Originally Posted By: Shannow
used_Oil,
I'm hopeful that Oz will go nuclear at some stage. There's only one power reactor in the country (not ours), and two research, but we are one of the major miners/exporters, and have huge thorium reserves also.
Coal is strange at the moment.
Brown you would never export, they are still digging up trees while mining the stuff, it's 60% water, low CV, and low ash (because it hasn't been cooked long enough).
During our carbon tax experiment, the Govt that implemented it proved that they were not genuine, by using it as a social engineering exercise in giving welfare recipients 2-3 times their carbon costs), and gave the brown coalers $B's in subsidies, which displaced black coalers from the market.
With globl black coal prices dropping, local black coal mines are going into "care and maintenance" for the next decade.
As to Gas, Australia is about to start massive natural gas exports, 4-5 times the volume of our domestic (including power) consumption, with no gas held for Australians. So we as home heaters are competing with global LNG.
Conservatives are saying that's the free market, and consumers need to make rational economic decisions with their cooking and heating, but we are the only country in the world that hasn't reserved some for the domestic market.(*)
Lead to some of the biggest gas stations being mothballed last year...they re-opened as the coal seam gas is coming on stream before the export facilities, so gas is having a last hoorah.
Interesting how THAT free market is working, as domestic NG prices are equivalent in heating value to unleaded petrol. I have seen coal fires popping back up here in town, one neighbour is removing his gas furnace and going to wood heat (we are considering same in our renovations), and another is heating on bottled propane, so that he buys the fuel up front rather than getting a $1,500 quarterly bill in winter.
Do you think if you go Nuclear it will be a Canadian CANDU reactor? The ACR-1000 looks like a promising choice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
Originally Posted By: Wikipedia
AECL had been working on a design known as the ACR-700, using elements of the latest versions of the CANDU 6 and CANDU 9, with a design power of 700 MWe.[25] During the nuclear renaissance, the upscaling seen in the earlier years re-expressed itself, and the ACR-700 was developed into the 1200 MWe ACR-1000. ACR-1000 is the next-generation (officially, "Generation III+") CANDU technology which makes some significant modifications to the existing CANDU design.[36]
The main change, and the most radical among the CANDU generations, is the use of pressurized light water as the coolant. This significantly reduces the cost of implementing the primary cooling loop, which no longer has to be filled with expensive heavy water. The ACR-1000 uses about 1/3rd the heavy water needed in earlier generation designs. It also eliminates tritium production in the coolant loop, the major source of tritium leaks in operational CANDU designs. The redesign also allows for a slightly negative void reactivity, a major design goal of all GenIII+ machines.[36]
However, the design also requires the use of slightly enriched uranium, enriched by about 1 or 2%. The main reason for this is to increase the burn-up ratio, allowing bundles to remain in the reactor longer, so that only a third as much spent fuel is produced. This also has effects on operational costs and timetables, as the refuelling frequency is reduced. As is the case with earlier CANDU designs, the ACR-1000 also offers online refuelling.[36]
Outside of the reactor, the ACR-1000 has a number of design changes that are expected to dramatically lower capital and operational costs. Primary among these changes is the design lifetime of 60 years, which dramatically lowers the price of the electricity generated over the lifetime of the plant. The design also has an expected capacity factor of 90%. Higher pressure steam generators and turbines improve efficiency downstream of the reactor.[36]
Many of the operational design changes were also applied to the existing CANDU 6 to produce the Enhanced CANDU 6. Also known as CANDU 6e or EC 6, this was an evolutionary upgrade of the CANDU 6 design with a gross output of 740 MWe per unit. The reactors are designed with a lifetime of over fifty years, with a mid-life program to replace some of the key components e.g. the fuel channels. The projected average annual capacity factor is more than ninety percent. Improvements to construction techniques (including modular, open-top assembly) decrease construction costs. The CANDU 6e is designed to operate at power settings as low as 50%, allowing them to adjust to load demand much better than the previous designs.