Posted 21 Sep 2009 10:14 AM Upping the ante on nuke power
One of the great quotes from Ziggy Switkowski is that it is never hard to figure out where things are moving; it’s just hard to figure out the timing.
Switkowski, chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and the head of John Howard’s review of nuclear energy earlier this decade, is quietly increasing his forecast of how many uranium-fuelled power stations will be operating in this country by the middle of the century.
His initial number – recommended by the review task force – was for 25 nuclear plants in Australia by 2050, with a recommendation that the first be up and running within a decade.
Now he has increased that proposal to 50 power stations, supplying 90 per cent of Australia’s electricity needs by mid-century.
Switkowski was one of a trio of participants in a forum at the ANSTO open day at Lucas Heights, Sydney, on Saturday, a show-and-tell that attracted some 3,000 people. Ninety of them left the sunny outdoors to sit in the ANSTO theatrette for 75 minutes to listen to the presentations – the other two speakers were Burt Beasley, director of technology and innovation at the Australian Coal Association, and myself, with Robyn Williams, the presenter of ABC Radio’s The Science Show in the chair.
Switkowski believes that 60 per cent of Australians are open to this country’s use of nuclear energy – but many of them, he acknowledges, just don’t want the station in their neighbourhood. He foresees public support for the idea increasing over the next two to five years.
His initial perspective was that Australia should aim to have a nuclear plant up and running by 2020 – a pretty ambitious target, in my view, given the political climate and the regulatory path any such proposal would have to travel – and two by 2030, but he now thinks this is a much too conservative an approach.
Italy, he pointed out to the forum, was a country where the population had been fiercely opposed to adopting nuclear power – and now it was moving to build five atomic power stations. Australia was now the only economy among the world’s 25 biggest not embracing the domestic use of nuclear energy.
The number of nuclear plants around the world will reach about 1,000 by 2040, Switkowski says, rising from 400 now, and they will be new technology operations because the current capacity will have reached the end of its licensed life.
Nuclear technology, Switkowski argues, is moving in to a new phase where small reactors, a tenth the size of existing plants, will be able to de deployed and they be freed from the need for large water supply because they will be gas-cooled. These mini-reactors, he says, will be no bigger than a residential dwelling and will be available to provide electricity to regional centres of up to 100,000 people, to remote mines and to desalination plants.
This country, he accepts, is now irreversibly on a path towards a low-carbon economy and the challenge is both to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and to protect the economy’s competitiveness. His answer to the challenge is to embrace nuclear technology.
Allowing for the fact that people coming to the ANSTO open day could be expected to have an interest in nuclear power – and those willing to sit in a forum still more so – I still found it interesting that the audience did not demonstrate any antipathy to what, if you believe the public polling, is something that scares the pants off your average Aussie.
The other bottom line here, at least in the next 10-15 years, is cost. Nuclear power is 20 per cent to 50 per cent more expensive to produce than conventional coal or natural gas. It can only become competitive in the Australian power marketplace when the fossil-fuelled generators are required by law to remove carbon dioxide from their power plant emissions.
Now that we are being told by government that the population will double in the next four decades, the capacity of renewable energy to even come close to delivering all the low-emitting or non-emitting power that will be needed in 2050 seems to me highly debatable – on this basis, as Ziggy avers, where things are moving seems obvious; how long it will take to get there is another matter.
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