> proposing unrealistic nuclear solutions to seriously focus on renewables.
they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments.
Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.
50% of Australia lives in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Having a nuclear power plant for each would make sense. Melbourne would make the most sense first as it gets a lot less sun than the others.
Meanwhile nuclear is feasible in China, South Korea, maybe in the UK (who are well into sunk cost on their next reactor already), and probably in the US.
My understanding is that I the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, a helluva lotta solar power generation can be built and up and running and generating power.
And in that time span as well, solar power will increase its efficiency.
And then batteries, to store and deliver that power outside of generation hours, are a parallel to that.
If a nuclear power plant could be built quickly and simply, the equation would be different.
Unfortunately, from the limited amount that I've read, nuclear power plant projects often run over time and over budget, exacerbating the time scale issue I described above.
I don't think that's actually true. US Navy and their contracting shipyards had consistently built nuclear subs in 3 year strides for decades. One set of fuel lasts is good for 1/5th century, after that the sub needs to be cut up and refueled. It's not something that take years after years of permitting and change of plans and suspected acts of arson of unknown motivation if it's literally operated by US Army or Navy(but not NASA).
Solar power is just amateures littering compared to that.
there has been an unfortunate "phase shift" since 1970 in the nuclear energy industry/ecosystem, mostly because the risk engineering principle/mandate called ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable), and of course reasonable does not mean profitable. (which makes sense, we want safe reactors not just "there was a safety budget, and we spent all of it" >>safe<< ones, right? sure, but the real world is stubbornly full of cost-benefit trade-offs, and apparently we crossed it somewhere during the 70s.)
Nuclear is held to a much higher safety standard (eg in terms of deaths per Joule) than any other form of electricity production. And that includes photovoltaic!
Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced.
Sure, please adjust the numbers for when we had to evacuate cities for nuclear scares. You can do calculations in 'quality adjusted life years' or some other ways to convert deaths and injuries and the cost of evacuations. It doesn't really change any conclusions, even with very pessimistic estimates. I just picked deaths, because they are relatively easy to get clear numbers for.
And don't get me wrong: solar is mostly fine anyway. It's coal that's really obnoxious. Both in the mining and in the burning, and in the accidents. (And to a lesser degree other fossil fuels.)
Photovoltaic is great! On a purely technical level both solar and nuclear can work well, nuclear perhaps a bit better and we had the technology for longer. On a practical level, solar will win, because people fear nuclear.
All electricity generation methods have engineering challenges. Eg solar has some big problems with daily variations and seasonal ones. We can solve the former with batteries, and the latter via big cables to (sub-) tropical regions.
Wind is also great! And we've only just started tapping waves and tides, too. And geothermal.
nuclear safety has changed a lot. even though "walkaway-safe passively cooled" is not a technical term, but that's the design goal nowadays.
the real problem with nuclear is that the market is small, fragmented, US regulations are bad (as I elaborated upthread), so there's no real volume, no economies of scale, no healthy competition and there's basically no innovation even around the safety critical core...
1) The risk of evacuations happening is tiny and I'm not even convinced it is still a factor. We've not yet seen a messy meltdown of any plant designed and built after Chernobyl in 1986 and designs have changed a lot since then.
2) We don't know what a large-scale solar disaster looks like yet, but they might happen. For example I recall the Wikipedia page for the Year Without Summer [0] - we know that sometimes nature puts things in the atmosphere that might hamper solar in a way that nuclear can be designed around. IE, we might find we now have a risk of our power stations just deciding to produce less one year because of a usually unrelated disaster. Or maybe even stop if there is enough volcanic ash.
Plus renewable projects have had a more noticeable association with grid failures and mishaps than nuclear projects. We really don't have much experience with what mass solar failures (if they do exist, but they probably do) look like or how common they are.
How much bigger of a health hazard is manufacturing/installing solar panels compared to nuclear? Let's say, per one terawatt-hour of produced energy, how many people die doing each?
I don't see solar mentioned on this page. And according to data found in a sibling comment, they are practically similar (0.03 nuclear vs 0.02 solar).
Maybe I read it wrong, but I don't see anything supporting the statement: "Nuclear is so safe--even fully factoring in the accident at Chernobyl--that people very occasionally falling off rooftops when installing solar panels is a bigger health hazard per Joule produced."
First you’re going to need reliable worker safety data and population cancer rate data out of China (which makes almost all panels), which…. Good luck.
Nuclear power plants are unrealistic to build in short time frames, such as trying to meet agreed green energy targets. Part of the Nuclear proposal being put forward by Australian conservatives includes dropping out of the Paris Agreement and refocusing on a 2050 time frame (ie. past the politicians' retirement age)
If we had the renewables to replace the coal politicians would love it to retire in a heartbeat. The reason it’s sticking it around longer is because politicians fear the backlash from blackouts and high prices more than the backlash from the bad PR of delaying closures of coal.
they're doing unrealistic nuclear proposals, because they know it takes a long time to ramp up, and in the mean time, their buddies' investments in the coal industry gets time to exit and profit properly. It's designed to prevent losses in fossil fuel investments.
Not to mention that australian nuclear cannot be profitable imho - not when solar is so cheap. Their current proposals for nuclear basically requires taxpayer subsidies.