Terry McCrann: Gas is well and truly nuked
No Prime Minister, gas is not the answer to Australia’s electricity generation mess. In a post-bushfire Australia, nuclear is, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Sorry Prime Minister, gas in not the answer to Australia’s electricity generation mess – a mess, which is sliding seemingly inexorably and unstoppably to a full-blown Venezuelan (or German) style disaster.
Yes, it is part of the answer.
Until we start tearing down the useless bird and bat-slicing wind turbines and the, mostly bird-frying solar panels – the bats tend not to be out when the panels are, for want of a better word, “working” – gas will be a critical part of “the answer”.
As SA shows. We could all certainly chant: when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, there better be gas for lighting.
Indeed, gas would continue to be a critical part if we ever got back to a rational future where our electricity grid was built on the cheap and reliable base-load generation, the way it used to be before we were all driven collectively insane by “climate change”.
Yes, Virginia, “climate change” must be real; there’s the proof.
Until the laws of physics are repealed, there are only three options for base-load power generation, of which gas would be not only the worst option, but a particularly inept option. The other two are coal and nuclear.
And of the three, only one does not emit the evil carbon dioxide.
You have clearly abandoned the idea of building even one coal-fired power station – and through the 2020s we are going to need at least three, going on six-to-10 new base-load stations, each the size of a Hazelwood or an Eraring.
There’s also a little problem with gas. You actually have to have it; and as you correctly point out, state governments, across what’s laughably called the political spectrum, prohibit its discovery, far less its development.
But it might not be “discoverable” anyway.
Walking into parliament with a lump of coal did not age well. Do you really think doing a replay with a gas cylinder is going to be transformative?
In the wake of the bushfires, utterly irrational as it might well be, it is now quite simply a case of TINA. There Is No Alternative to nuclear.
Take it right up to “Each-way Albo” and “de(nier) Natale”. If they really want to walk away from fossil fuels, they have to be prepared to embrace nuclear.
This should be beyond political opportunism and energy fantasies.