North Queensland regional power independence and a superb new water supply for Cairns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present hydrological and economic modeling of a dam 40 km south of Cairns at an altitude of 620 m. The key is a relatively large dam wall and a small but deep 40 GL lake in a catchment area that receives 6–10 m of precipitation annually (120–160 GL run off). This would secure all current and future water needs for Cairns. The lake would be coupled by a vertical shaft to a 250 MW (peak) hydro-power station 500 m below and inside the mountain. From there, a 6 km tunnel running east connects with the coastal dam service-tunnel and a 3 km tunnel running west takes the water back to the river below the falls. On average this would result in the release of 300 ML/d opening up opportunities for tourism, new industries, and irrigated farming of high yield crops. The tunnel offers the possibility of a new transport corridor from the Coast to Atherton on the central tablelands. The increased flows in the dry season could be important for the health of the river which is also a nursery-ground for the Great Barrier Reef. The CO2 savings from reduced coal fire power needs are significant. Comparative analysis with all three local dams shows that the proposed lake is smaller and many times more useful per m2. Importantly, this reliable hydro-power would allow considerable regional load-balancing of unreliable wind and solar power, representing a big step away from dependence on remotely provided power which is a key recommendation in the widely supported Tropical North Queensland – Sustainable Region Initiative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.084 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".