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The Bullroarer - Tuesday 12th February 2008
Posted by Phil Hart on February 11, 2008 - 10:21pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
The Age - Australia set to Stay in Nuclear Club
AUSTRALIA appears set to remain in a controversial global group of nuclear energy countries, even though green groups fear the country could end up being the world's radioactive waste dump.
ABC Landline - Green Power From Bagasse
In northern New South Wales the sugar cane industry is undergoing its biggest revolution since mechanical harvesters replaced cane cutters and their knives. The industry's 650 growers are the key components of a 180 million dollar green energy project that will radically change every aspect of their operations. It's a huge and expensive challenge but if it works it will put more money in farmers'
pockets, make green energy available to hundreds of thousands of homes and snuff out spectacular cane fires forever.
SMH - Water will be the next big battle ground
The Age - Victoria looks to the rain-soaked north and asks: what about us?
The Age - In the Land of the Dutch Black the Cyclist is King of the Road
I'D HEARD the stories about the Dutch Black, but nothing prepared me for the alternative universe that is Amsterdam. It was clear from the moment I stepped off the train that my wildest fantasies were about to become reality.
I'm not talking about the sex and drugs; heaps of cities have that. It was the bikes — they were everywhere and in every shape and size imaginable: bikes for cruising, bikes for shopping, bikes for couples, bikes for carrying a whole tantrum of toddlers, and even bikes for the frail and wobbly.
The Australian - Garrett wanders into a minefield on natural gas
SMH - Woodside Buys Shell's North West Shelf Interests
SMH - Marchers Demand Rethink of Bridge Duplication
Australia Mulls Carbon Reporting Rules
Australian firms will have to collect data on their carbon emissions from later this year, under new reporting rules being considered by the government.
SMH - It's going to rain
RAIN, rain and more rain. That's the forecast for the next two months as Sydney yearns for a little ray of summer sunshine. The incredible deluge has been filling dams at a rate of knots and has put the Kurnell desalination plant site under water.
Appin's Cataract Dam is full for the first time since December 1999, with water starting to spill on Thursday night. Shoalhaven's Tallowa Dam, which supplies that region and is used to top up Warragamba Dam during dry spells, is also full. As at 9am yesterday, Sydney had received a whopping 172.4 millimetres since the start of February, compared with 4.4 millimetres for the same period last year. ...
La Nina, the opposite of the drought-causing El Nino, causes extensive cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. On the east coast, that equates to wetter weather. Sydney's dams are at 64 per cent of capacity, up 3 per cent in just a week. The water supply was at an all-time low at just 33.9 per cent in February last year.
Upstream Online - Apache kicks off Gippsland hunt
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From the article Garrett wanders into a minefield on natural gas
Yes, and an ICBM from China could do it to.
Indonesia has enough trouble holding their own country together... why they would even think of doing such a thing is not explained.
Is Indonesia Australias own private Iran?
And from the Australia set to stay in nuclear club article
It depends how you look at it. I think you could sustain an argument that all that coal we export IS coming back to haunt us... as altered weather!
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.