Yallourn

This is a strange one.

St. Kilda defeated Footscray at Yallourn.

Where is Yallourn? Yallourn's sort of, I think, is it sort of Gippsland area? Trafalgar? Trafalgar sort of area.

Yallourn, Yallourn power station is a thing these days.

So from what I can work out, Yallourn the town was sort of basically demolished at some point.

So the power station could be there.

So...

I'm all for getting the lawyers involved.

A lot of the coal generation has been offline at the moment.

People worried about, or finally, I think, accepting that not just Yallourn, but Araring, Yallourn certainly is going to close, I think now we can say.

And Araring, it's looking more and more, the odds are swinging, just like the odds against Trump winning the Senate are swinging.

are swinging towards a raring closing and that's pushed the futures prices up about $22, over 20% in the last, towards $100.

Really this technology, this hydrometallurgical technology, or for your listeners, a, an acid leaching t- um, technology, was really developed, um, out of CSIRO, you know, going back decades.

And, and it, its previous intent was to find an economic use for, um, fly ash from the power stations in, in the Latrobe Valley, so Hazelwood, um, Yallourn, and the like.

And, and what the, what the researchers found was that this, these, this fly ash had a high concentration of magnesium oxide in it, um, owing to the unique characteristics of the, the lignite formations or the brown coal formations in the Latrobe Valley.

And so what you saw was this technology be developed, um, patented, um, developed through time to get to a, a point in time where a demonstration plant had been built, um, in the Latrobe Valley, close to Hazelwood.

The issue's not so much the, the amount of resource that's down there.

It's, it's, um, in some ways getting access to it in a way that, uh, that is in flow or in parallel, moves in parallel with the closure and rehabilitation plants of each one of those sites.

And so as you can imagine, as that industry sort of approaches the, the end of its life, um, you know, Hazelwood shut down a couple of years ago, uh, Yallourn's looking to, um, close up in '28.

You're, you're moving at the same pace or if not in, in lockstep with the closure and rehab teams at each one of those sites.

I mean, if you look down in Victoria, there's been, there's just been complete ignorance of the looming disaster down here, where you've got these three large coal mines.

Uh, Yallourn is meant to be turned off, I think, next year.

Um, and it probably has to be because it hasn't been maintained.

It's very old, and it will be turned off, and yet, and yet everyone's got their head in the sand.

I started with Richie when I was living at home with Mum and Dad and I'm going back now to about 1971, 72.

We'd just moved back from Yallourn, we'd been in Gippsland for four or five years, moved back to Mount Eliza and I used to have a paper route and I did that Gee, for four years down in the Gippsland.

As a young kid, I was doing it like at the age of 10, 11 virtually.

Yeah, okay.

So our coal-fired electricity network here in Victoria is going to be shut down over the next eight or nine years.

And coming up in just 15, 16 months, the Yallourn power station, it's almost 20% of our power capacity, and it's going to be shut down for good.

Now, in my view, we should have, five, 10 years ago, built a new modern coal-fired power station, far less emissions, but we didn't.

We said, no, no, no, solar, wind, batteries will do the job.