this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Australian Politics
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I'm sure I have also heard on radio national that Australia would have a lot of trouble running on nuclear because we only have ~26 million people.
We could only support about two or three normal sized reactors with our power usage
If we only had three, taking one down for months for maintenance would knock out a third of our supply, half if we had only two
We really would want to use small reactors and have dozens of them, but they're even more expensive, and we probably couldn't support the expertise to run them due to the small population
Solar and wind and batteries is cheaper. Solar and wind and pumped hydro is cheaper.
It looks like the largest effect of an attempt to go nuclear would be to extend the lives of coal plants under a promise that the new reactors are only five years away for the next two decades
You also can't just turn nuclear on or off. You'd need to also get rid of existing solar. Ie: get people to disconnect rooftop solar to make nuclear work.
If you told people they weren't allowed to export solar anymore, so many would disconnect from the electricity grid, starting the grid death spiral where wealthy individual subscribers unsubscribe, poorer people get higher bills and it gets relatively cheaper to get solar and go off the grid, etc
You end up with only the poorest buying electricity with government or charity money and industry using the grid
That would be really bad for nuclear, losing the bulk of the home market
Yeah I can't remember where I read that but it's definitely a possibility IIRC.
It might be cheaper financially, but we've known about the huge environmental cost of dams for decades now. It boggles my mind that people suggest it in the same sentence as renewables.
Let alone that the immediate risk to life and property if a dam bursts can be similar to that of a nuclear meltdown.
Though I wonder what the environmental impacts are of mining Lithium to produce batteries on massive scales vs pumped hydro batteries to support solar whens it's dark or not very windy. There's plenty of other options as well like an elevator battery thing, but pumped hydro is probably more cost effective and safer to run as it's something we already know how to operate locally, the impact will just need to be managed.
Pumped hydro is not exactly a dam. There's a hole and 2 water reservoirs. Yes there's a cost but so does anything.
We are talking in the Australian context where the dams were built in the '50s for hydro power.
And? We should be decommissioning and demolishing any that are upstream of settlements because of their huge risk of catastrophe.
Dams help prevent natural disasters. Preventing flooding is famously why the Aswan High Dam was built in Egypt, and the presence of flood-managed dams in SEQ is possibly one of the reasons we were affected so much less badly here in 2022 than Northern NSW, where the dams are comparatively small, ungated, and have no active management during flood conditions.
I agree that dams are not great ecologically and we should avoid building them, especially given how incredibly useful solar and wind power are (though wind has its own ecological problems). But it's not especially useful to say that they have a "huge risk of catastrophe".
There are a class of American privately owned dams that recently got press for being at risk of catastrophe. I think that's what informed that lemming