This channel should have the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8

TL;DW: Coal, gas lobbies.

hahaha. They're absolute gold!

And equally depressing.

Don't nuclear plants need vast amounts of water? Australia's kinda lacking that in the middle of the country.

Any steam turbine plant needs a cooling system, nuclear or fossil fuel. You don't need potable water, seawater or wastewater can be used for cooling.

I would assume any steam turbine plant needs water for the steam, and that steam is eventually lost through evaporation.

the water in steam plants is a closed loop, and the heat is gathered from condensers. the water is cooled via evaporation through a cooling tower

No, they are typically closed cycle, where the steam is reused.

You just need to cool the steam with ambient air - water is better (more cooling) but hardly required.

There's this really cool invention called the bucket. It lets you recapture steam as it re-condenses.

That's one way to build them, but it's not the only way. They can be built not to need a lot of water, I assume there are some drawbacks.

And it's hardly "vast amounts", it's a small portion of the flow of a small river.

A coal plant also works better with a water source - there's no real difference here, you just need something to cool the steam at the end.

If coal can work in Australia so can nuclear.

The middle of the country has no need for large quantities of power as almost nobody lives there - almost all Australians live on the coasts near to water.

Or, to generalize even further -- the vast majority of Australians live in or around a handful of cities along the southeast coast of the country (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra), or one city on the west coast (Perth).

A map of the country's population density may help bring this into perspective: https://i.redd.it/9mw8ttqqu0b41.jpg

Almost all largely populated areas in Australia are coastal.

No you don't. At high temperatures, you can use air cooling...

Environmental parties in Australia (The Greens and similar) were built on the idea of resisting nuclear and hydroelectric, so you have decades of lobbying against it. Eventually the coal lobbies allied with the more conservative parties as The Greens started pushing for wind/solar. This made sense for the conservative parties as Australia produces nothing of value outside of iron ore and coal.

There is no mainstream party that supports nuclear outside of the libertarian party (which gets single digit percentages at the ballots).

probably cause the entire continent of australia is about as big as the lower 48 states but has only a few more million people than the state of florida. the cities are far more spread out. the investment would be very high and only benefit on small area

Australia has a few large population clusters. Most people don't live in the interior due to the sweltering heat and lack of water. They live on the east/south-east seaboard (Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne-Adelade, clockwise). The reactors can be colocated with the people.

This is correct. 50% of Australia's population live in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane (40% in the first two). The below image shows just how empty the vast majority of Australia really is:

https://i.redd.it/9mw8ttqqu0b41.jpg

Australia has abundant uranium, dry geologically stable uninhabited space, bauxite, iron ore, and thermal and coking coal. Australia really should have developed large steel and aluminum industries powered by coal and uranium, rather than shipping all the raw materials out with no value add.

> Australia really should have developed large steel and aluminum industries powered by coal

We did.

BHP had massive steelworks in Newcastle and Wollongong (~150KM north and south of Sydney), aside from others.

BHP found it was cheaper to do it in other countries where environmental, safety and labour laws weren't such as hassle to deal with (aka: Paying a living wage, avoid killing your workers, and limiting the impact you had on the surrounding population).

Newcastle also had a massive Aluminium smelter - but again, cheaper to do it overseas.

It's a repeating pattern.

We still do.

Alcoa is the largest employer in South Australia, and operates the world's largest integrated bauxite mining and aluminium refinery.

If only we could transmit electricity over long distances.

You realise you're commenting on a post about Canada using Nuclear power, and all of the things you said about Australia also hold true for Canada?

We can transmit electricity over long distances thanks to (U)HVDC and it is more and more applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

Canada has them. Pretty much the same situation

Canada is a very different case: electricity sources are 2/3 renewables, mainly hydro (~60%). Nuclear: ~15%

Canada is a big place. Depends on the area. Ontario, for instance, is almost 60% nuclear. [1] It has by far the lowest CO2 emissions per kWh in the country.

Remember, Ontario is 40% of Canada's population.

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

Do people in Ontario use way less electricity than the rest of the country? If 40% of the people gets 60% of electricity from nuclear, I would expect the whole country to get at least 24% of electricity from nuclear.

Canada has a lot of mining industry, and presumably not in Ontario, perhaps it uses more energy than people?

And a fair bit of hugely energy intensive aluminum refining in Quebec (mostly hydro power)

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... maybe?

Hydro is tough for a lot of reasons. It's pretty ecologically devastating, flooding large regions and turning fish into mulch. It can also produce as much climate impact as a fossil fuel plant - or more - largely due to methane and CO2 emissions from the newly flooded land. [1] I'm not 100% sure where the Quebec hydro mix actually lands due to the significant variability on a plant-by-plant basis, and I don't know if that's factored in or how it was amortized in the StatsCan link - this wholistic analysis is fairly new afaik.

I trust StatsCan though, so your point is well made.

[1] https://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2019/11/15/long-conside...

There are rules (releasing water...) and equipment aiming at reducing harm to aquatic life, even worst cases (migratory fishes). https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/habitat-conservation...

"the rate of emissions per unit of electric generation from hydropower (excluding tropical reservoirs) is much lower than for fossil fuel technologies." Source: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1209/ML12090A850.pdf

This is the study I was referring to re: GHG impact. It depends where and most importantly how long you run the plant. [1]

I'm not really opposed to hydro, I only responded because the impact of the creation of reservoirs is likely not factored into the headline numbers.

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.9b05083

Do you have a source hydro turbines “turning fish in to mulch”? I’ve been around lots of hydro projects and the main hazards for fish seemed to be either dewatering of habitat due to turbines reducing flows too quickly or I heard it is bad for them if the dam uses the spill way and makes the water all aerated

I was being a bit glib there, I just meant that it was bad for the fish. My understanding is the average mortality rate for fish passing through a dam is 1 in 5. [1]

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...

As the comparison was set with Australia (as a whole nation), I considered Canada as such.

This is a little deceptive I think. Electricity only makes up about 17% of canada's energy use, with 75% or so of our total energy demand coming from carbon sources[1]. We mostly use natural gas for heating, while in many other places in the world it's more likely electricity is gonna be used for indoor climate control (AC, heat pumps, even resistive heating).

Yes, as electricity only globally provides at best about 25% of final energy all this is misleading when it comes to the 'big picture'.

Usage profiles are indeed pertinent: Australians probably don't need dissipate energy in order for heating as Canadians do, but even this perspective isn't easy to grasp: heating thanks to gridpower is a thing in some nations without really cold seasons, France being one.

However the subject here is a gridpower-producing nuclear reactor, this IMHO sets a perimeter.

Apart from the whole vastly-differing-amounts-of-water thing.

Nearly all of Australia's population centres are on the coast, Alice Springs being the most notable exception with a population of around 25k. And most of Australia's population is loosely clustered on or near the east coast, which already has a somewhat interconnected power grid (emphasis on sort of).

I'm aware of the population distribution.

Only WA+NT are not connected to the national grid.

The problem with having a nuclear power plant on the coast where there's sufficient reliable water is that nobody wants one in their back yard.

(Yes there's parts of the WA/NT/QLD/SA coastlines where population drops to bugger all, but they're generally less suitable for all sorts of reasons)

Putting them inland where they're still near major interstate grid connections runs into the water problem again.

Which is a problem Canada doesn't have.

The water is closed loop right? Can’t you pump or even deliver the water by truck?

(Sorry if this is really ignorant)

I'm not a Nuclear Power physicist, but you can Google up images of a whole lot of them.

There's at least one common feature that you see in all of them - the giant cooling towers, often pictured emitting large white fluffy steam clouds while they're operating.

They're also all on massive permanent rivers, lakes or the ocean.

Pumping/Delivering water for that purpose is basically not feasible.