Originally budgeted as a $2 billion renewable battery, it’s now estimated it won’t get power to the grid for less than $10 Billion. Despite telling me four months ago that the tunneling machine ‘Florence’ wasn’t bogged (it had “encountered soft ground”) the 7.30 Report tells us in the last 10 months the bogged Florence appears to have tunneled just 150m from its starting point before a 50m hole to the surface appeared on top of it.
All of this for a project to produce the same amount of electricity in a year that the Liddell coal fired power station could make in two weeks.
Sounds pretty bad. My understanding is that they will need to extract Florence and build a concrete-lined tube until they hit bed rock – one big enough to accept the boring machine obviously with a pretty solid floor. Why was this not all worked out during initial site surveys?
And just one of the now commercially-emerging molten salt nuclear reactors would provide cheap power 24/7 ….