Sylvia

There will be a parliamentary inquiry looking at nuclear energy as well as the uranium issue. This is something that I have successfully pushed for, and believe that, being a standing committee (with Coalition, Labor and Independents) it is an appropriate forum to consider factors relating to nuclear energy.

MArtin, wind and solar really are not good baseload options. Assuming that wind can be "averaged out", you end up with 20% of rated capacity (European experience). You would need 120 000 generators, costing over $200 billion, or 25% of GDP, or 15 years defence budget!

Dennis

Big Fish I'm inclined to think if an innovation has legs it will be commercialised within two or three years. For example look at the way hybrid cars have overshadowed fuel cell cars in spite of a head start. I hope fusion scientists are not nutty professors playing with big toys at the public's expense, only to ask for more money later on. It seems like good insurance to implement what works now then switch if the superior technology is affordable. To make the switch we will still have to have a viable economy in 40 years or whenever. To me that means a max effort on renewables and efficiency with fission as the baseload generator. It seems though we will make a lot of mistakes before coming to that position.

Although fusion power is promising, the reason fusion power is not mentioned is that it has been promising for forty years. It has proved a lot more difficult to achieve a practical generator than I think anyone ever imagined.

Presumably it will come one day, but at the moment it makes no sense to plan on the basis of its existence.

Last I heard, cold fusion had been debunked, and belongs in the same category as spoon bending. It was never plausible that a chemical process could drive a nuclear reaction.

A parliamentary enquiry into power is a total waste of time and money. These things are almost invariably politically driven. The problem is an engineering and financial one, and has to be addressed by the engineers and economists.

Sylvia.

Sylvia.
>A parliamentary enquiry into power is a total waste of time and money. These things are almost invariably politically driven.

I agree, unfortunately with the degeneration of political accountability into spin, an ineffective/powerless opposition and a government that wants to gag it’s scientists –see the CSIRO bows to the spin doctors- ‘these things are almost invariably politically driven’ rubber stamps.

>The problem is an engineering and financial one, and has to be addressed by the engineers and economists.

Yes if they have the right terms of reference otherwise we are back at a Fracklin River scenario.

Dennis, the “European Experience” (20% of rated capacity) that you oh so happily quote is an old but popular “anti windfarm” figure for single European wind farms (data drawn from 1978 – 1987, comparing isolated small scale windfarm delivery to their 'theoretical' peak delivery).

The point is that wind turbines are far larger and far more efficient in 2005, and by connecting them up by a dispersed and integrated power network you can circumvent the obvious limitation of regional variance in wind speed.

So your 'make-up figures', in exclamation, are rubbish.

Dennis, I should have also said that you are right, wind and solar are not good baseload options compared to coal - but only if you accept the idea that the cost of emitting carbon into the atmosphere is zero!

I don’t think the cost of emitting 27 tonnes per person a year (as Australians do) is zero!

I, along with the world’s climatologists (who are sure enough to publish their work in the last few years), think there is an adverse effect of these emission. For this reason, I think that the more costly option of renewable energy is, in fact, worthwhile.