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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Nevermind. I was wrong. Seawater also works. There are even power plants that are air-cooled using giant radiators. But it's definitely disadvantageous to build a nuclear power plant in the middle of a desert with no abundant source of water.

There's one in the US south-west that cools by evaporating all the local sewage water, but that doesn't exactly scale well.

Higher reactor temps will eventually make the cold side less important. Delta-Ts on current reactors are at "1800s steam engine" level, terrible thermal efficiency. The Chinese are developing high temp air-cooled reactors for their northern desert regions for that reason, maybe the ozzies could piggyback off that.

All that said eastern Australia is in an amazing position for HVDC solar transmission from the deserts, which will undermine nuclear economics. Unless they can't be built because of some sacred spraypaint can worshipped by the local tribes.

Well probably, yes. And I'd assume that a hot desert(like 90% of Australia's territory) is not a great place for air cooling. But is there any reason you can't build reactors on the coast, where the vast majority of Australians actually live, or at least near enough to it to pipe seawater in?

Yeah even if the coast is relatively dense by Australian standards there's still huge chunks of the Eastern coastline that's essentially undeveloped. Latrobe-Gippsland has a large coal mining presence already and about 6.5 people per square KM (which is concentrated into a few urban areas)

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