Siso

Love pumped hydro, 80%round trip efficiency, multiple GW size storage and a mature technology.

sorry I'm late on this. Regarding the report the coalition have on NP. It can't be worse than the gen cost report. It sounds like the new one still give NP a 30 year life which is not right. Some plants have been given 20 year extensions on their 40 year lives which will bring them out to 60 years. There is no reason not to expect the new reactors to be capable of 80 years. They also gave wind a 40-50% capacity factor. The farm I worked was in the low 30's and one year I know was under 30%. There hasn't been much private interest in NP in Australia because the easiest way for companies to make money is the status quo. Do we really want private companies running our power. It hasn't really been to successful in the last 30 years. NP can load follow, it just never has had to and hasn't been a top priority. The other thing with private retailers is that the general public should not have to be corparate lawers or economists to get the best deal on electricity. This harms less educated (I'm a fitter and work with my hands. If I start reading documents my mind goes blank after a few minutes unless they are technical) people more. Electricity is not just a nice to have but is a necessity. Nuclear spent fuel problem has been solved with recycling, 300year storage for fission products (approx 10 half lives and then very little radiation left) and burial for the long lived waste. (long lived because it is not very radioactive) The biggest issue with it is the new fuel is so damn cheap it may not be economic. Same story with wind turbine blades. Denmark has been going down the renewable path a long time but they still have a coal fired plant. (see www.electrictymaps.com) Germany's opposition are talking about restarting some nuclear plants that are still in one piece. There is a plan for large virtual battery's using everybody's home battery. Do we want our grid to reply on the home owner. I know people that are getting so little return on the excess they are putting into the grid while the retailer gets a lot more saying the will turn them off. Energy Australia was looking at doing pumped storage in SA near port Augusta using sea water but there was not enough profit in it. They will probably hang off until the government (taxpayers)give more money to make it more profitable. I am not anti renewables (worked on a wind farm for over 10 years) but they are far from the answer by themselves. Finished now.

There are different parts to the spent fuel. The fission products that is the high level waste which needs to be stored for 10 half lives (about 300 years) and it will be back to background, this is the nasty stuff and is really radioactive but decays reasonably quickly. Unused fuel(uranium 235 and one of the isotopes of plutonium 239?) which can be reused in the reactor. Light water reactors only use about 3 % of this so it can be recycled and the long lived waste which is not very radioactive and can be stored safely underground. You would need to eat this for the radioactivity to hurt you- Alpha radiation. I wouldn't because it is still a heavy metal. This needs spent fuel reprocessing to separate these parts. France currently does this.

The bad spent fuel is only bad for a small number of years. After 300 it is only as radioactive as normal. It gets less radioactive everyday. The long lived spent fuel is only long lived because it is not very radioactive. There is still a lot of potential energy left in the spent fuel that can/should be recycled. Hopefully new reactors will be built with decommissioning in mind. Yes I would quite have a Nuclear spent fuel facility next to me. Not saying we should use NPPs, but it should seriously looked at.

Storing h2 for export is not easy. High pressures and low temps are needed, losses in efficiency. I think Fortescue have given up in NW WA

The salt has a higher boiling point(>1000degrees) then water meaning that the reactor part of the cycle can be kept at or close to atmospheric pressure instead of high pressure to keep the water liquid around the core. (70 bar in a BWR) The salt is then passed through a heat exchanger to turn water to steam for the turbines. Also in the very unlikely event that the reactor leaks it falls on the floor, cools and solidifies instead of flashing to steam.

Just a update on the cost of a wind turbine I got a quote for a new 3.5MW turbine for an insurance company about 4 years ago. The price was 6,000,000 installed. This doesn't include the price of the civil work, switch yard and the KM's of underground cabling needed for the whole farm. A major hurdle in keeping up with the installation of turbine is the supply chain for new turbines.

We need to remember that putting 30% renewables is reasonably easy. As the penetration get more we need to start adding storage and it gets harder as the base load generators start falling off because it is not profitable. Ireland has some pumped hydro that is filled every night and handles the extra demand during the day. Renewable storage that we need has to handle the multiple days of low wind we had NEM wide like we had at the end of May and other times this year. We still don't really know what this is going to cost because it has never been done anywhere in the world at Australia's scale. (large amount of hydro would help but we don't have the resources for this.)

A bit of info how the UAE got over the regulation writing towards the end of the video

I'm hoping it happens. We have been trying for renewables for the last 10-15 years and we are still nowhere near successful. Can see a bit on the availability and generation of wind recently at this link. https://www.joannenova.com.au/2024/06/despite-spending-1-8-trillion-on-clean-energy-last-year-the-world-is-still-81-fossil-fueled-burning-more-than-ever/ Also some interesting info at Watt clarity website particularly about the amount of wind at the end of last month. https://wattclarity.com.au/ Also see https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time for a real time energy use across the NEM. You can see how far we still need to go with renewables and storage. Every GWh of pumped hydro requires 1 GL (1 billion litres) to be pumped to a height of 400m. 1GL is 1km x 1km x1m dam. Roughly 80% round trip efficiency. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map is also an interesting site. Good to keep an eye on France smashing GWs of energy into their neibours most of the time These websites aren't run by the ABC or Murdoch press. I also worked on a windfarm for over 10 years and we quite often constrained or stopped because of excess generation. The synchronous condensers helped this when they came on line. Renewable generation also gets a large scale renewable energy credits for every MW. This is worth about $40/MWh at the moment which means they can generate down to - $40 dollars before they are switched off. (subsidy?)The large scale gas and coal are paying money for each GWh they generate at these times. You can imagine what they charge when the sun goes down to make up for this. I think we will still be seeing energy prices rise for a long time before they fall.