Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are the future of reliable, abundant energy—and they run circles around solar farms in every critical category, according to US action group the Grassroots Army.
The SMRs sound like a better alternative to Peter Dutton’s plan to send Australia even deeper into debt with five large reactors that would cost an estimated $600 billion. They would be built on the sites of five current major coal-fired power stations – Liddell and Mount Piper in NSW, Tarong and Callide in Queensland, and Loy Yang in Victoria.
The Coalition does, however, propose SMRs at the Northern Power Station in South Australia and Muja Power Station in Western Australia. Why not other locations?
A major advantage of SMRs over large reactors is that prefabricated units of SMRs can be manufactured and then shipped and installed on site, making them more affordable to build than large power reactors, which can face construction delays and large cost blowouts.
SMRs by contrast offer savings in cost and construction time, and can be deployed incrementally to match increasing energy demand, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Grassroots Army should have included wind farms in its spiel because they share the same basic problem as solar farms – low energy density.
As pointed out by the US activists, a single SMR can power an entire city on a fraction of the land required for a solar farm. For example, the 300-megawatt SMR requires less than 10 acres, while a solar farm generating the same output demands over 2000 acres, land that could be used for farming, housing, or industry.
Unlike “unreliables”, SMRs provide consistent, 24×7 energy. As we know, solar panels stop producing the moment the sun sets, forcing reliance on expensive and inefficient battery storage, complicated salt-heat storage systems or backup fossil fuels. Meanwhile, SMRs deliver constant, uninterrupted power rain or shine, day or night.
It’s common sense, which seems beyond present-day bureaucracies in Canberra and the state capitals.
If carbon dioxide is seen as a problem (which it isn’t) economic planners can give themselves the warm fuzzies by knowing that SMRs generate power without producing CO₂ emissions and don’t require the massive mining operations needed for solar panels, which rely on rare earth metals from places like China.
Unlike solar panels, which have a lifespan of 20-30 years and create mountains of toxic waste, SMRs can operate for decades with minimal waste and zero reliance on foreign supply chains.
As mentioned previously, the matter of energy density, that is how many households can be powered from a given unit of energy, one fuel load in an SMR can provide years of power, while solar panels must be constantly maintained, cleaned, and replaced.
SMRs also keep running when extreme weather such as snowstorms or cyclones hit, and solar panels and wind turbines become useless.
“SMRs aren’t just a better energy solution; they’re the only realistic path to long-term energy independence and stability,” says Grassroots Army.
“If America (read Australia) wants energy security, environmental responsibility, and economic prosperity, we need nuclear innovation, not sprawling solar fields that eat up our land and drain our resources.”
Amazing – getting some truth now about electric vehicles from mainstream media. Channel 7 spotlight Brisbane – airing as I write this Sunday night 6 April, 2025 – absolutely shocking as we all knew – Environmental destruction and workers treated like slaves are being killed, injured, maimed, sickened – EVERYONE STOP BUYING ELECTRIC CARS IMMEDIATELY – YOU WERE TOLD IT WAS ALL FOR A CLAIMED CLIMATE CRISIS WHICH IS A TOTAL SCAM.
Re “That’s the way it is in the Wild Wild West, when you’re a Fourth World Nation utterly hijacked by paedophile Satanists and marked for extermination.”
Frighteningly, it’s now a GLOBAL phenomenon in the West! Look at Britain, France, Germany, US, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Canada….
All taken over by Young Global Leaders groomed into positions of power and influence. All driving the same fkd up agendas for the destruction of our human normality and existence.
Surely no normal people thing it’s all a matter of chance or coincidence?
Surely normal people have figured out that with robotics and AI most of the world’s population will no longer be needed and will present a hazard to the power and control of the “You Will Own Nothing” but you will be happy [in heaven no doubt] brigade.
daviddd2 said – “… Point about stupidity is that we’re happy to slash our wrists by not using our coal ourselves but happy to export OUR coal to others to use to THEIR heart’s content…”
And our gas. Don’t forget the natural gas. Gas is illegal now in Victoria. And the most expensive gas on Earth anywhere else in Australia if you can get your hands on it. That’s why we ship ALL our gas off overseas, for FREE. Australia is the world’s LARGEST natural gas exporter, because we give it all away for FREE. Because we’re not allowed to use it here in Australia, because “Climate Crisis”.
And our Uranium. Don’t forget the Uranium. Just like all our iron ore and bauxite and everything else we dig out of the ground, we ship it all off overseas, because we’re not allowed to use it here in Australia, and we wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it even if we were allowed to use it.
And our eggs. Don’t forget the eggs. We’re not allowed to eat eggs here in Australia, because “deadly Bird Flu”. That’s why we have to kill every chicken and sparrow this side of Mars, to save us all from the “deadly Bird Flu”.
And the Honey. Don’t forget the Honey. We’re not allowed to eat Honey here in Australia, because F*CK KNOWS WHY. That’s why we have to burn every beehive this side of F*CKING PLUTO, to save us all from the deadly F*CK KNOWS WHAT.
And the beef and lamb and pork and goat and milk and cheese and anything remotely associated with animals of any kind. Don’t forget all of that. We’re not allowed to have any of that here in Australia. That’s why we have to poison and inject and kill every living thing within twenty light years of Earth, because F*CKING LUCIFERIAN GENOCIDAL GLOBALIST BS.
And because our entire craven paid-off sold-out Treasonous fake corporate “government” and the hordes of self-annointed ruling “elites” and self-serving unelected beauracrats here in Australia, mass-murdering baby-eating Lucifrian psychopaths one and all, are being paid to kill us all off, real slow and sadistic like.
That’s the way it is in the Wild Wild West, when you’re a Fourth World Nation utterly hijacked by paedophile Satanists and marked for extermination.
Pacific islanders believe that God is in charge of Climate Change and I agree with them –
Climate change: a sign of the ‘End Times’
“……….… These things are because we’re living in the Last Days. So, there is not much we can do about it. That’s why these things are happening.
… I’m thinking it is the end of the world and God will come. Big man ba come [big man [God or Jesus] will return]. The world is ending – that is why the climate is changing. The only person with control of this is God.
…it’s the Creator himself that brings these changes. I can try my best to change it but I can’t. Everything happens according to God’s will.
While more research is needed to see how widespread these views are, we know that this is a perception shared among other Pacific island countries, such as Tuvalu, Fiji, and in Tonga, where it appears to be widely believed that only God can reverse the impacts of climate change and natural hazards because He created this universe.
The primary responses to the changes observed by the participants in this study are to attend church and reflect upon their personal relationship with God. If they have a good relationship with God, it is thought that their garden will be blessed and result in a good and healthy harvest…….”
https://devpolicy.org/climate-change-a-sign-of-the-end-times-20200918/
Luke 21:10–11 — King James Version (KJV 1900)
10 Then said he unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: 11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.
Point about stupidity is that we’re happy to slash our wrists by not using our coal ourselves but happy to export OUR coal to others to use to THEIR heart’s content.
Clearly we’re NOT INTERESTED in REALITY but in fake morality, righteousness, fantasy and hypocrisy some players have dropped in our ears. Who the fk do we think we’re kidding!!! We can’t survive on a diet of that sht.
We’ll be gone long before any “man made” climate change takes anyone out. Huge climate change has occurred throughout history. i.e. Ice Age and Global re Warming .
There’ll be no change to that. Simples.
Small modular reactors are not new. They are a scaled down and simplified version of the normal nuclear reactor, and they still have the same pros and cons, namely water supply, safety, containment, radioactivity and the problem of disposal of used fuel rods. They may be cheaper than a full-blown nuclear power station, but it’s still an expensive way to produce steam for a turbine to power an electricity generator. Carbon emissions are the last thing that should be considered, as it is not only a scam but an emotional appeal to those who have no understanding of what is involved.
WTF is wrong with us folks? Coal is good enough for the US, China, India, Japan and Russia but not for us?
Are we insane or mentally deficient? The best coal in the world! But it’s not good enough for us? What!? Pure insanity! Madness!
Whoever cancelled our coal here in Oz needs to be arrested, flogged and gaoled for a criminal act against the Australian state and people.
It’s a complete, fkd up fraud which we’re buying into like stunned mullets. Meanwhile, somebody is making a motza and a half out of it. .
We think we’re helping the world by slashing our wrists? Since when did we start tolerating sht like that in this country? Not to mention the corrupt BS merchants behind it.
Charlie Clelland: “Cold Fusion is one of those things that never lived up to the initial hype …”
The hype related to the idea of a “cold” rather than “hot” nuclear reaction. I doubt anyone expected entire cities to be powered by it but it showed much promise for modular power supplies.
Pons and Fleischmann continued their work in south Spain in a Japanese funded research laboratory and around 1999 were ready to go with their “cold fusion” battery.
The head of Nuclear Research in France admitted on ABC’s Quantum at the time that he said “cold fusion” was fake at first but then he did the tests himself and confirmed it was a real nuclear reaction albeit with mediocre results. But he also grudgingly said his results did not compare with the phenomenal results a nuclear lab in Yugoslavia was getting, suggesting Pons and Fleischmann were really onto something.
Nothing more was heard since then so it may have been shut down and stopped from release by vested interests. Think Tesla, wireless electricity and why he barely even rated a mention and why nobody had heard of him for ages!!!!
Nah.
Chernobyl was a totally crap design which would not have been licensed in the West. The operators got the reactor into a state where it just exploded.
Fukushima daiichi was a failure by Tepco to build high enough bund walls to prevent the tsunami destroying the back up diesel generators. The neighbouring plant Fukushima dainu managed to avoid the meltdowns by bringing power inti th plant and keeping the cooling pumps going.
Three Mile Island was a maintenance screw up where a critical valve in the cooling circuits was left closed. The reactor operators weren’t trained to recognise the reactor going into a meltdown. TMI did not leak any radioactive material outside the containment vessel.
Unsuspecting Innocent Bystander
“They thought nuclear power was a good idea at Chernobyl, Fukeshima and Three Mile Island too ..”
I believe all three were sabotage.
So sick of clueless politicians thinking first of getting themselves elected instead of what is in the best interests of Australia now and into the future … 50+ years ahead.
We have over 1,000 years of coal reserves, yet refuse to use it for ourselves but happy to export it for others to use.
How dumb can we be? Let’s get back to building a HELE coal plant in each state to begin with. Tell the Greens and anyone who thinks that CO2 is a toxin, to get nicked!!! Short term we only have gas to fill our needs (despite Vic refusing to drill) and nuclear has had endless years of protests which has stopped any construction.
Just GET BACK TO COAL!!! It is the most sensible and cheapest thing to do!
I think you’ll find possible Hugh cost blow outs are precisely the attraction.
Cold Fusion is one of those things that never lived up to the initial hype but there is a real effect which, because we don’t understand the details of how it works, seems to be just beyond our capabilities to turn into something useful.
Gotta wonder why they killed off “cold fusion”. It was ready to go 20 years ago. The inventors were nominated for a Nobel Prize until they were quickly shuffled off into no man land and dubbed charlatans when their work was actually verified.
A garden shed sized battery box capable of supplying average house needs indefinitely at zero running cost. Too cheap, too accessible and too difficult to control and monopolise?
Another Tesla-like product that is not easily metered and financially exploitable, not to mention not capable of leaving us in the dark on somebody’s whim.
To all you politicians who are supposed to be working for us, the electors. Why not for once listen to us and do our bidding. Australia, not like most other countries does not as yet suffer iced up and overcast skies for long periods. We have an abundance of coal to provide for electricity (and steel producing) for many years to come AND the infrastructure already in place. All that is required is maintenance and any additional expansion of service to newly developed areas. No new infrastructure cost involved, saving billions (or maybe trillions) of dollars of borrowed credit from overseas.
For once let Australia do its own thing and tell the United Nations and W.E.F. to get nicked. We know what is best for us. Let the “pretend greenies” stuff up other countries but ignore them here.
In eons to come if ever we run short of coal and gas, that is the time to turn to nuclear power. That is unless our politicians have by that time given away the rights to our own nuclear elements, such as uranium and thorium to others.
They thought nuclear power was a good idea at Chernobyl, Fukeshema and Three Mile Island too ..
Thorium (Th232) sounds very attractive but there are many engineering problems to solve. Th232 is not fissile but will absorb a neutron and undergo a two step process to make U233 which is fissile. The question is how is the U233 handled – the Indians are making U233 in their (originally) Canadian designed reactors from Thorium and then separating the U233 for fabrication into fuel. Molten salt reactors can burn the U233 formed directly.
There is a big gotcha with Thorium – in the process of making U233 a small % is produced as U232 – this isn’t a problem but a couple of the decay products of U232 are hard Gamma ray emitters. This means a requirement for very heavy shielding where U232 is produced. Exactly how a U233 from TH232 spearation plant would work is an open quesiton.
Even so – there are some attractive features of Th232 as fuel. All of the Th232 is burned unlike the 3% or so in conventional light water reactors. U233 is said to produce smaller amounts of heavy transuranic elements by neutron capture – these are the ones that the greenies get upset about – half lives longer than the age of the universe , etc. The “waste” from U233 fission is mostly just fission products which have a decay to background of about 300 years – considering that gravestones survive for >300 years and can still be read it suggests the waste is not a major issue in terms of encapsulation and warning future generations.
Wait till we the people find out about Thorium 🌞🫡💥
We must be the most dumb ass peeps ever. We accepted ditching the lifeblood of our self sufficiency, our manufacturing sector, by removing protective tariffs on our manufactured goods. All in the interest of “free trade”, “level playing fields”, etc.
Noble cliches and ideological mantras which we were suckered into until our lifeblood was sucked out of us. Something like the “privatisation” binge we had.
And guess what? We now no longer need any of the cliches and ideological mantras. It’s OK to have tariffs! It’s good to have tariffs, it’s good to protect yourselves and your families.
It’s also OK to protect flagging American manufacturing with tariffs. And its now OK to protect our NOW NON EXISTENT Australian manufacturing with tariffs as well. rotfl.
Gotta luv that warm fuzzy feeling of being gaslit, spooned, loved and cared for by our politician lovers, eh possums?
I heard we still have plenty of coal and it produces cheap reliable energy which is the biggest influence on cost of living and a necessity to revive manufacturing.
It sounds too good to be true.
Nuclear power is a bad idea. It is very expensive, and there would be huge protests no matter where they tried to dump the spent radiocative fuel rods, let alone if any Govt attempted to build nuclear power stations. Powerhouse economies like China run hundreds of coal-fired power stations. Australia has an abundent supply of clean coal. And modern coal power stations have much lower emissions using the latest technology. Unless we want to be a banana republic with wind turbines and solar farms destroying our natural environment and eco system (incl: endangered animals), and want transmission lines and the easements required for them locking out prime farming land and creating a huge eyesore, then it’s time to dump Labor’s destructive UN Agenda 2030 plans and the Liberal Party’s nuclear fantasy, and go back to cheap, reliable, clean coal and build new SOTA baseload coal as well as gas-fired power stations, and upgrade the turbines in existing hydro electric power stations using the latest US technology which significantly increases the efficiency and power output of the turbines.
Lee Kuan Yew said that Australia would become the poor white trash of Asia.
He was mostly right, except that it’ll be the poor brown trash of Asia, whites aren’t even going to be a relevant Australian demographic soon enough.
Snuff Scotty and AnAL and Penny Wong and Lurch are making sure of that, folks, so smile and hold onto your butt cheeks because we’re almost there. Well, not us exactly, because we won’t be there.
I mentioned modular nuclear and the article Cairns News did on the back-of-the-truck GE reactor article recently published here, to Peter Dutton’s office today. They couldn’t wait to get off the phone, so Dutton’s pledges are looking, at least to me, seriously dubious. Like any election promise, the proof is in the pudding that never eventuates. So? No pudding is likely. No custard either.
Is the $600 Billion the cost for the Victorian CFMEU to build the plants? The South Koreans have recently completed 4 x 1400 MW reactors in the UAE with all up cost for the four of $24.2 Billion. Rosatom has been offering end to end packages – build, train, supply fuel, help operate and take back waste fuel rods for 1300 MW plants for about $5 -6 Billion (depends on location).
The South Korean and Russian reactors are high pressure, water moderated reactors and suffer from the complexity of high pressure engineering and multiple safety systems since the reactors are not walk away safe.
The Indonesians are considering a license for the first of 9 molten salt reactors.
These plants are rated at 500 MW and are to be built in South Korean shipyards.
The advantage of molten salt reactors is a much higher operating temperature (more efficient) and near complete fuel burnup without requiring fuel rods.
Copenhagen Atomics is working on molten salt reactors with the whole reactor and generator fitting into a standard 40foot container with first delivery about 2030. The design of the 20 to 50MW plants is designed to make power generation flexible since the modules can be assembled into plants to meet demand.
Terrapower is also building a 345MW Sodium cooled reactor in Kemmerer, WY. The $4 Billion reactor has a unique capability to store heat in a molten salt container and produce 500 MW for some hours. The Terrapower is a high neutron energy reactor and can burn U238 and Plutonium.
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And another thing, folks, if necessary these so-called Small Modular Reactors can be installed deep underground, out of sight and not taking up valuable real estate, but still producing 24/7/365.
Try doing that with any other kind of energy.
But hey folks, let’s be realistic and look at Australia’s policy track record, we already know that as soon as we get these bastards installed, we’ll be banned from using them. Probably have to rack up a trillion dollar debt to lay undersea power cables to export 100% of the power produced to Singapore or Denpasar instead, for free.
Instead of waiting forever for a nuke power plant to be signed for by the government to be constructed and then the wait until it is completed I propose as a taxpayer who is having to pay for it ,I reckon it would be far cheaper and quicker to buy a sea going plant from the Russians who have constructed one and are building more so that to me would be a more viable solution .
Just tie it up at any wharf that is connected to the grid through their ship to shore power system and there are no problems with cooling as it is immersed in water and a cafe built next to it would be good for the tourists who will travel far to see it .
Think of having one in each State capital city
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