21 Comments
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Norm St Cyr's avatar

Josh, did you ever consider letting him finish one sentence without you interrupting in four times? It's just a thought.

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BatteredBrontosaurus's avatar

Double painful when it’s clear Josh doesn’t have a fucking clue what he is talking about.

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Tyrone's avatar

This is really difficult to listen to. Josh you constantly interrupted Aidan and you got stuck on the system vulnerability point even after he had answered your question.

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Temporal Perturbations's avatar

It gets better as you get towards the end

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Tyrone's avatar

Yeah I persevered and it did get better but oh boy was it tough.

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Ruth Loewen's avatar

Excellent guest and discussion. Morrison is so very well-informed, so great at understanding Josh's points and responding, and so non-defensive. Really impressive. It helps that I agree with his viewpoint.

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Mullet Snyder, the Lying Poet's avatar

Give me nuclear!

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Temporal Perturbations's avatar

Not sure how it works in Australia… but here in the states, the “spigot” is not just left on full blast ~” regardless of whether or not you need it…” (that’s not how it works). In fact, that’s the whole point of control systems that ONLY produce exactly as much power as you need when you need it determined by the total demand at the time. You can get that kind of control easily with “thermal systems”… much more difficult and expensive, not to mention less reliable to achieve with “renewable” systems. The most efficient and best bang for your buck, is nuclear power.

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Brad Grant's avatar

Was hoping he would provide a compelling argument on why the CSIRO and every other major research body is wrong, but he sort of just hand waved them away and used system complexity as a synonym for "more expensive"

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Pete Horne's avatar

So how about this. We take Josh at his anarcho-capitalist word. We let the Nimbin collective create their own network and deal with the ups and downs locally with solar and wind without a parachute. No carbon emissions; happy hippies. Then we have another collective in the desert that makes a separate nuclear power plant and network and they smelter aluminium and steel. No carbon emissions and happy industrialists. The industrialists pay their own community social benefits but the Nimbin people have no claim to it. The Nimbin people have no productive output except a GST on art and pottery and look after their own their way. I’m ok with that. I know the community I’d choose to live in.

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Norm St Cyr's avatar

Pete, then go live there. Go live in this perfect world you think you can create. It must be great to be so smart that you know better than all other humans that have ever existed.

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Andy Clayton's avatar

This guy is all shill, no substance.

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Andre Quintyn's avatar

Again a good conversation. Learnt a lot, as always it’s refreshing to hear two knowledgeable people not so much sparring, but exploring. I’m on the fence about nuclear, but have now a better understanding of the complexities of energy management.

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Chris Schwarze's avatar

Good podcast. Counter argument to the renewable evangelical guest that Josh called ‘mate’. At least on this subject, Josh was able to question his guest and overcome personal bias.

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Roger Zuill's avatar

Hi Josh I want to put a pumped hydro scheme on my farm for personal use. I stopped adding up the cost when I got to 125000 dollars

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Matt McLellan's avatar

The discussion on the Broken Hill event begged the question, if we went large on Nuclear generation wouldn’t it have been on the end of the transmission line that was damaged and set the whole event off? How is there a better outcome on that event from a centralised generation framework that Aidan is advocating for?

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Paul Coffey's avatar

Good conversation Josh, I enjoyed that. It might help that I started nuclear agnostic to start with, but regardless I enjoyed hearing you talk to someone who could set out the case in clear terms.

Aidan seems like a good communicator in general. He never seemed to get flustered by the interruptions, was ready to concede problems where they existed, and laughed readily. I was hoping you'd ask him - as an ardent nuclear fan - what he thought of the sales pitch at the last election. I imagine he must have been frustrated to see the point being argued so badly.

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Laurence's avatar

This was embarrassing to listen to. Utter rubbish. No mention of Thorium and small companies like Copenhagen Atomics.

No imagining what tech will give us re solar, wind and hydro.

More coal generation? I’ll put whatever money you want and bet that will never happen.

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Norm St Cyr's avatar

You interrupted and talked so much that maybe you should have done the show alone.

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Jack Matthews's avatar

I agree that the perceived complexity of a distributed system scares this guy. I'm surprised that Josh didn't point to the internet as an example of a complex distributed system that works really well. Distributed systems are always more fault tolerant and reliable than centralised ones.

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