Australia fast-tracks plan to send solar power to Singapore

You've got no data this one. It has never been done before and even the people directly involved in the project can't be sure what surprises may or may not be in store as they push the boundaries of engineering practice.

> Could this project be late? Of course. "Nuclear generator late and over budget"? No.

This is bald-faced fabrication. I've never been confronted with quite so blatant a guess presented as a confident fact.

Even arguing that "nuclear projects can't be completed to plan" is in itself a bit much - planning standards can change. Bad planning isn't a property of nuclear electricity and good planning isn't a property of undersea cables.

This could easily be $50 billion down the drain and the project is still never completed. The risk is there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable

I do agree that over the course of the next 10-50 years renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper.

What I'm not sure about is if "the grid" will be cheaper or if we'll end up seeing the renewables self-ownership spiral that causes folks to disconnect from the grid, driving prices up for everyone else on the grid, thus causing more people to disconnect, etc. When renewables are cheap and your house's usage is fairly well known (see years of smart meter historical data) then at some point it becomes economically feasible to be your own grid.

Certainly a lot of military "interventions" in the past couple of decades have been pretty disastrous though.

I propose a "you break it you buy it" model. Until such time as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have peace and good governance, no more military adventures to spread liberal democracy.

Nobody is talking about re-occupying North Africa.

Again, you're reading too much into this. Maybe go back to Portland with that rhetoric?

If they can get usable flow batteries on a ship, this will be quite an option to powerships even today.

But if we're talking Malaysian Chinese....

People need to stop worshipping Singapore like they are a fantasy land of perfection. They have specific flaws of their own, plus flaws similar to other countries.

I'll give it a go.

From the article you cite:

"Nuclear: there are two key points to differentiate in the estimates of nuclear energy safety. The first is the period which the studies cover. Analysis by Markandya & Wilkinson (2007) predates the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and therefore does not include this accident in its estimates. This fact, however, does not fully explain why the two studies differ: we might assume the inclusion of the Fukushima disaster would increase death rates but in fact the estimates of Sovacool et al. (2016) are lower.

"The largest differentiator here is the period which the Sovacool et al. (2016) estimates cover. They report normalized death rates over the limited period from 1990 to 2013. This means the 1986 Chernobyl accident was not included. Sovacool et al. (2016) only include deaths from the Fukushima accident, with 573 attributed deaths. It is useful to note here that not all deaths were a direct result of the accident: for Fukushima, there were no direct deaths from the disaster; one confirmed death from radiation exposure; and the rest noted as premature deaths from evacuation and displacement of populations in the surrounding area."

In addition I see that they are considering deaths only, which for both fossil fuels and nuclear fission is going to skew the numbers in their favour compared to renewable.

Not sure what a complete picture would look like - you'd have to put some $-values against health & QoL impacts, and that's assuming you could accurately do root cause on chronic illness back to a power generation.

In any case, nuclear fission is unlikely to make a resurgence, for any number of reasons.

And if you read further you see this:

Let’s again put this into the context of our town of 27,000 EU citizens, who would collectively consume around one terawatt-hour of energy a year. These are the impacts if they got all of their energy from a given source:

Coal: 25 people would die prematurely every year;

...

Nuclear: it would take between 14 and 100 years before someone died;

...

Solar: 53 years before someone died.

Also, the costs of nuclear accidents are generally underestimated:

according to our analysis, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% probability of a Fukushima-like event (or more costly) every 60–150 years, and a Three Mile Island event (or more costly) every 10–20 years.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.026