard Martin's book, Thorium, Super fuel, subtitled, green energy.
Alan B.

Thanks so much Foxy

For your kind thoughts "Saturday, 22 December 2018 9:43:42 AM"

Remembering Dad.

Hi Galen

Thanks for your Christmas Season Youtube [1] bringing good wishes to all.

Specifically Charlie Chaplin's inspiring speech of global togetherness, tolerance and understanding during the darkness of WWII (1940).

Charlie must have enraged the actual "Great Dictator" [2] Hitler of the totally inhumane, including anti-Semitic, values.

Regards

Pete

[1] http://youtu.be/ibVpDhW6kDQ

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator

Hi Pete,

You are most welcome

Cheers
Galen

Dear Pete,

I know how you're feeling.

This will be my first Christmas without
my mum. She passed away in late January.

So many memories.

Thanks Foxy

I'm sorry to hear you lost your Mum this year.

I find my grief comes in waves. I forget, then remember my Dad, then forget again.

I hope you have a mainly Merry Christmas.

Pete

Everard,

Pointless and boring sums up your contributions to OLO for 2018, and pretty much every year previously.

At least get the spelling of the author's name
correct before making your usually - exciting and vibrant
observations!

Aidan, Alan B

You are misinformed. Stop believing the fanciful – if not deceptive -- claims of the CSIRO and other warmists.

Remove your blinkers. Observe what happened in the rest of the world as a result of increasing the penetration of unreliable weather-dependent renewables, at the expense of reliable coal-fired generation.

Without exception, electricity prices went up.

If there were any respite in Australian prices by increasing unreliable weather-dependent renewables, it would be only temporary.

If the unreliable, weather-dependent renewables were cheaper than coal, there would be no need for their subsidisation.

There is no scientific or economic justification for spending (actually wasting) billions of dollars on installing unreliable, weather-dependent renewables -- there is no measurable impact on global warming, but power prices are driven up and supply reliability is driven down