Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Timeline - World History Documentaries" channel.

I'm Australian but studied aerospace engineering in America (U. Illinois). I work in industrial control systems and am FORMALLY qualified in functional safety. A number of years ago I worked with a technician who was American and his first career was as a nuclear power plant operator on American Aircraft Carriers. I have worked in Australian nuclear industry on the mining side which included doing their formal introduction into the nuclear fuel cycle. So I am fairly well educated, qualified and I've been around people who know their stuff. There's quite a few things you are absolutely right about and few things you have wrong and I don't mean some of the obvious typographical errors. You are absolutely right they needed to have a legitimate engineer who actually knows their subject on this, but I can say that about so many documentaries on technology these days its impossible to count them. That's just part of the overall failure of our media to ACURATELY INFORMING people. I'll start with Al Gore - misguided is a better term. He meant well but unfortunately missed the boat when it came to actual solutions. But that's one of the worlds biggest problems an oversupply of people who think describing a problem is also a solution to that problem. People like AL Gore need to say their thing ASK for solutions and then STFU. The horrible effect he, the fossil fuel industry, the nuclear industry, wind industry, solar industry, Greenpeace and others have had is they argued and argued and never solved anything. You mention Diablo Canyon - right now in Australia there are over 25 million ignorant people who have no idea how much trouble we are in. We have over 20 ageing power stations and NO PLANS to replace any of them. When I first became aware of the problem a few years ago I checked and its pretty much the same everywhere across the developed world. Its not a Californian problem its an everywhere problem. On Nuclear power. You are absolutely right about the intention of building nuclear reactors for plutonium production but please DON'T BS - America has done exactly the same and so has Britain and France and China and others. Where do you think they all got the plutonium from? Britain's entire first gen nuclear plants were built for plutonium production the electrical power they produced was supposed to be a cheap by-product to help run industry. IT WASN'T CHEAP and those costs help ruin their industries. You are absolutely right that water moderated reactors are safer than graphite moderated reactors, BUT you are totally wrong to claim or allude that they are totally safe. Anybody trained in FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) knows they are NOT FAIL SAFE and that was proven at Fukushima. Its the fundamental difference between water moderated and molten salt reactors which are FAIL SAFE. You are totally wrong to claim that spent fuel from water moderated reactors cannot be used for nuclear weapons production. Any engineer who has ever looked into nuclear fuel cycles or physicist will tell you that's JUST WRONG. Please feel free to correct or clarify that statement. It might be a lot harder or more expensive but its certainly possible to make nuclear weapons from ANY spent fuel rods irrespective of the reactor type and you should know that. You are absolutely right that spent fuel is not used up its just fuel that no longer emits enough energy to drive the power generating process. However what you failed to mention is that the reprocessing of spent fuel is where plutonium is extracted. Its not the benign process that the nuclear industry proclaims. Also no matter how many times you re-process nuclear fuel you are still left with a gigantic waste problem. You mention Diablo Canyon but failed to mention San Onofre where there is over 1,700 tons of spent fuel rods sitting in a pool beneath the old reactor. One of the biggest issue in the world is that NOBODY is dealing with the more than 120,000 tons of spent fuel rods let alone all of the other materials that have to be dealt with to clean up the first generation of nuclear facilities. And that leads to your next problem. You are totally right about the issues with solar panels and toxic waster but you totally ignore the issues with nuclear waste and site clean up costs. Most solar panels are made with Gallium Arsenide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide) like so many other electronic components and any engineer who's looked knows what the toxic issues are. Solar panels is a waste issue the entire world is ignoring just like they are hiding the nuclear clean up costs. The only country that has so far released any details of nuclear clean up costs is Britain and they stopped after the costs blew out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Recent_site_management I will grant that at least you haven't been dishonest about the storage issue as others have. There are people in the pro-nuclear camp who are very sneaky about things. The worst I have seen is Michael Schellenberger who in one of his more famous TEDx talks used Switzerland's storage as the great example. Last I checked Switzerland's total storage was about 30 tons of spent fuel and that just doesn't compare to the 1,700 tons under San Onofre or the other 80,000+ tons the US has or the other 40,000+ tons the rest of the world has let alone the issue these Russians have with old submarines. There are too many people who use convenient facts to hide ugly truths. The thing you are most right about is the solar will not save the planet comment. That's absolutely true. Renewables will not save the planet. There simply isn't enough energy in places where we can use it. Australia's southern shore is one of the best places on the planet for wind but most of it is so far from where we need energy its all but useless. The center of Australia (like the Sahara) is great for solar but its also so far from where energy is needed its also next to useless. BUT anyone on the pro-nuclear lobby who claims solar and wind are not going to be major components of our future energy is living in a deluded fantasy. Its the ugly twin brother of the pro-nuclear people who claim nuclear (fusion, molten salt, small modular,...) will alone save the planet. There are 2 facts people will have to start accepting. 1) We have a far greater cost of cleaning up after previous generations than anyone realizes. 2) No one technology will save the planet.
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@blondeguy08 Mate if you think I got something wrong then say what it is or don't comment at all. I'm not perfect and I don't know any engineer who is. This is a serious subject and If I got something wrong I want to hear it, but don't dare say I'm wrong and then say nothing - that's BS.
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@soulsphere9242 I did this odd little engineering consult for a Taiwanese company wanting to invest in Australian Solar. In the course of it I became aware that we had stopped building major power stations. By major I mean greater than 1 Gigawatts (1,000 Megawatts). Our population was 15million in the mid 80s and hit 20 million by 2003 in that time we built many power stations including our biggest Loy Yang. Since 2003 we have not built a single major power station just a bunch of smaller ones. What's masking the problem is roof top solar and wind farms but none of that masks the rise in power bills. I did a single class in economics (actually the easiest class I ever did) and the entire class was about supply and demand in different types of markets. Irrespective if demand goes up and supply doesn't match then prices go up. Our populations gone up another 5 million and new supply has barely replaced the older stations that have been turned off. That's what's pushed prices up. In the next few years there's Liddel, Torrens Island and Yallourn W all scheduled to turn off. Its exactly the same problem Rick Flores has described for California. Its already happening in parts of Europe. About a week ago there in a conversation like this but more about energy prices. A guy from Romania described their situation. It was like he was describing Australia, except he was adding to a discussion about Britain. It was bizarre. Suddenly there were people from other places all saying the same stuff. That's Australia's nightmare. We (because of our banks) are addicted to foreign investment, which is idiotic considering our wealth. To replace our 23 coal fired units plus the older gas units is about $100 Billion (with B) and that's just to REPLACE NOT UPGRADE. To cover the expected population increases double that. BUT it gets worse, there will be no foreign investment because so many other nations are also facing the same problem and there won't be the money available. Australia like a lot of other countries has been drowning in wave of indecisive political BS overly influenced by billionaires who don't give a FK. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️
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@davidrobinson1510 It was one of the things I didn't mention in my reply but I think he grossly overestimated the degradation of solar panels. It could also be he's used older data from older panels. People need to consider that the cell technology has been refined and developed. Cell efficiency is improving all the time. In Australia the bigger issue we have had is badly constructed panels that are NOT properly weather protected. If they get water in them they're wrecked. In one news story I saw 2 guys had a business removing failed panels and breaking them down for scrap and re-processing. They averaged 600 panels a week at the time of the story. We've had panels meant to last 25 years and they have been lasting less than 5. So there is certainly issues with panels but degradation is only 1 of those problems and comparing older to newer cell technology should be part of that discussion. Our problems are the same as any product - low price does not equal good value.
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@dutchhoke6555 That's a bit harsh. Considering who he's talking about he's certainly older than most. The things I have questioned regard how up to date he is. I think he's certainly off on his solar panel degradation.
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