Given our unrelenting dependence on fossil fuels what happens when they run out? Rex Connor's 1974 prediction that eastern Australia would need WA gas is coming true. Instead of long pipes the transfer will be via LNG ships. What goes into oil refineries these days is less crude and more condensate and tar sand extract. $4/L petrol will slow things down, possibly by the end of the decade.

Note to Albo, Australia is already nethers deep in the nuclear fuel cycle. Olympic Dam is the current world no. 2 uranium producer and has the biggest reserves. The ANSTO developed laser enrichment process is now at work in Kentucky. Defence pundits say the subs are most likely locked in. Australia should put its name down with several SMR manufacturers and have some sites ready to go. Find a disused deep mine to store waste.

The article exaggerates the challenges of renewable energy while downplaying and ignoring its successes and benefits.

Firstly, the citing of the increase in CO2 mistakes correlation for causation. Economic growth, deforestation, and fossil fuel consumption in developing countries are the cause of the rise.

Secondly, the claim that solar and wind are not the cheapest forms of energy because they are "part-time generators" and intermittent is narrow. Wind and solar actually work out cheaper over their full life cycle. Once you account for costs of fossil fuels in areas such as fuel, maintenance, pollution, land degradation, and the impacts on public health, it becomes abundantly apparent why this is.

Finally, the assertion that an all-renewable grid is "highly unlikely to succeed" and will lead to blackouts, etc. is premature and baseless. It ignores grid modernisation, the deployment of complementary technologies, and rapid improvements to storage technology.

Nuclear power may be necessary, but it is not the silver bullet that Hemmings portrays it to be; given the set of challenges that it, too, brings with it.

A disused mine to store waste: To bury a coke can. Then let it seep into ground water, good idea. There is an above ground receptacle here already in the desert with the qualifying base for light water and medical waste only. With a decay life of 12 years. Heavy water and uranium solids can not be stored anywhere at this time. With a decay life of several thousand years.
SMR reactors are made small for small jobs, You would need 3.250 reactors to equal 1 GwH reactor. SMR are sealed tank ‘light water’ reactor to create steam or hot water. No where as efficient as a 1 GwH reactor operating with solid uranium fuel. France repurposes uranium for reuse but more expensive as new uranium.

Gosh, I think that AI is becoming quite entrenched in this forum, be it artificial intelligence or Albo's indoctrinated.

While the same people are making the same arguments about electricity generation, they are ignorant of - or just don't want to know about - what is going on, or not going on because of power shortages, in Europe, where they are are actually experiencing the failure of renewables; where, in Germany, people are fined for using more that their quota of electricity.

Keep up the constant yack yack, and cop a nasty bite on the bum when reality hits Australia, if we don't continue to use fossil fuels into the foreseeable future.

As I said on olo previously;
A friend of mine, Keith Alder, the boss at Lucas Heights from its
inception till his retirement had a proposal for major part of the
waste problem.
You build two especially designed power stations.
Into the first one you load the waste from the conventional nuclear
power stations. It produces power until the radioactivity falls to a
point where is unsustainable.
You take the waste from that reactor and load it into the second one
designed for that fuel and get power until it also depletes to a very
much lower level.
Other countries will pay us big money to take their waste and put it
through our stations and we get "free" power.
You then take the very depleted waste and bury it deep.
It is a metal so it does not leak out.
He put a piece of depleted uranium in my hand and it was amazing how heavy it is.
I have never heard mention of this solution since then.
Keith was a metallurgist and worked in UK power stations and was
somehow involved with the UK weapons program.
He was engaged by the government to build the Jervas Bay nuclear
power station until Billy Hughes pulled th plug.