People have been scratching their heads about the Dud's nuclear dream .
Why won't he release the details ? Labor is dead against nuclear so it's not like they would steal the Dud's ideas . What would he have to lose by putting the details out now ?
Also, the industry tried to work it out . With only a handful of sites and a handful of reactors they wouldn't be able to generate enough electricity and therefore would still need a large percentage of renewables . Nuclear would only produce around 10% they guessed .
But, the Dud says that he won't need all the new transmission which means that all the new REZs would be ruled out . The Puppet Littlleproud says that they'll be stopping renewable rollouts in rural areas so that also rules out the REZs. But the Dud says he would have renewables firmed by nuclear ?
No Rezs so no big wind farms or solar farms .
No new transmission lines .
So how could that work ?
Here's how:
The Dud's plan is for a 70% plus nuclear powered grid with the rest coming from gas, renewables and energy storage . Lots of nuclear power stations built on the old coal fired power sites .. Effectively replacing the entire coal powered fleet with nuclear .
This would explain how he gets around not building new transmission .
We already have 40% renewables in the system . That percentage of the total would drop as the overall electricity demand increases over time and would fit nicely into his 70% plus nuclear scenario.
The Dud's plan is to have 2 nukes up and running ( SMRs ) by 2035-37 ( his words ) with the rest coming some time in the 2040s.
ln order for that to work and for the numbers to line up it would require 2 things .
1. Stop building renewables today .
2. Massively extending the life of coal fired power .
We already have enough renewables in the system so to enable a 70% plus nuclear grid you wouldn't need to build any more at all . So renewable construction would stop dead. All our coal fired power is scheduled to close down by 2035. lf the Dud's nukes won't be finished till the late 2040s and we've stopped building renewables then we'll have to keep burning coal for at least another 15 years beyond 2035.
The Dud has been calling for the abandonment of the 2030 emissions target .
Now we know why . With the extension of coal fired power and the increase in electricity demand going forward our emissions would actually increase from where they are now . Reversing the trend of the last decade or so .
So. There it is. The Dud wants to shut down renewables and burn more coal on the way to a mostly nuclear grid sometime in the future.
Costings ? As expected . Based on examples such as UAE where there is no regulation and they have a horrific human right record for imported workers .
Apparently no one else on the planet, even the countries that have been building nuclear plants for 50 years , can build them on time and on budget. But according to Ted Obrien on 4 corners, Australia can .
