Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
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Bourke is a town of 4,000 people 800 kilometres (roughly 500 miles) away from Sydney. It is 370 kilometres from the nearest town of any size, Dubbo, which is a town of about 36,000 people.
I'm no electrical engineer, but even allowing for the flat terrain and lack of settlement transmission lines of that length would be a significant fraction of the cost of a power plant itself.
It would be about the equivalent of plonking a nuclear reactor halfway between Calgary and Saskatoon - a great way to deal with the NIMBY factor, but not terribly economically sensible.
More info:
Article at Wikipedia