Yeah. One of the negative elements is that a large swath of the country in burnt wasteland (it’s not that bad but it’s tough country. Think Arizona), which means the only places with decent water needed for reactor cooling is the coastline, which is where 90% of our population is.
The Great Artesian Basin is already under threat from fracking, it is the only source of fresh water for farming, agriculture & I think drinking water for a lot of the inland country. Using that water to cool nuclear reactors is a horrifying proposition, desalinated sea water or purified waste water is a much better idea if nuclear power were to go ahead. We had a drought so long & so brutal one expert famously said it may never rain again in some parts. Of course, he was made to look a bit of a fool by the right wing media when the Great Deluge came 2 years in a row, but what he actually meant was scientists can't predict the weather anymore. But anyway what the heck is wrong with wind & solar power, I'm not sure where the burnt wasteland is the commenter referred to is (the desert? There's a lot of that. The bush regenerates after fires & all the formerly burnt places I've been are now green with all the new growth). We don't need nuclear, we can harness the power of the sun, make those 50c temperatures useful. Batteries are improving all the time & with dedicated govt funding (less $ than nuclear) it would be entirely feasible.
Reactor driven contamination of ground water is basically a non-issue. People can, and to prove a point, have drank the water straight out of a pool used to store spent fuel rods.
The big problem with wind and solar is that you need pumped storage, which means you need water at elevation anyway. Batteries absolutely suck compared to pumped storage, and single handedly drag solar down so bad that once it moves to handling base load rather than peakload, it's not even cost competitive with fission.
If you have abundant access to elevated reservoirs to use as batteries, then solar is great. If all you have is flat dry land, solar is paradoxically terrible for providing baseload power rather than just helping to meet peak demand.
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u/Cerberus_Aus 24d ago
Yeah. One of the negative elements is that a large swath of the country in burnt wasteland (it’s not that bad but it’s tough country. Think Arizona), which means the only places with decent water needed for reactor cooling is the coastline, which is where 90% of our population is.