Tony Lavis,
A deceased friend of mine was at a conference at the Atomic
Energy Commission in Vienna in 1956 when the Russians described the
power reactor they were building, the same type as Chernobyl.
After their presentation a number of nuclear power station designers
got up and warned the Russians of a problem with their design.
The problem was associated with the carbon moderators.
The warning was that under some circumstances the moderator could store
very large amounts of energy and then suddenly release it causing the
water to turn to steam instantly.

The Russians poo pooed the warning but that was exactly what happened
at Chernobyl when they were doing a scram test.
My friend had supplied to him all the commissions investigation papers.

No doubt that sort of accident will not happen again.

Foxy said;
is the lack of high-capacity electricity transmission
lines where they are needed, and state governments are
showing little willingness to build them.

The only reason they are not built is because there is no incentive.
However if geothermal could be made to work at Coober Peady and in
the Hunter Valley where there are large deep down hot granite rock
then if the power was available they would build them.
A transmission line in the megavolt DC range is already in use
between Victoria and Tasmania.
The heat in the granite is generated by radio activity in the rock
so it would last for a very long time. Origin put a lot of money
into it and they got steam blowing back out the output pipe but
gave up for some reason, corrosion was one mentioned.
A UHV DC line to Coober Peady would be reasonable from Adelaide, Sydney
or Melbourne.
I have not seen any ERoEI figures for geothermal so it may not be a goer.

Sorry, Bazz, I know I'm a bugger, but I couldn't help trying to imagine your deceased friend attending a conference in his condition. No disrespect to your friend or you intended.

I doubt that another Chernobyl will occur. The Russians were notoriously slapdash when they threw that plant together; they probably still are. The one in Japan was much overblown by the media. I've contact with people living in Tokyo, and the drama fizzled out over a few days. However, I would never take issue with fears about nuclear. I think that the facts haven't been properly spelled out. There are still scientists, like the climate kind, who think that we plebs should accept what they say simply because they say it.

ttbn, ah yes I always re read my posts several times, but I missed that.
He was in charge of designing the nuclear station we were to build at
Jervis Bay and was really p*&^%ed off when Billy McMahon called him
to Canberra to tell him the project was cancelled.
He had some interesting stories to tell. He was involved with the
invention by Taffey Bowen of the magnetron and went to the US during
the war to show the US how to build them as they were necessary for a
major improvement in radar.

I suspect, but he never said so, that he got involved in the nuclear
business on that trip. He ended up at Sellafield in the UK and was at
Monte Bello Islands for the British nuclear tests.

A very interesting man and sore missed. He only died early this year.