Two in one week? What are the odds? First I've heard of it but Oklo is a fission company with zero revenue and their stock is already down %54. That seems promising. /s
On another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced.
As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources
and more recently it's back on the table as a somewhat redacted clause of the AU-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-sto...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-...
with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically.
I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations.
it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet.
This deal is half-baked, at best.
You're being generous. :-)
To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues).
In an entirely unrelated aside; see: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-r...
But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.