Thanks to walbrook's previous post with added highlights, this really puts to focus on the anti-nuclear loons and their fables/lies!The nuclear gamble
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Finally, theOpposition has announced it is going to develop a nuclear power future forAustralia.Thegovernment, along with the renewables subsidy-fuelled lobby, issued howls ofderision.Too expensive. The community won’t accept it.Drawing from noless an authority than a Simpsons cartoon, Energy Minister Bowen declarednuclear energy will cause mutations includingthree-eyed fish.
Predictably the movewas panned by renewable energy investor Malcolm Turnbull, who burnished his ownenergy credentials in creating Snowy 2 as a $2 billion solution to theintermittency problem of wind and solar that would be up and running by 2022.Snowy 2 will cost over $20 billion, not be ready by 2030 and will only providea minor part in firming up wind and solar.
With delicious irony onthe very same day as the Opposition’s announcement, the United States Senatevoted 88-2 in support of a bill to promote new nuclear powerby severelyreducing the regulatory impediments that have plagued the industry over thepast 20 years. The Senate committee’s Chair,Democratic Senator Tom Carper,called it ‘a major victory forour climate and American energy security’.
The BidenAdministration’s support for nuclear had previously been foreshadowed by EnergySecretaryJennifer Granholm. Formerly a firebrand pro-renewablespolitician, Granholm was mugged by reality, learning on the job that renewablesmean a disaster for reliable low-cost power.Over the past month, she has calledfor hundreds of new nuclear power stations (the US has just 94 at present).
Notwithstandingwhipped-up hysteria, nuclear generators are actually safer than wind and muchsafer than coal, hydro and gas (they also entail fewer greenhouse gasemissions).
Combined with its ownhypocrisy in opposing nuclear power yet sponsoring floating nuclear powerplants in submarines, the government’s propaganda is also coming unstuck withreports of awelcometo nuclear plants in areas where it is envisaged. TheCoalition’s plan itself was devised on the basis of internal polling with thosesame findings.
The Opposition hashad a long road to its Damascene conversion on nuclear – it was John Howardwho, succumbing to Green pressure, banned it as an Australian power source in1998.
But Howard and hisministers had an excuse. In 1998, nobody in Australia would have been under anyillusion that nuclear generators, with regulatory excesses and activists’opposition already causing cost escalations, could compete with electricitygenerated from the nation’s virtually unlimited low-cost coal supplies. Newcoal plant costs then and now were falling and new private sector powerstations were being planned in Queensland (Millmerran commissioned in 2002 and KoganCreek 2007) that were offering long-term contracts at under $40 per megawatthour. That’s one-third of the current Australian spot price.
Moreimportantly, in 1988 the global warming psychosis was yet to dominate thepolitical arena.
The Opposition’s nuclearplans were clearly conceived as a means of differentiating their product fromthat of the ALP. A key motivation was the Coalition’s internal divisions.Dutton and Littleproudrepresent leftists supporting renewables (who include Littleproud himself) astrong coterie supporting coal and most of its ranks fearful of facing Green,Teal and ALP opponents who have demonstrably been able to marshal electoralsupport.
Nuclear is safeand, in spite oftheCSIROandLazzardspublications, as attested by the US Administration’srecent moves,ismuch cheaper than wind/solar.It may be the cheapest source of electricity inareas like Japan, France, and much of China and India which do not shareAustralia’s fabulous coal reserves. This might also be true of South andWestern Australia where cheap coal is less than abundant.
But it is not thecheapest option in eastern Australia. Even with the most draconian regulatoryreform nuclear would never come close to the below $50 per megawatt hour priceat which new coal could be provided.
Moreover, it is farfrom ideal as a complementary power source to the intermittent renewables, arole seen for it by the Coalition.Wind and solar are so unreliable thatthey will need virtually 100 per cent back-up by controllable (dispatchable)supplies: nuclear, coal, hydro (further capacity of which is limited), gas ordiesel.Such back-up is cheapest when the ratio of fuel to operating costs islowest. Nuclear and (Australian) coal generator costs are 95 per cent fixed;they are incurred whether or not they are operating. Gas (and diesel) costs areless than 50 per cent fixed. Minister Bowen, in a rare demonstration of energyrationality, is correct in identifying gas as the complementary power sourcefor his beloved renewables, though vastly underestimating the extent of itsneed.
Mr Bowen has previouslyput a cost of$387 billionfor a nuclear-fuelled Australia, thoughWestinghouse Electric Company senior vice president Rita Baranwal quipped, ‘Ionly have three engineering degrees and that math doesn’t make sense to me,’ andput the cost at $110 billion.
Mr Dutton has saidhe will release the cost of his proposals before the next election (if it isheld in 2025).
Neither the ALP norprevious governments have ever puta cost on the Net Zero policy. Nor havethey ever disputed my estimate, currently$15.6 billion per yearand growing, which would mean costs wellin excess of $500 billion by 2050. The ALP program would cost at leastone-third of GDP each year by 2050 – meaningeveryone would be at least athird poorer.
Hopefully, if MrDutton prevails at the next election, Australia will buy time to come to asensible energy policy founded on coal with some nuclear.
