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Well to continue the "put things in perspective" theme, with the low efficiency from the HDR scheme, even a 2% rate of water loss would lead to unacceptable water requirements deep in the desert. I believe the best that been achieved elsewhere in the world is around 5%.
As for piping supercritical CO2 from the Eastern Seaboard to the Cooper basin, they can't be serious!
Finally a few hundred k's down the down the road Olympic Dam will supply 15,000 tonnes of Uranium per year to the rest of the world for something like a century. That would supply well over all Australia's electrical needs. But we're no longer allowed to mention Nuclear in Australia. It's politically incorrect again.
My guess is that all these attempts have to allowed to fail until the Greenies will admit it. We need nuclear power or coal to keep oz running. Which do they want?
Do we really need nuclear? If we stopped exporting coal we would have heaps of the stuff for Oz to run for at least this current generation and maybe the next. Add to that the dinky toy renewables that may be added in the next fifty years as well as a liberal dose of efficency gains and it may just be possible to avoid nuclear power for the forseeable future.
This may actually work in our favour in terms of technology advances that may come along in the future. Australia has always followed this pattern which tends to maen that we get second or third generation technology which has usually been tested out thoroughly on someone else and a lot of the bugs ironed out. We should hasten slowly in regards to nuclear power for this reason alone.
On the other hand, Asutralia could do much to lay the groundwork and build up our skills in nuclear power related industry such as uranium enrichment, manufacture of fuel rods and pellets, fuel rod leasing where we price the production, enrichment, maufacture, energy content, and disposal costs. An enrichment and fuel rod industry alone would give our engineers and scientists good exposure to honing uclear skills without the political risks of building a nuclear power industry on shore. Of course it may get to the point where not having a nuclear generator becomes ridiculous for teh worlds leading producer of a vital nuclear component but that is a side issue.
Regardless of the source of electricity it still does not solve the problem of declining petroleum and it's place in transportation. Only a concerted and informed reconstruction of our urban environment which enables people to drastically reduce the distances both they and the goods they consume are conveyed will get us anywhere near a sustainable future. All talk of electric cars and PHEVS is IMHO seriosuly deluded. We will need to rearrange how we live, huddling together for warmth, light and ease of trade, education and social welfare. At least in Australia we have plenty of wide open spaces to escape to (on the train) when the city gets to much for us.
Australia also might have the worlds best geology for storing nuclear waste.
I actually agree Magnus. Australias uranium industry should include an permanent nuclear waste disposal facility, somwhere deep in the outback. We can't keep digging up ore, processing it to yellowcake, exporting and then wahing our hands of responsibility for what happens to it. We either have a uranium industry or we should shut it all down and keep selling coal and gas as fast as we can shovel it out.
Why people want to shift from depending on one depleting resource to another is beyond me.
There is a huge desert with some of the best solar insolation available on the planet out there, and you guys are talking about digging more holes and shoveling radioactive material offshore and then back on again.
Amazing.
There is so much Light here it's f* amazing. Might as well use it. Welcome to the Solar Age.
You burn it, you store it.
This creates an incentive in the users not to use too much, to store it safely, or even to reprocess it to remove any danger at all.
If nuclear is safe then you can deal with the waste where it's produced, in your country. If nuclear is unsafe then you shouldn't have it at all.
We can sit on the highest mountain of coal, nature will not allow us to burn it all. The CO2 absorption capacity of the atmosphere isn't there.
Read here:
Climate Code Red: The Case for a Sustainability Emergency
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3600
To answer your question TheTransition, what I want is neither coal nor nuclear but a transition to solar. Technically feasible with today's technology.
Solar-thermal power plants in more arid regions - but spread around the 5 mainland states and NT and within cooeee of the grid - these can produce baseload power by heat storage for overnight and through a couple of cloudy days (and in Australia it won't be cloudy over all the solar-thermal power stations at once).
The cities become acres of rooftop photovoltaics to provide peak power through heatwaves and daytime usage.
No need for much water if any.
Big start up costs - but no ongoing mining, transport costs and no climate change terra-costs and no peak-oil or later peak-coal costs.
Solar is the future.
Great if Geothermal can back this up. Fair enough if some coal or gas power plants are used as back up in depths of winter - at least a world relying on solar will delay peak-coal issues (most of the world can do much of the above with solar - Africa, Nth America, Sth America, China, Indian subcontinent, Middle East have plenty of deserts).