A vast topic but I'd make several observations that suggest we may be barking up the wrong tree. First increasing emissions when we've had the RET from 2001, carbon tax 2012-2014 and direct action from 2011. The all important electricity sector has hovered around the 180 Mt emissions mark for two decades when it is supposed to plummet. Then there's retail power prices. ACCC thought the default offer policy would see average prices fall. It doesn't look like that will happen.

Now there's the renewable transmission corridors push. The aim is to reduce congestion and line losses. Trouble is just a couple of years ago we were told there was too much. The new build will be the gold plating you have when you're not having gold plating. Then there's east Australian gas exports. Just in case batteries don't prove enough to run smelters when coal is all closed we'll need something else. It beggars belief that eastern Australia will import gas which is probably what will keep the lights on in the 2020s.

Yes, let's have another time-consuming enquiry. Then have an enquiry into the enquiry/similar mad hatter time-wasting stalling to allow than status quo to continue like ever-worsening climate change, unabated!

It's not as though we're helpless/can't do anything!? BUT WON'T!

We have no other option than to take the nuclear route! As plain as the nose on your face! It couldn't be any clearer, more urgent!

Yes, coal/gas exports are almost alone propping up a tanking economy and are in terminal decline along with the global economy 1938 style? Coal/gas exports could be replaced by other much more enduring CARBON FREE energy exports, exported via undersea cables with super-strong superconductor graphene cores

At prices that never ever go down at the whim and caprice of the middleman importer, the latter eliminated via a direct sales to the consumer? A completely different kettle of fish from ships lining up awaiting their turn to unload!

Available for similar industrial application minus the usual transport shipping bill!

We have a very, very short window of commercial opportunity to become the world repository of nuclear waste. And earn annual billions for providing a burial service.

Governments are elected to do sensible stuff for folks too dumb to do it themselves? And just need to end the endless prevarication and patent self-interest that's progressively unwinding the economy!

Nuclear power generated by burning and reburning other folks nuclear waste in MSR thorium, with the material we are paid ANNUAL BILLIONS INDEFINITELY to handle/dispose of and in reactors these same annual billions could build and pay for over time, just makes too much economic sense for the perpetually prevaricating, political prostitutes, currently polishing our treasury leather in Canberra? If the cap fits?

Otherwise, these bought and paid for pollies (100 million in corporate funding?)? Would stop the endless political stoush and just crack on with doing what every boy and his dog knows, has to be done ASAP!

When you've run out of all excuses for the endless senseless delay! Have yet another interminable enquiry? Go figure?
Alan B.

Al

Your exactly on the mark.
The problem with electricity generation is political.

But that's the problem with all they touch. I've always said, now I'm repeating myself, the least a politician does, the better for us all.

Unfortunately they have the reins.
Suggest something that removes that massive problem.

Dan

Remove the nuclear ban. Add a carbon price. Bind energy retailers to a reliability requirement forcing them to marry unreliable renewable sources with backup to ensure 24/7/365 dispatchability. Remove direct and indirect subsidies.

Nuclear retailers would out-compete renewables ones, since the latters'reliability requires either preposterously expensive storage and/or carbon-priced coal/gas generated electricity.

The LNP needs to get a move-on with this. OTOH Labor has decided on a renewables path. The Finnish Greens support nuclear power while the reason the left are against it here has less to do with waste than with Gaia. Man needs to get out of nature's way by withdrawing to dense city-living (with a dense energy source driving everything, including desalination, food and synthetic fuel production) rather than trying to blend with nature. Earth repair and re-wilding and will ensue where man vacates.

https://medium.com/generation-atomic/2115-a-100-year-review-of-ecomodernism-43779c8f5d14?fbclid=IwAR1wGuUk_7EZEo8FERdqkDpk9SYj8Pef5aRAkWXHynMs8_Voh1FUayrP2Ek

Dan. There's only one way for sanity to prevail and get a change to carbon-free nuclear while there's still time and that is to put every incumbent last on the ballot paper at the first opportunity.

First cab off the rank has to be the repeal of the prohibition of nuclear energy and the establishment of a fund to fund and facilitate modern day co-ops to build and run them and dozens of other energy-dependent high tech industries.

Anything else has to result in some self-serving numbskulls just droning on and on how its somebody else's fault and somebody else's problem! That we're compelled to wait for someone else to act first!

Why?

Because nobody in our current parliament has the wit the will, the testicular fortitude or the smarts to go first! And get out of being the ones forced to make a decision by having yet another interminable enquiry!

I wish this were not so! But the facts and our current reality, speak for themselves so loudly that only the willfully blind and deaf cannot see or hear them, let alone the will of the people!

Yes, another election is some time off and some of our citizens can be bought for around forty pieces of silver or the modern equivalent.

And needs a concerted grassroots campaign like SSM, by all those who actually want climate change addressed and an economic new deal that's not just about lining the pockets of rapacious foreign investors! We always, sadly, get the government we deserve! And with them more of the same old, same old, business as usual!

What we need is a nuclear power party and some genuine people who can pass a lie detector test, to become part of it and fund it with crowdfunding! Volunteers? Or just complain and wait for someone else to do something?

If like me you love this country, then start doing and stop sitting on your hands waiting for someone else to do something! And goes for everyone who wants real change and real reform!
Alan B.

Lock in 2/3rds of our gas production for domestic use including energy production (the yanks did 100% export energy ban to give them selves a manufacturing edge but that is unlikely to fly here).

Stop prioritising access to agricultural markets over our manufacturing interests in free trade agreements.

Have the government own and operated a series of gas fired power plants to support our renewable efforts and to prevent price gouging from predatory energy providers.

Al.

What's needed is bipartisanship on the ground level. That's true equality.
It was once Nationalism, and an homogeneous population. Add in aspiration, and the train is rolling down the tracks.

All of that past cementing of the population is gone. United we stand, divided we fall.
This country is highly vulnerable because of the collapse of the unity it once had, and is plundered by a new breed of politician. (It's been outlined on these pages many times).

We could have the negative it is to the citizenry, ameliorated to a large degree by a redistribution of electoral boundaries, into a more inclusive mix, to include in each electorate, a more homogeneous cross section of the population.

Divide electorates up like slices of a pie for example.
This would force potential politicians to encompass all walks of life and their thinking, into their election campaign.

There's one idea Al

Dan

Great Steeley, but what about emissions, the whole point of the exercise?

As it stands the gas brings a dividend to gov't coffers. If we reserve we should charge out the gas to domestic retailers at international spot prices plus a carbon-price on its combustion for electricity.

Gov't delivering a service to consumers efficiently flies in the face of experience. It'll become another union feather-bed and a tax-base.

Geez I'm glad socialists don't run the country.

Dear Luciferase,

Firstly gas is rightly deemed a transition fuel. It is markedly less CO2 emissions per unit of electricity produced, doesn't have to sit there in constant baseline mode and is a far better fuel than coal for evening out spikes and dips in renewable energy production.

Secondly the amount of revenue we get from our gas exports is minuscule compared to those of Qatar which exports about the same amount of gas. Something about Abbott and shooting down a mining tax.

Finally you say “If we reserve we should charge out the gas to domestic retailers at international spot prices”. What? Even the most lassire fare capitalistic country on the face of the planet wasn't stupid enough to do that. By ensuring virtually all their production was reserved for domestic use it drove down the price and their manufacturers were the beneficiaries. Instead you want our manufacturers to pay top dollar for our own gas and be uncompeditive as a result.

Mate I happen to care about this country, its manufacturers, and its workers. You seem to only care about the profits of global resource companies. Tell me where I am wrong on this and I will listen but right now you would appear to be unAustralian.

Steeley,

I'll put aside the facts of total life-cycle fugitive gas emissions, methane's potency as a GHG, and that running gas in open cycle turbines to backup renewables is inefficient so doesn't deliver the 50% reduction on emissions (over a HELE plant, I'll presume) you claim.

The people "deeming" gas to be a transition fuel hold faith in miracles. Without a staggering storage discovery, there is no "Transition". It's the figment of vivid imaginations used to justify the path of countries like Germany, which is building gas reticulation and coal-mines rather than investing in storage that's just not feasible or economically viable for a modern civilization.

I love my country enough not to want it to embark on a similarly stupid path that will and destroy Australia's competitiveness and impoverish our children.

As for your flatulence about being un-Australian, pass your wind as you will but I won't pass comment.

PS. What's with this 'mate' stuff anyway? Passing yourself off as being more 'strayn than another doesn't strengthen your argument but highlights its vacuity