Second blast at NZ coal mine

[Jovial Monk]

Cheaper options?

I did specify 4th Gen. Very little waste.

[Showman]

Go more wind farms and solar,,a bank of wind farms can generate heaps of power as long as theres wind i guess.

Must be plenty of suitable windy places in NZ of course you would lose coal mine jobs but everyone can go on the dole like Tasmanians do or immigrate to Australia like the other 95% of kiwis.

[Jovial Monk]

We don’t have time. A solar generator would have to be an array 20Km by 20KM.

Maybe possible but the idiotic Greens opposed the CPRS so renewable energy projects were put on hold in the absence of a carbon price.

Nope, we need 4th Gen nuclear.

[Outlaw Yogi]

Cheaper options?

Yes .. every other method of generating electricity is cheaper than nuke.

I did specify 4th Gen. Very little waste.

Industry hype as always. Fast breeder waste is plutonium, y'know weapons grade bomb material, and is deadly for 25,000 years.

From my experience, the only people who support nuclear power are those who don't understand it and industry players seeking to get their mits in the govt subsidy honey pot.

A litany of nuclear accidents contradicts Obama's claims
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/japan/2009 ... laims.html

President Obama was clearly woefully misinformed when he stated recently that Japan has employed “nuclear energy in a safe and effective way.” Japan has a history of tragic and fatal accidents at its nuclear power facilities. In 1995, the Monju fast breeder reactor suffered a serious fire and sodium leak and was closed. In 1997, a waste-storage reprocessing plant at the Tokai facility burned and exploded. In 1999, there was a criticality accident at the Tokaimura uranium enrichment facility that killed two workers and exposed many hundreds of local residents to radioactivity. In 2007, an earthquake resulted in the release of radioactivity into the ocean from the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world’s largest with seven reactors. Five of the seven reactors are still closed.

Inside EPA: "Agencies Struggle To Craft Offsite Cleanup Plan For Nuclear Power Accidents"
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2010/ ... lan-f.html

[Outlaw Yogi]

For the unaware MOX is a mix of uranium and plutonium

Risks of long‐term irradiated MOX fuel storage in pools on‐site at nuclear power plants
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/Ri ... 20Mode.pdf

[Outlaw Yogi]

http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/NuclearP ... ations.pdf

The result of the failure of breeder reactor technology to come to technical and economic maturity
is that almost the entire waste stream remains to be managed even in the country that has the most
extensive plutonium (mixed oxide) fuel use – France. Only about one percent of the recovered
materials at the reprocessing plant at La Hague have actually been reused as fuel. And France has
generated added radioactive wastes contaminated with plutonium and other transuranic
radionuclides to concentrations high enough to require them to be disposed of in a deep geologic
repository along with vitrified high-level waste. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates
that the volume of high-level and transuranic radioactive wastes to be disposed of in a repository
as a result of the use of a reprocessing cycle in thermal reactors would be about six times the
volume of direct disposal of spent fuel.6

... reprocessing has turned out to be more-proliferation prone and expensive than
acknowledged during the days of greater enthusiasm for that technology. The surplus plutonium
in the commercial sector today rivals that of all the weapons plutonium in the nuclear warheads of
all nuclear weapon states combined.

Further down the page are cost comparrisons of using nuke versus using gas or wind for CO2 emmission reduction purposes.

[Outlaw Yogi]

aussie asked about options

Geo thermal & Hot rock
Solar thermal
Solar PV (cheapest over all)
Solar towers (hot wind tunnel with turbines)
Wind, large and small depending on application
Maglev Turbines.

And probably some others slipping my mind.
Personally I like Solar thermal because its easier to generate higher voltages with turbines.
Metalurgy of magnets has improved in recent years, the neodymium/iron/boron magnets are stronger and lighter.
Turning up in more products too. Have a look and compare a current Bosche falcon starter motor with one from a few years ago. They're 2/3rds the diameter and more powerful than the older ones.

Reactors take forever to build, always come with cost blowouts, never live up to industry claims, cost a fortune to run, and then another fortune for decommissioning, and makes a metagenic mess for eons.

[Showman]

I guess at the end of the day folks don't look at options its a case of we have coal here lets mine it and provide employment for the community and if we don't mine it some other bugger will.

Whats going to happen to the mine now i wonder ? If there cleaned it up and fixed things it would be hard to work down there knowing near 30 people have died ,i would expect to see it permantly shut down.

[Jovial Monk]

Forget geothermal: the overburden is too fractured so steam is lost in the rock layers above the hot rocks.

Forget wind. Have a look at output figures some time for solar, wind, 4thGen nuclear. Spain has a huge solar thermal installation, supplies a pitiful fraction of Spain’s electricity.

We should have started much, much earlier with solar. Only nuclear is left, that takes 15 years so we need to get started.

Any waste, the deep lead/silver/zinc mines at Broken Hill are ideal places to store it. Would provide employment there when the last mine stops working.

I used to be against nuclear, but we need to get emissions down quickly and nuclear is now the only way to do that. Oh yeah, and thorium will be the fuel. We got lots of thorium.

[mantra]

No Monk. Most thinking people want to use renewables and geothermal, wind, solar etc. are the way of the future.

This government promised us in 2007 that we would be world leaders in innovative technology, but there's no sign of it so far with pro-nuclear ministers like Martin Ferguson spruiking NP as though his life depended on it.

We have to reduce our coal mining obviously regardless of any initial cost and NP is not modern technology - it is becoming dated, but still being pushed by the World Nuclear Association which comprises the big end of town.

The tragedy in New Zealand was created through bad work practise and insufficient safety regulations. Coal is dirty and damaging to the environment - but so is NP if you bothered to look into the mining, processing, enriching, waste disposal, decommissioning etc. The cost is far greater than is sold to us by the pro-nuclear lobby.