These are the sort of technologies that can supplement renewable energy. We should be researching and investing in them, rather than unproven CCS pipe dreams and proven dirty nuclear.

This is the direction the Latrobe and Hunter valleys should be going in - a government with real vision would set up Solar, Wind and Distributed Energy Storage Institutes rather than wasting money on trying to “clean” coal.

Almost like a swear word these days, and usually, never used correctly, either in understanding what they are, when are used or why. To wit:

Everything is subsidized. There has never been a major invention or discovery that was either initiated witout subsidies or applied for practical use without them. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

This is especially true of the electrical generation systems. CATO Institue-type demogery aside, those that diride subsidies have not a clue about either political economy nor history.

There is not a wind turbine build or a solar cell stamped out that would be there without massive subsidies. I am pro-nuclear, perferably publically owned (and ergo opposed 100% to the current privatization rip-off proposed by the NWS gov’t) and regulated. In the world, every electrical grid was built either directly as gov’t expense and ownership, nationalized as such, or highly regulated and subsidized, wither through same public grant R&D or payments for right-of-way for plants and lines.

My advice: get over it!

I am NOT opposed to subsidies to wind power or solar power based on ’subsidies bad’. I oppose it because we should be subsidizing technologies that make sense, like the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. I’m opposed to subsidies for wind power and solar if it’s discussed as if they do NOT get them (which the do) and nuclear power plants, which mostly, actually, get little or no “subsidies”. Most nuclear subsidies have long since been relegated to history…1950s through 1960s.

In my opinion, gov’ts, ESPECIALLY the Aussie one, with it’s abundent uranium and thorium reserves and a population that 99% lives within 100 miles of the cold oceans that surround it, would be IDEAL for LFTRs or any nuclear plant.

David

Geothermal, sure, but not tidal. Tidal energy is intermittent, but it can be scheduled, which makes it superior in that respect to wind and solar in most locations. To provide baseload, you still need storage.

wilful - you used the word “reliable” but I think you mean capacity factor, the ratio of the actual annual energy output to the theoretical maximum output of a generator running at 100% for a year. It can be argued that wind turbines are reliable because they are available to generate power over 95% of the year. But they don’t. Worldwide average capacity factor for wind turbines is about 24%. You are correct that about 20% is the rule of thumb for wind energy penetration.

“the wind is always blowing somewhere.”

Peterc - The wind may always be blowing somewhere, but it may not be blowing where it counts. If you think you’re going to build enough wind capacity that there is excess wind energy available wherever the wind is blowing, and build the transmission system to move that energy to where it can be used, you’re dreaming. The costs and materials required are much too high. Better to build wind turbines in the best possible locations - where there is a good seasonal correlation between the energy produced and the load - and hope for cheap storage. Even then, I don’t think there is an economic advantage over nuclear energy with all costs in.

I’m certainly no expert, however I believe wind is, what, about 20% reliable? Coal is ~80% and nuclear 90%+. Just roughly. And that wind should as a rule of thumb never exceed about 20% of the total mix of the energy system, it’s just too unreliable. An entirely nuclear system would have a lot of wasted capital spinning around, while a coal system such as ours has roaring burners consuming coal without actual electricity production. Sees like there is no one approach, a mix is desirable.

Baseload relates to the minimum economic output of coal fired power stations, not the demand minimum.

Wind can meet this requirement if the wind farms are geographically dispersed; the wind is always blowing somewhere.

What I am unsure about is the minimum realistic level of baselaod that is required, how much uncertainty/risk is really allowable.

Geothermal and tidal would provide excellent baseload.

I think if you measure the full costs and inputs to nuclear plants, including fuel processing and transport, and the eventual decommission of the plant, solar would work out cheaper. It is a lot easier to recycle silicon.

Then there is the time - solar and wind can come on line fairly rapidly - if you look at German and Californian examples - both large scale and distributed. A mix makes good sense.

Ziggy Switzkowski’s (pro nuclear) estimates of commission new nuclear power stations is 10-15 years - which is far too late to address dangerous climate change.

Wilful - “baseload” is a term that describes the minimum output of coal fired power stations - which can’t effectively be “turned down” past that amount of power, unlike gas which is much more scalable and can be turned off - which is why there are now gas stations in Melbourne and elsewhere that only turn on when peak demand exceeds supply (e.g. on very hot days), then they are turned off when not needed.

The only concept that really matters for electricity supply is matching supply with demand so some storage or other clean supply (geothermal or distributed wind) would be needed typically at night when concentrated and distributed solar are not producing.

Our house has batteries, but I don’t think masses of lead acid batteries in every house is the way to go. They are expensive and only last around 10 years. Better we develop localised storage that is cleaner and more efficient than lead acid batteries.

This is just the sort of question markets are fairly good at sorting out — ie, which option is cheapest?

Electricity has the fairly useful property that it’s about as close to the abstract concept of a commodity good as you can get. Electrons are economically and physically indistinguishable. That means the mass action of consumers and profit-seekers can sort through all the accounting issues, timing issues, market issues etc etc to sort out the mix of winners.

It might be nuclear. I think that in the medium term it is. It may be distributed solar-and-wind. Or some mix. Or neither.

How long does it take to construct a nuclear power plant, and how long does it take to construct the number of solar cells or wind turbines required to generate the same amount of energy in any given year?

Comparing apples and oranges is just fine, but let’s make sure we’re comparing a gigawatt-hour of apples to a gigawatt-hour of oranges.

How much will it cost to build, say, the 1200 or so wind turbines required to replace one single coal-fired power plant in lieu of a single nuclear power plant? How much steel and concrete will be required? How many years will it take? What environmental impacts and whole of life cycle green house gas emissions will there be?

Let’s have a quantitatively realistic comparison between nuclear energy and alternative energy systems, gigawatt hour for gigawatt hour.

Robert: A very good post overall, excellent work!

I am also factoring in energy storage - this is where our $1b R&D money should be going rather than CCS and nuclear (both dirty, too long to implement and too expensive).

How about fuel cells, lithium batteries, capacitors, heat exchange reservoirs? All feasible at a local (suburb or street) level. But being total ignored by the fossil fuels and nuclear pundits, and our politicians. They were looked back in the 90s by CSIRO and others, but since abandoned - possibly under pressure from the fossil fuel lobby. Who killed the local storage initiative?

By the way, even the United States has their Million solar roofs which puts them into a world leadership position along with countries like Germany.

Pity we are so busy pretending that coal can be made clean and burning and exporting it like there is no tomorrow. A prospect that is becoming alarmingly real.

And Rudd/Garrett have put a brainless means test on the solar rebate, and Victorian Labor have announced a Clayton’s feed in tariff. I give Australia 0/10 on this for action and 8/10 for hyperbole and rhetoric.

Last time I looked, nuclear power generated nasty nuclear radioactive waste. Sure you can bury it, but the point is we don’t need it, or the nuclear proliferation risk that accompanies it.

Two things.

Firstly, if it’s nasty, it won’t be for long. Highly radioactive material has a short half life. That’s how radioactivity works; the two things are inversely related.

Secondly, the danger of proliferation is about plutionium, a side effect of having U238 in a reactor during fission. This is utterly ridiculous because plutonium is a difficult material to work with weapons-wise. It’s used in implosion devices, which require a *lot* of work to design, test and make. Outside the range of terrorists anyhow.

By contrast, U235 can be used by just about anyone to make a gun-mechanism bomb. All you need are the smarts to line up two lumps and shoot them together hard enough.

If we used breeder reactors then we’d have less uranium and plutonium lying about, less waste in general, and we’d get several orders of magnitude more energy from the same fuel.

And you’re not factoring in energy storage. Do that, and you’re looking at double or triple the cost, and would take you at least as long as nuclear plants to implement widely enough to make a real difference.

No matter what we do, we can’t fix our energy problems overnight, and claiming that small-scale renewables can completely ignores the complexities of the problem.

compared to the natural gas you’re presumably planning to run as backup to your wind and solar, nuclear is so much cleaner it’s not funny.

I think there is something funny about your facts. Last time I looked, nuclear power generated nasty nuclear radioactive waste. Sure you can bury it, but the point is we don’t need it, or the nuclear proliferation risk that accompanies it.

Gas is much cleaner than coal so it can provide us with a transition energy source until a mix of renewables comes on line - both large scale and distributed.

You can install renewable solar energy to power a house for the cost of an average car. I can’t buy a CCS or nuclear pipe dream to do this. Nor would I want to.

Germany put enough solar on their roofs last year to match a coal fired power station with a lot less sun than us, but I guess we are just to damn busy digging up coal to send to China and India.

And you haven’t addressed my key point - nuclear, if we were to start now - would come on line in 10 to 15 years - so it would far too late to address dangerous climate change.

If I recall correctly, it did have a good deal to say about the regulatory and staffing issues.

The short version is that renewable energy doesn’t build or operate itself either.

People really should stop insinuating or claiming that Robert Merkel or anyone here (as far as I know) is part of the ‘nuclear lobby’ or otherwise potentially benefiting in any way from a nuclear industry in Australia.

Robert, I apologise if that is how my comment was interpreted as it was certainly not directed at Robert, nor anyone else posting or commenting on this blog. I was thinking more of people like Ziggy. You know, the nuclear power is a panacea crowd. The hey let’s open a new power station every day for the next 40 years type of solution. They never outline staffing or training estimates.

I own a couple of thousand dollars worth of shares in Compass Resources, which is looking for uranium (amongst other metals) in the Northern Territory. The establishment of a domestic nuclear power industry would make SFA difference to the value of my investment, except possibly in slightly modifying Australian investor sentiment on anything nuclear related. Furthermore, my super fund almost certainly invests in BHP, which owns Olympic Dam, and RTZ, which owns 68% of Ranger. I haven’t checked. But then, so does just about everyone’s.

Professionally, my research is funded by government grants, and is on software reliability. My only contact with the nuclear industry in this role was that I once reviewed a paper reporting of a case study of testing a device used in a nuclear power plant. My co-reviewers and I ended up rejecting the paper because it wasn’t sufficiently novel.

That’s my entire professional and financial connection to the industry.

Regarding proliferation, can someone walk through the logic with me one more time? Dozens of countries, including plenty less stable ones, with less professional policing and security apparatus than Australia, have successfully kept fissile material out of the hands of those evil terrists for decades. If Australia had nuclear power, using it’s own uranium, precisely how would the terrorists be able to slip through our wide open defences?

We are certainly no more likely than any other country to acquire nuclear weapons just because we’ve got power plants. Somehow the Japanese have resisted this temptation quite well until now.

And as for it being a target of a terrorist attack, well anything’s possible, but given the number of substantial terrorist attacks on Australian soil (erm, zero) why is this seriously considered? There are plenty of softer targets that would do as much or more damage.

The real reason this is raised is because it’s the topic de jour and it’s a specious reasoning with no intellectual credibility, but is something that would resonate with the tabloid readers.

People who don’t like a nuclear waste dump need to answer what we do with the waste otherwise. Just leave it around in rusting drums seems to be the blithe answer.