It's OK to be White and other dogwhistles - the Australian politics thread

Its in a National seat, and they said they were going to put nuclear reactors in Nationals seats!

I hope to goodness every single Barnaby press conference is inundated with demands for progress on the nuclear reactor for New England. Every. Single. One.

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This is abundantly clear to anyone who gives it a second’s thought, but they will have swathes of the media backing said lie, so it may just work.

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Unfortunately, this is taking the Trump route - tell them a lie often enough until people just believe it
 especially if you get a sector of media sowing doubt in people’s minds - remember the Voice referendum? Covid conspiracies anyone?

Any reputable energy organisation has stated that:

  1. it’s too expensive in Australia, where renewables are much cheaper.
  2. it’s not firming generation 
 it is baseload, so they need to run all the time, which will just make the solar peak in the middle of the day even harder to manage (ie. The market will end up having more instances of negative prices in the middle of the day and home solar owners will go nuts because they can’t turn off and will have to pay for the benefit of producing energy).
  3. it’s prohibited in Australia right now. Anyone that deals with Govts and red tape will know it will take ages to get everyone in Federal and State Govts to agree to Clift the restriction, then you gotta build it
  4. anyone that’s done a reno or works in infrastructure knows how hard it is to build anything here - when these old power stations were built we didn’t have the stringent environmental and aboriginal regulations we have now. See Snowy 2.0, Sydney Metro, WestConnex, etc etc
  5. and that’s not even going into the question of what to do with the waste, or (slim) risk of malfunction
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The Liberals have also intentionally inundated the news cycle daily with scandals and disinformation for the last 15 years. It makes most people turn off, so there are a lot of people who are tuned out to the full scale of their incompetence and social engineering. It has been very costly to our nation in that time period and will continue to do so until we election-bomb them into the stone age.

The problem is, Labor are really not much better at the moment.

Can’t agree with these two points.

Granted it’s prohibited, but it’ll be Dutton pushing it through, so they’ll raise the prohibition

In terms of the work, I checked and average time to build a plant is 8.5 years at the moment. They’re giving 10 years, which is probably about right, considering they’ll most likely subbie it out to some US or German company.

That timeframe is based on the assumption we have a nuclear power industry already set up, which we most certainly do not. There’s simply no way it is going to take even 10 years to build a reactor in the first couple of instances.

That might be average time to build in a place that has an existing nuclear industry and doesn’t have the Industrial Relations, Environmental, Aboriginal, etc restrictions that we do. We are starting from scratch and assumes that you can start to build it in 2025 when you don’t even have the start of a regulatory framework to cater for nuclear. It took ages for the energy market to cater for renewables when they first came in - it’s complex and there’s lots of players that have sunk costs that would be looking to be compensated for changes to the market that weren’t in place when they made an investment decision.

I’m not across the restrictions on nuclear, so you could be right
. But I would be surprised if it could be lifted by the Govt without support of both Houses of Parliament

Its 18.5 years to first power to the grid by their own timeline, it’s a fucking fantasy spun by lying cunts.

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But Nationals Leader David Littleproud confirmed yesterday the party’s proposed nuclear plants would not live or die on the consent of host communities, correcting his deputy Perin Davey who said the Coalition would not proceed with nuclear in towns that were adamantly opposed.
“She is not correct and we made this very clear. [Opposition Leader] Peter Dutton and David Littleproud as part of a Coalition government are prepared to make the tough decisions in the national interest,” Mr Littleproud told ABC’s Afternoon Briefing.
“Ultimately, we need strong leadership in this country to have the courage of its convictions to follow through and to make the tough calls in the nation’s interest.”

Yes, one must definitely have conviction, especially when you have said one thing, followed by something completely different because “strong leadership”.

Unfortunately, for a significant portion of the voting population, all they will hear is “cheaper electricity bills”.
Don’t discount the timing of this announcement coming right as the country enters the coldest time of the year and people need to heat their houses. You can all but guarantee the “can’t afford to heat my house and/or eat” headlines being pushed in the next month or so from the Murdoch press.

Basically, people are stupid. If they hear something enough then they will begin to believe it. See the Voice referendum.

Electricity bills are going out at the moment, yeah?

I think I got mine last week, so that would make sense for the timing.

I think everyone has missed the point of Dutton’s Nuclear proposal. It isn’t to build a nuclear power industry in the future, it’s to justify doing nothing now. That is all that the deniers have ever been doing ever since the first proposal by Reagan for a carbon trading scheme was scrapped due to lobbying by the fossil fuel industry back in the 1980s.

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100%. Last couple of cycles the version of doing nothing was about pushing the non commercially existent hydrogen solution.

Why 18.5 years though? Looking at stats, 85% of reactors were built and commissioned in a period of under 10 years. If they’re looking at smaller/modular rectors, an experienced country could build them in 3 years or so. I understand we have zero expertise in making nuclear reactors, but you would assume this would be outsourced to the myriad of companies that have a shit tonne of experience. If they’re looking at building in areas where you already have power plants that would be decommissioned, you wouldn’t have power infrastructure issues per sei either. Granted you would need water supplies etc.

We already have our own uranium sources, so the biggest issue would be enrichment as well as waste storage.

Bearing in mind, I used to be a decent proponent of nuclear power vs coal/gas however considering renewables are cheaper, it’s obviously a ridiculously silly option to go for. Im more just arguing the timelines than anything else.

One of our directors put it fairly succinctly on LinkedIn this week:

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You’re looking at two data points out of over 440


These are some decent stats and split between total builds and also builds after 1990. If you take builds after 1990, there hasn’t been a single one that took longer than 15 years. This isn’t taking into account current builds. Hinkley Point C is slated to finish in 2027, but will most likely over run.

With the Finland one, that was pure and horrible management on the team that was building the reactor. It’s currently the biggest reactor in Europe and third biggest in the world. The company that was managing the build have never done the full start to finish on Nuclear Reactors and have zero experts in place, they had to train people up. Further to that, the key staff in the company had zero experience in large project builds


In short, you can’t just cherry pick two reactors and suggest that that’s the norm, otherwise I could very easily point out that Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant was built in 3.25 years and Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant Reactor took 4.1 years to build


It would absolutely not surprise me in the slightest if that scenario was repeated by one of the two main political parties here. There’s actually no political party in Australia I’d trust to build a functional and competent nuclear industry here.

You’re comparing building a facility with implementing a working nuclear power solution.

Is it though? Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is saying they started construction of the first reaction in 1980 and it was commissioned in 1985. I know i’m using one example but doesn’t sound like it took them that long