> If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down
Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.
Seems to work just fine? This will of course penetrate down to less ideal locations as costs continue to decline.
> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.
> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).
Your examples don’t support your point. 60% renewable isn’t enough and they aren’t even into the hardest part of replacing the base load at that level.
> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030
That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.
1 to 60% was possible in 15 years. All the while we have had these cost curves for wind and solar. [1] So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?
Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?
>So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?
Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.
The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.
>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.
It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?
When was this crane thing? It would have been long after the reactor had reached cold shutdown, so what exactly was the accident it was supposed to have almost caused?
Not the OP but the crane incident was shortly after the first incident. The higher ups wanted to use the polar crane to lift a bunch of radioactive debris out of the core that almost melted down. At least one of the workers (Rick Parks) ended up whistleblowing over it because the crane was the same one that was there during the incident and most likely had taken damage. He was concerned the crane would fail while lifting the radioactive debris out (around 1000 lbs of it) and fall back onto the core. Check out the Netflix document Meltdown: Three mile Island for more info.
Yeah, that "shortly after"... the reactor top wasn't lifted off until FIVE YEARS after the accident.
So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.
They added large amounts of borate to the water before opening the top. There was no way it was going to go critical (and if it had, it would at best have been a steam explosion, not a nuclear bomb, as the chain reaction if it could have occurred at all would have been with slow thermal neutrons.)
Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.