Antinuclear

Australian media bombarding us with pro nuclear propaganda as election approaches

South Australia’s “The Advertiser” can be depended upon to regurgitate nuclear lobby propaganda. Yesterday’s offering was ” Nuclear-powered desalination for SA?

Some people were impelled to write to the paper. Here are a couple of answers:

from Renfrey Clark:  Nuclear-powered desalination for SA? B.W. Foster (The Advertiser, April …) has a vision of nuclear power in South Australia providing abundant desalinated water for domestic use and irrigation. But price considerations, alone, show that nuclear is the wrong choice.

In the most advanced desalination plants, which use reverse osmosis technology, the key price factor is the cost of electrical energy. Here, renewable energy sources have a dramatic and quickly increasing advantage.

Research at the Australian National University concludes that in future decades a 100 per cent renewable energy system, “balanced” by pumped hydropower or batteries to make supplies fully dispatchable, would have a “levelised cost” of A$75-80 per megawatt-hour.[1]

Comparable studies for nuclear power in the US suggest prices well above A$100 per megawatt-hour.[2]

That’s not taking into account the massive additional problems ‒ and real dangers ‒ of the nuclear industry. In 2016 the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission recommended firmly against developing almost all aspects of the industry in South Australia.

In coming years advances in desalination, along with further steep drops in the cost of renewable energy, will likely make desalinated water affordable for various kinds of high-value agriculture.

Nuclear power, however, will not be part of the picture.  (picture below is of MIT’s small portable system)

from Robyn Wood : Yet again we hear the same tired old calls for Australia to adopt nuclear power (The Advertiser 22.4.19). We recently had a Nuclear Royal Commission that found that nuclear power is uneconomic. Quite apart from the safety risks and lack of a permanent high level reactor waste disposal system, the costs of building nuclear power plants around the world are skyrocketing, and the costs of building renewables is rapidly coming down. Building renewables with energy storage such as big batteries and pumped hydro makes far more sense than wasting our money on nuclear power.

April 23, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, media