Thread: Cheap diesel for my Disco, but the Gov't won't invest.

its funny how people are led to believe certain things. I have worked in a uranium mine and the ore has a lower radioactivity than granite. This is a fact. Correctly handled, no person should even be subjected to radioactivity in a nuclear plant. it would need to be strategically sighted in australia due to its high water demand for cooling but one plant of the correct size could service the whole country.....errrrr.....thats if our seven different countries could agree on its distribution.....

Originally Posted by Hymie

Why don't they just fire up the coal to oil plant that ran in Morwell in the '80s?

The one they just started pulling down?

Originally Posted by mcrover

In reality......and I mean reality and not some green point of view or non green point of view, Nuclear fuel is clean........after it has been mined and treated etc.......until it is not usable anymore.

Nothing that produces electricity is totally clean, it all has a carbon/environmental foot print.

a. Solar uses a lot of chemicals and precious metals/materials to produce the panels and outputs are not great for the cost of the systems

b. Wind power has a visual environmental impact (which I personally find not all that important) as well as the amount of materials and space required to build them and the output is not huge and reliant on the wind being just right to work.

c. Nuclear uses a lot of energy space and materials to mine the uranium and then it takes more energy to enrich it but then puts out many more times that energy without producing any more environmental pollutants (unless an incident happens and then it is much much worse) until the end of it's useful life though in the end, the used fuel rods are tiny in comparison to the amount of carbon etc that has been produced by a coal station in the same output/time.

d. Hydroelectric has a massive environmental cost to build and then that is also reliant on drought which in Australia is a major negative.

The best thing about Hydroelectric is that we need to store water anyway so they may as well use the gravitational power to produce electricity while providing electricity to the grid.

As far as producing liquid fuel from coal, it is dirty, too dirty to be used mainstream.

Look at Alaska....they convert peat to diesel and it is one of the highest poluting industries in the world but with the price of fuel how it is it is still worth big business doing it at the moment.

I think that Nuclear is the way to go and I wouldn't care if they put it behind my house....at least if something went wrong I wouldn't have to care about it for very long in that case but I do think we have the technology to make it safe and if nth Korea and Russia can do it fairly safely with their bodgy gov's then I think we should be able to manage it with ours.

You didn't mention geo-thermal, solar-thermal, wave energy or tidal energy all of which are clean energy and when they have a disaster, which will happen. You can still live next door.

Not a fan of nuclear under any circumstances.

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

You didn't mention geo-thermal, solar-thermal, wave energy or tidal energy all of which are clean energy and when they have a disaster, which will happen. You can still live next door.

Not a fan of nuclear under any circumstances.

agree.

And if some do want to go a nuclear style route, Thorium is far, far safer than uranium. (no plutonium waste for starters)
Scientist urges switch to thorium. 14/04/2006. ABC News Online
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/thorium/2008/07/02/
We lead the world in thorium fusion technology, it is far more abundant in nature than uranium, we have the worlds major deposits and it has a half life measured in years, not hundreds of thousands of years, yet our previous Federal Govt showed no interest.
Why ?
Because Bonsai's mates (Ron Walker, et al) were intent on developing a uranium based nuclear power industry in Oz.