Stuff nuclear... I don’t trust people, engineers or ‘fail safe’ systems.
Pumped hydro and molten salt, can easily powerAus... day and night.
Ok, time to chime in...
Pumped hydro sounds good, but it plays on the economics of the privatised electricity market - pump when demand is low and power prices are cheap, generate when demand and prices are high. The current electricity market makes it viable because you can make money from it, but it's still a process that needs a net energy input to work. The
Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project addresses this by combining pumped hydro with a large scale solar array. This seems like a very viable solution using contemporary technologies, although from a purist 'zero emissions' perspective, I'd argue that our electricity market needs to be more regulated to put the planet first: the temptation for the owner of Kidston is for them to sell solar and hydro power during the day when prices are good, and buy cheap fossil fuel power at night to re-lift the water.
Ignoring long term waste issues, nuclear is obviously cleaner than coal. However, building large power stations away from consumers is old school thinking. In Australia of all places (tyranny of distance), building big base load generation sites hundreds of kilometres from urban centres, with long transmission lines is a legacy approach; it was only done because the power stations needed to be built near the source of energy ie. coal fields, or water in the case of hydro. Now that the generators and transmission networks are largely privatised, the corporate owner puts profits and shareholder returns ahead of reliability and we end up with ageing and failing infrastructure. The future is more decentralised generation, 'micro grids' and the like, where towns and regional communities are self reliant on local generation (be it solar, wind, pumped hydro, gas etc.) but with interconnections to adjacent communities for reliability. Unless you can build small scale nuclear (retask US nuclear warship tech perhaps?), it has no place in the future - big reactors are part of the old grid structure.
Wind is problematic - it's not always windy, turbines impact visual amenity and clobber birds, and there is
evidence to support claims there are negative health impacts from living near wind farms. Hydro seems more innocuous, but flooding river valleys and restricting natural flow in water courses doesn't sit well with me. We're also a flat, dry continent for the most part, so there are only a handful of places where hydro is even possible.
That leaves solar, but it's hardly the least attractive option. The sun is the ultimate solution in nuclear generation (no waste although if she blows we're all fucked); there is enough solar energy coming from the sun to power the planet for the next 5 billion years. In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in a year. We receive roughly 1kW of solar radiation per square metre of surface area under ideal conditions, and PV panels are efficient to the tune of about 20% so we only use a fraction of that energy with current technology. The obvious issue with solar derived electricity is that you need to be able to store it effectively for it to be a viable substitute for CO2 producing generation. The innovation is happening though - residential battery storage, commercial scale molten salt and solar pumped hydro are obvious ones. You can also use solar electricity to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be produced and collected during the day and then run through gas turbines at night - 24/7 solar power in effect. Regardless of the method of storage and delivery, the source is clean and green.
Reducing demand is another way too, but that's a whole other topic that includes overpopulation, deforestation, basic greed and the artificial notion that world economies must continue to grow for us to prosper as a society. And this thread has been hijacked enough.
So... apparently reusable shopping bags are making us sick now:
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...k/news-story/e994b4ca811a0c9af4c9948c50b37a26