Yeah, We know. The same people will agree, and same set will disagree. Yawn. It's a waste of time discussing nuclear while we keep voting for the same backward drones.

Readers, please comment on this vacuous article before it is, not rooted, but worse, Alan B.'D

Nuclear has always proven unproblemic, expensive and only needs one bad day in 40 years to be unforeseenly disastrous.

Arguments agaist nuclear being expensive are based on unproven hope, eg. of Thorium enthusiasts.

Beyond about 20% wind and solar where we're at now the integration costs escalate. That's before millions of electric cars, desalination, heatwave aircon and so on. The extraordinary contortions that 100% renewables advocates go through reminds me of OCD sufferers who won't step on gaps in the footpath. There's also hypocrisy; when new transmission was built a couple of years ago it was demonised as 'gold plating' now it's necessary to develop the resource. SMRs on brownfield sites like Hazelwood and Liddell won't need new power lines.

Wind and solar increasingly needs to be curtailed due to line congestion and system strength rules. They lose money due to frequency correction FCAS charges and marginal loss factors all the while getting the LGC subsidy which was supposed to be gone by now. After nearly 20 years of the RET electricity emissions have declined a few percent, not almost eliminated. It should be obvious that nuclear is the logical replacement for coal. That politicians can't see that shows they are part of the problem.

CORRECTION:

Nuclear has always proven PROBLEMIC, no matter what marketing claims come out about safe, new, cheap, small, modular, technology reactors.

Nuclear enthusiasts talk of small power reactors in isolated communities.

Even for small reactors in isolated communities environmental-regulatory-courts-political-planning permissions could take a good 20 years.

"So why is it that as a nation we continue to deny our own nuclear expertise and experience? That we restrict ourselves to limited and inadequate solutions to generating clean and reliable electricity? That we continue to export uranium for others to use to generate zero-emission electricity?"

Because we are so bloody stupid.

David

Yes! We need to have an adult factual debate on this topic. And give we can get the emotions out the mountainous misinformation from the anti-nuclear, anti-development greens, We might be able to develop an industry and the cheapest electrical energy in the world and in complete safety! And allow other folks to pay our entire R+D/development outlays at no cost to us ever!

Nobody who understands even the basics of nuclear energy is going to suggest we develop solid-fuelled reactors, but rather SMR (small modular reactor) servicing microgrids with MSR (molten salt reactor) given theses can be built as complete units inside a standard-sized shipping container and burn other folk's nuclear waste which among other things will allow us to power the nation for thousands of years with almost free CARBON FREE electricity!

In a conventional reactor, the reaction is controlled by the raising and lowering of the fuel rods with ELECTROMAGNETS! And means they need back up systems and back up the backups! And those backs cannot be in a cellar or basement if there is even the slightest chance of flooding! Neither diesels nor alternators work well underwater! Nor staging transformers (Fukushima)

Chernobyl was a nuclear accident going somewhere to happen? First, the Cheif engineer was a political appointment? And the rods may not have been changed on an absolutely essential schedule? In which case the, generated by the nuclear reaction, xenon may have expanded inside rods? and added to the 150 atmospheres of pressure inside the reactor?

Thereby forcing something to let go and superheated to white-hot water immediately flashing to its component gases as a highly explosive and massive fuel bomb. It was a hydrogen explosion that wrecked Chernobyl and an uncontrolled reactor that then created the rest of their problem given a total power outage and no ability to cool the reaction. Given all the coolant, i.e., the water, had flashed away in a microsecond. And no backup ability to repace it or lift the rods!?TBC.
Alan B.