King Hazza: "compare the amount of access and promotion of alternate power sources and fully-electric vehicles"

The difference between you and I King is I am more right wing, although that may perhaps come as a surprise to Shadow.

And OK, you win. You got it right when you asked "Why are you guys even going on about this?". Except as a source of amusement and education to those of us doing the chatting, it is meaningless noise. I would no more have the government go round forcing us to drive electric cars, provide tax breaks to ethanol substitutes for petrol or PV solar units than I would have them force electricity companies to build nuclear plants.

If you think CO2 emissions are going to cost us dearly in the future, you nudge our capitalist society into fixing it. The straight forward way to do that is to charge the CO2 emitters now for the damage the CO2 will do to future generations. That is exactly what the ETS does. Where is it efficient to do so, individuals and corporations will avoid that cost and move to processes that produce less CO2. It is hardly rocket science.

The ETS seems to make a fair attempt to doing what Shadow wants: it charges the emitters and gives the money back to poorer consumers. It is revenue neutral. The net result is electricity that doesn't generate CO2 becomes more attractive, as for that matter does simply using less electricity. Who knows, maybe using the money to install insulation is more attractive than using different generation techniques.

This attempt to compensate consumers won't be perfect. There must by definition be winners and looses, otherwise we would not change. Besides, they could not resist the opportunity to do some social engineering, and use the ETS as another means redistributing income from the rich to the poor. I happen to think that an egalitarian society where the difference between rich and poor is small is in the end good for all of us, rich and poor alike, so I don't mind that.

Back to the discussion at hand.

I view what Rudd's declaration as essentially meaningless. We are not going to develop substantial expertise in nuclear here. The enormous investments required means it is an area of expertise singularly ill suited for a tiny country like Australian. It is becoming a centre of expertise that takes time, whereas the decision to get someone like Westinghouse to build a nuclear to build a plant can be near instantaneous. Thus Rudd's declaration can be reversed on a dime, without any ill effects. Thus unlike the ETS, I view this "Dinosaur Rudd" examination of Rudd's nuclear policy about as worthy of discussion as Abbott's budgie snugglers.

That is not the case for all replacements for coal. Installing a small wind power base sounds like a good idea. Unlike nuclear, the incremental cost is small, and our electricity people need the experience in handling its unique effects on the grid. And also unlike building nuclear plants, a wind generating building industry is certainly viable here. A small poke from the government to get the experimentation started sounded like a wonderful idea to me, and Howard did exactly that. Ditto for solar, geothermal and so on, which Howard didn't do.

The difference between nuclear and these other technologies is the poke required is small. A few hundred million reserved for pushing experimentation in renewables over a decade could dozens of these explorations into new areas. Granted most of them would be failures, but it would not fund one Nuclear plant.

Shadow is gradually wearing me down on nuclear. We disagree about fuel availability, but I have to acknowledge there is enough around last the lifetime of any plants we build now. There are other problems. The thought of radioactive wastes with geological lifetimes and nuclear proliferation gives me the willies. Shadow will say we can develop economical technological fixes and I think he is right, but as of today it is still an article of faith. I prefer not to leave such things to faith, if at all possible. Holding back is one way of doing that.

Just wondering, apropos this topic, whether very many OLO viewers read the OLO article 'Clean electricity, cheap electricity, safe electricity' by Alex Goodwin, published on Wednesday, 23 December 2009? See: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9857&page=0

I found the comments thread to that article to be one of the more interesting and constructive interactions of recent times on OLO. There seemed to be far less vitriol and defending of established positions by resort to the labelling of other posters: perhaps this was because so much of the subject matter appeared to all to be a quantum leap ahead of the more common understanding of the promise (if that's the right word) of nuclear-fuelled power generation. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9857&page=0

Could it be that there are effectively vested interests in, or deriving from, the regulation of the construction and operation of erstwhile conventional nuclear power stations that are threatened by the seemingly simpler, and above all, claimedly environmentally safer, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) design? Perhaps the patentability of the LFTR is seen as being insufficient to make it attractive to corporate investors that would perhaps see their return on investment largely coming by way of the sale of rights to use of the design, rather than from economies in power generation achieved by it in any specific application.

I wonder whether the relative ubiquity of Thorium in comparison to that of Uranium has played any part in the seeming world-wide reluctance to at least trial this technology, and if so, what possible vested interests are seen as being threatened, and in exactly what way?

I can't escape the feeling that the Rudd government is intentionally foreclosing on all power generation options that have any existing, or foreseeable, prospects of viability in the context of the publicly-owned utilities model clearly favoured by an overwhelming majority of Australian electors.

I can't escape the feeling that Chevron corporation is intendedly being given the inside track in regard to future monopoly energy supply in Australia.

Forrest Gumpp: "Just wondering, apropos this topic, whether very many OLO viewers read the OLO article 'Clean electricity, cheap electricity, safe electricity' by Alex Goodwin, published on Wednesday, 23 December 2009?"

I did, obviously as I posted a comment on it. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9857#159029

My personal view was Alex Goodwin had written an ad for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, and it was about as balanced as an ad. I didn't say that directly in my comment, but that was the point I was trying to make. Now that you have drawn my attention to it, I see the supporting link I in the comment was bad, thus rendering the entire thing useless.

The link should have been:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1.html

It is not the article the link points to that is important although it isn't bad. It is the comments that followed. I think some nuclear engineers decided to battle it out in there.

The impression I had of LFTR's after reading that link wasn't diametrically opposed to what Alex said, it was more a matter of degree. It removed Alex's sizzle to reveal the realities of the sausage underneath, if you like. Alex's article left you wondering what the planet wasn't covered LFTR's already. By the end of the reading comments posted at the link above, it was clear why not. It was also clear LFTR's weren't the only proposal on the plate. There are many others out there, each with seemingly as good prospects.

They all also had nits. The nits had to be ironed out. The problem is once you have come up with a plan to iron them out, it takes a several $ billion experiment (ie, building a plant) to see if you have succeeded. I think Alex was spruiking for the Australian government to invest in just such an experiment. If so, as you can see from my comments above, I think it is a singularly bad idea.

Rstuart you have the wrong idea about me- I am NOT a socialist or "left wing" person at all- I thought that would have been rather obvious by now.

I'm just pointing out that while most governments of other 'greening' countries are doing something useful and actually assisting in providing and investigating serious alternative power sources for consumers to offset any ETS some of them have or may not have forced on their public, Austrlia isn't doing jack.

Basically, the whole idea was paying more for 'dirty' fuel with a serious attempt to move from dirty fuel to 'green' fuel in a manner convenient to the public and consumers;

In Australia it seems more of a case of paying more for 'dirty' fuel and trying hard to maintain the 'dirty' fuel industries using taxpayers and ratepayers cash- whilst putting in almost no effort at even applying the same intervention in the market to subsidize green energy, including Hybrid or full-electric cars which for some reason are still highly limited and quite expensive compared to ordinary models.
As most Australians use and need electricity to do their work and are going to need their cars, all you are doing is paying more for your living in this scenario.

But to make it clear, I am AGAINST an ETS.

And by extension, why is it so much harder to use the involuntary jump in dirty fuel prices to subsidize green fuel costs more, or actually put some real effort into at least connecting us with some European green markets, advertising for green energy products, etc?

Apparently, it's ok for government to interfere with our markets and pricing, but NOT ok for them to actually attempt to implement some infrastructure- or at least help someone else who is willing to do it.
(and personally I always thought that governments actually doing this kind of thing was the purpose they existed to serve- provide services).

rstuart

Thanks for the links. The discussion strengthens my belief that the pause in nuclear technology has little to do with greenie protesters and everything to do with nuclear weapons.