Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?

protocolture an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind.

Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.

Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.

Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.

Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.

Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.

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echelon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?

Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.

We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.

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rgmerk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.

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eqvinox 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.

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MostlyStable 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.

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qlte an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable.

PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.

I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.

	▲	throwaway69123 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

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amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.

I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.

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SugarReflex 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)

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davewasthere 5 hours ago | parent [-]

One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.

I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.

If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.

But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.

	▲	fc417fc802 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km. To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.

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dalyons 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism