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Please In My Backyard

By Eric McErlain
A town in Australia lobbies for a nuclear power plant.

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Comments

Randal Leavitt said…
A town with a clean energy generator based on fission buried under city hall, a plasma torch so that a garbage dump is not needed, and parking meters with plugs for charging electric cars, will be a good place for clean and quiet industry. Seems like a model that many places would like to follow.
July 12, 2006 at 1:41 AM
Anonymous said…
Unfortunately, it's rather unlikely that anybody would be interested in building a nuclear plant in Bourke without substantial financial incentives, and unless those financial incentives weren't available anywhere else.

Bourke is a town of 4,000 people 800 kilometres (roughly 500 miles) away from Sydney. It is 370 kilometres from the nearest town of any size, Dubbo, which is a town of about 36,000 people.

I'm no electrical engineer, but even allowing for the flat terrain and lack of settlement transmission lines of that length would be a significant fraction of the cost of a power plant itself.

It would be about the equivalent of plonking a nuclear reactor halfway between Calgary and Saskatoon - a great way to deal with the NIMBY factor, but not terribly economically sensible.
July 12, 2006 at 12:57 PM
Anonymous said…
What about a small reactor like the Toshiba 4S envisioned for Galena, Alaska?

More info:
Article at Wikipedia
July 13, 2006 at 11:57 AM
Anonymous said…
Anonymous, that kind of thing might be practical for local generation. What they were proposing was a large-scale plant to supply, essentially, the Sydney market, to take advantage of the relative lack of a NIMBY factor and the, um, ample supply of available labor in the town.
July 14, 2006 at 11:28 AM
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