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Nuclear too slow to replace coal, and baseload “simply can’t compete” with wind and solar, AEMO boss says (reneweconomy.com.au)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia's ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.

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[–] ThrowawayPermanente 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There are 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There's also a fuckton of gold in the ocean, just waiting for someone to figure out how to filter the entire ocean and pull out the individual atoms. All at a profitable price point.

Same with uranium. Which means it'll never happen.

We will have cracked fusion, mined the far side of the moon for helium3 and brought it back to terra before we crack that nut

For context; we've only mined ~200k tonnes of gold historically with an estimate ~50k tonnes left. The ocean holds 20milion tonnes, worth over $770Trillion and it's not cost effective to get it out.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The environmental damage you will cause by digging shit up from the oceans, if that’s even possible, will be insane. Absolutely insane, completely bonkers, but it does prove once again that nuclear fanbois don’t give a rat’s arse about the environment.

[–] ThrowawayPermanente 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You don't have to dig anything, it's literally in the water, you could filter it out. In theory.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You must be obnoxious on purpose, pulling our legs here, right? By the time we’ve collected enough for one fuel rod, humanity will either be extinct or evolved into some sort of powerful plasma creatures https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater

[–] ThrowawayPermanente 2 points 4 months ago

How did you get that conclusion from the article you linked? The article talks about a material that can recover 6.63 mg/g per week of uranium from seawater, so a ton of it would produce just over 10lbs/week. If you produce a large enough amount of that material and put it to work it will add up to a useful amount of uranium in a short amount of time.