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Nuclear is fucking awsome and had the ability to fix our energy issues. There is strong evidance that the oil corporations are actually responsible for manufacturing nuclear fear narrative because it poses an actually economically viable alternative.
Thats not to mention the CSIRO who access tally forgot to include the most economically viable nuclear energy method of there analysis of "all" energy production methods. So much for independence.
In 3 years, solar panel cost has mostly dropped in half (you can buy a 10kw system for the same as 6.6 a few years ago). Battery cost dropped 25% over the past year.
Nuclear can't dispatch any power (incrementally or otherwise), until its fully built. Nuclear is also expensive power, and it can't be dispatched as quickly or cheaply as solar/batteries (so the nuclear power station will remain offline). Don't forget that generators need to sync to the grid fully, and can even lose sync and take hours to come back online (which happened to Loy Yang recently, and there were huge blackouts in victoria). When more despatchable power is needed, batteries will win EVERY time (because its cheap and instant).
Its reasonable to think that even 40kwh batteries will be cheaper and safer than even 10kwh batteries too and much higher efficiency solar panels (and possibly solar windows), so people will get off the grid and can have days of solar eclipse too.
Battery capacity is limited by cost still.. It won't be in the future (don't forget, residential is about $ per kwh, NOT density)
One thing that is also misunderstood, is that panels still also produce power when its cloudy too.. Solar panel efficiency in 10 years will increase rapidly, and this will only improve..
Nuclear is like an average olympic athlete who isn't allowed to start a race for 10 years. Sure it looks competitive now, but there are so many other athletes around, that by the time Nuclear gets to the starting line, the other athletes will be finishing.
So you propose building a reactor that doesn't have anything actually working beyond demonstration reactors yet?
It still has many of the same issues coal and gas has:
- Its still centralised. The power companies can still rip us off.
- Solar is already cheap and already only takes 4 years to pay off. The Government would have to subsidise the power during the construction period to prevent people moving to solar. And, Solar is effectively free after it has been installed
- It STILL needs instantly dispatchable power. You can't just turn on a generator. You need to spin it up to the correct speed, and it needs to be in the same phase. If its out of phase, the generator jumps forward or backwards and damages itself.. Safety circuits will kick in. Loy Yang's kicked in during the storms. Nuclear will likely have the same issue.
- It doesn't solve the unreliable power in Rural areas. Whereas, solar, wind and batteries can because they can effectively treat it more like a "microgrid", with less central points of failure.. ie, instead of centralising the batteries, scatter them in various areas.
- Whilst there is reduced radiation, and its cleaner than Coal, you STILL have radioctive byproducts that will last ages. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how well they're stored, there is always a risk they'll end up in the water table and not secure and it will be expected that a future generation will likely need to use excess energy to convert the radioactive materials to non-radioactive (somehow)
The only real problem it solves is that its more reliable than solar, and cleaner than coal. But.. In two and a half years, solar panel efficiency also increased by 5%. So, in 10 years, that could be a 20% efficiency increase too.. And in 6 years, the cost halved.
In the unlikely case the thorium plant does need to be shut down (natural disaster as an example, similar to Fukashima), we're basically screwed. Microgrid's wouldn't have this trouble.. Also, it basically requires that we just do nothing about the pollution for 10-20 years whilst they're building it, or the extra power requirements we'll need to transition to non-fossil fuel cars.