Australia, and the planet, has nuclear energy.
Solar IS nuclear.

It is amazing that some people will prostitute themselves to produce such garbage.

100% renewables means regular blackouts and loss of industry, loss of jobs, and an even steeper downward plunge for the West. Plus the continuance of the things the naifs think are caused by CO2 - bushfires, drought and floods. Setting up nuclear will take too long, so the only possible answer is a return to the fossil fuels than nature endowed us with.

Hi Ttbn,

"Setting up nuclear will take too long, so the only possible answer is a return to the fossil fuels than nature endowed us with."

Sooner or later, we'll have to turn to nuclear power generation. And yes, in the meantime, rely on fossil fuels.

I imagine that nuclear power generation has advanced a long way since Chernobyl was built (and shut down). Hopefully, we've learnt lessons about building nuclear power plants too close to the coast in a tsunami-prone area, and away from tectonic fault lines, like Fukushima.

And we don't have to build dirty big power stations. If submarines can be powered by nuclear energy, then why not a multitude of small power stations ? One near each town, and dozens around cities ? If they're safe in submarines, why not small power stations a reasonable distance from each town ?

Yes, it may take some time, but time passes one way or the other, so why not at least contemplate a huge network of nuclear power stations ? And use fossil fuels in the meantime ?

And, of course, use renewable energy sources, bearing in mind that wind towers and solar panels currently need to use fossil fuels in their manufacture ? They don't last forever either, so how much CO2 do they save during their productive lives relative to that produced in their construction ? Any at all ?

Of course, once renewable energy producers, towers and panels, can be constructed using renewable energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear power, then of course use and build up renewable energy production. But in the meantime .....

Joe

There will never be enough energy storage. For a barely adequate 1% or 3.65 days of Australia's annual 262 Twh electricity consumption we'd need 2.62 Twh. At an optimistic figure of $200 per kwh capex that would cost over $500 bn.

Some dissenting opinions on the just released Nuclear Prerequisites report said cheap fast build reactors were a pipe dream. In the next breath they listed countries that would go 100% renewable by 2030. Who is dreaming? Germany for example cannot close its remaining nuclear reactors by 2022 as promised without the lights going out. Eastern Australia will almost certainly need to import gas when Liddell and Yallourn close. Neither cheap nor low carbon.

We'll need even more electricity for EVs, desalination and gas replacement. Perhaps we'll have to learn this lesson the hard way.

I suppose one day we will wake up to real threats in the world such as the rise of communist China, Islamic terrorism, massive drug use and suicide. Meanwhile as we dumb our kids down and scare them with pseudo science we waste billions and force people to pay higher power prices while being arrogant and stupid enough to think we can control the weather.

Joe,

You mention nuclear powered submarines. We have a government that is intent on having our next fleet of submarines CONVERTED from nuclear to old fashioned and dangerous (lack of stealth and range) diesel. Governments, both parties, who act in such a bizarre way are highly unlikely to accept nuclear power.

You also mention Chernobyl. Here's something I read recently about Chernobyl:

" There were technical problems when one reactor overheated on an evening shift in April 1986. It could have been easily controlled, but the supervising manager was out of his depth. In return for his standing and activism in the Communist Party, he had been allowed to skip units during his engineering studies. In fact it came out in the subsequent investigation that he had completed barely half of the required coursework. Strings had been pulled by Soviet officials to ensure university administration waved him through. So, years later, when he had a demanding job with great responsibilities, he couldn’t cope with a simple hitch. He gave wrong instructions to staff. That led to the world’s worst nuclear accident". (Dr. Christopher Heathcote, in article the failure of making allowances for certain people in education, Quadrant Online, 20/11/2019)

The old socialist policies again. More dangerous than nuclear?

People who have been waffling on about the dangers of nuclear power, but who believe a bit of carbon dioxide will bring the world down, are idiots. There is no polite way to describe them.

Hi Taswegian,

Speaking of EVs - when would be the most sensible time to charge up an EV's battery ? Probably in the early hours. When would the pumping up-hill of Snowy 2.0 water be cheapest ? Probably in the early hours. So increased demand for electricity in the early hours in our most built-up areas ?

But don't economists advise us about supply and demand ? If demand goes up, so do prices ? So will Snowy 2.0 will pay standard rates for pumping water up-hill, and charge standard rates for consumers by running it downhill. So down the track, if EVs ever get going in a big way, there could be an evening-out of electricity prices over the 24-hours ?

Have I got something wrong ?

But it still might have been a Good Idea at the time.

Joe

@Joe that's a tricky question. AFAIK Snowy Hydro reckon they will pump using windpower and solar by day, probably discharge 6pm-10pm then go back to wind power til dawn. California found that too much coal power went into pumped hydro so had a curfew. You can either charge an EV when grid power is cheapest if TOU pricing comes in or when it is lowest carbon not necessarily cheapest.

Slight catch I don't see Snowy being built before 2030 if ever. Maybe for now charge the EV with home PV by day then transfer from a home battery at night.

When is the best time to plant a tree?

Answer, twenty years ago.

We could have embraced clean safe, carbon-free nuclear energy twenty years ago, but for ignorant fearmongering.

Fatalities for gigawatt of power produced is lowest for nuclear! See Alan Goulding's Facebook page for a couple of evidential videos complete with comparative charts/graphs.

If coal-fired and gas-fired power had to pass the same rogue emission standard as nuclear? All would be forced to close!

The ost associated with current nuclear is the pressure they are required to wor at, 50 atmospheres and the cost of prefabricated and enriched solid fuel.

Remove both those elements and suddenly one has nuclear power no fossil fuel can compete with on cost and safety. And allows other folks nuclear waste to be burnt as fuel we are paid to take from them in annual billions. And in walk away safe, MSR's. We could if sanity finally prevails, build several of these with other folks money!

And a couple or three thorium powered examples to primarily produce medical isotopes, not the least of which would be alpha particle isotope, bismuth 213. Which would have a nice healthy medical tourism spin-off and many current death sentence cancers sent to remission!

All that stands in the way is sovereign risk to some of the debt-laden tax avoiding, price gouging, profit repatriating, foreign investors!? Even though cancers like brain cancer and ovarian cancers both individually exceed the annual road toll!
Alan B

For every 'tricky question' on alternative energy, there is an even trickier answer.

Taswegian. You had better do some sums on the number of solar panels and batteries you would need for all that power. You might be surprised how big the numbers are if you live where you do.
David

Coal produces "800 elephants" worth of waste to power a 70 year human lifespan, so that's bad. But it gets worse.

Even 'clean' power like solar PV uses 15 times more building material and 5000 times more land than nuclear. http://tinyurl.com/y2n45cz9

It also quite worryingly produces 300 times the waste per unit of energy than nuclear! http://tinyurl.com/ybpwgrsc By 2050 Australia could have 1.5 MILLION tons of solar e-waste to try and recycle, and we currently don't include that cost in the price of solar installations. http://tinyurl.com/y6clgxa8

Indeed, renewables expert Matthew Stocks (rightly) demanded someone show the cost to decommission nuclear power plants and store the waste. But when asked, he admitted he hadn't done the same for solar! Why does solar 'cost modelling' not include the *huge* task of cleaning up and recycling 300 times the waste? http://tinyurl.com/y8vwdgp4 "Clean" solar is not so clean.

But the real worry is EROEI - Energy Returned over Energy Invested - which measures the energy profit of a power plant after all the energy it cost to build it in the first place. Renewables have an OK EROEI on their own. But what about a 100% renewable grid? What about the energy to build all those pumped-hydro dams as 'batteries' for when the sun goes down and wind goes quiet? The figures on this paper might be a little old, but show that renewables + storage may not even be a high enough energy source to run our world. http://tinyurl.com/ya3c3esp Dr James Hansen — the climatologist that diagnosed our climate problem — says believing in 100% renewables is like believing in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. http://tinyurl.com/yclaf2sn

ttbn. Your coverage of Chernobyl is mostly correct. A friend of mine
Keith Alder who when he retired was boss at the nuclear reactor in
Sydney. He had worked at nuclear stations in the uk and was involved
with the British nuclear weapon tests at Monte Bello.
He designed the never built Jervis Bay nuclear power station.
I mention all this to give you the source of my information.

In 1956 he was at the Vienna HQ of the Atomic Energy Commission for
a conference on Nuclear Energy. The Russians gave a talk on their
Magnavox power reactor design. They gave a detailed description.
After their presentation a number of attendees rose to speak to draw
attention to what they believed was a design fault.
They pointed out that energy stored in the carbon moderators could in
some circumstances caused instant boiling of the cooling water.

This happened in the test of procedures that ttbn mentioned.
The Russians rejected the warnings of those present.
How much better off we would be if they had taken notice.

An excellent article and what a wonderful comparison with the article by the Greenpeace campaigner a week ago. This article had an engineering and technology focus. The Greenpeace article was marketing driven.

"Recent polling from Greenpeace shows that nearly 70% of people think big businesses should set a target of 100% renewable energy, while 67% of people would prefer to work for a company that uses renewable energy." That's great. Maybe Greenpeace polling will show that 67% of men would like their wives to be as beautiful as a supermodel and 84% of women would like their husbands to bring home a million dollars a week.

This article shows the difficulty of getting to 100% renewables and does it with checkable quantities from good references, not some wish list of hopes and dreams.

I hope we can start planning nuclear power plants soon rather than waiting until coal fired plants are closing down and we don't have any plan for getting the electricity we need. Getting nuclear rolling won't be easy. It will take a long time and needs to be well thought out to address the rational and irrational fears from the general public.

I wonder if the coal industry likes the idea that everyone is afraid of nuclear power? Of course they do. Less competition means more profits.

Another well done to Dr Tom Biegler for not implying that nuclear was a silver bullet that would solve all problems. He is actively in favour of more wind, solar and hydro. He just makes it clear that our energy demands are huge and far too huge for wind, solar and hydro alone.

Combatting global warming will require a group of strategies including population stabilisation, nuclear and negotiations with our neighbours. None of it will be easy, but the sooner we start trying to address it, the better the results will be.

Hi ateday

Very true. Solar cells are receivers of the solar energy created by nuclear FUSION reactions on/in the Sun. http://energyinformative.org/what-is-solar-energy/

Solar cells are a far cheaper and less dangerous means of tapping nuclear energy than any type of nuclear reactor on Earth.

Cheers

Pete

Pete, you really should go back and read the article.
David

I'd love solar to be cheaper than coal but it's only half true. If you *only* look at the cost of solar on a per kilowatt hour to the grid basis, YES, it's cheaper than coal. But when you include real storage to back up our modern cities an industries for cloudy weeks and winter having less sunlight? It's much more expensive. Let alone if you actually cost cleaning it up!

Are yes, that poorly written article.

Own ideas - don't need the article crutch.

Cheers

I just wanted to make sure I'd made these 2 points loud and clear.

Dr James Hansen, THE climatologist that diagnosed our climate crisis, says believing in 100% renewables is like believing in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. http://tinyurl.com/yclaf2sn

Instead he says the world should build 115 reactors a year! http://tinyurl.com/zp3552t

Here is an interesting street debate on this very question.

It is by Friendly Jordies who challenges people to tackle him on NUCLEAR POWER SUCKS - Change My Mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5K1ImzI24M

Layman discussions but pretty informative.

Ha ha ha! Yeah, usually I agree with Friendly Jordies but was of course quite sad when he went off against nuclear power a few months back. More people die every DAY from coal (when it goes right) than in the entire history of nuclear power GOING WRONG! And there is good reason to believe that nukes are going to get exponentially safer and cheaper in the coming years especially with standardised Molten Salt Reactors from ThorCon coming off their shipyard assembly line at 7 c kwh.

Hey, I was anti nuclear for my first 40 years. If I can change when shown the facts, anyone can change.

For the interested layman whose knowledge of the science and the business of nuclear physics is dangerously inadequate, please consider this enquiry genuine and bipartisan. Well, as bipartisan as an honest attempt can be coming from one who is already on record here as resolutely anti-nuclear as demonstrated by the South Australian enquiry roughly two years ago into establishing an international nuclear dump.

[a] Is radioactive nuclear waste included in calculations that confer the awarding of a "clean" certificate? If not, why not?
[b] There are many kinds of nuclear plants that generate electricity. May it correctly be presumed that their waste is significantly different in quantity, degree of toxicity and length of half-life decay?
[c] Will Tom Beigler soon now present a dissertation on nuclear waste management with details of the storage treatment of different kinds of waste and the location of a waste management facility or facilities, including methods of transport of such waste to this facility?

If [c] is not within his field of expertise, could OLO be persuaded to approach someone eminently qualified in order that we are appraised of a complete picture of the nuclear power cycle?

The nuclear electricity generating industry constantly disappoints when it is asked questions it hopes will not be asked. On the question of introducing Australia to nuclear power, it has a woeful record of being open, factual and comprehensive in its participation in public enquiries as evidenced by the blatant bias that saturated the South Australian government-organised Citizen's Jury mentioned in my first post. The way it was conducted doomed the enquiry almost from the start when criticism was stifled in a most amateurish fashion that offended the Jury's intelligence, not to mention that of the interested public.

Once again, the industry has demonstrated its perfidy by avoiding highly pertinent questions. The industry has created a huge cross for its back in prematurely and greedily creating itself before dealing with a waste problem that can remain toxic for thousands of years. It wants a naive beginner, not yet committed as they are, to solve this problem for them BY TRUSTING THE ALTRUISM AND BENEVOLENCE OF MULTI-NATIONAL BUSINESS AND THE POLITICIANS WHO SERVE THEM FOR AS LONG AS THE WASTE REMAINS TOXIC. It presupposes an Earth whose transient regimes will ALWAYS act with a precise and unwavering sense of responsibility to guard and protect nuclear storage facilities, and the modes of transport to rejoice in a Red Cross-like protection zealously and meticulously administered even when it contravenes and or militates against national self-interest.

Earth's first nuclear power plant began operation in 1954 in Russia. The first fully operational commercial plant began operations at Calder Hall in the UK in 1956. If waste problems persist then the industry itself has a problem that its hierarchy must solve or individual executives must be encouraged by the likelihood of disposession and takeover by government.

Private industry obsessed with profit cannot be trusted. Their moral itegrity is skewed [to put it moderately] Government-funded agencies have already spent billions of taxpayer's pelf in research. It's high time the industry paid to solve its own problems by assuming responsibility

Hi Pogi and MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Nuclear waste is not a problem, it's the SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE!

The original nuclear engineers in the 1950's would be HORRIFIED to think we all still thought nuclear waste was a 'problem'. They knew then what I only learned in my 40's. Nuclear breeder reactors EAT "normal" nuclear waste.

They burn the longer lived stuff (actinides) to get 90 times the energy of a normal Light Water Reactor. Breeders leave some final waste (fission products) but they are so hot the burn themselves out in 300 years. AND it's only 1 golf ball to power your entire lifetime with reliable abundant clean power, all day, every day no matter the weather. Reliably. Without the impossibly expensive task of trying to build huge expensive pumped hydro dams to try and get you through the night with 'unreliables' like wind and solar. Nuclear has enough power to light your world and charge your EV, or even manufacture synthetic fuels to replace oil and jet fuel. At 1 golf ball per person-lifetime, Australia would only have 25 million golf balls to bury every 70 years, filling just 1.25 Olympic swimming pools! That's compared to burning 800 ELEPHANTS worth of coal for 1 lifetime of energy. The final nuclear waste (fission products) just melts down into ceramic blocks that will be buried under the energy park. Uranium goes in, and never comes out again! Here's a 4 minute video that explains it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE

Now imagine another solution for the FINAL waste (fission products only, no lovely high-energy actinides).

Imagine the WHOLE world of 10 billion people in 2050 is nuclear powered and that most of those reactors are breeder reactors eating nuclear waste.

The other option is to collect the entire WORLD'S nuclear waste into one old barge every 2 years, tow it out to the deepest ocean trench, and sink it.

WHAT?! POISON THE OCEANS! KILL THE WHALES! NEVER!

But wait! It's been vitrified, melted into ceramic blocks. It's not a fine dust that might float around somewhere. It's not going anywhere.

Also, REMEMBER THE PHYSICS! Water halves radiation every 15 cm, so a few meters of water between the barge walls and the waste cages inside would protect sea life. No-one is going down 6km to try and grab this stuff, and there's not much they could do with it if they did.

In 300 years, it's safe. Done! Nuclear waste is just not a problem. But if we make other choices, by 2050 Australia could have 1.5 MILLION tons of solar panels to recycle. America would eventually have to recycle 1.35 MILLION solar panels EVERY DAY! Now that's a waste crisis!

But worse, solar and wind are just gateway drugs for fossil fuels, especially peaker plants like natural gas. Go down the renewables only route and I guarantee we will not solve climate change. An energy storage revolution would have to occur that's several orders of magnitude cheaper, and there's NOTHING like that even on the horizon.

If we get magic batteries, then I'm all in. But until then, we need to BAN MAGICAL THINKING! We need hard nosed, REAL engineering solutions to the energy problem, and mass producing CAP1400 once-through reactors is the only solution to climate change today while we commercialise and perfect the vast array of options of breeder reactors we KNOW work but just have to commercialise. (Like Ed Pheil's MCSFR.)

In 10 years we may know if Svenmarks global Maunder minimum hypothesis
has overpowered the AGW process by the fall in earths average temp.
If so we can continue to burn the coal as it will be cheaper than
renewables and nuclear. Also will hold back the cold times.
However nuclear is the only long term option.

One US study showed that based on mtbf of solar cells in a 100%
renewables system they would need teams of workers to replace
100,000 solar panels EVERY day.

Oh BAZZ, really?

Svenmark has been duped by the same tired old anti-climate myths. He must be politically allergic to the policy demands of climate change.
http://www.desmogblog.com/henrik-svensmark

COAL IS NOT CHEAP!

Coal kills nearly 3 million people a year, which is about 650 Chernobyl disasters a YEAR. (The west NEVER built a single Chernobyl reactor — not all nuclear reactors are the same!) Every year coal kills the same as 650 Chernobyl disasters. https://tinyurl.com/pqgdd5q
This is why George Monbiot says: “….when coal goes right it kills more people than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. It kills more people every week than nuclear power has in its entire history. And that’s before we take climate change into account.”
http://tinyurl.com/93nm9sn
The health costs nearly double the cost of coal! You pay once in your electricity bill, and again in your public health bill.
http://tinyurl.com/6m2o7c5
Dr James Hansen has calculated that by displacing coal, nuclear power has already saved 1.8 million lives.
http://tinyurl.com/ydx6mxrb
W.H.O. also reports that the pollution from energy poverty, like wood and dung smoke, kill another 4 million people a year. That's 7 million people a year dying from dirty energy worldwide. The health bill isn't just treating those who eventually die, but also includes those who survive with lung diseases and other health complaints. The health bill is enormous! If we pump money into solving climate change, we also create clear skies and reduce health bills, create energy security and avoid potential oil wars and we prepare for the fact that fossil fuels are actually finite and will one day peak and start a permanent decline

Nuclear energy is very green. It emits almost no CO2 to mention. Yes opponents of nuclear power frequently claim that uranium mining emits a lot of CO2 but this is simply wrong.

In this topic, you have to understand that people lie. A lot.

Now, nuclear power does also create nuclear hazards of various kinds, including nuclear weapons proliferation. Maybe those aren't "green" in which case it's not green. The radiation at Fukushima and Chernobyl is very real.

But from a purely environmental perspective, in terms of protecting the maximum number of fish, fowl, lands, oceans, and human lives, nuclear is still vastly superior to burning coal/fracked natural gas (which are the primary electrical energy sources in the world).

Right now, China burns so much coal that the pacific ocean is literally being polluted by mercury.

Chinese coal is killing the Earth and environmentalists respond by trying to ban nuclear power. There you have the environmental movement in one sentence.

The biggest problem in the nuclear business is that it's so small and underfunded, there are all kinds of whackos beginning to crowd in and make big claim for very bad ideas. For example Thorium Molten Salt Reactors (horrible) and PACER (even worse).

Whaaaat? You don't like MSR's? Sorry, but you're going to have to explain why. I know many nuclear engineers that think they're the BEST!

+ It *cannot* melt down because the fuel is already a liquid.
+ It requires power to keep the fuel up in the core and reacting. In a power failure the hot liquid salt pours down to the drain tank and the moment it cools to 400 C the salt crystalises into a solid block that's not going anywhere.
+ The Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor eats uranium and thorium and nuclear waste and nuclear warheads!
+ It burns all the longer-lived 'waste' out of it, getting 90 times the energy out of the waste, turning a 100,000 year storage problem into today's energy solution.
+ The final wastes are fission products that you melt into ceramic blocks and bury under the reactor carpark for 300 years. Then they're safe! Your whole life would only result in 1 golf ball of waste. That volume for Australia would only come to 1.4 Sydney Olympic pools of nuclear waste after 70 years of abundant, reliable, carbon free electricity!
+ Uranium from seawater can run the world for billions of years. It's essentiall 'renewable' because geological activity and erosion tops up the oceans.
+ Dr James Hansen, the world's most famous climatologist, says we need nuclear power and we should look to the history of the French. They built out a mostly nuclear grid in just 15 years. It can be done, fast and cheap. The French electricity bill is about half Germany's, and Germany is only a third done with their unreliable wind and solar plan. According to Hansen the choice is nuclear power or climate change.

lizawilson illustrates my point very well.

And while Max Green adjures Svenmark to curb a political allergy toward climate change, I must thank him for offering a reply to my OP but simultaneously must ask him to deal with his own allergy toward answering the questions therein

While the quest for information from a lay majority in society is treated with ignore, my suspicions are only increased with every instance. For the present, while this sorry condition persists, I will justifiably claim that the nuclear power industry and those who support it CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

They have done an execrable job of selling their industry to the public and maintained an adversarial attitude since inception.

I have perused the USA's DOE site online. It seemed sincere and impartial and that is absent from so many "experts" online who prefer to utter patronising noises to increase their mystique of being a repository of arcane secrets that a lay public is unfit to share.

For instance: Much is made of TMSRs, thorium molten salt reactors?
Q; What salt, of the many different kinds of salt, is used? Is it abundant in nature? Does it eventually degrade by use over time? What is the residue product? Does the thorium make it radioactive? Is the residue re-usable or a waste product? What kind of safe storage is required for the waste? Do you know of any other pertinent questions that should be asked? Has your answer been as complete and comprehensive as current knowledge allows?

A lay person may be able to seek all that information online, EXCEPT FOR THE LAST TWO QUESTIONS. But most of the lay public have not the time to satisfy their curiosity except for a weekly couple of hours browsing the internet and if the kids aren't monopolising the family computer.

The industry's PR reps reputations have demonstrated a contempt for public awareness and a genius for substituting word soup for informative content in news releases etc. Very few of the interested lay public have any confidence that they, or their bosses, would answer the last two questions honestly.

The MCSFR is the Molten CHLORIDE Salt FAST Reactor, it doesn't JUST burn Thorium (so please stop calling it a THORIUM reactor!), but also burns uranium, plutonium, waste and warheads, and it is the safest cheapest simplest breeder reactor concept out there. My understanding is the Chloride salts become radioactive but are endlessly recyclable. The fission product wastes are only extracted once every 40 years, which is an electro-chemical process that removes them from the salt and then the salts are reused.

The fission product wastes can be vitrified (melted down) into ceramic tablets that are like water proof bricks you can store in a bunker under the reactor-park and 300 years later are safe. It's only 1 golf ball sized piece of ceramic tablet per human lifetime of energy. It's NOT! A! PROBLEM!

As for the rest of Pogi's rant, Pogi seems to be under the assumption that just SNEERING at all the knowledge shared with Pogi is a logical response that somehow confirm's Pogi's original suspicions. But that's circular.

EG:
Attacker: Honestly Pogi, you've got to get over this fixation with your mother that you've repressed!
Pogi: But I don't have a fixation on my mother?
Attacker: Ah, but that just shows how repressed it is!

That's an example of what it's like to discuss nuclear power with Pogi. One answers Pogi's questions as best as one can as a lay person, but it all backfires and Pogi rejects it all with Bulverism.

"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

Max Green. I'm not the only skeptic and critic of nuclear power generation. my criticisms were legitimate, well attested and not denied by the industry. It can't deny them because it is standard practice.

It's a pity you're not mature enough to realise that my criticisms were not personal and always directed at the industry or an aspect thereof. That you thought it desirable to resort to the personal demonstrates quite clearly that fictional sarcasm is a poor choice of tactic in a vital and contentious issue such as this and allowing dudgeon to stain your attitude is never a welcomed substitute for eloquence.

Nevertheless, I genuinely hope that your solstice celebration was a very happy occasion for you and your family and that 2020 finds you ready and eager for its challenges and rewards.

Pogi, words words words! Let's cut to the chase.

You asked these questions.
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=20648#363592

I answered them. Breeder reactors get 60 to 90 TIMES the energy out of each bit of uranium than a normal once through reactor. Nuclear 'waste' is the SOLUTION to climate change, not a problem to be managed. The thorium and uranium goes into a nuclear power park, probably with 6 to 10 reactors in there and a police station as well (why not put all these government services together for extra security?), and then the uranium and thorium NEVER come out again. The vitrified ceramic nuclear waste bricks are buried in a bunker right under the reactor park. In 300 years they are safe!

Remember, it's ONLY 1.3 Olympic Pools of waste every 70 years for the WHOLE of Australia's 25 million people. It's only 1 golf ball per person lifetime. There's just no need to freak out about the final REAL nuclear waste, the fission products with all the actinides burned out. Once we've got 60 to 90 times the money out of the uranium, we'll have the money to vitrify the waste and deal with it once and for all!

We have a climate emergency. We need to be pumping MCSFR's off the production line ASAP. They provide abundant, RELIABLE BASELOAD POWER forever. It's time to get serious!