Opposition leader Peter Dutton has dismissed a report on nuclear small modular reactors by the highly respected Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, saying the Coalition has consulted its own experts and it is not interested in the views of “fanatics.”
ATSE on Wednesday described SMRs as a “chimera”, and said they were unlikely to be able to be built in Australia before the mid to late 2040s, more than a decade before the Coalition’s timeline of 2035.
The report by ATSE is in line with other assessments by the CSIRO, the Australian Energy Regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator, former chief scientist and virtually everyone in the energy industry.
But Dutton dismissed it out of hand.
“What this report shows is that the lights are going to go out, and that wind, in particular, is not reliable,” he told journalists in the Hunter Valley, not far from one of the sites identified by the Coalition to host a nuclear power plant, according to a transcript posted on his website.
Actually, the ATSE report says nothing of the sort. It doesn’t address grid reliability problems, nor does it look at SMR costs or waste issues.
It observes that the technology does not yet exist in OECD countries, will not likely be commercially available for another 20 years, and concludes that any move to go earlier – as the Coalition wants to do – would be both costly and risky.
