Thanks for that OMS.
Nice succinct demolition of Dutton brainfart pamphlet
Pretty some journos continue to treat the pamphlet seriously
Like this pieceGiven this 2037 timeframe, we should examine what the global experience tells us about construction times for nuclear power stations.
In western countries with appropriate regulatory frameworks, recent construction times have far exceeded a decade. In countries like the United Arab Emirates with different regulatory and governance standards, it’s under nine years. It’s not just the construction times that Australia needs to consider. Before any nuclear power plant can be built here, we would first need to establish a regulatory system. That could take up to five years.
The Coalition plan states that nuclear plants “will start producing electricity by 2035 (with small modular reactors) or 2037 (if modern larger plants are found to be the best option).”
Even if this unlikely proposition were possible, this effectively means that nuclear won’t replace coal-fired power stations. Most, if not all, of those coal-fired stations would be gone by the time that nuclear comes online, and coal would have been replaced by renewables.
This negates the argument that ‘baseload’ nuclear generation will replace ‘baseload’ coal. It will have been replaced by renewables ‘firmed’ (supported) by storage to deliver flexible supply, which large thermal power stations struggle to provide because they are difficult to fully ‘ramp’ up and down quickly.
this
There’s good reason why Australia hasn’t followed the lead of the 32 other countries in adopting nuclear power. With our more abundant solar and wind resources and greater land area, we don’t need to.
And this
The Coalition then plans to progressively introduce five full-scale nuclear reactors (at around 1GW each) plus two SMRs (at around 0.5GW each) starting in 2037 and 2035 respectively, by which time all the present 21GW of coal capacity will have already retired and been replaced by renewables.
