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7 comments on The Bullroarer - Tuesday 12th February 2008
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I agree with Ferguson that Australia can and should heavily influence the global nuclear fuel cycle, rather than the current half-pregnant approach. Australia could set up a high level waste repository before even building a commercial reactor. Then watch the big bucks flowing in. Down the track we could embrace not only waste disposal but nuclear electricity, co-desalination and perhaps enrichment using the Australian developed laser process.
Enriched fuel could be leased so that customers who don't properly account for the right mix of isotopes get blacklisted. Ditto those who wilfully divert material to weapons. I'd go further and say that yellowcake or enriched fuel is conditional upon using less coal elsewhere in the system.
Ziggy Switkowski points out that 25 medium sized reactors would take half of Australia's yellowcake output. Let's make that 20 GW or maybe half the baseload. Export customers would have to take a number and wait, consistent with Westexas theory. If it looks like breeders/thorium/fusion will be late in arriving then a percentage of remaining fuel must be committed to constructing renewables.
I think the verb here is ARE [late].
You know, not that many years ago (maybe 50-100) industry survived without "baseload" power. Sure it was a different system, but people still "made money", jobs were to be had, and analysts didn't nash their teeth over the absence of that "necessity" - baseload power.
The political reality is that 25 nuclear power plants is currently unacceptable to the public... no matter how many University of Melbourne Physics graduates they would employ.
And what would we do when the US asks for an "exemption" so that it can maintain its nuclear arsenal to help protect us from [insert name of future "global enemy" used as justification for foreign policy here]?
We need to maintain a sceptical approach to the term 'baseload' power. The importance of 'baseload' is being somewhat over played.
We have arbitrarily shifted a lot of power use to night-time because we have created this baseload supply. Large solar generating capacity would mean that all those home hot water heating systems could be turned on during the day instead. The same goes for a lot of industrial uses which have been shifted to night production because of the cheap electricity. If we didn't have this 'baseload' generation, the economics wouldn't drive as much energy use at night.
cheers
Phil.
I heard today that electrolytic zinc and aluminium smelters pay about 3c per kwh 24/7. For obscure reasons this is supposed to help everybody. In the old days of sailing ships the sailors would remain wenching at the local tavern until the wind sprung up. Maybe the smelters could hoist the jolly roger or similar when cheap power is up and the workers could call in to do a bit of smelting. Alternatively electricity pricing should be reviewed for round-the-clock users.
I usually refer people to Mark Deissendorf's "Baseload fallacy" document too :
http://www.cana.net.au/documents/Diesendorf_TheBaseLoadFallacy_FS16.pdf
Instead of competing with our uranium customers, why don't we just build a national smart grid and plug in as much CSP solar, wind, wave/tidal/current and (hopefully) geothermal as we need (plus some little extras like bagasse burners and hydro), along with plenty of storage to help even out the peaks and troughs (I'm quite encouraged by those graphite experiments).
Its not like we don't have a good enough geographic spread to largely avoid the "baseload" bogeyman, and with some intelligent demand management and storage we can solve the intermittency problem.