Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; At this rate Snowy 2, the keystone of Australia’s renewable energy roadmap, will take over 40 years to complete.
A sinkhole, toxic gas and the $2 billion mistake behind Snowy 2.0’s blowout
Four Corners / By Angus Grigg, Lesley Robinson, Kamin Gock
It was the start of night shift when the tunnel began filling with gas.
Workers going underground at the Snowy 2.0 site say they were told that there was nothing to worry about, that it was just water vapour.
But on that Saturday in early July, chemistry had finally caught up with them.
The previous year, the giant machine digging tunnels for the project had caused a sinkhole to open up.
Workers had spent seven months trying to stabilise the nearby ground, pumping in thousands of litres of grout, cement and polyurethane foam.
Now that foam had triggered a chemical reaction, producing toxic gas.
Snowy Hydro, owned by the federal government, has never disclosed this safety breach, even as it pumps out highly produced videos and press releases.
It was not meant to be this hard.
…
Its 15km journey below Kosciuszko National Park should be well underway by now, but it’s gone just 150m.
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/snowy-hydro-sinkhole-toxic-gas-tunnelling-four-corners/102995568
How did I come up with my figure of “over 40 years to complete”?
October – June = 5 months
5 months x 15km (15000m) / 150m of progress in 5 months = 500 months or 41 years
Lets not forget, this green energy project is the keystone of Australia’s Net Zero vision, it is supposed to make Australian renewable energy infrastructure affordable and reliable.
It would appear someone got the geology a bit off. But praying harder to Gaia or making offerings to Saint Michael Mann will solve everything.
<Tangent>
The true proper original St Michael is now vanished, consigned to history.
All gone.
Because and as many (if not all) UK women who are now mostly grand-mothers will know, St Michael was the brand-name of all the clothing items sold in Marks & Spencer stores on UK High Streets
The important/notable thing about St Michael was that he was 100% British = all the garments sold in M&S with the St Michael tag inside them were British Made,
everyone was proud of that and probably made M&S the globally famous store/brand that they are.
They willingly paid the higher price of St Michael because they knew they’d be getting Good Stuff
You’ll never find a Made in UK tag on even just a pair of socks nowadays
<End tangent>
Yeah, a lot of M&S stuff now comes from Israel.
Yeah we appear to have switched from making M&S stuff to making S&M stuff in the UK!
It feels like this project has a lot of Diversity, Equity (money), and a plenty of Inclusion.
HAW HAW HAW HAW HAWHAW HAW, another government program heading for catastrophic failure because it was created by a group of Plant eating fascist eco loony nincompoops.
Not sure why you are so gentle and measured in your criticism of these people.
I did consider a few more insulting words but gee I am in a nice mood today.
Yes it can be a fine line between getting your point across and being cut by a moderator, can’t it?
Not really as I didn’t name anyone or an organization.
Positively genteel of you. Do you sip your tea with your pinky sticking out?
Do they offset the carbon used on the cement, foam, etc used to stabilize the ground?
Story tip
https://clintel.org/the-new-pause-lengthens-to-8-years-9-months/
Thousand trillion dollars for a tenth of a degree less warming
This fiasco is just one more example of politicians (in this case Malcolm Turnbull) and unqualified bureaucrats reacting to green / left demands that “we must DO SOMETHING” to fight climate change. (Using only taxayers’ $$$$s of course).
Was it Einstein who observed that there are two things that are infinite –
space and human stupidity?
It was space and human stupidity, but he was unsure about space.
He actually said the universe and human stupidity, but space is close enough; at least for gov’t work!
groan – how could I forget?
♪♫
Our one source of energy…
The ultimate discovery….
Electric blue for me….
Never more to be free….
Electricity….
Nuclear and HEP….
Carbon fuels from the sea….
Wasted electricity
<Volume to 11> <Play>
(Matilda as you’ve never seen her before either)
I’ve run into the philosophy that ‘This is such a good idea that it just HAS to work’, on a geothermal diamond drilling project where I was ordered to conduct a packer test on a hole where the fracturing that I was measuring in the core, and from observations when helping the drillers trip rods for bit changes when I had time and seeing where rods jammed, predicted a 100% chance of failure by jamming the rubber sections within 10m of the bottom of the casing, and subsequent total loss of the hole. It was only after I wrote up a memo forcing signatures accepting responsibility for the failure when it occurred, that I finally got the folly stopped. The probability seems high that the same thing happened here, but without anyone forcing individual accountability for decisions. The management pressure to forge ahead that I encountered was worthy of psychological study!
This fiasco seems strange in that one would expect sufficient geotechnical drilling to have been conducted along the entire tunnel route before boring decisions were even contemplated; does anyone have an understanding of just how the existence of the soft material was not known?
Likely, it had to proceed despite any such warnings in order to maintain the fiction of the viability of a government program at the time it was proposed.
Now the people who proposed it are gone and those in charge today are saying oh well we can’t stop now.
The fallacy of “sunk cost”.
Yes, you can stop now.
My understanding was that the existence of the soft material was indeed well known, but because the project was a government project that had already been heavily publicised and promoted it was too expensive to stop it. Politically expensive, that is. Nothing to do with money, that’s only the people’s money and can be spent in any amounts to support the politics.
Thanks, Mike; I guess that explains it. It is essentially the stuff of Titanic decisions, full steam ahead to certain disaster as the concept is no more viable than cutting an iceberg in two with a maiden-voyage watch-what-this-thing-can-do ship. Renaming the boring machine from Florence to Titanic seems appropriate–as if anthropomorphisation of a piece of industrial machinery wasn’t childish enough.
Brings to mind the Space shuttle cartoon with the title
“A schedule is a schedule”
which a bloke gets when he tries to stop a launch because the boosters are attached up side down
Looks like incompetent civil engineering.
As a civil engineer I am astounded at this failure. The number of people who new it would not work must have been huge. The only way I can see this getting to this point must have included high level management (government) taking responsibility.
Trust me, nobody in government will be taking responsibility for this fiasco.
Contractors do not throw money away as described in the article someone told them they would cover the cost so keep going.
that said I agree with you that no person in government will be held accountable. there may be repercussions for the agency as a whole but they may get away as well.
“”over 40 years to complete””
They started building the Sagrada Familia in 1882… they it should be finished in 2026 – and that’s just a big house
The problems of dealing with a limited budget.
Foam? That was dumb.
Back in my Safety Officer days supporting Hazmat & demolition projects, we used polyisocyanurates foams to seal various openings. We would first attempt to provide fresh air exchanges to reduce the off-gassed diisocyanate levels, succeeding in quite a few instances. However, in situations where the gasses were not able to be sufficiently scrubbed or removed from the workers’ breathing zone by organic vapor respiratory filter cartridges (which would saturate and break through almost immediately), to continue to work in the environment we had to set up full-faced supplied air breathing systems – expensive as all get out! Not to mention the dermal (skin contact) issues for certain workers. Also, at levels less than the OSHA PEL (0.02 ppm, with IDLH at 2.5 ppm!!) an issue arose with workers becoming sensitized to low level exposure. For these workers, we would have to yank out of the situation, and place them on ‘light duty’ until cleared for work by a physician – while maintaining full pay levels. Needless to say, my company quickly found alternatives to pray foam use.
Regards,
MCR
Aside from the toxicity issue- spraying foam into a tunnel along with massive stuff like cement seems irrational. Won’t it all get crushed?
What a bunch of boneheads, build fossil fuel and nuclear generators. At some point all these CAGW knuckle draggers are going to answer for this mess.
I’ll bet you a million dollars they will not answer for this mess
They’ll write the history of it to make it seem that they were right after all- by twisting the story around. Like the way they twist the truth now- with such stupidity as the idea we’re having an emergency. Whatever it is- it ain’t no emergency.
It costs Australians $1.4B, the money given to the public broadcaster to gaslight better than commercial media.
Meanwhile the electricity customers are suffering.
story tip
Nervous Time to Be a Big Power Consumer in Australia, BHP Says (yahoo.com)
They should have used the late great solar concentrator (demonstration plants) to do the digging.
How did I come up with my figure of “over 40 years to complete”?
October – June = 5 months
5 months x 15km (15000m) / 150m of progress in 5 months = 500 months or 41 years
reminds me of the mistake a junior planner made on the YF23.
after 1 year of data he projected an overrun of 1 billion dollars.
we sent him for classes in stats and forecasting.
years later we came in on budget.
what he failed to understand was some projects progress slowly ay first before
learning curves kick in. and other projects take off fast, only to slow later on.
You could also compare the actual progress to the projected progress, but that might ruin the story.
Engineered projects often show little progress but not much “just yet” in the way of reports, drawings, and estimates but high costs because skilled people are putting their effort into getting the grindstone up to speed….This is when some asshat always asks for an “Earned Value” report.
Steven – The article clearly says “At this rate”. You must be a climate scientist to make that kind of mistake.
You got me, extrapolating 41 years of tunnel digging is as unlikely to be right as a long term climate forecast.
moosh never did do those classes on Stats and forecasting… did he !
Still remains a very ignorant Eng-Lit failure.
Probably couldn’t even make it as a barista. ! (where many woke leftist eng-lit failures end up)
That would be Northrop Y23 stealth fighter. Two prototypes were made that flew a limited amount in testing because the budget had run out.
You were in marketing so the “we” is a stretch.
Ouch!
If moosh had anything remotely to do with the marketing, sales etc of the YF-23…
… no wonder it never got off the ground !
Any “learning curve” in this case is sure to be offset by the obvious fact that the further one tunnels into an underground shaft or borehole, the greater the time needed to remove (i.e., excavate) the rock debris from that tunneling due to ever increasing distance from mouth-of-tunnel to working end.
Not only that but the greater the difficulty of tunneling because of (a) the need to provide electricity, water, shoring material and breathable air to the working end, and (b) the need to remove any water leaking into the tunnel from surrounding rock, as the tunnel gets longer and longer.
Tunneling 15 km is not a trivial task.
Story tip
A farmer has been paid almost £1.5million of public money to stop rearing pigs to allow 5,000 new homes to be built.
…
The pig farm is on either side of the A47 bypass south of Norwich. By closing it down, the reduction in pollution means that officials will be able to grant permission for 5,000 homes elsewhere in the county.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12666543/Farmer-paid-million-public-funds-stop-rearing-pigs.html
Why can’t the developer pay that? It’s not all that much spread over 5,000 homes.
“”the reduction in pollution means that officials will be able to grant permission for 5,000 homes elsewhere in the county.””
Offsetting
What’s going to happen to the price of pork now that so much production has been eliminated?
The farmer’s probably sold all the pigs to somewhere in Shropshire to try the same trick – after some years and several generations of pigs they may end up back near Norwich.
Think of all the damage to the environment caused by all that cement & polyurethane foam. They’re completely mad. I wonder how much this unicorn was set to cost?
The purpose is to appear to make progress. Not to actually make progress.
Where’s Nick Stokes?
What! You got Mosh, what more do you need.
He sent in his backup steve.
WHO CARES !!!
Land of Oz could be the Land of Thorium Liquid Salts Cooled Reactors…..cheap reliable safe abundant electricity for a growing economy.
. . . that have never existed at commercial scale, and do not currently exist, let alone have demonstrated feasibility or reliability.
Land of Oz . . . yeah, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
“Its 15km journey below Kosciuszko National Park should be well underway by now, but it’s gone just 150m.”
Well, 1% penetration is usually touted as a roaring success by ‘green’ energy advocates, even if the first 1% is the easiest.
Surely they had geological engineers core drill and analyze the ground to select a stable rightaway for the tunnel. It is total BS to say the tunnel caused the karst terrain.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/karst/
“Karst landscapes can be worn away from the top or dissolved from a weak point inside the rock.
Karst landscapes feature caves, underground streams and sinkholes on the surface. Where erosion has worn away the land above ground, steep rocky cliffs are visible.”
Who in Australia (especially in the government) is getting filthy rich off this massive grift? Do you have any actual journalists there who are interested in finding out and letting the public know?
I’ve been told everyone in nearby towns where the workers are staying have purchased new automobiles.
Are they electric?
Probably not. Rural Aussie roads are pretty hard on automobiles, those batteries would take a heavy duty pounding. What I was told was “lots of new utes everywhere”, I assumed my friend meant diesel 4WDs
“diesel 4WDs”
That’d be the go… lots of them around here 🙂
Something we can agree on. I’d buy a HD diesel Hilux tomorrow if they sold them in the CONUS. A small/mid sized pickup with 3500 kg tow capacity. My diesel Colorado has this capability, but I’m sure it’s nowhere near as rugged/reliable as what you all can buy.
Back on 9Jan2018 then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/09/higher-electricity-bills-if-snowy-20-hydro-not-built-says-frydenberg
Quote [He acknowledged the cost was “more than first thought, with geological tests indicating there are five different rock types and three fault lines that will need to be negotiated”.]
Five(5) rock types – more like 155 – three fault lines similar stupidity
I said my bit 30Dec2017
Trigger warning Snowy 2.0 is a doghttp://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=5494
And even if it is ever completed, it will have to rely on coal fired power for the pumping !. 🙂