Libs embrace nuclear power


BUT WON’T LET GO OF INTERMITTENT ENERGY “PARTNERSHIP”

Oh well, half a loaf!

Peter Dutton is leading the Liberal team to demonstrate a bit of ticker to challenge the Labor narrative on The Voice and now he is taking up the Small Nuclear Reactor (SMR) option.

He delivered a spirited address to the assembled IPA faithful in Sydney this morning. He showed a strong grasp of the arguments to take the SMR road against the wooden-headed resistance of the Government that is “justified” by the preposterous CIRO GenCost study.

But rejecting wind and solar power is apparently still a bridge too far, so we need to keep the pressure on to demonstrate the rank folly of connecting intermittent energy to the grid. And then there is the “clean energy” lie.


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2dogs
2dogs
July 7, 2023 5:21 pm

The preposterous CSIRO GenCost study.

“Plenty of other people have made the case against nuclear on the basis of issues like a lack of social licence” – so the government should oppose it because it is expensive due to the costs in getting the government not to oppose it?

Alamak!
July 7, 2023 5:35 pm

Good to see libs offering an alternative to the green fantasy cult. I feel many people will take this a sign that come the next election we have real choices.

feelthebern
feelthebern
July 7, 2023 5:37 pm

If the offer was free power for all those within 100km of a reactor, watch the bidding war erupt.

Petros
Petros
July 7, 2023 6:06 pm

They just dropped Rennick from the senate spot at the next election.

Rossini
Rossini
July 7, 2023 6:07 pm

What a goose!
What’s wrong with these new styled coal fired power stations. Not as if we lack the coal.
We are governed by a bunch of soft cocks with little or no opposition.

Cassie of Sydney
July 7, 2023 8:57 pm

It begs the question, what stopped them from doing this prior to the May 2022 election?

wal1957
wal1957
July 7, 2023 9:39 pm

This won’t get me to vote for the Libs again.
If they believe in the gerbil warming nonsense and that
CO2 is worse than “orange man bad” then the only reliable 24/7 option is nuclear.
Take a stand you limp dicked @-wipes! Get off the bloody fence!
Solar and wind don’t make the cut.
Pandering to the wind and solar cult won’t provide the reliable energy that Australia needs, nor will the Libs steal any votes from that cult. The greens and Liebor have most of them tied up in a bow and sucking on their teats.
SFL‘s.

Tom
Tom
July 8, 2023 8:50 am

Pandering to the wind and solar cult won’t provide the reliable energy that Australia needs, nor will the Libs steal any votes from that cult.

The entire SFL electoral strategy is to appease — in fact, to suck up to — people who will never under any circumstances vote for them. Apart from reeking of cowardice, that’s almost as mentally ill as leftism.

Australia’s renewable energy scam is a backward dope-smoking fever dream straight out of a Nimbin commune in the 1970s where all the hippies are allowed to make money out of destroying the national power grid.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
July 8, 2023 9:35 am

This is a big deal even bigger than championing a policy that will free us from the despotic fickleness of ruinables.

He is taking on a myth that has been carefully cultivated for at over half a century. Photoshop the most lurid images from the Hiroshima A-Bomb Museum onto modern Australia and you have the all too common conception of nuclear power.

It started with the hippies when The Beatles were in their heyday. It was being slathered on through the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, Reagan’s Presidency, the birth of Microsoft, the disintegration of the USSR (a very sad event for anti-nuclear types), Friends, Frasier, Afghanistan, Iraq, the jug-eared stammering narcissist – it has been woven into peoples thinking for a long time, and without reexamination.

I hope he is ready.

Roger
Roger
July 8, 2023 9:42 am

He delivered a spirited address to the assembled IPA faithful in Sydney this morning.

Preaching to the choir.

Very courageous, Mr. Aspiring Prime Minister.

The fact is there’s majority support for nuclear power in the community and Dutton has latched onto this as politically useful.

Rabz
July 8, 2023 9:52 am

There will never be a nuclear reactor built in this country in any of our lifetimes.

We will however be gifted with astronomical energy bills for occasional electrickery, leavened with many, many blackouts.

HOP Time™ will hopefully provide the solution.

Lee
Lee
July 8, 2023 12:09 pm

The entire SFL electoral strategy is to appease — in fact, to suck up to — people who will never under any circumstances vote for them. Apart from reeking of cowardice, that’s almost as mentally ill as leftism.

That’s because, like most institutions, the Liberal Party has been successfully penetrated by the left.

One might almost say taken over by the left; as in Victoria.

Cliff Boof
Cliff Boof
July 8, 2023 2:11 pm

Rabz said, “There will never be a nuclear reactor built in this country in any of our lifetimes.”

Probably not. It will be built elsewhere and shipped here, like most sophisticated manufactured goods.

https://www.smrnuclear.com.au/

billie
billie
July 8, 2023 4:32 pm

I’m waiting for Helen Caldicott to be wheeled out

I’m surprised the usual suspects aren’t already spewing forth about Chernobyl and Fukushima, both of which had effects that have been wildly exagerrated.

BTW – You can still do tours from Kiev to Chernobyl, they range from $100 to $1,000 depending on the tour content.

Search for Chernobyl tours

Hey, everyone has to survivie somehow, and the tour operators are no exception.

Farmer Gez
Farmer Gez
July 9, 2023 10:35 am

CSIRO GenCost analysis produced by working with AEMO.
Now isn’t that a cosy little in-house card game.
AEMO is basically the planning arm of the renewable energy business sector.
Go and check out their web page and tell me that looks like a government appointed independent energy planner.

Dot
Dot
July 9, 2023 3:11 pm

For those of who have not been propagandised to by myself:

LFTRs in 5 minutes – Thorium Reactors

A short video of Kirk Sorensen taking us through the benefits of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, a revolutionary liquid reactor that runs not on uranium, but thorium. These work and have been built before. Search for either LFTRs or Molten Salt Reactors (MSR).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY

Dot
Dot
July 9, 2023 3:14 pm

The “Killer App” for “carbon mitigation” would be a total 30-year tax holiday for any nuclear power and related industry or businesses.

It would not punish consumers or businesses as coal-fired or petroleum power energy use or production.

It would mitigate carbon “pollution”.

It would see much-needed capacity built.

It would not support unfeasible renewables nor their terrible ecological records like higher embedded carbon use, cadmium or rare earth poisoning, birds being killed, farmland being used for uneconomic purposes, etc.

Hugh
Hugh
July 9, 2023 4:10 pm

I wrote this on “Currency Lad” last night without seeing the above:

***********

Carbon Dioxide is the best solution to greening the planet. It may cause a tiny bit of global warming, but global warming is also good for greening the planet, so another bonus. As I’ve asked before: when according to secular science has life teemed on earth? As I understand, around average temps of 25 degrees C, as opposed to the current ~14 degrees C. So, while not at all opposed to SMNRs as a free market decides, I also want more coal and other fossil fuel stations, without expensive scrubbers robbing the earth of precious CO2.

We really know how to shoot ourselves in the foot. Appalling ignorance on all sides of the political debate.

**********

I didn’t see the part of Dutton’s proposal to replace SMRs on old coal-fired power stations.

Um, no, Mr Dutton. You need to cast yourself (and us) free of the ridiculous global warming misinformation narrative and grasp the truths:

1. We need MORE (that’s MORE) CO2 to green the planet and we need more global warming to expand the areas of teeming life (which mainly occurs between 40 degrees North and South of the equator, especially NEAR the equator). And we could terraform the Sahara (once a verdant grassland) and the inland of Australia. We have the technology. SMRs and coal-fired power stations they could help there. But, au fond, let the free market decide! I couldn’t give a damn about some yellow-bellied skink. Actually, if a teeming jungle grew up in our inner parts, I surmise we’d be surprised to see what declared “extinct” species emerged rediscovered. In any case, if we let people buy, breed and sell these endangered species, they’d be as rare as a Rhode Island Red.

2. A SMR replacing an old coal generator is exactly wrong. I know about the economic transmission lines argument. But why can’t an SMR replace some disastrously inefficient wind farm or solar plant? Instead of a highly beneficial coal plant … for God’s sake BECAUSE it produces CO2 plant fertilizer and accelerates our emergence from the near disastrous (for all life) Little Ice Age. Oh, plus ending the madness of getting rid of our superb fossil fuel-based vehicles which drive energy prices for Little Tommy (or Trisha) Taxpayer down through the floor. Net zero is disastrous!

They wouldn’t be SMRs, anyway. They would be pretty much full-size nuclear reactors. They would be Ss or Ms. I don’t object to that in principle. But the point is, with mini nuclear reactors about the size of a couple of telephone boxes (cf: US nuclear subs powered since WWII on a tiny amount of fuel by weight) well distributed throughout the burbs and suburbs and interconnected powerlines, you’re much more resilient to an attack on more centralised targets.

But the HUGE downside of sapping in SMRs for fossil fuel power stations is, to repeat: you’d be preventing producing CO2 from fossil fuels, and stifling precious global warming!

Let the free market work out transmission lines economy, by privatising the whole thing and using its demonstrated efficiently distributed knowledge system. The market came up with telephones and radio (F.M. and A.M.) and T.V. and P.C.s and Laptops, and so much more. And, you know, oil refinery (J.D. Rockefeller) which, mirabile dictu, not only saved the whale, but also produced hundreds of products from the sludge left over from refinery, such as the plastics industry … and nylon stockings! All in the quest for profit! Not some unaccountable, income-guaranteed bureaucratic jerks in a 9 to 5 office. Is it that hard? Dutton, you are seriously in need of an education in liberal (minimal state) values. You’ve been a policeman. Well, great. Nothing wrong with that. You understand about law and justice, crime and punishment and defending the innocent (Tommy Taxpayer). Call Aussie Gina Rinehart at your earliest convenience for some serious counseling. She’s not been the richest female entrepreneur in the world for nothing.

  1. Yeah it’s a bit steep. Even for a wretch from the scrub, basic flea-vaxxes-antibiotic course against E. canis etc is…

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