Is it because the lack of infrastructure that they can’t deal with it on the offset of a nuclear meltdown? Or that the resources needed to maintain the reactor needs to be efficiently sent?
In: Engineering
Nuclear power plants put out next to no pollution. Coal plants are built next to cities and kill million with their pollution and cause smog and poor air quality. The power needs to be made close to where it is used, or it becomes leas efficient moving it, and there are losses in moving it larger distances.
If you built one in the middle of no where, a small town would need to be built around it.
Nuclear Plants need rivers, lakes, or oceans for cooling.
Humans also like to build cities near rivers, lakes, and oceans as its needed for drinking water and transportation.
Reactors are extremely complicated to build, fuel, cool and operate. You need to transport large amounts of steel, concrete and heavy equipment. You need easy access to the materials and skilled labor for accessories like the buildings, control panels, pumps, roads, transformers and transmission lines. Commercial reactors are mostly cooled by water, so you cannot build one in a remote desert.
To fuel them, you need to transport tons of radioactive material regularly to change the fuel when it gets used up. Finally, the technical people who run the reactor and their families need somewhere attractive and interesting to live nearby as well.
They need water and lots of highly trained people. Plus a very competent infrastructure around them just in case something bad happens needing specialist equipment.
So middle of Australia not so good.
Nuclear power plants have a ton of technicians and engineers working at them. Who get paid well, are educated well, and definitely wouldn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere, because they chose such career to live well. Living in the middle of nowhere is not very nice. And whom you can’t find and hire in the middle of nowhere, because such people usually circle near big, advanced cities. Which often become bigger and more advanced due freely available clean power being nearby, like a nuclear plant.
And of course, everything has resistance, including power lines, and resistance basically means that some electricity will not pass the cable, but heat it up, instead. Which means energy loss. The longer the lines, the more you lose.
I think it is more reasonable than building cities commonly built near sea shores, being directly threatened by tsunami, hurricanes and sea level rise.
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