New Chief Scientist a 'why not' kinda guy

dungfungus said :

HenryBG said :

dungfungus said :

… all the world’s nuclear waste could be buried safely in one of the soon to be abandoned open pit mines in remote Australia ….

Yes, and the vast herds of outback unicorns will ensure your “safely” is real..

There are aircraft, vehicles and people that have disappeared in the vast outback and they haven’t been found despite a lot of searching so even if nuclear waste was simply thrown on the ground out there the chances of someone stumbling on it are very small.
Even Bob Hawke could see that.
Why is it that when a simple solution is suggested it is ridiculed on this blog?

Your “simple solution”, if I am reading this correctly, being to randomly distribute around the outback radioactive waste in the open air?

I don’t know, Dungfungus – why *would* such a suggestion attract ridicule?

On a more serious note, the US decided on a “simple solution” for their mountains of leaky drums of radioactive waste:
Mount Yucca:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository

37 years later, and $12billion spent, and the site has failed as a repository for nuclear waste, proving once and for all that nuclear waste is an intractible issue, and therefore should be costed into the nuclear option as an *infinite* cost.

Rotten_berry said :

rubaiyat said :

More on Thorium reactors:

A 2011 MIT study concluded that, although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm

So sounds like a dud, but very useful as a faux “solution” and excuse to sit on your hands with all the dirty fossil fuel generators.

It has potential but there are still a lot of hard engineering and regulatory problems to be solved in the scale up from small research reactors to commercial power plants, despite what the thorium fanboys will say. The molten salt concept seems messy to me, dealing with all that hot and highly radioactive liquid fuel salt. I like it better than the liquid sodium cooled breeder concept, which also has lots of fanboys, but obvious hazards.

But unless somebody cracks the electricity storage problem something like this will be needed eventually. Telsa’s powerwalls are still an order of magnitude too expensive for large-scale grid storage. Eventually we are going to have to replace gas heating with electric heat pumps, and solar isn’t much good during cold cloudy weather when heating demand peaks. While the costs of wind and solar are falling steadily they also suffer from diminishing returns as their penetration increases, because the outputs are somewhat correlated over areas that can be connected together by a grid for reasonable cost, and poorly correlated with demand patterns. Without a cheap way to store the power you will end up dumping it to ground when the wind is blowing, then firing up the gas and coal plants when the wind stops.

TBH I remain agnostic on the question of whether cheap storage or cheap and safe nuclear will be an easier problem to solve.

Pumped Storage works and if we just stopped building the biggest wasteful consumer of energy, MacMansion filled suburban sprawl, energy demand wouldn’t be overwhelming in the first place, but sigh it’s so obvious that nobody gets it or more importantly does something about it.

We have become Thoughtless the Tanked Out Fat Consumer. Probably the first thing everybody reached for when the WHO issued its warning on processed meats was more bacon and burgers. People have become so brainwashed by universal corporate marketing that they just do what they are told and plug the empty thoughts with consumerism in the hope that that will fix what’s wrong.

rubaiyat said :

More on Thorium reactors:

A 2011 MIT study concluded that, although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm

So sounds like a dud, but very useful as a faux “solution” and excuse to sit on your hands with all the dirty fossil fuel generators.

There doesn’t seem to be any point to any of that stuff, when wind, sun, and tides are providing us with free power that is totally clean.

The only reason people want govenrments to invest in expensive high-tech nuclear nonsense is because a small number of large corporations stand to make a motza out of the lack of competition in the area of nuclear technology.

rubaiyat said :

More on Thorium reactors:

A 2011 MIT study concluded that, although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm

So sounds like a dud, but very useful as a faux “solution” and excuse to sit on your hands with all the dirty fossil fuel generators.

It has potential but there are still a lot of hard engineering and regulatory problems to be solved in the scale up from small research reactors to commercial power plants, despite what the thorium fanboys will say. The molten salt concept seems messy to me, dealing with all that hot and highly radioactive liquid fuel salt. I like it better than the liquid sodium cooled breeder concept, which also has lots of fanboys, but obvious hazards.

But unless somebody cracks the electricity storage problem something like this will be needed eventually. Telsa’s powerwalls are still an order of magnitude too expensive for large-scale grid storage. Eventually we are going to have to replace gas heating with electric heat pumps, and solar isn’t much good during cold cloudy weather when heating demand peaks. While the costs of wind and solar are falling steadily they also suffer from diminishing returns as their penetration increases, because the outputs are somewhat correlated over areas that can be connected together by a grid for reasonable cost, and poorly correlated with demand patterns. Without a cheap way to store the power you will end up dumping it to ground when the wind is blowing, then firing up the gas and coal plants when the wind stops.

TBH I remain agnostic on the question of whether cheap storage or cheap and safe nuclear will be an easier problem to solve.

Amusing to see the green left trying to deal with our new chief scientist. He ticks so many of the right ideological boxes – he wants to shut down the coal industry ( big cheer!), but acknowleges that it won’t happen overnight (muted grumbles ) and then says that *nuclear energy* could be part of the mix. You can almost see the luvvies spluttering into their free-trade flat whites.

Can’t wait to hear what he has to say about GMO, given he is married to the excellent Elizabeth Finkel.

Problem is, he can’t be dismissed easily, since he demonstrably knows what he is talking about.

The ACF says Australia needs ‘an energy mix that is 100 per cent safe’.

Finkel obviously understands that there is no such thing as ‘100% safe’ and that unless we take off our ideological blinkers, we will still be waiting for the perfect solution in 50 years.

By then, it will certainly be too late.

HenryBG said :

dungfungus said :

… all the world’s nuclear waste could be buried safely in one of the soon to be abandoned open pit mines in remote Australia ….

Yes, and the vast herds of outback unicorns will ensure your “safely” is real..

There are aircraft, vehicles and people that have disappeared in the vast outback and they haven’t been found despite a lot of searching so even if nuclear waste was simply thrown on the ground out there the chances of someone stumbling on it are very small.
Even Bob Hawke could see that.
Why is it that when a simple solution is suggested it is ridiculed on this blog?

More on Thorium reactors:

A 2011 MIT study concluded that, although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201101/hargraves.cfm

So sounds like a dud, but very useful as a faux “solution” and excuse to sit on your hands with all the dirty fossil fuel generators.

Testfest said :

Grail said :

And with his strong pro-nuclear stance not being mentioned once in this article, one is immediately reminded of the reason Alan was appointed Chief Scientist: the Liberals want Australia to be the world’s nuclear waste dump.

No mention of his pro-nuclear stance? Maybe Catriona added this paragraph after you submitted your comment:

“He has been an advocate for nuclear power and electricity as replacements for coal, and when questioned at his first press conference he stuck by his zero emissions vision: “My vision is for a country, society and world where we don’t use any coal, oil or natural gas, where we have zero emissions electricity…” but he tempered it with “but you can’t get there overnight.”

His stance on nuclear power is well known.

He hasn’t got around the real problems of nuclear power. The nasty byproducts that last a huge amount of time and the fact that there isn’t enough cheap uranium to do the job, as well as it is dangerous to transport and leads to nuclear weapons.

The alternative of Thorium reactors may have some potential but like any new nuclear power stations, are stop gaps and a long way off contributing to our energy needs.

Meanwhile there are a stack of clean alternatives if people would stop playing the fool and get on with installing them.

dungfungus said :

We are already the biggest carbon polluters by population and there is no evidence that is harming anybody so all the world’s nuclear waste could be buried safely in one of the soon to be abandoned open pit mines in remote Australia and no one will know the difference.
Australia showing leadership again.

Well if you have your eyes clenched firmly shut on the mountain of evidence showing carbon dioxide is causing global warming you may as well go for the complete “ignore it at your peril” of open cut nuclear waste dumps.

Why not just put it in the boot of your car, or in the Mugga Way tip you so admire because the one sense that hasn’t left you is your olfactory sense?

dungfungus said :

… all the world’s nuclear waste could be buried safely in one of the soon to be abandoned open pit mines in remote Australia ….

Yes, and the vast herds of outback unicorns will ensure your “safely” is real..