Antinuclear

Bowen demolishes case expensive for nuclear power

AuManufacturing 19 September 2023 

Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has rubbished opposition calls for Australia to embrace nuclear poower in the form of small modular reactors.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has injected his idea of a nuclear renaissance into the energy debate, suggesting he might change the Coalition’s official opposition to nuclear power, saying Labor was putting ‘party interests ahead of the national interest’.

According to the former head of the Australian Nuclear Scientific and Technology Organisation Dr Ziggy Switkowski who chaired a federal review of nuclear powe that ‘on paper, they (SMRs) look terrific’, but that we won’t know their costs ‘until the SMRs are deployed in quantity’.

Bowen told a Canberra press conference: “Since the last election, the party which spent ten years telling us we didn’t need to worry about climate change says they’ve found a solution for climate change and it’s nuclear.

“They didn’t bother for their ten years in office to promote a nuclear agenda, but as they desperately search around for an alibi for their hatred of renewable energy, they settled on this since the last election.”

Dutton made a nuclear plan the centrepiece of his Budget reply, but Bowen said there was actually no policy and nothing costed.

“Peter Dutton said at a speech earlier this year that it’s easy, you just plug and play nuclear in to replace coal. Well if it’s so easy, Mr Dutton, where is your plan?”

​Bowen released cost estimates of $387 billion to replace Australia’s 21.3 gigawatts of coal-fired power with nuclear.

This would involve the construction of 71 nuclear reactors spread across Australia.

Given the public pushback on even low level waste disposal sites, any plan to build 71 nuclear power plants would likely be political suicide for any government……………………………………………more https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/bowen-demolishes-case-expensive-for-nuclear-power

September 20, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics