Nuclear IS expensive.
Sadly it seems the main reason it is expensive is an unbelievable amount of over-regulation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ts_Forgone

Sadly I don't think there is any likelihood of politics changing to the degree where people will hold nuclear to the same safety standards as other more dangerous forms of generation (i.e all the others).

Pumped hydro is great, way better than batteries, but it requires the right geology, and availability of water.

Green is right, calling landlines in specific electorates was very handy.

However ...



This is a sweeping statement.

There are other ways to skin the cat

The above graph shows that the 20% of the polling booths with the fewest people with a graduate degree saw a swing of nearly 7% to the Coalition. On the other end of the spectrum, the most educated fifth of polling booths- actually swung 0.5% towards Labor (two party preferred).

How I did it: first I got this morning’s results for each polling booth in the country from the electoral commission and looked at the population in the Microburb directly surrounding it, making the assumption that if you live within a few blocks of a polling booth, that will be the one you vote at.

Then I gave it over to the machine to find the drivers of the swing. Out of the many tens of thousands of potential predictors I’ve collected over the years, university education came up #1. It has a correlation of -0.4 with a negligible P value (6061 polling booths could be matched and had enough data).

A pattern of bias among experts

The core problem is that when humans ask specific questions in surveys or of databases, they are starting with bias. Whereas the “big data” approach to throw in as much data as possible and let the machine find the patterns.

In this case, survey targets no longer reliably answer land line calls and even when called on their mobiles, most don’t agree to be surveyed. So it was left to the experts to try and make the surveys representative. Chances are they weren’t entirely empirical about this and relied on their intuition.

My work analysing the data of big Australian consumer brands has routinely uncovered this systematic bias: market researchers and analysts make sense of numbers using a mix of stats and intuition. That intuition is always informed by their own life and experiences. They are mostly cosmopolitan, don’t encounter uneducated people so their voice is not properly extracted or smoothed over as noise.

There are many factors at play of course and I’m certainly not saying that all the Left has to do is send people to university. In the corporate world, I encounter lots of assumptions about them like that they are simply poorer versions of us and all they want to do is be like us. But these forgotten people have their own values, and don’t understand the world in the same way.

Nor am I saying intuition is worth nothing. It’s very valuable in coming up with hypotheses. But eventually these assumptions are tested in the marketplace and the polling booth.

The two Australias

In predicting behaviour these days, my models end up dividing Australia into two classes: a university educated, affluent, multicultural, cosmopolitan one on one side and on the other have to be very delicately described – the people who go against the brand’s values. But every mainstream brand should strive to understand the latter, not least ones that are supposed to champion the working class.

Nuclear's cost is down to decommissioning and commissioning, and you are right, the costs there are due to regulation. It has tough regulation for a reason, without that regulation, the safety standards that it now achieves wouldn't be there. And the cost of a failure of a nuclear plant is exponentially larger than the cost of failure of say a wind farm. A wind turbine might catch fire, and then that needs to be replaced. A meltdown in a nuclear facility can render a large area uninhabitable for millennia.

ANU did a study and found around 25,000 suitable sites in Australia from a geological perspective. Also dont get caught up with the water issue, a pumped hydro system is a closed system, it doesnt require a river, it requires a basin (and this is one that can be filled) to create the storage at the top of a hill and one at the bottom. It is incredibly well suited to Australia as the geology is not seismic and there is ample land available.

Sure you can say the woke bit wasn't an australian issue but is the rest of my point not understanding the situation here?

It's fine if they don't want to listen - but why should we subsidise their unsustainable mining and farming practices if we are going to use that line if argument?

I don't doubt all of these stoic Qlders have no problems accepting farming grants and Cyclone assistance when they need it?

If you live in the, Expanding, Cyclone zone, tough - you won't be lectured.....

That is the language of Scomo

Yeah, but you post that to everyone who doesn't agree with you.
Besides that, I'm surprised you can remember what i post, as it is usually only around test time or RWC.

Farva,

What is the Greens policy on transitioning workers in coal mining regions, and their assets (the family home, for example) to the places where there will be new, green, jobs?


What about people who do not want to go? What about the communities that exist now?


These are complex and difficult problems. Not amenable to simple, easy to remember, solutions.

It's fine if they don't want to listen - but why should we subsidise their unsustainable mining and farming practices if we are going to use that line if argument?

Albo or Jim Chalmers?


If Albo gets it he will lose the next election, so they might just as well roll the dice and go for the bright shiny errr Queenslander.

Megatrends trump politics and renewable energy is where it's slowly but surely going.

It's become clear that the ALP's policy agenda was far too big for the Australian people. Life is pretty good for most people in this country and the ALP misread the mood for change. Instead of proposing sweeping changes across a range of areas, they should have concentrated on just one or two priorities. Similar to what Rudd did in 20017. For example, if they had run just on climate change, and introducing the NEG, I think they would have won office. There was a mood for real action on climate change. But this sentiment was diluted by concerns about changes to negative gearing, franking credits, superannuation etc which played into concerns about the ALP's spending and allowed Morrison to run the mother of all scare campaigns. This meant that lots of people who want real action on climate change ended up voting against the the ALP.

I want Albanese to become leader, and with the right policy agenda he can win govt in three years. Morrison is a skilled politican and orator, but so too is Albo. This govt lacks talent, lacks a mandate to do anything significant and is still outdated and divided.

Yeah, a lot of attention has been placed on the current government's love affair with coal but the market itself has been moving at a rate that will see Australia hit 50% renewables by 2025... link.

Interesting to read your claim that this government lacks talent. Even more remarkable when the opposition lost the un-loseable election. Not just lost but got hammered. I will never forget this excerpt from a recent exchange on national television:

I can't see another coal power station ever being built, so renewables with a load of gas turbines to fill the holes is most likely, BP & the frackers et al will be the winners