We are talking about nuclear in South Australia. This is good. There is a whole lot of work ahead of us. It is vital for people who feel strongly about the issue to expose themselves to information, to ask the questions, to attenuate signal from noise, to dig deeper.
Robert Stone’s film condenses decades of history and every main aspect of the issue into something extremely watchable. Please consider getting a copy from your favourite vendor.
Google Play
Apple iTunes
Fetch TV
The technical accuracy of Stone’s arguments and that of the claims of his subjects has been painstakingly established. Anyone interested in delving further into pretty much anything upon which Pandora’s Promise touched should definitely head over to Pandora’s Back Pages.
South Australia’s current demand for electricity is a bit over 13 GWh per year. About 500 MWh is contributed by rooftop PV systems. Nearly 3.5 GWh, or 27%, is provided by wind farms.
I for one would like to see most of that dominating 9 GWh of coal and gas capacity replaced by state-of-the-art modern nuclear baseload, such as the Westinghouse AP1000. Just as an example. To illustrate, back-of-coaster style, at a very rough estimate gas contributed 3,183,000 tonnes of CO2 in that period, coal 2,240,000 tonnes, for a total of 5,423,000 tonnes. 5.4 million tonnes of infrared-trapping, ocean-acifidying carbon dioxide. And the nuclear reactor? My maths says it would emit 144 tonnes.
These are IPCC 50th-percentile rough-as-guts numbers, five orders of magnitude is five orders of magnitude. And that’s one way to be serious about climate change.
It would be in no way simple, cheap or rapid – as I said, there’s still a whole heck of a lot of work ahead of us. But, I’m just sayin’. And I’m just offering some of the information for why I’m sayin’. Because I think a whole lot of people are listening.
The Actinide Age 