We will see. It is relatively easy to get to a 70% renewables grid, it is much harder and more expensive if you insist on getting to 100%.
As the US DOE report highlights, it is the Total System Cost of the grid which is lower with nuclear included, not the full cost of an individual generation facility, and certainly not the marginal cost of generation of each unit of electricity. That is because there are two unavoidable downsides of all renewable energy sources :
a) Intermittency. That requires significant overbuild of capacity, and also backup (and serious backup in a 100% grid, for 12, 24, maybe 36 hrs, not 25 minutes as allowed for by the CSIRO LCOE calculations). Those are both very expensive.
b) Diffuseness. Energy needs to be harvested over enormous surface areas, typically remote from centres of demand. The infrastructure required to access the grid is extraordinarily expensive (and again deliberately underestimated by the politically captured CSIRO), and that is after obtaining the social license to build it.
It's very, very expensive to go from 70% to 100% renewables without some baseload support. You can have gas with emissions or nuclear without.
Don't get me wrong, renewables are a fabulous gift. I'm very pro renewables and have plenty of renewables based investments. But like you, I'm also pro nuclear because the world can't decarbonise without it. And replacing retiring coal plants, GW for GW, with new nuclear is a win-win because the grid infrastructure is already there, a massive cost saving.
I don't dispute that Australia has world first renewables credentials and if any country can decarbonise entirely with renewables it is us. You are also correct that the nuclear route is (somewhat) easier for countries with existing nuclear, although there are very many countries around the world commencing their nuclear journey now. And the lead times for SMRs are likely to be shorter than many expect given the resources being thrown at the problem and the fact that, for the first time in fifty years, there is a pro-nuclear political consensus nearly everywhere except Australia.
It's unfortunate that it has become such a partisan issue in Australia. We need independent scientific and technical leadership, not the Labor mouthpiece CSIRO and certainly not boneheaded politicians. But as a uranium investor I console myself with the fact that, in terms of the global market, Australia is an utter irrelevance.
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