Rent seekers hoping to profit from the wind and solar scam are in meltdown, following the Liberal/National Coalition’s plan to take a nuclear power policy to the next Federal election. Wind and solar have no hope of surviving a meaningful, long-term nuclear power policy, and the wind and solar scammers know it. Nuclear power is always available, whatever the weather; no need for batteries, no need for back up. Whereas hopelessly intermittent wind and equally unreliable solar are, well, you know….
Our old mate, Giles Parkinson heads up the propaganda team at Ruin-Economy. Giles and his mates are clearly beside themselves. Now Giles has always had difficulty grappling with reality. This time, however, he is absolutely spot on when he says “the nuclear push is designed to bring the rollout of renewables to a halt – not just temporarily, but for good.” 10 out of 10 Giles, or as the Fonz would say, ‘correctamundo’.
Giles, working his way through the 5 stages of grief, is still apparently in a state of denial, as Eric Worrall highlights below.
Aussie Green Panic: “the nuclear push is designed to bring … renewables to a halt”
Watts Up With That
Eric Worrall
22 March 2024
Opposition party support for nuclear energy appears to have collapsed renewable investment.
Clean Energy Council launches national ad campaign against “nuclear distraction”
Renew Economy
Giles Parkinson
22 March 2024
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The CEC says there are two key messages from the campaign: “Nuclear is a distraction”, and “Don’t risk Australia’s Future.”
The campaign is already appearing in more than 2,200 locations in city building lifts and lobbies in Sydney and Melbourne, and on animated digital billboards in airport lounges at Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne Airport.
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The campaign by the CEC follows an intense push by the federal Coalition, amplified and often widely supported in mainstream media, to bring a halt to the rollout of large scale renewables, and keep coal fired power stations open until some sort of nuclear option becomes available.
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It is becoming increasingly clear that the nuclear push is designed to bring the rollout of renewables to a halt – not just temporarily, but for good.
The Coalition’s chief advisors admit that nuclear, which apart from its extremely high costs, is inflexible and has poor ramping rates, to respond in changes of demand or supply, is effectively not comparable with a grid supplied larger by wind and solar, which needs fast and flexible capacity to support it.
In effect, because the grid is morphing from a system built around centralised “baseload” principles to a more distributed system based around wind, solar and flexibility, the two technologies – nuclear and renewables – are effectively incompatible.
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I agree with the Clean Energy Council that the Australian opposition plan to build nuclear on decommissioned coal sites is not the best solution – though given 25+ years of failure to make renewables useful, their advocacy for more green energy is absurd.
Nuclear might be affordable in the long run, but financing high up-front costs is not something financially stretched energy consumers could easily absorb. Building low cost brown coal plants or refurbishing old plants would be a much better strategy for lowering end user energy prices.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of nuclear, and there are plenty of remote sites in Australia where nuclear would be the cheaper option. But ignoring our vast remaining reserves of brown coal does not make economic sense.
Brown coal does not have value as a saleable commodity, because unlike black coal, brown coal cannot be transported economically. Brown coal has lower energy density than black coal, and when stored for transport has a distressing tendency to spontaneously combust. Brown coal’s only value comes from digging it up then immediately shovelling it into an adjacent coal power plant.
Having said this, it is hilarious that an economically challenged opposition plan for dispatchable zero carbon nuclear energy is enough to crash actual investment in green energy.
Watts Up With That?
STOP THESE THINGS 
Ed Husic said on Sunday no one wants nuclear near them. I will give them the two hectares required, 100 metres from Portland Alcoa high voltage line. Whichever way I look, I can see turbines around us. Now just waiting till they start the Hawkesdale Ryans corner turbines. How much worse the cumulative noise will be than the Macarthur turbines!?!
Nuclear power is intentionally and artificially (not intrinsically) expensive, intentionally constipated by its opponents who are either Marxists who want to destroy societies, or are too unable to think for themselves to do other than believe the Marxists. China is building 1,400 GWe plants using ripped-off Westinghouse technology for $US 2.75/watt. Why did the Vogtle plants in Georgia, using the same designs, cost $13.75/watt? Here’s one data point: When vibration was discovered in a pipe during initial tests, a $30,000 pipe brace became a $3 million license review.
Traditional nuclear power plants don’t do load following well, so they usually have a fast-acting open-cycle gas turbine nearby (not behind the back of nowhere with 1,000 kilometers of transmission lines) for “topping.” But GE/Hitachi/Terrapower have solved that problem. They are building a GE/Hitachi PRISM reactor coupled to a molten-salt thermal store from which heat can be transferred at very different rates to the steam generator, at Kemmerer, Wyoming. The reactor’s bare capacity is 300 MWe, but the thermal store can provide 500 MWe for up to four hours. The combined system is called Natrium, the Latin word for “salt.”
If you want something smaller (or larger), GE/Hitachi offer PRISM in varying sizes from 150 to 360 MWe.
If you’re worried about safety or spent fuel or weapons proliferation or any other of the usual shibboleths, don’t be. They’re all stinking red herrings. Read Plentiful Energy by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. You can get it on paper from Amazon. Dr. Chang has also generously given permission to post it at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf
The prototype for the PRISM design, Experimental Breeder Reactor II, was proven to be walk-away safe.
The only downside of the Kemmerer plan is that they’re not going to include the fuel cycle facility described by Till and Chang, which essentially eliminates the “nuclear waste” (i.e. spent fuel) problem and the always-imaginary from the get-go weapons proliferation “problem.”