well its apparently expert vs expert...i saw the interview with mat keane today...apparently the previous nsw government had a serious look at nuclear...also i read this
Professor Ty Christopher, an electrical engineer with four decades of experience in the power industry, is the director of the Energy Futures Network within the faculty of engineering at the University of Wollongong. I spoke to him on Thursday.
Fitz: Thank you for your time, professor. Let’s start, if we may, with your credentials to make comment on the new proposed wind farms off the Illawarra coast and the energy matters of the day. You’re an academic, a Wollongong local, and have also worked in the power industry?
TC: Yes, I’m now just shy of 40 years in the power industry, including 10 years on the executive of what is now Endeavour Energy, with the last five years as the chief engineer. I am now with the University of Wollongong, helping co-ordinate energy futures research, and I lead a collaboration of just under 100 academics from all disciplines across the university – social scientists, market economists, marine ecologists and engineers, all of varying backgrounds – to bring together those minds in a focused way on energy systems.
TC: Again, no. It is the highest of any energy source, but it is about 90 per cent because it, too, has maintenance downtime, where it is pulled back from full throttle. But the factors against building nuclear power stations in Australia right now are incontrovertible. The International Atomic Energy Agency publishes a guidelines handbook – basically a step-by-step guide on how to go nuclear in your country. It is the internationally recognised manual on what you have to do to go from zero to a functioning nuclear energy power plant. That manual says that the minimum time of establishment, starting from it being legal – which I might add, it is not in Australia at the moment – is 15 to 20 years. So the first big problem with nuclear in Australia is, what do we do to have reliable power in the 10-year gap between when most of the coal exits and only the first nuclear power plant could possibly be commissioned?
Fitz: You have a certain fatigue in your voice as if you’re a little tired of explaining plain facts for the umpteenth time.
TC: Anyone telling you for political reasons that we can do this as a nation in less than 20 years or that that delay won’t cause terrible problems is divorced from reality in what they’re saying, Peter. I say this from the point of view of being an engineer who’s delivered billions, literally billions of dollars worth of energy projects throughout my life. Even 20 years is very optimistic. And then, with nuclear, you still haven’t solved the problem of cost. The most recent CSIRO annual review shows that the cost per gigawatt out of nuclear is five times more expensive per gigawatt than out of wind.
and finally
Fitz: Do you foresee the electricity bills in NSW and Australia going lower, as renewables keep coming online?
TC: Yes. And the more renewable energy there is, the lower those bills will be.
