Hacker News Reader

Comment by Full_Clark | Hacker News Reader

Will be interesting to see how Australia goes. They have extensive rooftop solar already, and one of the major parties in the current election is proposing to build nuclear power plants rather than go farther with renewables.

FWIW I think the nuclear plan as proposed would be a flop, but given that there are currently zero nuclear power plants there and Australia has a strong track record of opposing nuclear power, it's interesting to note that the idea has even been brought up without becoming instant electoral poison.

View on HN

The secret ingredient is millions of dollars from fossil fuel lobbyists, and the Murdoch media running a heavy propaganda/misinformation over the past year. Their only goal is to divert public funds away from solar/wind projects.

If voters choose to go down this path it'll be an absolute tragedy for the country and a huge missed opportunity.

I say this as an Australian realist living abroad who always was relatively pro-nuclear.

The more insidious will be if the government starts putting roadblocks in the way of solar expansion, like the UK government basically banning onshore wind turbine development (which is much cheaper than offshore wind). Absent government interference, solar already has good enough economics it's going to dominate without public funding (which may still waste a lot of time and effort on nuclear plants).

(I also see a big trend of objections to grid-scale solar deployments, which is nuts to me: why on earth do you care about living next to a solar farm? It's about the most inoffensive local development that could possibly happen)

Various state governments are already blocking solar projects.

I'm continually shilling Saul Griffith's work on here, I can't remember the particular piece but he calculated that by delaying the solar/wind transition, fossil fuel businesses would profit on the order of 100 trillion dollars.

My conspiracy theory is that Chinese development and proliferation of fossil fuel disrupting technologies is the root source of all of the current global instability. Only a matter of time until the petrodollar becomes obsolete.

I agree that the current nuclear proposal seems intended principally to extend the life of the coal and gas plants. It's likely born from a cynical attitude of 'who cares about how much the nuclear plants will cost when/if they do get built, just kick the carbon-neutrality can down the road another decade and let the next generation of politicians deal with it.'

I do wonder if there'll ever be a desire to build nuclear plants for baseload firming, though. What amount of excess capacity has to be built in to an all-renewables + storage grid to give the the same reliability as the current grid? Could nuclear power ever be cheap enough to compete on ROI with the marginal providers, the last ~5 gigawatts of wind or solar needed?

David Osmond work is interesting. He wrote last week: "Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand) Results: Last week: 98.6% RE Last 187 weeks: 98.7% RE (1/5)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com