Vegan,pro-nuclear,maths,cyclist. Author of GreenJacked! about obsolete science behind anti-nuclear movement. https://teapaw.org/t.co/ybPquTgb3L
Adelaide
Joined September 2009
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Could you run an aluminium smelter with wind, solar and batteries? Let's suppose we tried to do it in South Australia. We have thousands of MW of utility scale wind and solar. Could we run a smelter with it? How may batteries would we need?
open.substack.com/pub/geoffr…
A nuclear waste repository only has to last ~500 years (less than the age of the Pantheon), after that the gamma is close to background, so the stuff is only dangerous if you ingest it, making it far safer than many things you can buy at Bunnings/Walmart etc.
Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza is around 4500 years old.
#Nuclear waste repositories will have to contain their contents for more than 20 times longer.’
Hard to guarantee 100,000 years.
In fact digging it back up again in 40 years might be more accurate.
neimagazine.com/decommission…
You only have to contain nuclear waste for ~500 years (the Pantheon has stood for longer), after that, the gamma radiation has decayed (close to background) and all that is left is alpha and beta . So the waste is then less dangerous than many things you can buy at Bunnings.
When people like @ShackelWill advocate for Nuclear is the way forward, strange how they never mention what to do with the waste.
Geoff Russell Ⓥ retweeted
Traditionally, in water-based reactors, you have to make the water very pressurized to prevent it from boiling.
That means you need very thick, heavy forged vessels. 25 times too heavy to ship on normal roads. 6 to 12 months to make. Only a few companies in the world do it.
We use liquid metal [sodium] as our coolant. It has a high boiling point and very high thermal conductivity.
It’s not pressurized. So our vessels have very thin walls. Less than an inch thick, instead of 6 to 12 inches. And that lets us make them with standard machinery, a plate roller, welding, waterjet.
You get vessels in days, not months, and we ship them on normal roads.
Excerpt from @MattLoszak on Climate Confident
What's the eco-footprint of a data centre? That has little to do with the actual building(s) or the water. A 1,000 MW data centre in Australia may occupy 150 ha, but need 6,600 ha of solar panels & ~1,000 large wind turbines (batteries not included). geoffrussell.substack.com/p/…
Geoff Russell Ⓥ retweeted
Yesterday I appeared before the House of Commons Natural Resources committee to make the case for a Canadian nuclear industrial strategy centred on CANDU.
As Washington mobilizes behind Westinghouse and the AP1000, Canada faces a defining choice: will we champion our own reactor technology or help build an American industrial enterprise with Canadian shareholders?
My five-minute testimony is below.
For the full transcript and deeper analysis, visit my Subst@ck, Decouple Media. Link in the comments.
Geoff Russell Ⓥ retweeted
It has been a consistent signal for over a decade. @alpsa to its credit has not participated in the knee-jerk electoral anti-nuclear politicking that plagues other states.
South Australians accross the political spectrum are supportive of nuclear power.
63% of South Australians, including 58% of Labor voters support it according to polling we commissioned with YouGov.
⚛️ Take Action & Learn More
lifttheban.com.au
In most Aus states, electricity for proposed #datacentre pipelines is similar to or exceeds total state grid capacity. The environmental footprint of these centres isn't about water use but electricity requirements. Here's an SA case study. geoffrussell.substack.com/p/…
The 1,200 MW Tungkillo SA Data Centre. Water, noise and electricity. What is the fuss about?
geoffrussell.substack.com/p/…
Almost noon in Europe and Germany's 200 gigawatts of wind and solar "generators" is generating 27 gigawatts of electricity. France is keeping the espresso machines hot to the tune of a couple of nukes worth of electricity to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and England. 1/2
Why do anti-nuclear people bang on about the 0.5% of output lost during the year because of temperature limits on discharged cooling water into rivers in France? Solar panels also have heat problems, but their output drops by considerably more. 1 / 3
For example, panels lose about 0.35% of maximum power for each deg C above 25C. So on a 40 degree day in Adelaide, a 440 Watt panel would have a max output of 374 Watts. And over the fleet per year? Gemini Argon estimated losses of about 7-8 percent over the fleet. 2/3
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It's very calm in Western Europe. Germany, without its nukes, is burning wood, coal and gas. Importing about 1 nukes worth from France who is exporting about 7.5 nukes worth to a bunch of countries. So renewable Germany is emitting 576 gms-CO2/kwh compared to 61 from France.
I love that Electricity Map is putting numbers on its bars, now it's easier to quantify just how utterly dependent most of Europe is on French nuclear plants. At the moment it is running almost 4 reactors for the Italians, a couple of the Brits, 1.5 for the Germans ... etc. 1/2
Geoff Russell Ⓥ retweeted
The entirely unsurprising erosion of what new entrant grid batteries can expect to earn has come around shockingly fast... and before annual NEM share has even hit 2%.
Geoff Russell Ⓥ retweeted
The treated water Massachusetts won't let Holtec discharge: ~800,000 gallons containing less than 12 curies of tritium—about as much as a self illuminating tritium exit sign (~11.5 Ci).
Math: 12 Ci in 790,000 gallons = ~148,000 Bq/L. Using the ICRP 72 adult ingestion-dose coefficient (1.8×10⁻¹¹ Sv/Bq), that's 0.0027 mSv/L. A single-view chest X-ray is ~0.02 mSv, equivalent to drinking about 2 gallons of this water undiluted.
The ban is pure theater. It needlessly makes nuclear more expensive and slows the transition to a cleaner electricity grid. A federal judge struck down New York's similar ban in 2025 as preempted by federal law, though New York appealed. Massachusetts relies on a different law, so we'll see how that plays out. Meanwhile, the lawyers will keep cashing the checks!
