Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Nuclear power should be a no-brainer for climate activists – scalable zero carbon energy which most Conservatives and climate skeptics would find acceptable. But despite the obvious advantages, greens in Australia and elsewhere continue to shoot their credibility in the foot, by placing their distaste for nuclear power ahead of what many of them claim is an existential global climate crisis.
Is nuclear energy an essential weapon in the fight against climate change — or a toxic white elephant?
ABC Rural / By Daniel Mercer
Posted Yesterday at 6:43amMike Young sometimes wonders why nuclear power has become such an accepted part of life in his native Canada when it is still so deeply controversial in his adopted home of Australia.
Key points:
- There are calls to overturn Australia’s longstanding ban on nuclear energy, which produces no emissions
- Nuclear power provides about 10 per cent of the world’s energy needs, though none in Australia
- Critics say extremely high construction costs and time delays make nuclear power uneconomic
…
For Mr Young, it is an attribute that should put the nuclear option firmly on the table as the world tries to wean itself off fossil fuels such as coal, diesel and gas.
“It needs to be part of the mix,” Mr Young said.
“You have to remember that by 2050, the forecast is we’ll double electricity demand.
…
Mr Buckley is the director of energy finance studies for Australia at the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), a think tank funded by environmental philanthropists.
He said the high capital cost of nuclear power stations and their tendency to suffer budget and time blowouts made them uneconomic.
“The cost of nuclear is almost always double whatever anyone estimates,” Mr Buckley said.
“There’s not a nuclear power plant in the world, that I’m aware of, that’s been built without massive government subsidies.
“Why? Because a corporate can’t take a $20 billion punt.
“And we’re not talking Aussie dollars; we’re talking euros, or pounds or American dollars — serious money.
“No company can afford that, particularly if there’s a 10-year delay
…
Future ‘renewable, not nuclear’
Mr Buckley remains unconvinced by the arguments for small nuclear reactors.
He said the technology was yet to be proved at a pilot stage let alone a commercial level.
Mr Buckley said renewable energy costs would continue to drop, making other options including nuclear power unviable.
“This is not a single plant operational in the world, and there’s a very good chance there won’t be even a demonstration small scale nuclear reactor plant this decade,” Mr Buckley said.
…
France and Sweden’s nuclear programmes are unequivocal proof that the “high cost” of nuclear power in most jurisdictions is mostly the cost of the red tape, not the cost of plant construction and operation. France still generates around 70% of their power from nuclear plants. It took just 10-20 years for France to eliminate most of their fossil fuel power generation starting in the 1970s, and they did it without breaking the bank – a feat which could easily be replicated throughout the world, by copying the strategies France employed to keep costs under control.
We know affordable small nuclear reactors are possible, because they have been built many times, by research institutes and even universities – which is more than you can say about affordable renewable energy systems.
But people like Think Tank director Mr. Buckley continue to hang their hopes on the fantasy of renewable energy cost reductions they believe will occur in the near future.
If Greens genuinely wanted immediate bipartisan support for zero carbon energy right now, they could drop their fear mongering and prevarication and join forces with their political opponents, to wholeheartedly sell the idea of nuclear power to the public.
But despite decades of renewable energy failures, most greens continue to oppose the one form of zero carbon energy which could make an almost immediate substantial dent in global CO2 emissions. They continue to pin their hopes on imaginary renewable technology advances which they claim are imminent.
Aussie Climate Activists believe that they have everyone’s best interests at heart when they reject Nuclear Power Sources, as they instinctively know that adoption of Nuclear Power would immediately cause everyone in Australia to glow in the dark.
They know that a conversion to nuclear won’t cause our capitalist economy to collapse
21st century economies that remain industrialized will go nuclear even as anthroCO2 is revealed as beneficial simply because nuclear will eventually be the most economic source of energy.
Note the Chinese aren’t limiting their nuclear power, nor are even the Japanese. Great Britain dips its toes in the water(with Chinese help).
Heck, I even predict that Germany will re-enter the field within a decade.
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If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise…
..It was always a matter of how far towards economic and political suicide governments would go before the truth of the statement…
…became blindingly obvious to even a politician or captain of industry.
Renewable energy is killing the Golden Goose.
FLOP26 and dear little Greta (and the Queen) asking ‘why aren’t you doing anything about it?’, plus the post pandemic gas crisis, has pushed them into grudging admissions that ‘we may need nuclear as well‘
That is the current nonsense position. Of course it will only be a matter of time before some small child will point out that since the nuclear part of the grid has to be sized to cover the total loss of renewable energy on windless nights or overcast windless days, why go to the expense of adding any windmills or solar panels at all?
I cannot believe people who say ‘we need nuclear as part of the mix’
Even the greens realise that once you have any nuclear energy at all, you might as well have it all nuclear.
And that is the effective end of ‘renewable’ energy, forever.
Personally I can’t wait.
Not complicated is it? Just a couple more years, NuScale will prove SMR’s this decade, wind and solar additions will end by 2040, 40 years late. But we know what Einstein said about humans and the universe.
see china got its tokomak to run at high heat for a few minutes recently
Yea well Australians have become a bit of an embarrassing laughing stock lately with Novak Djokovic being the only guy ever to be thrown out of the Australian Open for missing a couple of shots.
Yes – totally ridiculous.
Hey Novak, that booster is to increase the velocity of your drive.
H/t Fauci THE science.
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Fact is that Fauci originally specified boosting in the right arm but then Collins emailed him to correct that to the left arm.
See? It’s the Science.
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It’s all so stupid I can’t believe it didn’t occur here in canada, where apparently we are going to start taxing people for not getting vaccinated.
Remember, we have a carbon tax and a federal environment minister who is a sociopathic green extremist activist.
When it comes to stupid, no one beats canada
“When it comes to stupid, no one beats Canada”
You are possibly correct but that doesn’t stop an awful lot of others trying. Australia is looking like a prime new champion of ridiculous though California and New York keep showing their credentials in the “real stupid league”.
Having highlighted the usual contenders, I would also offer Germany a chance of replacing Canada as the champion. Who else would think closing down perfectly functional nuclear plants at the start of a European winter when the gas supply is severely restricted, and the hostile supplier, has 100,000 troops massed on the border of the country whose pipe line carries the gas?
As an act of stupid, Germany is right up there.
Re: Germany – who would think that they would close any super-low carbon emission nuclear plants (1/2 the CO2 per kWh compared to wind) regardless of age or codition when supposedly there is a climate emergency going on and it still has huge amounts of coal power that isn’t planned to shutdown? I guess the coal miners union and the plant owners count more than the alarmists (thank God for small mercies) but also count more than science or people’s limited budgets.
I think those nukes were due to close anyway.
But Germany is full of Germans. Fat smug, and still convinced that they are simply the natural people to run Europe, if not the world, and Germans are not corrupt and are very intelligent and good engineers, and if they say it can be all done with windmills and solar panels of course it can be and it will be, because nuclear is very very scary and unnatural, and Germans love their Nature, and even Hitler liked dogs and was a vegan, so there.
My sister, who has lived there 50 years, is exactly as described above, and is thrilled that now she has a left wing and green coalition. She has solar panels on her roof, an electric car in the garage, and from her bedroom window you can see the windmills…
She is of course, an ArtStudent™ whose degree is in langauges.
I try not to rock her certainties. Even her kids realized that the best thing to do is leave the dream intact.
“She has solar panels on her roof, an electric car in the garage, and from her bedroom window you can see the windmills…”
Trump said once, that if a windmill is put up within sight of your house, your house’s value decreases by 65 percent.
Trump knows real estate. 🙂
2plants apparently developed cracks so they shut down the others to run safety checks
not a bad thing
except…they also refused nord2 and that WAS the height of stupid
“I would also offer Germany a chance of replacing Canada as the champion. Who else would think closing down perfectly functional nuclear plants at the start of a European winter when the gas supply is severely restricted,”
This has to take the “stupid” prize. Whoever thought this was a good idea, is a real idiot.
nah he lied and thought his fame n fortune would get him in..not that it wasnt the 2 ro 3x vaxxed incoming OS that gave us oh mi god anyway.
Exactly, fascists run Australia now.
The immigration forms are pretty clear, but apparently not so much for tennis players. The penalties for not filling them out truthfully are very clear on the forms themselves. If you don’t answer truthfully then the consequences are on you.
Beaurocracy is very often totally inane, but you have to fit in with it at borders in particular. I remember entering Mozambique one time where I had filled in the online visa application, printed out the filled in form and having to totally redo it because the printed version was on A4 instead of letter.
Because, apparently, getting covid itself doesn’t give you as much protection as getting vaccination$.
yeah Aus like canada has a severely thick attitude to natural immunity being better then a vax
I think it is just that the Australian authorities don’t like people who resist their demands.
Power, brought about by the Wuhan virus, has corrupted many individuals in many nations. Australia seems to have more than its share of these authoritarians, although there is plenty of it going around everywhere.
That’s because power corrupts people. A lot of corrupted people are now trying to order all of us around. They think their opinion of things is superior and should be imposed on everyone else, and that’s what they do when they have the political power.
The best defense against authoritarianism is “States Rights” (in the U.S.), and voting with your feet.
Australians don’t have a bill of rights so that argument doesn’t fly here. The powers they are using have been there in different forms since federation based mainly on small pox and spanish flu. The powers are far reaching and you must comply whether you like them or not or think they are fair etc doesn’t come into it. The only thing they ever needed to use the powers was the declaration of a pandemic.
Don’t forget the government disarming the populace. The power hungry a$$wipes have NOTHING to fear from an unarmed populace. Same in Canada. Same in the UK. Same in NZ.
Hopefully when the new Republican US president gets in office, he will arrange for overflights of rural areas in these countries dropping hundreds of thousands of arms for the future resistance, along with blockading all of their ports from all international commerce.
Totalitarian governments must be stopped. Common law used to mean something, but does not now. The governments of these countries believe that the “Crown” owns everything.
Not as much as Djokovic, the man that talks to water
yeah the only dude thrown out for NOT taking pharmas
The conditions were given long before the tennis association got involved. Whether you like it or not or you think it’s stupid most of Australia would flip you the bird and say who cares what you think.
Actually he was tossed out for telling porkies on his application. Whatever you think of the criteria it has to apply to all evenly just as Mr Depp and Ms Heard discovered breaching quarantine with the pooches. You don’t like the criteria go see the UN or take it up in the Hague. Rules is rules and you don’t get a free pass because you’re popular or important as Boris is discovering at present.
It’s an Anglo thing and old Charlie lost his head over it.
Why is Australia competing with North Korea on totalitarianism? Is is just dumb machoism or what?
Exactly
Companies won’t take a punt because eco-loons can and will move goalposts and cause costs and times to increase unpredictably. This is their intention and goal. They are the sole reason nuclear isn’t an attractive investment.
That’s why you need the government on board with a sizable share – that prevents the next Green whimsical BoJo or similar idiot from arbitrarily shutting it down.
It’s not the punt, its the political reliability of the government.
Now that there is a damning indictment of virtually all western governments.
That is exactly true, however there is a third political component, the ordinary ocker. Who has to pay the bills.
So far he has shrugged his shoulders and let people squabble over it, but when the Aircon in Alice cuts out, and the beer cooler serves warm beer, and his ‘leccy bill is three times what it was two years ago, he will want something done, or else.
Australia is still a democracy. More or less.
more LESS in recent 2 yrs
First, the activists will not distinguish nuclear power from nuclear weapons, and the only thing they know about either is that they are insufferably icky.
It is indomitable ignorance one is dealing with.
The greens and nuclear power are the current version of the Bourbons, who learned nothing, and forgot nothing.
Anyone would the think the greens were in power or had the balance of power here in Aus.
What’s wrong with our gutless conservative government?
Blocked by legislation banning nuclear, without the numbers of votes needed to pass a repeal of the legislation how could the Coalition Government proceed, and why does this fact make them “gutless”?
Also often ignored is that in our Federal of States the Commonwealth of Australia the States have the say in approval of Development Applications and the others needed for any new venture to proceed, coal or other mines, power stations and so called renewable energy installations and much more.
However, the Federal Government has some input and in 2019 placed an end date for renewable energy Federal subsidies, in 2021 they moved to buy nuclear powered submarines because defence is a Federal responsibility and they started a new review of nuclear power stations with emphasis on modular nuclear generators. However, to repeat, nuclear power stations and modular generators cannot be built here without State Government support.
Yes Robert is more than just a little clueless.
What’s wrong with our gutless conservative government?
Our conservatives supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. They were a bit quieter in 2020, but I’m pretty sure they supported Biden.
Australia’s political center is much further left than the USA, so the closest US match to Australia’s version of mainstream conservative politics are the US Democrats. This is also the case in the UK and Europe, causes a lot of confusion.
”Australia’s political center is much further left than the USA,”
Yep and it has moved that way recently it seems. I think the difference between the Hawk government and the Morrison Gov is not very obvious.
What’s wrong with our gutless conservative government?
I think you’ve spotted the problem.
But uncontrolled and unlimited subsidies for wind, solar, hydraulic is of course much better?
Commonwealth subsidies are being phased out since 2019, I think the end year is 2030 which has dampened enthusiasm for private sector investment into new wind or solar installations, after gaining the necessary State Government approvals and construction timing new projects or ventures are facing loss of subsidies well before the equipment reaches use-by date and needs to be removed and replaced at a significant cost to shareholders.
and the govts wanting to surge knock out home solar on hot days as well as start charging the customers for Input as well as the already outrageous per kwh charges is making a LOT of people stop installing home solar
and batteries are 10k or so unless subsidised and no one wants that cost. and then if you go OFFgrid but power runs by the home they plant to STILL charge a fee for NOT using the grid anyway
Of course they do. Everyone has to pay their fair share to keep the troughs full for the Green swine, er ahem, to Save the Planet I mean.
Nuclear power is an insanely bad choice. We have all seen plenty of warnings of the bad things that can and will happen. Consider the Fukushima reactor meltdowns. Water in huge quantities was used to cool the wreckage of the reactor cores. And where did all that radiation go?Into the Pacific ocean, that’s where.
Now think back to that incredible documentary “Godzilla”. Where did Godzilla come from, how did the creature come to be?
Godzilla was created by the action of nuclear radiation on native ocean life. And where, exactly? In the Pacific ocean. Exactly where the Fukushima radiation is going. Now we know from the documentary all the events that happen next. First and obviously, Tokyo is destroyed. Then all of Japan is trashed. People in North America and Australia should not feel smug about this. Godzilla is a powerful swimmer and is sure to arrive on the US west coast. Then the US can kiss San Francisco and Los Angeles goodby. Australia will fare no better and the same for Europe.Before anybody advocates for nuclear power, they need to put forward a solid plan for stopping Godzilla. So far, nobody knows how to do that.
Don’t forget radiation also creates mutant humans with superpowers… 😉
So do spider bites.
Don’t look now, TonyL; he’s under your bed already.
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I’d rather do coal and gas for now until nuclear is perfected or something better comes along, but the insane say we need to do something NOW!!!!
There is so much irony in the world and so I laugh continually that the eco terrorists with their climate emergency bs will eventually stampede the world into nuclear.
Imagine, Jane Fonda and her people being ultimately responsible for the world shifting to nuclear.
Can’t you taste the irony?
15,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Nobody was killed by the nuclear plant failures in Fukushima. The radiation releases were minimal, and effectively zero radiation was released into the Pacific ocean.
A little perspective is in order here.
A little rereading is in order here instead…
Sheesh John, Tony gives strong science-based arguments about the dangers of Godzilla. I think you’re the one who needs a bit of perspective or should I say sarcasm detection?
TonyL: “Before anybody advocates for nuclear power, they need to put forward a solid plan for stopping Godzilla. So far, nobody knows how to do that.”
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Don’t despair, Tony. I hear there’s a team out there right now trying to talk King Kong out of retirement. I believe they are also looking up Mothra to do a tag team on Godzilla.
Anyhow, by the time King Kong and Mothra are done beating up Godzilla, Godzilla will be ready to retreat to a bar in the Florida Keys and tie on a 100-year drunk.
It sounds like a good plan to me.
I think the United Nations has a plan to fix the Godzilla crisis by creating Giant Robots as big as Godzilla, with humans inside directing the action.
Of course, the United Nations will need a lot more funding, and the cooperation of all, to carry out this globe-saving action.
What should we call the new United Nations group handling the Godzilla problem? I suppose the UN has high confidence in the existence of Godzilla after running the “data” through their computers.
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half!
Many people in the US would welcome Godzilla destroying
Sodom and GomorrahSan Francisco and Los Angeles. In fact, many people in California would feel the same. They would cheer and say: “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”.Godzilla wouldn’t bother Australia; most animals and quite a few plants bite and/or are poisonous. Only those who grow up here know which ones are safe to play with.
I didn’t grow up here, but I have a very simple strategy. If it’s runing/flying/crawling/slithering away from me, it’s all good. If it’s coming towards me, kill it, with fire if necessary!
Good one. That’s what I do.
“Many people in the US would welcome Godzilla destroying
Sodom and GomorrahSan Francisco and Los Angeles.”I think the politicians are doing a pretty good job of destroying those places already.
I’m sure Scott Morrison maybe already has a plan, like a lockdown or visa cancellation
Morrison: “We will not issue a visa to Godzilla. Godzilla will not be permitted to enter Australia.”
Godzilla: “Hold my beer.”
That eruption off Tonga? Eruption my backside, it was Godzilla breaking wind
Wastes?
So long ago that most of you weren’t born I came up with the idea of dropping them into the sun.
The problem? It takes an immense amount of energy to decelerate them out of solar orbit.
My brother came up with dropping them into the subduction zones of great oceanic trenches. In the ensuing half a century I’ve only seen that suggested elsewhere twice. They would be safely disposed of longer than it would take the radioactivity to decay.
Then there is reprocessing wastes a les Francaises.
& thorium.
Atomkraft, ja bitte.
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A few years before he died, ex-Aussie prime minister Bob Hawke proposed the idea that Australia could become the mined uranium > nuclear fuel > depleted rods hub for the whole world.
Being a discrete one-nationally governed continent that shares no land borders, has the largest natural deposits of yellow cake, whose vast center is virtually uninhabited, is geologically extremely stable, and has a technically advanced mining industry, Bob reckoned Australia could dig it up, process it into nuclear fuel, ship it off to the world, take back the depleted material, and bury it forever in military-controlled concrete lined deep bunkers in central Australia.
Made sense to me . . .
Yes, not a bad idea but they might become excellent saltmines for future Anti-Carthaginians.
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Same thing here in canada
Massive uranium reserves located in the Canadian Shield, a vast area of sparsely populated rock billions of years old
Dig up uranium, make power, store waste back down same hole, seal it
Same sort of thing we do in oilsands, as we mine a new area and separate the oil, the sand goes into the previous hole
Yes and the Aboriginal Land Council at Muckety Station in the Northern Territory were keen to have the dump on their lands and of course benefit from leasing the land for revenue purposes.
We hear how the Brussels bureaucrats control everything in Europe but it was ten countries, France, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, that got Europe to approve nuclear as a green power source. link
It’s interesting that the majority of those countries have direct experience with the horrors of Marxism. Maybe the idiots who have taken control of the universities (and then other institutions) in the English speaking world can’t get traction in such countries.
It looks like Australian public opinion is swinging in favor of nuclear power, especially when CO2 emissions are cited. link
“…pin their hopes on imaginary renewable technology advances which they have claimed are imminent.”
What is imminent is the total collapse of the renewable idiocy. Europe is slipping back into fossil fuels in desperation and at a terrible cost from the damage they’ve done to the fossil fuel industry itself, fearing for the wellbeing of their citizenry, survival of their economies, food production (shortage of N-fertilizers made using nat gas), untenable costs for power and heating.
We actually had ‘peak’ renewables in Europe in 2011! And major decommissioning of old wind is underway. Here is a snapshot for Germany, which accounted for 36% of European renewables in 2018 and it’s gone down from there to the present:
How many nuclear reactors could have been built for trillions already spent on renewables and the lie that renewables draw their existence from.
The left always compares their hypothetical ideal situation with the current messy reality. With more and more real world experience with wind and solar, it should get harder and harder to argue for the hypothetical ideal situation.
Having
embracedapproved nuclear as a green solution, it appears that Europe is coming to grips with cold hard reality. My guess is that will spread, maybe even eventually to California. Mind you, that might not be until after the Mexicans take it back. 🙁Apparently Tim is an ABC go-to guy for anti-fossil fuel ‘expertise’:
New coal mines have Buckley’s chance as China cuts consumption: analyst.
‘A prominent
energy analystwrongologist says a slump in sales for China’s biggest coal company should raise alarm bells for Australian producers …energy analystwrongologist Tim Buckley from anti-coal think tank The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) said the cuts to Shenhua’s sales reflect China’s attempt to reduce its energy intensity and coal dependence in order to reduce pollution …’ (ABC Mar 2015).Tim Buckley? What an incredibly appropriate name! Buckley’s chance of being right.
His namesake had some great tunes in the ’70s.
Him and Frank Zappa made up much of my cassette collection..
I always confuse him with timbuk3
“The (nuclear) future’s so bright I gotta wear shades”
“…high capital cost of nuclear power stations and their tendency to suffer budget and time blowouts made them uneconomic.”
Enormous redundancy, over design, picketing harassment, sabotage and lawsuits by ideologue anti-social misfits is the reason for half the price tag and most of the delay. Why do we give such power to these neurotic misanthrope against the electorate? Unfortunately the silent majority is, …well… silent.
Maybe we should protect these developments with the military if global warming is our biggest threat and it is a destabilizer of world peace and security.
Here in canada the government announced that the “market” will decide on nuclear.
Which is code for the government piling regulations against it to make it impossible and expensive as they have done with oil and gas.
And yes, if you ask them they will confirm that government fiat is a market in action
Tim Buckley is against coal, gas and fossil fuels in general, he is also against nuclear so what is left?
Why is he described as a bland-sounding ‘finance analyst’ when in truth he is a very outspoken wind and solar campaigner.
Nonsense, the US Navy has 83 currently operating small nuclear reactors that power submarines, aircraft carriers and other ships efficiently and safely. The only reason that new grid level nukes are not being built is the irrational fear resulting from just 3 largely over hyped accidents. Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. These events have been thoroughly investigated and the causes would certainly be addressed in any new designs. In fact, the proposed designs for new Gen 3 and Gen 4 reactors are said to be melt-down proof.
If there was sincere political will to actually replace fossil fuel electricity with economically viable CO2 free alternatives, the excessive cost and construction time due to regulatory red-tape and environmentalist resistance could be eliminated overnight by streamlining the regulatory and permitting process.
That’s what I can’t understand. We obviously can do nuclear, and do it cheaply and safely. Why is that not obvious?
“Gen 3 and Gen 4 reactors are said to be melt-down proof” and that maybe so but nuclear power plants would make superb targets in the event of a war.
Personally I’m all for fossil fuels and making the planet greener besides Australia still has hundreds of years worth left in or under the ground and there is no climate crisis that I can see.
Be a lot more fallout from the nuclear weapons needed to breach containment vessels, than from the reactors.
And why would you bomb valuable infrastructure when its that and the land you want?
If the CCP decided to hit us, it would nuke the main centres of population in order to get rid of the greens and liberals.
I don’t think you would need a nuclear weapon to breach the containment vessel, any of today’s conventional but high explosive warheads would do the trick. As for valuable infrastructure nobody has ever cared about that before in previous wars, winning is the only objective.
If Greens genuinely wanted immediate bipartisan support for zero carbon energy right now, they could drop their fear mongering and prevarication and join forces with their political opponents, to wholeheartedly sell the idea of nuclear power to the public.
It’s not about outcomes it’s all about the struggle for power so the dooming must continue unrelentingly on all fronts for compliant control of the masses-
Met Office predicts the collapse of society following climate disaster (msn.com)
They will decide what’s good and what’s reactionary armed militias and criminal gangs in order to be saved from the dooming.
“Met Office predicts the collapse of society following climate disaster”. So now the Met Office thinks it can comment on what society will do. This arrogance shreds their credibility. And what is a climate disaster? The whole headline is non-sensical. Isn’t the collapse of society the disaster? Keep the scares coming all you Met boffins, it’s a good job preservation strategy, until the tax payers see straight through you
The current solutions to no sign of climate doom is already leading to collapse of society. Wasting trillions and impoverishing the poor and middle class, shuttering job creating economies, not-fit-for-purpose high cost power and fuel, is no way to prepare for any type of problem.
A cold winter in Europe (it’s certainly cold here in eastern Ontario with lows -30°C, but this is Canada) may bring that society to the edge of collapse before spring.
The report the Met Office commissioned worries that collapse will bring in “populist” governments!
From Webster: “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people”
O dear, we can’t have that! That is diametrically opposite to the plan the champagne socialists have for us.
The USA has also had some -30F temperatures this year.
Clean up tripple meltdowns & Marshal islands first. “HELL OF WAY TO BOIL WATER” Einstine
Scorched earth at 37.5 square metres per kW nameplate AC output with Chinese mined and produced solar panels is better you reckon?
Damages dispute between contractor and owners of NSW solar farm at standstill | RenewEconomy
No snow and ice there either as you can tell why it’s called Sunraysia.
This is the part where it gets weird Steven. If the entire planet is on the brink of a 6th mass extinction because of CO2, who cares about a few meltdowns? What are a few hundred square miles of ruined land compared to the risk of the entire human race becoming extinct?
Surely bipartisan acceptance and an immediate path to substantial CO2 emission reduction is worth the risk of an expensive cleanup, if you truly believe the world is in peril from anthropogenic CO2.
Careful Eric, some people’s heads explode when confronted with logic.
Exspeshully Wurld Speling Champeen Steven “Einstine”Ionien
But we are all gonna die from global warming and you are worried about a meltdown?
Greta would say how dare you 🙂
It seems that few people, even here, understand the greens. The idea that the greens are looking for or would welcome a solution to the problems that they feed off is quite simply absurd. The greens feed off problems, real or imaginary. When they have a ‘problem’ like climate change delivering for them day after day, the very last thing they want is a solution.
Of course the greens oppose nuclear energy. Nuclear energy works, and anything that actually works is automatically opposed by the greens.
If you simply understand the the greens will oppose anything and everything which can actually work, then you are on your way to understanding the greens.
I think you don’t understand either.
The Green movement comprises people who actually believe that crap, and people who are there for the money, or to destroy society, or to make careers out of it. (Or to score chicks if I remember) …
All of those categories will oppose anything because they have invested huge amounts of faith, ego, hard cash, and credibility in the RenewableReligion™
Up till now they didn’t care whether it was true or not, apart from the UsefulIdiots™. These are not responsible people, they are selfish children who want to be seen and heard and act like they are really adults, but they are not, they are still rebelling against their parents who will in the end make sure the lights stay on and the internet works.
Except it’s dawning on them that there are no parents, and no one will keep the lights on and the internet working if they screw it up. It is not a grand student politics activist game with no consequences.
Here is your popcorn, now sit back…
What utter nonsense.
God job griff. Short and to the point. Saves us so much time trying to decipher your usual nonsense. Just go straight to the heart of the matter and summarize your point, every point you’ve ever made. Kudos.
Looks like griff has tired of telling lies that keep getting shot down,
Now he’s just going to fling
pooinsults.There is an expression – There’s money in confusion.
There are opportunists looking to capitalize on the useful idiots that buy into a dystopian future and give support to their efforts. Those opportunists are working hand in hand with competitors of the U.S. and allies.
You are correct that greens will oppose anything that works as long as it works in the “wrong” places.
Rosatom has orders for 38 of their standard 1200 MW design nukes on the books, with construction well under way in developing countries such as Bangladesh, which has the foundations for 2 units finished and with the machinery on the way. With international finance being banned for fossil fueled power plants, and the developing world leaders being insufficiently stupid to believe that gentle breezes and sunbeams will meet their requirements, they have no other option but to go with nuke or Chinese coal fired units. Of course, regulatory requirements and the green blob are relatively light in those countries, which helps. I suspect the finance is on a build-own-operate system, although the Egyptians are having their own O & M people training in Russia, and India already has some of these plants so will go it alone with their block order of 6 more.
Attitude to nuclear is an IQ test. If it’s in 2 digits you’re anti, if it’s in 3 you’re pro.
And if it’s in single digits, you’re in politics…
Buckley:
Mr Buckley remains unconvinced by the arguments for small nuclear reactors.
“This is not a single plant operational in the world,
There are dozens of them operating in Russia (for instance on ships) and China, who have an operational thorium salt modular reactor.
But nothing done by the racially wrong people such as Russians and Chinese counts for Buckley. He just illustrates how massively racist modern progressivism has become.
Countries could buy modular reactors from Russia today. If they weren’t racist.
A Russian ship mounted reactor is tiny…
There are 2 35MW reactors on the ship supplying Pevek, to a population of 4,500
I think you’d need to cover the Eastern seaboard with nuclear ships to power the Eastern USA?
The Chinese do NOT have an operational commercial Thorium reactor and won’t for a decade
So no nuclear Yellow Peril just yet?
A Russian ship mounted reactor is tiny
Small is beautiful.
Buckley did not say that currently available SMRs can’t power the whole world.
He denied that they exist.
The Russian ship reactors prove he spoke falsely.
Looks like China are in a leading position in fusion development:
China’s $1Tn artificial Sun burns five times brighter than real thing in breakthrough test (msn.com)
Or is this more “mendacity from the yellow monkeys?”
/sarc
Which part of “it costs allegedly $1 trillion and it doesn’t actually generate any power” do I need to elaborate on when I say that something that might (or might well not) be technically feasible does not automatically become commercially practical?
Commercialization of fusion power is 40 years off. Always has been, always will be.
Meanwhile here’s a 4th generation SMR in China (high temperature gas cooled, pebble bed) plugged into the grid and working fine.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1242878.shtml
These will soon be flowing along the belt and road. While western countries carry on contemplating their antinuclear navels. Democracy is eating itself.
Nuclear needs a technology boost if it is to be a serious alternative. Uranium stocks are pretty limited and classical reactors inefficient. We need the fast breeder reactor or other efficient technologies to really meet energy needs.
Uranium stocks in nature – economically viable uranium stocks – are sufficient for about 10,000 years.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient reactors are. There is far more uranium than we need for now.
If the price goes up we reprocess it.
If the price goes up more we build fast breeders.
Currently uranium is so cheap that it represents in terms of raw yellowcake about 0.1c/kWh on the price.
In terms of a fully manufactured fuel rod of enriched uranium it is around 0.6c/kWh
There are an estimated 10-12 billion tonnes of fertile and fissionable material in the world. It is so energy dense that even if the extraction costs were to go up ten times, it would barely affect the cost of the final product.
In 8000 years, we should just about have got fusion power going, and can start to burn the oceans
After we have stripped the 4 billion tonnes of uranium out of them.
Far more issues with rare earths and lithium for the renewable fantasy.
What people fear most is that nuclear energy succeeds in making uber low cost energy in vast quantities available to anyone for almost ever.
Difficult to make profits out of something that isn’t subject to supply chain manipulation.
I agree with everything you said Leo, except for one minor correction. In 8000 years, fusion will still be about 40 years from commercial feasibility just as it always has been and always will be.
Uranium stocks may be limited, however the total amount of recoverable uranium on the planet is huge. Enough for several thousand years at current demand.
The concentration of uranium in the average back yardin Australia isas great as the concentration of gold in the average gold mine.
Whatever made you think that reneable energy was about saving the planet?
Because it is?
The planet doesn’t need saving.
Humans however need saving from the alarmists and greens.
Buy a South Korean power plant, it takes only seven years to build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant
Indeed, that was a candidate for one of the UK nuclear sites, Wylfa in 2017.
Financing failed…
because the yoof of the 60s/70s are running the enviro and abc and media
and the tiniest hint of the N word here is enough to have abc belting to air to run every scare story they can dredge up
I laughed when I first heard of the co2 warmist bullshit and said well the greenies will have to die first rather than the chance theyd EVER use the one no co2 fuel.
and Ive been laughing ever since;-)
and no I would prefer coal n gas thanks i dont have an issue with co2 as I reckon the 2 oxygen atoms in it are pretty important to life as well as that poor little carbon one
Ausie environmentalists should have supported my tennis hero Novax Joke-ovic who led the recent anti lithium mining ‘Environmentalists uprising’ in Serbia’s capital, now thrown out of Australia.
President Trump’s close friend Nigel Farage declared:
“There are lessons from history about authoritarian governments that behave in this way.
If you’re not scared, you ought to be.”
At least Novax got one more influential backer.
I would like to know what our friend and the site’s editor Mr
Eric Worrall thinks about all this postXmas pantomime.
Novak Djokovic has taken a stand in support of protesters in Serbia who are raising opposition to an upcoming government project involving an Australian mining company. Major roads and highways have been blocked across Serbia since Saturday as anger swells over a plan to allow a mining company to extract lithium in the country.
https://thebridge.in/tennis/novak-djokovic-serbia-mining-protests-27172
Nuclear power should be a no-brainer for climate activists – scalable zero carbon energy which most Conservatives and climate skeptics would find acceptable.
Well it isn’t scalable -you can’t turn it up or down, so pitching it at peak demand means you have to dump a lot of power at cheap rates (see French nuclear…)
But the obstacle really is the huge cost and long build time. And the never addressed properly issue of nuclear waste and despite everything, continual safety issues popping up somewhere in the world. (not much reported but Chinese EPR has been leaking gas recently)
I doubt whether Australia can afford a nuclear plant.
It could certainly supply most domestic power demand year round with solar.
Hi Griffo
Low demand is 11pm to 5am, ideal for charging your four-wheel electric toys.
Nice try vuk, but we both know that griffter can’t conceive of the idea of having the base load supplied by reliable nukes and the peaks supplied by natural gas. There’s only an intermittency problem when some of the sources are, well, intermittent.
Yeah this is the same idiot who tells us grid scale storage will resolve everything shortly. Nobody accuses him of being honest or consistent.
Looks like griff is out to prove that there is no subject under the sun which he is incapable of being completely wrong at.
Nuclear plants can have their power levels raised and lowered. Current plants may be less efficient when their power levels are dropped, however that’s because they weren’t designed to be variable. For those that were designed from the ground up to be variable, have no trouble changing power levels.
Regardless, Germany for one has lots of experience dumping unneeded power at low rates, or even having to pay to get rid of, thanks to all of it’s wind and solar that excel in producing power when it isn’t needed.
Cost and time of construction isn’t a problem. Over regulation, constantly changing regulation and nuisance lawsuits are a problem.
The problem of waste was solved 70 years ago, reprocess it.
Nuclear is by far the safest form of power.
The problems with solar and it’s inability to create power when power is needed have been repeated ad infinitum.
The simple answer is that the watermelons pushing the nuclear scare morphed into the groups pushing climate alarmism.
Well China is rolling out nukes-
New Reactor Spotlights China’s Push to Lead Way in Nuclear Power – Bloomberg
While the Green credentials of solar is being questioned with its scorched earth coverage-
Solar panel farms growth raises more questions over potential for heavy metals to leak into soil (msn.com)
Welcome to tradeoffs in everything we do climate changers.
they are backward illiterate fools
Tim Buckley has the predictive accuracy of Canada’s CMIP6 model.
What people seem to ignore is that if you bring in nuclear ( or any other baseload energy source you don’t need renewables. But if you keep building more renewables you still need baseload power. If A is cost of baseload and B is cost of renewables A can never be more expensive than A+ B.
The reality is without a cheap effective solution to storage of renewables , renewables are simply not fit for purpose. Both Libs, Labor and Greens are fully committed to net zero but without nuclear in the mix they are not serious. They are relying on technologies that don’t exist and that it hasn’t been for want of trying , with governments and the private sector throwing billions to resolve the issue of renewables intermittency.
I’m running as a candidate at the next election in Goldstein where the issue of climate change is going to be critical as it is a seat where Climate 200 ( a billionaires backed political group ) has backed Zoe Daniel to try to unseat the current Liberal member based on energy policy.. The party I represent is the Liberal Democrats , a Libertarian party which ironically doesn’t believe in net zero but has as the basis of its energy policy the removal of Nuclear power ban and removal of all government subsidies for energy.
In discussions with my Greenie friends and family I am getting some traction in the suggestion that Nuclear should be in the mix and because of the lag in getting these plants operational it needs to happen now. It will be too late in 8 years time when Loy Yang coal plant which supplies 30% of Victoria’s electricity closes and no base load power has been built to replace it. With other states adopting similar policies closing down coal plants Australia is heading for an unmitigated disaster scenario.
It is critical that minor parties like the Liberal Democrats, United Australia or One nation hold the balance of power in the senate or Australia will not have a workable grid in 10 years time.
Only then with constant blackouts, energy rationing and skyrocketing prices will people realise how cheap the nuclear solution is.
This country has long since gone woke and stupid.