Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?
Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.
Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.
Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.
Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.
I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.
I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.
As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.