Good question Joe. I know that you will not be holding your breath waiting for an answer. I think the whole idea of CO2 being the bogey man is silly. Wind power is expensive, too conumers and industry. The last thing this country needs is dearer power just to try-something-out. Leigh Creek in SA is looking like becoming a ghost town because all the climate BS, and Labor redtape BS that doesn't allow the power company to offer prices that would cover their costs - and that's using cheap coal - the only thing that enabled Australia to be competitive in the past.

I am still nervous about nuclear , Foxy. I suggest it only as a sure-fire thing for the environment, but the alarmists reject it. It is expensive, too. A choice has to be made between cheap, reliable power and a strong economy, or airy-fairy stuff and a dead economy.

Dearest Foxy,

My understanding is that major problems with nuclear energy plants occurred thirty (Chernobyl) and forty (Three Mile Island) years ago, with much earlier versions of nuclear technology. By the time any plants were in operation in Australia, even if the governments involved approved them tomorrow, it could be 2030, eighty years or so after Chernobyl was built, and around seventy years after Three Mile Island was built. I would be confident enough now, and certainly by then, if I'm still around, to live next door :)

As for 'rapid population growth', that's history now: without immigration, most European countries would be losing population. Russia and Japan both have declining population. Australia, the US, South Korea and many other countries have low 'natural' population growth. And China's population story is a disaster waiting to happen.

Only Africa and South America seem to have relatively rapid population growth, but not as much as popular myth would suggest, and their growth rates are slowing.

Yes, even if there was zero population growth everywhere, population would still slowly rise, simply due to more people living longer.

Meanwhile, world food production has risen faster than population over the last forty years, although I can't cite where I read that, sorry.

As for resource exhaustion, the big producers are capping their mines and wells because of over-production around the world, and it seems that there are literally oodles (1 oodle = 1.35 billion tonnes) of iron ore, copper ore, etc. - BHP doesn't know how far the Olympic Dam deposits extend, there is so much of it. And technology is likely to find ways to use less and less materials each decade.

Smile, and have a nice day, Foxy,

Love,

Joe

//Today, nuclear reactors are seen by some as
monuments to a god that failed. There are nuclear
plants in many countries, but many of them are
managerial, financial or engineering diasasters.//

They aren't in France. The French generate over 75% of their power from fission and are the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation. Their power industry also has a much better safety record than our own predominantly coal-based power industry. If the French can do it I see no reason why we can't.

// Despite consistent assurances
from the industry that nuclear reactors are safe,
opinion polls show that the public is unconvinced//

People's attitude towards expert advice is remarkably inconsistent. They seem to have great faith in medical opinion, and most people will take physicists at their word that black holes exist. But if a climate scientist tells them humans activity is causing climate change, or a nuclear engineer tells them that nuclear reactors are extremely safe, they reject the advice out of hand.

Call me naive, but when it comes to technical and scientific matters I have far more faith in the advice of experts than I do in the poorly-founded beliefs of the great unwashed.

//The disposal problem seems to be one that has no acceptable
technological fix.//

Abject nonsense. Somebody hasn't done her homework. There are acceptable technological fixes for the problem of high-level waste disposal. The obstacles to waste disposal are political - NIMBYism - not technical.

If the government wants to put a high-level waste disposal facility in my backyard that's OK with me but I will have to move inland because the coast is not sensible location for such a facility. And get a bigger backyard. Other than that I see no problems with the idea in principle.

//especially since the serious nuclear accidents in
places like Chernobyl//

Chernobyl was no accident. If I use a meat-slicer without the safety guard in place and do myself a mischief, is that an accident or self-harm?

The operators in the Chernobyl plant intentionally shut down or overrode six different safety systems in order to conduct an unauthorised experiment. Any one of those six, had they been left on, would have prevented the disaster. I'd like to think that any nuclear power plant operators we might employ in the Australia will have a better appreciation of OH&S than Ukrainians from thirty years ago.

Also, the Chernobyl plant lacked a secondary containment building, in order to facilitate the easy extraction of plutonium for the soviet military nuclear program. If they'd had one there wouldn't have been a disaster. There's no way we'd be silly enough to build a reactor without secondary containment. There is no way Chernobyl could have happened in Australia, and no way that it can happen.

And yet the irrationally anti-nuclear people like to drag out its dead corpse to flog as often as they can. What's up with that, Foxy?

Foxy,
You can stop worrying about nuclear power as we have missed the
boat and we will never be able to finance a fleet of nuclear stations.

The article to which you referred and everyone else on here have
ignored, or are simply unaware of, is why wind farms are a failure.
Some are, usually for geographical reasons bigger failures than others.
Sth Australia and Albany are examples of good sites, but never the
less they will be failures.

The reason is simple, ERoEI, Energy Return on Energy Invested.
The best wind farms are around 8 to 10 without taking backup into
account. Once you add backup, and can you not have backup (?), then
the ERoEI is around 4. Solar cells are worse.

For those reasons a new energy regime cannot be built by wind & solar.
This is why the attempts to ban coal WILL fail as without it being
available we CANNOT build whatever the next energy system will be.

Now there is a real problem coming over the horizon.
It is the ERoEI of oil and coal. Oil's ERoEI is down to 10.
Coal's ERoEI is around 30 so it is giving us a bit more time than
oil has available.
To put is all into perspective the ERoEI for oil & coal in 1930
was Oil 100, coal 80.

So you can see that we are on borrowed time.