14 Comments

I love the nuclear (fusion) reactor that we already have. It's a nice, safe, 150 million km away, so the energetic-photon collectors that harvest the energy don't have to keep being replaced from neutron flux degredation.

Oh, and its existing fuel supply has been estimated to be good for at least another three billion years or so.

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Actually the Sun is good for another 70 billion years at current output. Left unmolested however and thermostat goes haywire, burning through about 90% of the fuel in a few million years as a Red Giant.

Thus the only option is to put the Sun on a diet and star-lift most of its mass before it goes off the rails. Fortunately we have a billion or so years to get ready.

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A decent response to the Potato. Of course the one delightful aspect of nukes that gives Spud a hard-on is that it's centralised power to millions, thus a worthy fiefdom for a Mr Burns style wannabe like Darth Kipfler.

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The Uncle Fester lookalike, the vengeful leader of the dinosaur party, perfected his moral compass during his time in that shining example of laura an norder, the Queensland Police Force, which made him a perfect candidate for the Young Liberals.

I suspect the hand of the liar from the shire in this affair, as part of the pentecostal plan to scale the first of the Seven Mountains, and achieve world domination, what nuclear power has to do with this whole business, only the supreme deity knows. It is a fact that the minister for everything ignited the fuse which may well result in a spectacular-looking armageddon.

It would be a fitting end to the failed human experiment.

The thing with nuclear power plants is that the operators in the control room have to be right all the time, it would be a pity if a glitch or a spilt cup of coffee by a hung-over trainee on the control panel, turned the east coast into a great example of political hubris.

Expect another announcement soon, that they are making good progress on the Nuclear Fusion reactor, the sun in a steel doughnut, when they are actually chasing a fresh batch of funding from a hedge fund. The elephant in the pile is where can they get large amounts of Tritium.

The liar from the shire would have known that none of the AUKUS cabal could knock up a fleet of sub-surface kettles. My cynical mind suspects it could be a dead cat on the table trick, for scomo to sneak in the first of the Seven Mountains on his way to world domination.

My wife reckons I've drunk too much homemade Gin again, she's usually right.

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My weekend is never really underway before I’ve read your comment, Ken.

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Once again Dutton opens his big gaping hole and the mining industry's words out You dig what I'm saying?

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I assume the conservative love of nuclear is its one of the few carbon zero-ish power sources that allows society to remain a centralised controllable power sold off to private companies and profits guaranteed by government where as more green energy proposals can be decentralised and while still able to privatise the concern is the private can be down to the level of the individual punters roof charging their vehicle. I expect they would also prefer hydro over wind and solar. Hence their brief flirtation with Snow Hydro 2.0.

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Brief flirtation? Snowy 2.0 is being built as we speak, 2 years behind schedule and at double the cost. Brilliant planning and execution as always by our NeoCon overlords.

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Love how succintly you put this JB. Just wish I could do the same whenever I'm faced with the mental cases who argue against renewables in favour of nuclear. (The same with EVs...that one just does my head in)

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Methinks you're taking piscatorial pot-shots in a big round thing made of wood. Don't get me wrong, fish and chips is all well and good, I likes me spud deep fried 'n all. But nukular reaktuz is not so much a brain fart as a shit stain running down the back of P Dutz's hammy.

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Great article. Nuclear makes no economic, environmental, political or social sense. The depths to which the COAL-GASition will stoop to slander the cheapest, safest power available - wind and solar - are seemingly unfathomable.

Actually, nuclear costing twice as much as coal and gas is an understatement based on the most recent evidence. More like 3-4x for the builds from the past 20 years, and most of them took longer than a decade too.

And then there's the primary fairy-tale of the nucler industry - so called Gen IV reactors, which can't melt down, and use up spent fuel rods from past generations of reactors. The technology is real, only it is absurdly expensive and very difficult to build and maintain, so they have been 20 years away for 20 years now.

It's all a giant Macguffin for renewables haters, the most stupid people on earth.

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"It's Major Spud...shh don't mention the renewables."

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The latest news on the nuclear sub front is that the guardians of the free world have decided to build our nuclear diving tubes when they have finished building all of their war machines. Our government has announced that our boats may be ready by 2040, history tells us that 99% of all government contracts aren't completed on time or within budget. We can safely say that timeline may blow out to 2050.

An unreported fact is that one of the greatest minds of our civilisation, Sir Issac Newton, has stated that the Apocalypse will occur in 2060. He came to this conclusion, by sourcing this earth-shattering, literally, news from the Old Testament, in the Book of Daniel. Ergo we will only get about ten years of work for our billions of dollars. By the time we take delivery, nuclear power will be obsolete, being replaced by Lithium Crystals, or some new power of nature that Elon Musk has discovered.

Peter Dutton will have become a pile of Humus by that time.

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Sep 23, 2022
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Well, Rich illigitimate Advocate, how about you start with a business case good enough to attract the private funding to get it off the ground? What's the expected return on investment? Oh, that's right: no nuclear reactor has ever come withint 1B of turning a profit over its working life...

So good luck with that.

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