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Comment by ageofwant | Hacker News Reader

The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.

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It isn't idiotic. While it is partially ideological reasoning behind their rejection, nuclear power is overall a bad deal with current technologies. France might have problems operating theirs because they have a drought and rivers aren't able to cool the plants. Uranium is only available in limited supply additionally to the high costs of nuclear energy this will become a problem in the long term. We only recently have opened the first permanent storage for nuclear waste (would need to look up if it really opened).

Part of the problems are regulation, taxes and missing expertise. I guess Finland wants nuclear energy because prices skyrocketed as Russia capped the lines. But nuclear energy could never be a solution to solve that deficit.

Nuclear waste is process and reactor specific. These are engineering problems and are several magnitudes of order smaller problems to deal with that dealing with carbon waste.

No, it is not a small problem. There are processing plants that show elevated cancer rates in the population living near them and a significant part of radioactivity is just pushed into rivers or the ocean. That is after we have forbidden the practice to just drop nuclear waste in barrels but this is still a legislative shortcoming.

Sure, there are better reactor designs and processing methods but they aren't available yet. We should never exclude fission power completely, just that it isn't a good option right now. If research is inhibited by not using bad and costly technologies, we need other sources of funding. That is an issue that could very well need solving.

I did not say it was a small problem, I said the current problem of stopping CO2 pollution and removing what we already have pumped into the environment over the last 200 years are orders of magnitude larger.

There are good solutions to the problems you pose. Most of the problems with fission energy generation is due to PWRs and using fuel pellets instead of liquid fuel. Current technology burns only 3% of the fuel in pellets before having to replace them. MSRs can burn 97% of their fuel. Solid fuel nuclear reactors have byproducts that are radioactive for millions of years. The byproducts of MSRs are radioactive for hundreds of years. MSRs can actually burn the dirty remains of the nuclear fuel tossed aside during the 20th century.

Sorry, I'm kind of hijacking this comment. Honest question, would Australia actually need nuclear? The whole continent looks like it could become a renewable powerhouse for wind/solar/hydro, there's also quite a lot of lithium there from what I understand.

Australia exports millions of tons of thermal coal annually, we have vast gas fields of WA. These are profitable because a international market exist. The market exist because of a lack of affordable alternatives. So no, with enough baseload tech Australia will be probably be OK without nuclear. Solar to H2/Ammonia for example.

Green parties never endorsed nuclear energy. Maybe you're voting for the wrong party?

Perhaps adopting nuclear energy is not the only thing I care about ?

Incorrect, that would be Rupert Murdoch.

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