China watch.

China didn't wait at all, on Taiwan, sending jets and recon planes to Taiwan on the same day Russia started it Ukraine invasion.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10547685/Taiwan-scrambles-fighter-planes-nine-Chinese-aircraft-enter-air-defence-zone.html?ito=social-facebook&fbclid=IwAR1DKH0zThPCTP7CybeykKLiaFUYMoIXb-bRur-16FkvpOMh-k4XsjtTQXA

Ukraine is the false flag event China was waiting for.. I think that is why the world police (us) is not responding militarily to ukraine. NATO knew they pushed Russia too far and are willing to concede ukraine to take the focus of their expansion program over the past 30yrs.

Fair call that Beno.

So /shock/ China had been told about the invasion of Ukraine prior to it happening, so they could prepare propaganda to try and get support for similar aggression against Taiwan.

www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/chinese-news-outlet-had-accidentally-published-rules-for-pro-russia-reporting-days-before-invasion/ar-AAUhCZT?ocid=msedgntp

The writing is on the walls now.
If I was Taiwan, I would be building massive beachhead defences that would repel a ground invasion using the Chinese new troop landing boats.



andmagazine.substack.com/p/meanwhile-in-the-south-china-sea?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozMDI1ODk4OSwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDk0NDgyMDcsIl8iOiJJWVZ4NyIsImlhdCI6MTY0NjAwODc5OSwiZXhwIjoxNjQ2MDEyMzk5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNzQ2NTgwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.cfo8pa_MtRhQENnSeuzzz4kTkqa7pw0k5rDuoq9s82U&utm_source=url

We need some too. Might be wise to procure one or two SSBNs loaded with a few nukes for advanced negotiation with dodgy neighbours.

Nuclear power just isn't competitive any more. It costs about 4x the price that renewables do. It struggles to compete even in established markets like the US. The setup costs in Australia would be enormous. We'd need to be establishing an entire new industry, not just pay for the reactor build costs. 
'Base load' is a largely obsolete term in Australia. We no longer have large scale industrial processes that run 24/7.

Solar/wind farms do not have a 'questionable' amount of power generation. What needs to happen (and what is happening) is you need 3MW of renewables for every 1GW of coal that you replace. You also need a very large grid, large enough to span weather systems so all the wind farms aren't either flat out or still all at once. Australia has this (but somewhere like Fiji does not).

One day they'll go obsolete. At that time it will be a hell of a lot easier to decommission them than a coal plant. Pulling down Hazelwood is a nightmare compared to removing wind turbines. There's no real ability at all to restore coal mining pits to their original state either. The best way to deal with this for now is to use them as fairly mediocre pumped hydro storage, effectively turning them into giant batteries. But this does not change the fact that the mined land has been permanently destroyed.

Same. If it's for a nuclear deterrent, that's a defence, not economical decision. So it doesn't have to make a profit. We'd be doing our own enrichment here, so the reactor would sell energy into the grid at a financial loss as a by-product.
You're spot on about gas peakers too. There are many around now, and for good reason. It's still fossil fuels, but used intermittently it's fine.

Unfortunately, that money is at least a decade too late.
It'll take around 5 years to build the east coast sub-base, on top of keeping the water deep enough for subs to move through like Exmouth in WA, the subs are still 5-10yrs away before the first is operational as well as beefing up the navy to man them. We've lost our long-range strike capability by retiring the F-111's
It would be nice to see all of that money go to tested and proven weapons tech, instead of the typical Aussie way of not ordering "off the shelf" tech and customising it which causes operational tech problems down the line, like those ships they got a few years ago that were nuclear powered from the factory but got modded with jet turbine engines and ended up in the dry docks becasue there was nobody in Aust qualified to even service them, let alone repair them when they broke down lol