Cont.
MSR thorium would allow cost-effective desalination and moving water far enough inland in sufficient quantities to effectively drought-proof the nation and provide cost-effective broad-scale irrigation.

Deionisation dialysis desalination has already proven to be cost-effective for broad-scale irrigation and with conventional power! Imagine how much cheaper it could be if only our energy was the lowest costing in the world!

Consider these comparisons. A traditional light water reactor 350 MW, will require during an operational lifetime some 2551 tons of enriched uranium as fuel And from a product as scare as platinum. And produce as much as 2550 tons of highly toxic nuclear waste.

However a 350 MW MSR thorium a FUJI. Would only require for the same period, one ton of thorium, which is vastly less expensive and as common as lead, for which it would produce around 1 to 5% of waste. And from tried, tested and proven technology!

It's time to end the endless moronic prevarication and just get on with it.

As for needing huge time? And way out into the future?

The record shows that the quickest time to build and commission a nuclear reactor, was around six months, albeit, from a known and problem-free design!

And all that proposed here! As mass-produced, factory-built, FUJI 350 MW modules?

The world's lowest costing energy coupled to space-age automation will give us the world's lowest costing steel with the lowest possible carbon footprint!

Ditto aluminium and many other metal smelting operations, many of which could be placed near the deposits and salt repositories!? Given graphene highways and byways would make it more cost-effective to transmit the electricity to the mines and their adjacent refinery operations and then just transport the finished metal rather than ore!

Similarly, all our exports should be valued added, and doable with the world's lowest-cost energy coupled to space-age automation. We have a 2.5 trillion dollar super fund looking for a safe, tax-reducing repository!

And given the above, could leverage a further 2.5 trillion invest funds,, minus the foreign control that currently comes with it!
Alan B.

I suppose it's good to have an opinion like the author's which is contemptuous of government regulation, and can ignore the past examples, some very recent, such as the Global Financial Crisis caused by the dismemberment of government oversight in the U.S.A.financial system. Such myopia cannot recognize the necessity of government regulations which benefit the social as well as economic interests of a country. This dislike of regulation is abetted by a rear-view vision of the economy and our world. This world is constantly changing, every minute, every day. The windmills will never stop turning no matter how hard you try; Don Quixote discovered this fact. Perhaps the author should read what is often described as the 'best literary work ever written.'

Dear Cyclone,

Indeed.

And look at all that building regulations which are stymieing more apartment blocks to attract Chinese investors. Whatever could we do to combat such a regulatory assault?

And what about our high level fuel standards, these make cars so much more expensive.

"Australia ranks 66th in the world for its fuel quality, the lowest of all developed countries, with an allowable sulphur content up to 15 times higher than countries like China.

Australia’s most popular unleaded petrol – 91 unleaded – allows sulphur levels of up to 150 parts per million compared to the 10ppm allowed by the European Union, and the government has indicated this will not change until 2027.

This means some of the best and cleanest European cars cannot be exported to Australia, leaving some manufacturers to either export older generation engines on certain models, or to not export them at all."
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/02/eu-to-push-australia-to-clean-up-petrol-standards-as-part-of-free-trade-deal

Or about our poor strawberry growers who have to apply to the UN each year?

"About 70 per cent of Australian strawberries are being grown on runners that have been fumigated with an environmentally damaging pesticide that has been banned around the world.

Methyl bromide is an odourless and colourless gas which was banned under the United Nations Montreal Protocol in 1989 because it depletes the ozone layer.

Australia agreed to phase it out by 2005 but a decade later, nine strawberry runner growers at Toolangi, in Victoria's Yarra Valley, are still using nearly 30 tonnes a year."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-29/toxic-pesticide-used-on-australian-strawberries/6354488

In other words the author is full of it.

I was in Sydney a month ago. I live in the northeast United States and working for Apknite, this is not an area generally known for cheap real estate, particularly around major metropolitan areas like New York and Boston. But I was astounded at what I was being told was the price of real estate in the Sydney area. I had several people tell me that their adult children have essentially given up any hope of homeownership and their only opportunity is to be given the home their parents own.

An here is some clear evidence things are not as rosy as the government would have us believe:-

“Today’s figures show the worst annual economic growth for 18 years. GDP per capita is now lower than it was a year ago, productivity is plunging and the economy is pretty much staying above water purely because of government spending and a drop in imports due to weak investment and household spending.

We have now had four consecutive quarters of trend growth below 0.5% – that hasn’t happened since the 1990s recession nearly 30 years ago.

If we include public investment, government spending overall accounted for nearly 70% of the growth in the economy in the past year – a figure not far below that which occurred during the GFC.

If we take out government spending and investment, and also trade, the private sector shrank 0.5% over the past year. That only happens when the economy is pretty much in the toilet.”

Pretty scary when you think about it.
Galen

Thanks Al.

If only we the democracy suckers, could elect people with a vision like you.
And I don't wish to be insulting at all, by comparing your vision to that of a long lost visionary, Barry Jones, that polymath who's flaming visionary light was extinguished very quickly as an MP.

The sign of a desperate democracy, is one where the total rule of its people is governed by an army of sycophants at the top. That is Australia. A self serving nightmare for half the hapless population, factored out of any meaningful existence, who can go root their boot, while they watch the examples of total disregard of their simple demands, such as an affordable roof over their head, while the politicians at the top, nail in the injustice by refusing to deal with it as a hedge to the secure little number it is, guarding their own mulitiple housing portfolios, and ensuring an army of rent slaves for themselves.

This is self serving at its worst! It has robbed the country of aspiration.
The same group of "terrorists at the top", further prop up the building of a failed economy, by artificially escalating a property bubble, and brand name it as market force driven, with many more immigrants than can be reasonably sustained, and manipulated interest rates designed for bank profits.

Along the same path, tertiary education credentials are devalued to that of a corn flakes packet, with valueless Micky Mouse curriculums and a team of used car salesmen at its helm, attached by another self serving umbilical chord directly to the politicians bed room.

Who says it like it is, but those who lose by it? Talk around for the economic realities of a failed economy and a divide and rule establishment order for a dose of reality

As I see it, China waits patiently on the side lines for this alcoholic look alike country, to hit the skids.

Dan