The only reason why Dutto is pushing Nuclear as an option is because he is a crony.

Wind power generation has a barrier to entry, but it is much lower than Coal or Fracking, which is why there is so much corporate-sponsored astroturfing against it. Coal and Fracking also has a lower barrier to entry, but is cheap compared to Nuclear.

Solar is the great equaliser. Anyone can throw a handful of solar panels on their roof, connect them to an array of old car batteries and add an inverter and voila! Instant home power generation. Get out from under of the boot of Power Companies and be self-sufficient (as long as you don’t want to use a hair-dryer).

If the proles can get of free energy and no longer need to rely on The Grid, all of the Corporations that own Dutto will no longer have any political power.

Dutto is not offering Nuclear as an alternative to Coal and LNG to the electorate, he is offering it as an alternative to his lords and masters.

Energy generation is not an issue at all. It’s a completely solved problem.

It’s energy storage that is the problem, and that’s why we need nuclear.

But Dutton isn’t pushing nuclear because he’s being responsible. He’s not actually pushing nuclear, he’s just pushing a pipedream doomed project designed to take time/money/effort away from renewables, storage, and actual nuclear, all to keep money flowing to the coal industry shareholders.

Indeed. To me there is no debate: renewables are the only immediate way to bring us to net zero by 2050. The LNP are presenting this alternative as though we have time ahead of us - as if the planet is not already retaliating against our existence.

As an aside, the only somewhat valid argument I’ve heard is that nuclear would make future Australia an energy powerhouse for the region and allow for exponential growth, which is not something to dismiss flippantly. But in that I would think we would only need one, not seven! However, trying to put my paranoia aside about nuclear power plant meltdowns, that tech would need to be absolutely foolproof - and from my understanding, that is apparently true of modern nuclear generation tech available today. Yet, a solution for long-term storage of waste is still another huge and costly hurdle, let alone how you communicate the toxic danger of the area thousands of years into the future.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Energy is bid into the market at the spot price. Because the marginal cost of producing energy from renewables is so cheap, this will displace energy from all other sources when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. This is what’s already happening with the coal generators today.

By the time any nuclear gets built, there will be so much solar in the system that nuclear will have to be forcibly shut off at least 40% of the time or operate at a loss. This capacity factor is then on par with wind, so you may as well just build more of that - it’s way cheaper. The concept of baseload power is dead and has been dead for a while. What we need is more dispatch-able generation and storage.

You always know when the coalition is in opposition- that’s when you hear about their nuclear plans. In power, it’s crickets.

It’s all noise, distracting us from other more important things which need our attention now

Nuclear is literally the most expensive way to generate energy and no amount of liquid salt or SMR hallucinations can come even close to fixing that problem.

You don’t need to create fear of nuclear, it’s a bad choice all by itself.

In 3 years, solar panel cost has mostly dropped in half (you can buy a 10kw system for the same as 6.6 a few years ago). Battery cost dropped 25% over the past year.

Nuclear can’t dispatch any power (incrementally or otherwise), until its fully built. Nuclear is also expensive power, and it can’t be dispatched as quickly or cheaply as solar/batteries (so the nuclear power station will remain offline). Don’t forget that generators need to sync to the grid fully, and can even lose sync and take hours to come back online (which happened to Loy Yang recently, and there were huge blackouts in victoria). When more despatchable power is needed, batteries will win EVERY time (because its cheap and instant).

Its reasonable to think that even 40kwh batteries will be cheaper and safer than even 10kwh batteries too and much higher efficiency solar panels (and possibly solar windows), so people will get off the grid and can have days of solar eclipse too.

Battery capacity is limited by cost still… It won’t be in the future (don’t forget, residential is about $ per kwh, NOT density)

One thing that is also misunderstood, is that panels still also produce power when its cloudy too… Solar panel efficiency in 10 years will increase rapidly, and this will only improve…

Nuclear is like an average olympic athlete who isn’t allowed to start a race for 10 years. Sure it looks competitive now, but there are so many other athletes around, that by the time Nuclear gets to the starting line, the other athletes will be finishing.

better bang for your buck

No, you’ll definitely get bang with nuclear 💥💥💥

Link the east and west coast grids to let afternoon solar on the west coast flatten the evening east coast peaks, pick a big old chunk of desert in South Australia for wind and solar, throw in a few gigabatteries and tart up some hydro systems, done.

Probably only be $10-15 billion or so.

Thing is, Renewables are already cheap. By the time Nuclear is built, batteries and solar will be hugely cheaper than the price they are now.

The same thing that happened to NBN will happen to nuclear (basic Game theory). With NBN, competitors undercut the NBN with 5G, because FTTC and FTTN was so bad.

In this case, if they start building, everyone knows that power costs will be expensive, so renewable energy companies will target the prices, and encourage people to install solar and batteries anyway… If batteries are 1/5 of the price they are now, everyone will simply install 5x more batteries, more panels (because they’ll also be more efficient and cheaper than they are now, and work during worse conditions) and remove themselves from the grid. From a game theory point of view, Solar/batteries have a 10-15 year head start and are already cheaper.

I bought my 6.6kw panels maybe 3 years ago, and 10kw is apparently already cheaper. If I wait 5 years, 15-20kw will probably be cheap (and I have more than enough roof space, so the only thing limiting me would be weather the power company allows it)

I have no idea why anyone would want a centralised grid. Last major power outage here in Victoria during storms was triggered because Loy Yang coal fell offline, and non-solid state power generation takes ages to come back online (it needs to sync up to the grid). Solar and batteries sync up immediately, so

fwiw Sabine has a history of commenting outside of her area of expertise and having some very bad takes.

She’s an astrophysicist. Listen to her closely when she’s talking about what’s going on in space. But her comments on other subjects such as climate, trans rights, and, yes, nuclear energy, should be taken as those of a random interested layperson. Maybe they’re right from time to time, but they don’t deserve any special consideration.

In that video, for example, she herself admits to ignoring the planning stage, and she’s only talking about countries that already have large nuclear industries. Australia has no nuclear expertise to begin with, so it’s guaranteed to take a lot longer for us than it does in places like Germany and America. And even then she ends up admitting it’s at least twice as expensive as alternative options. She tries to downplay this by making a joke about astrophysics and orders of magnitude, but here on Earth that’s a big difference, and that’s in the best case.