As the shift away from fossil fuels gathers pace, the Coalition has turned to an emissions-free technology with a long and contentious history — nuclear fission. These are the numbers you should keep in mind when thinking about its place in Australia’s energy transition.

I encourage you to at least glance through the article before you leave a comment that other commenters will dunk on you for.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] psud@aussie.zone 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (11 children)

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

[–] dillekant 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] dillekant 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah I can't remember where I read that but it's definitely a possibility IIRC.

load more comments (8 replies)