"Peter Dutton has called a press conference for 10am, so it is all official – nuclear is go.
The Coalition teleconference meeting has wrapped up, and the seven sites have been named and it is as we thought: Collie in Western Australia, Mt Piper and Liddell in New South Wales, Callide and Tarong in Queensland, Northern Energy in South Australia and Loy Yang in Victoria."
"There are already issues being identified with the sites – first, the sites would need to be purchased from private operators. There will need to be some pretty major changes to legislation, both state and federally. The Queensland LNP, as recently as yesterday, said it would not lift the nuclear ban for the state, which is a problem given two Queensland reactor sites have been identified by Dutton’s team.
Tarong in Queensland is a particular issue as it doesn’t have a secure water source. In 2006, then-premier Peter Beattie had to propose a waste water pipeline as a last ditch measure to save the plant during a drought."
Okay that’s good, spaces for hydro storage isn’t an issue.
The only problems/questions left are:
1000 MW = 1GW : $1.8B
And your quote says we need 450 GWh of storage.
So 450 x 1.8 = $810B
(I’m assuming I haven’t made a mistake about the 14 hours of storage and the converting between GW and GWh).
Our current GDP is 1.6 trillion.
So we could do it, but it would cost us half of our GDP for one year (but we’d be spreading it out over multiple years).
I’m assuming economies of scale would come into effect, but how much more efficient can you be at making and pouring concrete.
I haven’t found any source on the fiscal cost of the Coalition’s plan (I doubt they even know, and I suspect that they’re just trying to extend the life of coal by relying on delays), but it begs the question:
Would their seven proposed nuclear stations be cheaper than $810 Billion?