8 ms·

Reasons why Australia doesn't and won't have nuclear: 1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion

by flgb 4y ago

Reasons why Australia doesn't and won't have nuclear: 1. Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives (uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) 2. Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason)

thecopy 4y ago
I have never understand the economics argument. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then slightly more expensive electricity should not matter - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.
- BongoMcCat 4y ago
  I think that the economic argument is that it isn't viable for a private company to start a nuclear power-plant, it would require government involvement, and lots of people don't want the government to get involved in something that they think no-government entities can handle.
  - oblio 4y ago
    That's silly for electricity. Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations. Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.
    - emteycz 4y ago
      Electricity is a free market on a huge portion of the world, including EU, which is working hard to make it even freer market. > with corporations there is zero accountability This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is? Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again. On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.
      - oblio 4y ago
        > One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is? Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry. What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition. For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Yeah, distribution is a huge can of worms. But production (and storage, as soon as it makes economical sense) are quite easy to entry. There are many cars that are more expensive than a small sized hydro or solar plant.
      - aerostable_slug 4y ago
        Note that managing lots of small generation is much harder than a few big ones that are contractually bound to behave according to certain rules. Distributed generation is extremely exciting, but it's also a big challenge.
  - account42 4y ago
    You don't nee the government to get involved in the nuclear plant if you don't want them to be - you can have the government make sure that the cost of global warming is paid by the coal plant. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then properly accounting for their cost would significantly disadvantage coal power - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    In the US, private companies have built all our nuclear plants. And reactors like this little one in Canada will make it a lot easier.
    - flgb 4y ago
      With entirely public money and underwriting.
      - DennisP 4y ago
        You're claiming that the government paid to build the reactors? Do you have a source?
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Is EDF a "private" or "government" entity?
- pydry 4y ago
  If a form of carbon free energy costs 3x as much as carbon free alternatives, takes 3x as long to build and occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it? The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost. If nuclear power could compete on a level playing field it'd be great but it sucks up subsidies like nothing else and puts the taxpayer is fully on the hook for dealing with all and any 800 billion dollar fukishima events.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    "occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it?" is an absurd way to describe the small number of incidents we've had in the past - they can all be attributed to egregious chains of human errors and/or bad planning. To quote: But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7 metres at the Daiichi site. However, this had not yet led to any major action by either the plant operator, Tepco, or government regulators, notably the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Discussion was ongoing, but action minimal. The tsunami countermeasures could also have been reviewed in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines which required taking into account high tsunami levels, but NISA continued to allow the Fukushima plant to operate without sufficient countermeasures such as moving the backup generators up the hill, sealing the lower part of the buildings, and having some back-up for seawater pumps, despite clear warnings. We already know that the Chernobyl incident was due to even more egregious human error and poor planning.
    - snapcaster 4y ago
      But I think this is still a point against it. Its maybe not "fair" but if the regulators can't be trusted to properly maintain and protect nuclear power installations isn't that something that has to be accounted for?
    - Retric 4y ago
      The fact people in government and private industry knew the risk 18 years without addressing it it probably the most damming thing about nuclear power. The public simply can’t trust the industry or regulatory bodies. Which means they must assume avoidable disasters are going to be a regular thing. I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.
- michaelt 4y ago
  The economics argument has to be understood in the larger political context. Nuclear doesn't have a big support base. It's basically only supported by educated technocrats. And those educated technocrats are already holding their nose, because they know big government projects are often late and over budget. And the designs that are intrinsically safe haven't been built before. And if there was a meltdown, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. And nobody's going to want the plants built in their area. And a permanent waste repository has been a political football for longer than most of us have been alive. At the same time, if you squint hard enough when you look at the figures, solar+wind+batteries look cheaper. Squinting that way is pretty tempting if you were on the fence anyway.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Yeah, renewables have gotten a lot cheaper. They weren't viable, but now they are, and waiting is a sunk cost. I think it's unconscionable that we chose to emit ~20 gigatons of CO2 instead of pushing nuclear from 20% of our electric supply to 100% -- we would be there today if we had just kept up the pace -- but what's done is done. We killed nuclear and waited for renewables to become viable. We paid the price. The CO2 is in the air. Now we can move forward.
ed_balls 4y ago
> Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy True for cost per Watt, but there are other factors. A good replacement for burning fossil fuels is solar + batteries, which is more expensive right now. Even if batteries get cheap, you still have to protect yourself from black swan events e.g. volcano eruption which hides the sun. Also, it seems Australia would need nuclear weapons to protect its independence in the future. It's critical to have nuclear experts at home.
crashingintoyou 4y ago
> Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel No they wouldn't. To quote https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-history-top-locations-companies/ https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-hi... > Australia is home to 31% of the world’s recoverable uranium. Australian uranium is exported and consists about one-quarter of its energy exports. Australia uses no nuclear power and depends on coal. The uranium mining industry is a billion dollar industry in Australian dollar ... In 2019, Australia produced 7790 tonnes of uranium and was ranked the world’s third best producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  I assume that the previous poster meant that Australia does not have a 235U-enrichment plant. If that is true, Australia would have to export natural uranium and import back uranium enriched in 235U, unless they would choose to build a reactor with heavy-water, which can use natural uranium as a fuel.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    What preventing Australia from building an enrichment plant?
    - adventured 4y ago
      Nothing. The entire context is absurd to say the least. Australia is one of the most affluent countries in world history and hyper resource rich. They should have a third of their energy supply coming from nuclear. Nuclear is expensive (commonly said)? So what. Australia is hyper rich ($67k GDP per capita) and can afford to do it and can afford to subsidize it for consumers. What's a lot more expensive (risk) is having a weak, unreliable grid with a poor diversity of energy sources. It's insane not to subsidize nuclear, if one believes even the calmer side of environmental warnings re climate change. It's extremely potent energy technology, we know how to build it, and we know we can keep improving on it yet.
      - 4y ago
yodelshady 4y ago
2. sounds an awful lot like "renewables are not a viable form of energy and require gas". One gas replacement - nuclear - needs no backup. The other - renewables - needs backup of a scale that exists only on paper. I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which I have - in private, and they'll admit it. Almost nowhere are renewables outcompeting nuclear. What is outcompeting is greenwashed gas.
- flgb 4y ago
  I understand you are trying to make a general argument, but those dynamics are definitely not true of Australia. Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given the solar and wind resources we have.
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    >Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. But there is still plenty of coal production no? Here Nuclear which is the vast majority of our production is being phased out due to political pressure. Our Greens push gas plants to cover the lowdays for renewables. Which variable production source is kept in mind in South Australia in the scenario where coal is pushed out all togheter? Is there a hydro dam or so?
    - Guidii 4y ago
      Yes, there is "still plenty of coal production" in Australia. Some references: Coal accounts for about 75 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation, followed by gas (16 per cent), hydro (5 per cent) and wind around (2 per cent).[1] About 92% of electricity in Ontario is produced from zero-carbon sources: 59% from nuclear, 24% from hydroelectricity, 8% from wind, and 1% from solar. [1] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:text=Coal%20accounts%20for%20about%2075,around%20(2%20per%20cent) https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:t.... [2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html#:~:text=about%2092%25%20of%20electricity%20in%20Ontario%20was%20produced%20from%20zero%2Dcarbon%20sources%3A%2059%25%20from%20nuclear%2C%2024%25%20from%20hydroelectricity%2C%208%25%20from%20wind%2C%20and%201%25%20from%20solar https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr....
dghughes 4y ago
There's a place in Australia where an Indigenous people's legend is there is a sacred serpent under the earth and people are to not dig there. It was discovered that there are huge deposits of uranium in that region and just under the surface.
- tintedfireglass 4y ago
  We shouldn't awake the dragon's tail
modo_mario 4y ago
> Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah. >(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities. >with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason) I went to check gov sources and it still seems to be mainly fossil fuels tho renewables are growing. What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Here our greens are pushing for gas.
- flgb 4y ago
  > What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    > We get high solar output every day, even in winter Doesn't electricity usage vary quite a lot throughout the day? Especially in the evening.
- mrep 4y ago
  You can make gas with electricity [0], it does not have to come from the ground. Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]! And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
tintedfireglass 4y ago
AFAIK Australia has the highest uranium reserves on the whole planet. Why do they need to import?

by flgb 4y ago

thecopy 4y ago

I have never understand the economics argument. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then slightly more expensive electricity should not matter - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.

BongoMcCat 4y ago
I think that the economic argument is that it isn't viable for a private company to start a nuclear power-plant, it would require government involvement, and lots of people don't want the government to get involved in something that they think no-government entities can handle.
- oblio 4y ago
  That's silly for electricity. Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations. Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.
  - emteycz 4y ago
    Electricity is a free market on a huge portion of the world, including EU, which is working hard to make it even freer market. > with corporations there is zero accountability This is not Somalia, lol. There is rule of law here and it works fairly well. The only problem is who people vote for.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is? Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again. On the back end I think the UK market works reasonably well with a light regulatory touch allowing for microgenerators. The retail side is more of a problem. You can't really expose retail customers to the spot price (that went wrong in Texas), so there has to be an intermediary, who is vulnerable to bankruptcy instead if the spot price shoots up.
    - oblio 4y ago
      > One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is? Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry. What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition. For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Yeah, distribution is a huge can of worms. But production (and storage, as soon as it makes economical sense) are quite easy to entry. There are many cars that are more expensive than a small sized hydro or solar plant.
    - aerostable_slug 4y ago
      Note that managing lots of small generation is much harder than a few big ones that are contractually bound to behave according to certain rules. Distributed generation is extremely exciting, but it's also a big challenge.
- account42 4y ago
  You don't nee the government to get involved in the nuclear plant if you don't want them to be - you can have the government make sure that the cost of global warming is paid by the coal plant. Either climate change and global warming are serious issues, and then properly accounting for their cost would significantly disadvantage coal power - or they are not serious issues and we can keep burning coal and oil.
- DennisP 4y ago
  In the US, private companies have built all our nuclear plants. And reactors like this little one in Canada will make it a lot easier.
  - flgb 4y ago
    With entirely public money and underwriting.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      You're claiming that the government paid to build the reactors? Do you have a source?
- pjc50 4y ago
  Is EDF a "private" or "government" entity?
pydry 4y ago
If a form of carbon free energy costs 3x as much as carbon free alternatives, takes 3x as long to build and occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it? The additional pumped storage needs of solar and wind are more than offset by their vastly lower cost. If nuclear power could compete on a level playing field it'd be great but it sucks up subsidies like nothing else and puts the taxpayer is fully on the hook for dealing with all and any 800 billion dollar fukishima events.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  "occasionally goes boom requiring an $800 billion clean up bill why build it?" is an absurd way to describe the small number of incidents we've had in the past - they can all be attributed to egregious chains of human errors and/or bad planning. To quote: But some 18 years before the 2011 disaster, new scientific knowledge had emerged about the likelihood of a large earthquake and resulting major tsunami of some 15.7 metres at the Daiichi site. However, this had not yet led to any major action by either the plant operator, Tepco, or government regulators, notably the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Discussion was ongoing, but action minimal. The tsunami countermeasures could also have been reviewed in accordance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines which required taking into account high tsunami levels, but NISA continued to allow the Fukushima plant to operate without sufficient countermeasures such as moving the backup generators up the hill, sealing the lower part of the buildings, and having some back-up for seawater pumps, despite clear warnings. We already know that the Chernobyl incident was due to even more egregious human error and poor planning.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    But I think this is still a point against it. Its maybe not "fair" but if the regulators can't be trusted to properly maintain and protect nuclear power installations isn't that something that has to be accounted for?
  - Retric 4y ago
    The fact people in government and private industry knew the risk 18 years without addressing it it probably the most damming thing about nuclear power. The public simply can’t trust the industry or regulatory bodies. Which means they must assume avoidable disasters are going to be a regular thing. I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.
michaelt 4y ago
The economics argument has to be understood in the larger political context. Nuclear doesn't have a big support base. It's basically only supported by educated technocrats. And those educated technocrats are already holding their nose, because they know big government projects are often late and over budget. And the designs that are intrinsically safe haven't been built before. And if there was a meltdown, the taxpayer would have to foot the bill. And nobody's going to want the plants built in their area. And a permanent waste repository has been a political football for longer than most of us have been alive. At the same time, if you squint hard enough when you look at the figures, solar+wind+batteries look cheaper. Squinting that way is pretty tempting if you were on the fence anyway.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Yeah, renewables have gotten a lot cheaper. They weren't viable, but now they are, and waiting is a sunk cost. I think it's unconscionable that we chose to emit ~20 gigatons of CO2 instead of pushing nuclear from 20% of our electric supply to 100% -- we would be there today if we had just kept up the pace -- but what's done is done. We killed nuclear and waited for renewables to become viable. We paid the price. The CO2 is in the air. Now we can move forward.

ed_balls 4y ago

> Nuclear isn't commercially viable in energy markets with very high levels of variable renewable energy True for cost per Watt, but there are other factors. A good replacement for burning fossil fuels is solar + batteries, which is more expensive right now. Even if batteries get cheap, you still have to protect yourself from black swan events e.g. volcano eruption which hides the sun. Also, it seems Australia would need nuclear weapons to protect its independence in the future. It's critical to have nuclear experts at home.

crashingintoyou 4y ago

> Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel No they wouldn't. To quote https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-history-top-locations-companies/ https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-hi... > Australia is home to 31% of the world’s recoverable uranium. Australian uranium is exported and consists about one-quarter of its energy exports. Australia uses no nuclear power and depends on coal. The uranium mining industry is a billion dollar industry in Australian dollar ... In 2019, Australia produced 7790 tonnes of uranium and was ranked the world’s third best producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada.

adrian_b 4y ago
I assume that the previous poster meant that Australia does not have a 235U-enrichment plant. If that is true, Australia would have to export natural uranium and import back uranium enriched in 235U, unless they would choose to build a reactor with heavy-water, which can use natural uranium as a fuel.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  What preventing Australia from building an enrichment plant?
  - adventured 4y ago
    Nothing. The entire context is absurd to say the least. Australia is one of the most affluent countries in world history and hyper resource rich. They should have a third of their energy supply coming from nuclear. Nuclear is expensive (commonly said)? So what. Australia is hyper rich ($67k GDP per capita) and can afford to do it and can afford to subsidize it for consumers. What's a lot more expensive (risk) is having a weak, unreliable grid with a poor diversity of energy sources. It's insane not to subsidize nuclear, if one believes even the calmer side of environmental warnings re climate change. It's extremely potent energy technology, we know how to build it, and we know we can keep improving on it yet.
    - 4y ago

yodelshady 4y ago

2. sounds an awful lot like "renewables are not a viable form of energy and require gas". One gas replacement - nuclear - needs no backup. The other - renewables - needs backup of a scale that exists only on paper. I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which I have - in private, and they'll admit it. Almost nowhere are renewables outcompeting nuclear. What is outcompeting is greenwashed gas.

flgb 4y ago
I understand you are trying to make a general argument, but those dynamics are definitely not true of Australia. Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given the solar and wind resources we have.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. But there is still plenty of coal production no? Here Nuclear which is the vast majority of our production is being phased out due to political pressure. Our Greens push gas plants to cover the lowdays for renewables. Which variable production source is kept in mind in South Australia in the scenario where coal is pushed out all togheter? Is there a hydro dam or so?
  - Guidii 4y ago
    Yes, there is "still plenty of coal production" in Australia. Some references: Coal accounts for about 75 per cent of Australia’s electricity generation, followed by gas (16 per cent), hydro (5 per cent) and wind around (2 per cent).[1] About 92% of electricity in Ontario is produced from zero-carbon sources: 59% from nuclear, 24% from hydroelectricity, 8% from wind, and 1% from solar. [1] https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:text=Coal%20accounts%20for%20about%2075,around%20(2%20per%20cent) https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/overview#:~:t.... [2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html#:~:text=about%2092%25%20of%20electricity%20in%20Ontario%20was%20produced%20from%20zero%2Dcarbon%20sources%3A%2059%25%20from%20nuclear%2C%2024%25%20from%20hydroelectricity%2C%208%25%20from%20wind%2C%20and%201%25%20from%20solar https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr....

dghughes 4y ago

There's a place in Australia where an Indigenous people's legend is there is a sacred serpent under the earth and people are to not dig there. It was discovered that there are huge deposits of uranium in that region and just under the surface.

tintedfireglass 4y ago
We shouldn't awake the dragon's tail

modo_mario 4y ago

> Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah. >(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities. >with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be economically curtailed on an almost daily basis (our coal plants are all closing for this reason) I went to check gov sources and it still seems to be mainly fossil fuels tho renewables are growing. What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Here our greens are pushing for gas.

flgb 4y ago
> What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  > We get high solar output every day, even in winter Doesn't electricity usage vary quite a lot throughout the day? Especially in the evening.
mrep 4y ago
You can make gas with electricity [0], it does not have to come from the ground. Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]! And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

tintedfireglass 4y ago

AFAIK Australia has the highest uranium reserves on the whole planet. Why do they need to import?