The topography of Australia may support massive, pumped hydro? So what? Has anyone with a brain calculated the cost of pumping water to those desirable sites? Well, we could always privatize the pipelines with foreign funds borrowed in the billions, billions we will service until hell freezes over.

Whereas SMR MSR thorium can be built for around the same money as a large diesel and simply sited where needed. Given routine maintenance good for up to 100 years of reliable carbon free service. But the good news doesn't end there.

Nuclear power (proven science) has been used to convert inexhaustible seawater into all manner of alternative fuel by combining hydrogen and CO2 as this or that hydrocarbon into liquid fuels, fertilizers and plastic. The latter two will remove some (locked away) carbon from the environment.

Every Australian household creates enough organic matter to support the conversion to biogas and all their gas needs. Adding food scraps creates a saleable surplus. But with scrubbing and feeding it into ceramic fuel cells, that surplus becomes more than 50%. Waste products include sanitized reusable water and a carbon rich soil improver.

Population reduction done successfully and just as Max Green described it! And I agree with Foxy that even clerics are entitled to a view. Nobody stopped any of them with their loudly proclaimed assertions on homosexuality! But hopped into them good and proper, when they talked about manmade climate change! More later.
Alan B.

Yeah. The preacher of the "SMR MSR thorium" religion should not be laughed at

And has all his marbles.

If these religionists had been spouting anti abortion or anti homosexual themes, the same people here earnestly defending their right to free speech would instead be demanding that they not be permitted to impose their views on society. If it wasn't for double standards.....

We aren't going to get to net zero - at least not with the current technology. So-called renewables (they are anything but) haven't got a chance of delivering the present, let alone future, power needs of the nation.

Dark matter is something that astro-science uses to 'balance the books'. Their theories don't work because they can't find enough mass in the universe to make them work. So DM is inserted as a balancing item. Pumped hydro is like that as regards net zero. Their fantasies don't work so they introduce never-ending pumped hydro schemes to 'balance the books'. The baseload power you have when you don't have baseload power.

But pumped hydro isn't going to do what's claimed for it. The most advantageous pumped hydro scheme available in Australia is Snowy 2.0. It is currently going to cost at least 6 times more than originally forecast, will be at least five years overdue and won't provide the backup power originally envisaged. And that's the best we've got.

But whenever the net-zero zealots are presented with the reality that 'renewables can't supply baseload, pumped hydro is wheeled out to square the circle.

Like Germany today, we'll probably get to the point where the politicians realise they can't punish the people any further and will give up their fantasies. But its also possible they cave on nuclear or some new technology up-ends everything - who knows alanB's MSR fantasies might yet work out in a decade or three.

In the meantime, as we commit economic suicide, the rest of the world merrily continues to use the most efficient power possible - fossil fuels....."A group of more than 100 scientists has determined that 2022 will be a "record year" for carbon emissions".

MSR thorium is no fantasy as prize winning investigative journalist and science writer, Richard Martin will attest in his book, Thorium, Super Fuel, subtitled green energy. He also encapsulates his book on U tube. So, if reading is a problem, then just listen.

The real fantasy is the moronic belief that we can keep endlessly burning fossil fuels indefinitely. Or exporting the same to the world.

It's only a matter of time before the world places a carbon tariff on all products produced or processed with fossil fuel. And countries like Oz will find their terms of trade dry up and we become another failed banana republic, because we're governed by recalcitrant, tin eared, blinkered numbskulls, who wouldn't know the time of day, but for the clocks.

Renewables are not the magic pudding they're made out to be the green movement! Nor will they support an industrial renaissance! But force what remains offshore where folks still use the brains they were born with!

Just don't do something, stand there.
Alan B.

Alan B, I hear all your questions about the cost of pumped hydro and overbuild - I really do! I was putting those same questions to the Blakers team at ANU - especially Matthew Stocks.

But it's tough to model. It involves a certain level of trusting that they do actually want an accurate model. It involves modelling our worst weather systems during La Nina - those Dunkelflaute (Dark Lull) events during our cloudiest quietest La Nina winter weeks. What assumptions are you making for those? How long are they? Are you trying to store energy for weeks - which is crazy expensive. Or are you assuming they'll just overbuild more solar farms for those days - because even solar panels produce half power on a cloudy day? In that case, it may actually be cheaper to have seasonal solar farms you just curtail during the abundance of summer. (Although during droughts there might be seasonal work for them to desalinate water during those periods.)

I used to scoff at solar overbuilds when Blakers published in 2017. Now? I'm not so sure - as the cost keeps falling! There I was recommending Kirk Sorenson and Ed Pheil lectures to Stocks, but meanwhile the solar price KEPT falling! I kept seeing Australia's weather modelled and various estimates of 1.5 to 2 times our grid capacity being required for a stable grid - but Blakers models 6 times - which includes shifting Australia off oil as well. They modelled WWS (Wind, Water and Solar) back in 2017 being affordable. If that was true then, it is even more so now.
However, has MSR solved embrittlement? Got decades of demonstrated materials durability? I'm now psychologically prepared to ask these questions of my former favourites as I'm open to the idea of renewables.

Mhaze ranting about the cost of Snowy 2.0 is as bad as anti-nukes cherry-picking the cost of nuclear based on a sample size of one Hinkley Point C reactor. That's the kind of 'logic' I expect from the less rational FANATICAL 100% renewables crowd that hate on nuclear!

Off-river pumped hydro can be built in 3 years as you work on all parts of it at once. There’s no pesky river to divert. It doesn't hurt fisheries. Off-river opens up 300 TIMES more potential storage sites than we need.

Then you pump in water slowly from a nearby river, cover it in solar panels or rubber balls to slow evaporation, and top it up now and then. Per capita, this uses a tenth the water of a coal fired thermal plant! We'll SAVE 90% of today's energy-water by switching to renewables.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2516-1083/abeb5b#prgeabeb5bs6