> you have uranium exports already nope! Australia is big into mining - dig a hole, put the contents of the hole on a ship to a country that puts more effort

> you have uranium exports already nope! Australia is big into mining - dig a hole, put the contents of the hole on a ship to a country that puts more effort into things, cash the cheques. actually doing things with the contents of the whole is a lot of work and requires whole industries full of expertise and training pipelines and industrial policy, so it's easier to just dig holes->ship contents of holes. even owning the mining companies is not a popular hobby - much better to sell out to a big foreign company and take the cash, then they can worry about even the hole digging. if you've ever heard of the Resource Curse, Australia is one of the rare Rich Western Country victims of it - it's all too easy, and so everything else gets left by the wayside. and then the mining industry is rich, so has lots of lobbyists and pet politicians who cement it's power - even easy things like a Mining Super Profit Tax that would have just cut some of the profits that got sent overseas to fund developing other parts of the economy got scaremongered by a huge mining industry lobbying push and never happened. we are very very fucked if mining stops being easy and/or profitable. > wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power? nope! a few reasons: - it's a small population - less than a tenth the population of the US. having a nuclear power industry has enormous fixed costs. you need a web of companies that work on the various bits, you need universities and apprenticeships churning out experts, you need absolutely fucking enormous government subsidies, and you need to do that for decades. - Australian politicians are - partly because of the above - very used to not working hard, so trying to convince people that they need to pay even more for electricity to subsidise a new nuclear power industry - and like mining above, that's almost entirely going to be going to foreign companies. - renewables are absolutely fucking easy and cheap and quick. Australia is the size of western europe or nearly as big as the main bit of the USA, so you can just deploy thousands of square kilometers of solar panels or wind, across multiple timezones, across multiple climactic regions, etc. nonetheless, people whinge about this, including actual real federal ministers claiming that wind turbines on farms are "eyesores". - it's too late - even countries that have nuclear reactors take decades to build them, so starting now, even with political will and competence, would take, say, twenty years to turn the first one on. Australia needs to be net zero before then. so if people want to argue about deploying nuclear power in Australia, then go for it, but it needs to 1) not delay actual work now, which will mass deployment of renewables and storage and 2) it needs a plan to compete with renewables costs in 2050. saying "oh hey, let's do nuclear, it'll cost way more and won't be here until your grandkids are born, also you'll be subsidising it" is a very very poor sales pitch.