Climate Change Superthread

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Peter Dutton has outlined his Nuclear Plan he plans to take to the next election, and it’s deadset bonkers. I won’t go too much into why it’s a bad idea, it’s best you read the article and for your own opinions. But in a nutshell.

  • Costs too much to implement
  • Waste has been either overlooked or not looked into seriously
  • it’s not scaleable (like solar, wind, tidal)
  • NIMBY’s will ensure that the plants will be put in poorer areas or wherever it’s politically advantageous.
  • They will take way too long to make an impact of the climate.
  • There are far better solutions for our country.

This is not to say I am anti-nuclear. I am arguing why we need 7 but rather a few to backup renewables. But even then arguments dispute if we need that at all.

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Amy Remekis of The Guardian, with several questions as yet unanswered about the policy:

Will the Coalition release its costings before the election? They will make “other announcements in due course”.

So so far:

  • We don’t know how much it would cost;
  • We don’t know what reactors they would use;
  • We don’t know how they would purchase the privately owned coal stations;
  • We don’t know how they would overcome state objections;
  • We don’t know where the waste would go;
  • We don’t know how they plan on building two of the reactors within the 2035-37 timeline;
  • We don’t know where the funding would come from;
  • There has been no serious consultation with communities; and
  • There has been no serious research undertaken with the sites.
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I know this is a bit from left field but why don’t we burn our garbage?

I had watched a video on how waste is handled in Japan, the focus was on recycling but also covered “well we can’t recycled this, now what?” where they use industrial incinerators to burn the residual waste. In the past the emissions from this was vented into the atmosphere but many are being converted into closed systems with carbon capture systems.

I understand that Japan does this mainly because of the lack of space for landfills, and Australia does not have that problem. But in saying that buried landfill produces methane and allows for microplastics to get into waterways via ground water. I know we have systems to capture the methane for power generation, but part of me wonders how much of the methane actually escapes.

So is incineration a better option?

here is the initial video I watched about Japans Waste System.

:clapper: What Happens to Garbage in Japan