Wednesday 16th of April 2025
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

on the fast track to a 100% GREEN renewable energy future.....

Gas is the talk of the town, while nuclear is not, but a massive increase in solar power generation capacity has already put Australia on the fast track to a 100% renewable energy future. Solar cell engineer Andrew Blakers explains.

An academic living in cold Canberra retired his gas heaters a few years ago and installed electric heat pumps for space and water heating. His gas bill went to zero. He also bought an electric vehicle, so his petrol bill went to zero.

 

Forget nuclear, Australia is on fast lane to 100pc renewables

    by Andrew Blakers

 

He then installed rooftop solar panels that export enough solar electricity to the grid to pay for electricity imports at night, so his electricity bill also went to zero. That Canberra academic will get his money back from these energy investments in about eight years.

I am that academic.

Solar energy is causing the fastest energy change in history. Along with support from wind energy, it offers unlimited, cheap, clean and reliable energy forever.

With energy storage effectively a problem solved, the required raw materials impossible to exhaust — despite some misconceptions in the community — and an Australian transition gathering pace,

solar and wind are becoming a superhighway to a future of 100 percent renewable energy.

While the technological arguments for solar and wind power are compelling, it’s clear renewables have to overcome obstacles.

One is the division over the impact of the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure. It has divided affected communities across the country and needs to be addressed. Generous compensation and effective education about large regional economic opportunities are good ways forward.

There is also the political debate about what form Australia’s energy transition should take.

Solar surge

Yet, beyond those issues, solar offers unlimited energy for billions of years and provides the cheapest energy in history with zero greenhouse gases, zero smog and zero water consumption.

That explains why solar energy generation is growing tenfold each decade and, with support from wind, dominates global power station construction markets, while global nuclear electricity generation has been static for 30 years and is largely irrelevant.

In 2024, twice as much new solar generation capacity — about 560 gigawatts — was added compared with all other systems put together. Wind, hydro, coal, gas and nuclear added up to about 280 gigawatts.

There will be more global solar generation capacity in 2030 than everything else combined, assuming current growth rates continue. Solar generation will pass wind and nuclear generation this year and should catch coal generation around 2031.

About 37 percent of Australia’s electricity already comes from solar and wind, with an additional 6 percent from hydroelectric power stations that were built decades ago.

More solar energy is generated per person in Australia than in any other country.

Solar is by far the best method of removing fossil fuels, which cause three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, from the economy.

In Australia, 99 percent of new generation capacity installed since 2015 has been solar and wind, and it is all private money. The energy market is saying very clearly that solar and wind have won the energy race and energy policies are consistent with reaching the government target of 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030.

Solar on the roof coupled with energy storage in a hot water tank, an EV battery and a home battery allows a family to ride through interruptions to gas, petrol and electricity supply and that energy resilience can apply at domestic, city, state and national levels.

Managing the balance

Balancing high levels of solar and wind energy to avoid supply interruptions is straightforward at low cost using off-the-shelf technology available from vast production lines. New transmission brings new solar and wind power into the cities and also smooths out the vagaries of local weather by transmitting solar and wind electricity to where it is needed.

For example, if it is raining in Victoria and sunny in New South Wales, then electricity can be transmitted south. Storage comprises batteries for short-term storage of a few hours and pumped hydro energy storage for hours to days.

Together, batteries and pumped hydro solve the energy storage issues.

Pumped hydro energy storage provides about 95 percent of global energy storage. It typically comprises two reservoirs located a few kilometres apart and with an altitude difference of between 500 and 1,000 metres.

On sunny or windy days, renewable sources like solar or wind power are used to pump water into the uphill reservoir, and during the night, the water flows back downhill through the turbine to recover the stored energy.

The same water can go up and down between the reservoirs for 100 years. Global potential pumped hydro energy storage is equivalent to two trillion electric vehicle batteries.

Australia has about 300 times more pumped hydro energy storage potential than needed to support 100 percent renewable electricity. It already has three pumped hydro systems, with two more under construction.

Globally, the world has more than 820,000 potential pumped hydro sites, which is about 200 times more than we need to support a 100 percent renewable energy system.

When eventually complete, Snowy 2.0 will provide 85 percent of energy storage in the national energy market at a cost 10 times lower than equivalent batteries and with a lifetime that is five times longer.

Myths and misconceptions

There are those — often vested interests — who throw up arguments against solar energy, regardless of what the facts say about its merits.

Here are a few:

  • It takes up valuable farmland. Most of the area in solar and wind farms remains in use for agriculture. The area withdrawn from agriculture to generate all our energy from solar and wind is very small, equating to about the size of a large living room per person.
  • The rural landscape can’t fit in any more solar and wind farms. Heat maps developed by researchers at the Australian National University show the vast number of good locations for solar and wind farms.
  • Renewable infrastructure is a blight on the landscape. Hosts of solar and wind farms (and their neighbours) are generously compensated, while hosts of transmission lines are paid more than $200,000 per km. All the solar farms, wind farms, transmission and pumped hydro are in regional areas, which means that vast amounts of money and employment are flowing into regional areas. Solar farms are usually invisible from other properties. Open-cut roads, buildings, open-cut coal mines and gas fields are also visible in the landscape. People in cities have a far more cluttered view from their windows than rural people.
  • We will run out of critical minerals. No critical minerals are required, only substitutable minerals. Solar panels require silicon for the solar cells, glass, plastic and conductors, which are made from extremely abundant materials.
  • We will drown in solar panel waste. The amount of solar panel waste generated when all energy (not just electricity) comes from solar amounts to about 16 kg per person per year (mostly glass). Panel waste is a small and solvable problem.

https://michaelwest.com.au/forget-nuclear-australia-is-on-fast-lane-to-100pc-renewables-solar/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

nuke prob....

Nuclear Waste: An Unsolvable Problem even in nuclear power pioneer Germany [2013 — still current]
Even though the nuclear crisis in Japan – which rang alarm bells around the world about the impact of radioactive decay leaking – may have led Thailand to review a plan to build a nuclear power plant, and to postpone the decision for another three years, the question of a nuclear power plant does not stop at only the issue of safety. For Thailand,  the questions to consider are the costs which are high and whether investing in such technology is worthwhile, given our economic variables. Moreover, the calculation of the costs ad expenses has to embrace the whole system.


Over the past few months or so, we have found no clear answer as to the enormity of material damage as a consequence of the leakage of radioactive decay from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. This is because both TEPCO and the Japanese Government have not yet completed their process of problem solving. The extent of damages from these nuclear leakages might be one possibility that might recur at nuclear power plants all over the world.
The problem that will surely follow after any decision to build a nuclear power plant is the elimination of the eventual nuclear waste. To this day, no country in the world has been able to eliminate permanently the waste from used nuclear rods and other radioactive decay. The Thai agencies responsible for this still have yet to find a clear answer, triggering a current of speculation that one possible option should be the use of a potash mine in the Northeast for keeping these nuclear residues.
Current practice among countries with nuclear power plants mostly calls for geologic disposal. In other words, nuclear residues are kept in hollows several hundred metres under ground to prevent leakage in future. But this method is causing rows in some countries, for instance in Germany, which is facing a dilemma from keeping nuclear waste in a salt mine due to the seeping of non-saline water into the mine, which may lead to the leakage of radioactive decay into the surrounding environment and community.
This article recounts the lessons learned from a visit to the salt mine ASSE II last year.
This mine, first built in 1906 at 750 meters below the earth surface but now abandoned, was chosen by the German Government in 1960 as a permanent storage for nuclear waste. This stemmed from the belief that salt or glutinous earth possesses properties that can prevent the spread of radioactivity. At that time, Germans had not yet seriously studied the risks and dangers of the disposal of nuclear waste.
From 1967 to 1978 residues from nuclear facilities from all over Germany were transported to the ASSE II mine. It now holds 125,000 barrels of low-level and 1,300 barrels of medium-level nuclear radioactive waste.
Ten years later, water was found to have seeped into the mine chambers. Some layers of salt were eroded, causing cracks in the salt rock which partially collapsed. The nuclear waste containers were covered by the crumbled salt rock and saline water. This was considered a very hazardous situation because the metal barrels would soon be corroded, leading to radioactive material being leaked and contaminating the earth and underground water. Left unattended the mine could collapse and release the radioactive radon gas into the atmosphere.


The Helmholtz Association, a state-sponsored scientific research organization tasked with managing the nuclear waste depository, failed to make the development public until 2008. This led to renewed discontent among residents in nearby communities who have protested against the depository since it was first proposed. As a result, the management of ASSE II was re-assigned to another state organization.
Fixing the problem proved to be a headache. The first thing the German experts had to do to prevent the mine from collapsing was to inject concrete into the cracks in the salt rock and pump out the water as well as install a ventilation system to protect operators against exposure to radon. The next step was to remove the buried waste containers, some of which were already damaged and leaking radioactive material, and contaminated salt and soil from the mine. The operation was extremely complex having to deal with radioactive material in the form of solid, liquid and gas at the depth of 750 m and required a huge amount of expense.
Reinhard Gerndt, for 40 years the core leader of opponents to the disposal of nuclear waste at ASSE II, recalled that the authorities originally issued a technical report proposing the closure of the salt mine and turned it into a permanent nuclear waste storage.  But the discovery of water seeping into the mine indicated that the data in the report was inaccurate, sparking currents of opposition among the residents.
The protest made the news headlines, drawing the attention of the general public to this problem. Pressure movements grew to such an extent that the German government had to assign a new agency to take charge of the matter to placate the opposition. But villagers in nearby communities had been affected by the depreciation of their properties and the risk of radioactive decay contaminating water sources, especially if the authorities tried to extract nuclear substances by diluting the salt in the mine with water. In a worst case scenario, there might be contamination within two years. But the residents expect contamination to occur certainly within the next 30 years.


Currently the management and care of the ASSE II  comes under an agency called Landesamt fur Bergbau und Geologie (LBEG) or State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology, which has been mandated by the German government to solve the problem of water seeping into the salt mine.The short-term solution to the problem is to pour concrete into the cracks in the salt rock in order to stop top layers of salt from sinking further. However, nobody knows for how long this short-term solution will be able to keep the problem at bay. The agency is studying the possibility of transporting nuclear waste out of ASSE II before they are confronted with the problem of the salt mine sinking.
Annette Paritz, an official from the radioactivity protection department under the Environment Ministry who has been working on the problem of ASSE II since 2009, said once the decision is made to move nuclear waste somewhere else, the agency will have to face the big problem of how to manage safely the existing nuclear waste.


A more acute question is to where would the waste moved because there exists not a single disposal site that can store nuclear waste safely and permanently. Even now, there is no way of speculating for how many years it will take to solve the problems of water seeping into the mine, and the removal of nuclear waste from ASSE II.
At present an estimated 80 million euros a year is needed to implement the immediate solution. However, to solve the problems in the long term by removing the entire lot of nuclear waste from ASSE II safety would require a huge budget, in terms of research, equipment, manpower, and the transportation of waste. The burden of these expenses inevitably lies on the shoulders of the German government and people.


An important lesson to learn from Germany is not only a technicalone, that is how to prevent the spread of radiation in nuclear waste disposal but how to deal with organizational problems as well.
Annette Paritz further explained that all these problems stemmed from a lack of comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the risks that might imperil the country in the future. This mine had kept the nuclear waste containers under ground for more than 30 years. The crumbled salt covering the barrels had hardened over time, making it hard to get to the barrels. This problem was compounded by the lack of knowledge on the part of the responsible authorities at the time resulting in the lack of care in stacking up the barrels so that some of them were damaged and leaked. In addition, there had been no planning for the removal of waste when problems arose. Therefore to remove the waste, all the barrels together with the contaminated salt will have to be removed.
As of now, Germany still has no clear answer on the matter of permanent storage for nuclear waste. The complicated problem at the ASSE II mine involves only low- and medium-level radioactive waste. The problem is definitely more complex for the highly radioactive spent fuels that it has accumulated generated over four decades of nuclear plant operation. Although the country has decided to abandon nuclear power completely in 11 years, the accumulating nuclear waste would remain hazardous for an indefinite period.
Some German activist groups have proposed the storing of nuclear waste  above ground for the sake of transparency and to allow monitoring. But this method also carries risks and it looks as if the problem will remain a problem for the Germans to spend some time yet putting heads together to solve.


For Thailand, if a decision is made to build nuclear power plants, we may have to ask ourselves whether we already have in hand clear exits on the matter of storing nuclear waste which our children and grandchildren will have to deal with in future for hundreds or even tens of thousands of years.
More than that, are Thai people ready to bear the burden of hidden costs arising from the risks of having nuclear power plants and radioactive wastes that will follow?
If the answers to these questions are simply an attempt to pass on the problem to the countries selling uranium to Thailand, or equivocal as usual, then the postponement of a decision on the installation of nuclear power plants for three years may not be enough a time span for the future of the next generations which will have to bear the burdens.


https://th.boell.org/en/2013/10/15/nuclear-waste-unsolvable-problem