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The Forum > Article Comments > Rock power: Australia's future? > Comments

Rock power: Australia's future? : Comments

By Mike Pope, published 5/8/2009

It is likely that clean coal technology will prove so expensive that it is uncompetitive with renewables.

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Geothermal power stations are operated in France and Germany using hot rocks to provide heat (150C) which is used to generate electricity. Why then should this technology not be used in Australia to meet its base load needs?

Over 30 companies are currently mining for hot rocks in Australia and spending millions in doing so. Many of them are backed by major companies such as Woodside, Santos, Origin Energy, Sunsuper, etc.

These companies are having to deal with rock temperatures of up to 300C and high pressures which makes their task more difficult than that experienced in Europe. However they – and their backers – are confident they will be able to meet most of the base load power needs of Australia.

The MD of the leading and largest hot rocks miner, Geodynamics, recently stated on ABC radio that his company expected to be able to generate 15% of Australia’s base load electricity needs from its tenements in the north of South Australia.

If only half the companies engaged in hot rock mining are successful, the potential to supply all of Australia’s electricity from this source seems to exist and, according to Geodynamics, do so at about the same cost as nuclear power stations – see page 13 of Geodynamics 2009 half year report and other publications at http://www.geodynamics.com.au/

Nuclear power stations have several advantages. They can be located close to customers, built to size needed to supply an industry, a town or a city. The new Generation IV reactors burn 90% of their fuel and produce very little waste.

Nuclear also has the disadvantages that they can only be built near a large water supply needed for cooling, produce radio-active waste which must be stored for thousands of years and apparently take 15 years to design, build and commission.

In other words, if we start the ball rolling now (we wont) we could have a nuclear power station by 2025. By that date, geothermal may be well established and supplying 20% of base load needs.

So why wouldn’t we fast track its development and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?
Posted by JonJay, Saturday, 8 August 2009 9:53:52 AM
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The West Australia government's Environmental Protection Authority has concluded that the significance of impacts to the marine environment from the discharge of brine by the Perth Metropolitan desalination plant is still uncertain and that the marine environment of Cockburn Sound continues to be under stress.

Desalinating seawater results in two different liquids: drinking water and brine in roughly equal measure. Brine is hypersaline water roughly twice as salty as the sea. Dumped back into a still marine environment, the heavy brine can sink to the sea floor and smother the life there under high levels of salt.

One alternative is to take this brine and harvest it on land into commercial grade salt by allowing it to evaporate in large ponds and then scraping up the resulting salt. That’s rather ironic considering the creeping white death is one of the largest threats to Australia's economy and ecology.

http://www.gulfnews.com/nation/environment/10322908.html

"Australia has the highest per-capita CO2 emissions in the world. This statement is repeated, variously as per-capita CO2 or Greenhouse Gas emissions, ad-nauseam by the global warming lobby. I'm not sure how this bullsh!t has become conventional wisdom."

Clownfish – perhaps it’s because others do the research while you propagate spin on Australia’s pathetic CCPI - ranked number 55 out of 60 nations – number 1 being the best performer.

‘Australia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are the highest of any OECD country and are among the highest in the world. In 2006 our per capita emissions (including emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry) were 28.1 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e)per person.

'Only five countries in the world rank higher—Bahrain, Bolivia, Brunei, Kuwait and Qatar. Australia’s per capita emissions are nearly twice the OECD average and more than four times the world average.’

Currently, in the Kyoto Annex 1 countries, Australia is coming dead last and is ranked by all global climate institutes as a "poor" performer:

http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/?2275

http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp7.htm#7_1

http://www.germanwatch.org/ccpi

http://www.cana.net.au/kyoto/template.php?id=4

25 nuclear reactors to give an 8-18% reduction in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? (Switkowski)

25 reactors? By 2050? Only in La La Land my fellow posters.
Posted by Protagoras, Saturday, 8 August 2009 11:49:15 PM
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So, Protagoras, you are, in your usual circular and evasive way, acknowledging that I was correct in saying that Australia is not the world's highest per capita greenhouse gas emitter?

Thank you.
Posted by Clownfish, Monday, 10 August 2009 9:40:32 AM
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Shadow Minister,

I have spent some time looking on the net to try and verify if fuel and the other issues associated with nuclear are "solved problems". They don't look solved to me. However I did manage to convince myself it looks likely they all will be solved in a few generations of reactor design. In particular you are probably right about fuel - it too will be solved before it becomes a major concern.

As for whether they will be solved - I think JonJay summed it up nicely, except where he implied there are working GEN IV reactors. There aren't any.

I heard one nuclear proponent talk on radio about what a future nuclear reactor might look like. He envisaged a mass produced fast breeder reactor. Building it and decommissioning together cost less than twice what a coal fired plant costs now, and the pre-manufactured unit could be a drop in replacement for the existing coal fired boiler. The waste from fast breeders is not the huge issue it is for existing reactors (including CANDU and GEN IV) as there isn't much of it and it only lasts 300 years. And of course there would be no fuel supply problems. It all sounded achievable and it truly was a workable solution.

But it is not a solution that exists now. We have been designing nuclear reactors for about 60 years. The pace of engineering advances in nuclear power plants has been frankly glacial compared to just about any other technology you care to name. They probably have 20 years, at most 40, to deliver on the vision painted above. After that they will be overrun by other technologies. Going on past history I still say the odds don't look good.
Posted by rstuart, Monday, 10 August 2009 8:42:20 PM
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Hot Rocks On A Roll..

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25899350-30417,00.html

Or Are Oil companies still doing a SNOW job on HDR?

The $40million 'straight-up-&down' drill rig from Dubai is a far cry from the $2.5billion directional drill rig off the Louisiana-Texas region. This landbased drill can worm its way 'up-down&sideways' for at least 7Km to seek out oil deposits.
Yet here are the Hot Rocks using bastard-tech solutions down to the great depths of what? One Kilometre? And WOW! That's ON A ROLL?
A Roll with sesame seeds no doubt!

Get real we're all being snowed on from great CHEVRON heights.

The oil & coal conglomerates will see the planet descend into war before they will release their grip on their ENERGY and economic monopolies.

Debate all you like but nothing will change till people think for themselves and OBVIATE our Sodom&Gomorrhic dependence on petrol/oil/gasoline diesel & coal.
Posted by KAEP, Tuesday, 11 August 2009 6:14:53 AM
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Rstuart,

The CANDU reactors are being built now, (they have a fraction of the waste that standard reactors have and can consume some of the waste from standard reactors) and there are 6 presently under construction.

The reason that reactor design has been so glacial over the past few decades is that the public reaction to nuclear power has been such that very few reactors have been built, and no one is going to spend money where there is no payback.

With global warming, the EU, china and India are looking at massive investment in nuclear, with the intense focus on thorium and Gen IV. The future progress cannot be predicted based on the past few decades. The first prototypes are to be rolled out in the next few years, and can easily be producing up to 30% of the worlds power in 20 - 25 years.

In stark contrast, renewable energy and storage has had huge funding for decades, and it is not looking at producing reliable base load for decades.

The target of a 50% emmission reduction can be met by nuclear by 2050 if the greens are prepared to focus on clean nuclear rather than a nuclear ban.

For base load the choice will be coal and CO2 or nuclear.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:07:02 AM
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