Peter Dutton’s nuclear push is a “suicide note” playing mostly to right wing echo chambers
Unbiased polls find that support for nuclear power in Australia falls short of a majority; that Australians support renewables to a far greater extent than nuclear power; that a majority do not want nuclear reactors built near where they live; and that most Australians are concerned about nuclear accidents and nuclear waste.
Jim Green, Apr 3, 2024 REnewEconomy
A February 26 page-one article in The Australian newspaper ran under the headline ‘Powerful majority supports nuclear option for energy security’.
“Labor is now at risk of ending up on the wrong side of history in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” political editor Simon Benson wrote, adding that Labor “ignores this community sentiment potentially at its peril”.
The Murdoch papers ran hard with the story, as did Sky News. The Murdoch-Sky media frenzy was based on the results of a Newspoll survey which found 55 percent support for replacing coal-fired power plants with (non-existent) small modular nuclear reactors.
But the 55 percent majority was slim, not ‘powerful’, and the Newspoll survey was a crude example of push-polling as discussed by polling experts Kevin Bonham and Murray Goot and economist Prof. John Quiggin.
To note just one example of the bias, if NuScale Power’s 77-megawatt reactors were chosen to replace coal plants, 277 nuclear reactors would be required, not ‘several’ as the Newspoll survey question stated. And if we use NuScale’s latest construction cost estimate, the cost would be A$656 billion.
Tony Barry, a former deputy state director and strategist for the Victorian Liberal Party, describes the Coalition’s decision to make nuclear power the centrepiece of its energy and climate policy as “the longest suicide note in Australian political history”.
Barry is now a director at the research consultancy RedBridge. On the strength of a detailed RedBridge analysis of Australians’ attitudes to nuclear power, he says that just 35 percent of Australians support nuclear power and that only coal is less popular. If the Coalition is to have any chance of winning the next election it will not be with nuclear power, he states.
Peter Dutton’s positioning of the Coalition is all wrong, Barry says, and the party continues to play to “internal audiences” — in particular the right-wing echo-chamber typified by Murdoch’s ‘Sky after dark’.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears unconcerned by Murdoch push-polling purporting to show majority support for nuclear power. Speaking in parliament, he compared Peter Dutton to a nuclear reactor: “One is risky, expensive, divisive and toxic; the other is a nuclear reactor. The bad news for the Liberal Party is that you can put both on a corflute, and we certainly intend to do so.”
Stark raving mad’
The Murdoch-Coalition echo-chamber is drinking its own bathwater by taking pro-nuclear push-polling seriously.
The pro-nuclear bias of the Murdoch media is plain for all to see, and has been confirmed by a recent academic analysis. A note of dissent recently came from James Campbell, a political editor for Murdoch newspapers and websites across Australia. He says the Coalition’s nuclear policy is “stark raving mad” and he quotes an unnamed Coalition MP saying the policy is “madness on steroids”.
Campbell writes:
“You’d have thought that a mob that so easily unpicked the lead of the Yes case at the Voice referendum would understand that support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.
“And support for this is weak to start with – 35 per cent in favour versus 32 per cent opposed according to a recent RedBridge poll. …
“If we accept the next election is going to be all about the current cost-of-living crisis then nuclear power isn’t going to be much of a help to the Coalition, given it is at least 10 to 15 years away.
“Worse, not only will nuclear energy not be much help as a cost-of-living policy, its salience will make sure that no one gets to hear about whatever policies the Coalition does offer. …
“Then there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in “tealy” places are going to face the front on this? …
“And that’s even before you get to the state Liberal leaders! How many of them do you reckon are going to be lining up to sing this policy’s praises? …
“Madness. It’s total madness.”
Unbiased nuclear polls
Unbiased polls find that support for nuclear power in Australia falls short of a majority; that Australians support renewables to a far greater extent than nuclear power; that a majority do not want nuclear reactors built near where they live; and that most Australians are concerned about nuclear accidents and nuclear waste.
Here are the results from some polls in Australia over the past five years, with a decent sample size and questions that weren’t designed to push respondents in one direction or another:
* 2024 Resolve Political Monitor survey commissioned by the Nine newspapers: 36 percent support nuclear power, 23 percent opposed, 15 percent undecided, 27 percent “do not have a strong view, and would like to see the government investigate its use”.* 2023 Freshwater Strategy Poll: 35 percent support nuclear power, 35 percent opposed, 18 percent neutral, 12 percent unsure. Thirty-seven percent agree that ‘Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power’, 36 percent disagree, 27 percent neutral. Forty-four percent agree that Australia should remove the legal ban on nuclear power development, 29 percent disagree, 25 percent neutral.
* 2023 Essential poll: 50 percent support Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity, 33 percent opposed, 18 percent unsure.
* 2023 Savanta study commissioned by the pro-nuclear Radiant Energy Group: 40 percent strongly support or tend to support using nuclear energy to generate electricity in Australia, 36 percent strongly oppose or tend to oppose, 17 percent neutral, 7 percent don’t know. The study found that those who are most climate-concerned are least likely to support the use of nuclear power. (Perhaps they are better educated on the issues and the options.)* 2019 Essential poll: 44 percent support nuclear power, 40 percent opposed.
* 2019 Roy Morgan Poll: 45 percent support nuclear power, 40 percent opposed.
The Coalition (and other supporters) can take comfort that support for nuclear power exceeds opposition in most of those polls. But support doesn’t reach a majority in any of them.
Dr. Rebecca Huntley, director of research at 89 Degrees East, told the Nine newspapers that participants in focus groups were bringing up nuclear power more often than before the last federal election, but support usually dissolved once the discussion turned to timelines, logistics and the issue of how to store nuclear waste.
RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras told the Nine newspapers that the question of social licence would be impossible to overcome because soft support for nuclear power would evaporate and bump up against hard opposition which he puts as high as 32 percent.
Murray Goot says that “majority support” was being conflated with “strong support” in the Murdoch newspapers, adding: “A metre wide doesn’t necessarily mean a metre thick.” Moreover, he notes that the February Newspoll survey only achieved majority support by manipulating both the question and the response options.
A gender divide is clearly evident: the Savanta study found that men are more supportive of nuclear power than women in all 20 countries surveyed, including Australia.
Sticker shock
Some polls indicate that Australians need educating on this issue. A 2019 Essential poll found that 51 percent of respondents believed that nuclear power would help lower power prices, while 26 percent disagreed. The 2023 Savanta study found that 35 percent of respondents in Australia think that nuclear power would make their energy bills cheaper while 28 percent think it would make them more expensive.
In a 2023 Essential poll, 38 percent of respondents ranked renewables as the “most expensive” option, 34 percent ranked nuclear the most expensive option, and 28 percent ranked fossil fuels the most expensive option. But Essential also found that 60 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition that ‘Australia needs to rapidly develop renewables because it will provide a cheaper and stable energy source, and create jobs’, while only 17 percent disagreed.
Simon Benson wrote in the Australian that “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future.”
But nuclear power would increase both power bills and taxes and the only way that the Coalition can get around that problem is by lying and continuing to attack CSIRO’s detailed costings. The latest CSIRO GenCost report gives these 2030 cost estimates: small modular reactors A$212-353 per megawatt-hour, 90% wind and solar with integration costs (energy storage and transmission) A$69-101 per megawatt-hour.
Nuclear power could also involve the curtailment of rooftop solar to allow reactors to run smoothly and profitably. Put that in the electoral pipe and smoke it.
Teal independents…………………………………………
Opposition to locally-built nuclear reactors
Opposition to locally-built nuclear power reactors has been clear and consistent for 20 years or more. Here are some recent poll results:…………………………………………….
Nuclear waste and accidents are major concerns
The September 2023 Freshwater Strategy Poll found that a majority of respondents (55 percent) agreed with the proposition ‘I am concerned that nuclear plants are unsafe and people will be harmed’ while 27 percent disagreed and 17 percent were neutral.
The 2023 Savanta poll found that 77 percent of respondents were concerned about nuclear waste management compared to 18 percent not concerned; and 77 percent were concerned about “health & safety (i.e. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)” compared to 21 percent not concerned.
A November 2012 Essential poll found that 63 percent of respondents agreed that nuclear power isn’t worth it because of the need to manage radioactive waste, and 62 percent agreed that nuclear power is too risky because of the potential for serious accidents.
Younger voters
The Murdoch-Coalition echo-chamber was especially excited about younger poll respondents in the February Newspoll survey (65 percent support, 32 percent opposition). But the poll was biased and as Goot notes, other polls reach different conclusions:
“But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. “In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.
“In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.
“And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65”.”
Renewables are far more popular than nuclear
Opinion polls clearly show that renewables are far more popular than nuclear power:…………………………………………….
Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and a member of the Nuclear Consulting Group. https://reneweconomy.com.au/peter-duttons-nuclear-push-is-a-suicide-note-playing-mostly-to-right-wing-echo-chambers/
Spent nuclear fuel mismanagement poses a major threat to the United States. Here’s how.
Restricting its analyses to a severe earthquake scenario allowed the NRC to help allay public fears over the dangers of spent fuel pool accidents. There is good reason to question whether severe earthquakes pose the greatest threat to spent fuel pools.
Solar storms, physical attacks, and cyberattacks have the potential to cause a nightmare scenario …….
Bulletin, By Mark Leyse | April 2, 2024
Irradiated fuel assemblies—essentially bundles of fuel rods with zirconium alloy cladding sheathing uranium dioxide fuel pellets—that have been removed from a nuclear reactor (spent fuel) generate a great deal of heat from the radioactive decay of the nuclear fuel’s unstable fission products. This heat source is termed decay heat. Spent fuel is so thermally hot and radioactive that it must be submerged in circulating water and cooled in a storage pool (spent fuel pool) for several years before it can be moved to dry storage.
The dangers of reactor meltdowns are well known. But spent fuel can also overheat and burn in a storage pool if its coolant water is lost, thereby potentially releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the air. This type of accident is known as a spent fuel pool fire or zirconium fire, named after the fuel cladding. All commercial nuclear power plants in the United States—and nearly all in the world—have at least one spent fuel pool on site. A fire at an overloaded pool (which exist at many US nuclear power plants) could release radiation that dwarfs what the Chernobyl nuclear accident emitted.
Many analysts see very rare, severe earthquakes as the greatest threat to spent fuel pools; however, another far more likely event could threaten US nuclear sites: a widespread collapse of the power grid system. Such a collapse could be triggered by a variety of events, including solar storms, physical attacks, and cyberattacks—all of which are known, documented possibilities. Safety experts have warned for decades about the dangers of overloading spent fuel pools, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Congress have refused to act.
The threat of overloaded spent fuel pools. Spent fuel pools at US nuclear plants are almost as densely packed with nuclear fuel as operating reactors—a hazard that has existed for decades and vastly increases the odds of having a major accident.
Spent fuel assemblies could ignite—starting a zirconium fire—if an overloaded pool were to lose a sizable portion or all of its coolant water. In a scenario in which coolant water boils off, uncovered zirconium cladding of fuel assemblies may overheat and chemically react with steam, generating explosive hydrogen gas. A substantial amount of hydrogen would almost certainly detonate, destroying the building that houses the spent fuel pool. (Only a small quantity of energy is required to ignite hydrogen gas, including electric sparks from equipment. It is speculated a ringing telephone initiated a hydrogen explosion that occurred during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.)
A zirconium fire in an exposed spent fuel pool would have the potential to emit far more radioactive cesium 137 than the Chernobyl accident released. (The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has conducted analyses that found a zirconium fire at a densely packed pool could release as much as 24 megacuries of cesium 137; the Chernobyl accident is estimated to have released 2.3 megacuries of cesium 137.) Such a disaster could contaminate thousands of square miles of land in urban and rural areas, potentially exposing millions of people to large doses of ionizing radiation, many of whom could die from early or latent cancer.
In contrast, if a thinly packed pool were deprived of coolant water, its spent fuel assemblies would likely release about 1 percent of the radioactive material predicted to be released by a zirconium fire at a densely packed pool. A thinly packed pool has a much smaller inventory of radioactive material than a densely packed pool; it also contains much less zirconium. If such a limited amount of zirconium were to react with steam, most likely too little hydrogen would be generated to threaten the integrity of the spent fuel pool building.
After being cooled under water for a minimum of three years, spent fuel assemblies can be transferred from pools to giant, hermetically sealed canisters of reinforced steel and concrete that shield plant workers and the public from ionizing radiation. This liquid-free method of storage, which cools the spent fuel assemblies by passive air convection, is called “dry cask storage.”
A typical US storage pool for a 1,000-megawatt-electric reactor contains from 400 to 500 metric tons of spent fuel assemblies. (Dry casks can store 10 to 15 tons of spent fuel assemblies, so each cask contains a far lower amount of radioactive material than a storage pool.) Reducing the total inventories of spent fuel assemblies stored in US spent fuel pools by roughly 70 to 80 percent reduces their amount of radioactive cesium by about 50 percent. And the heat load in each pool drops by about 25 to 30 percent. With low-density storage, a pool’s spent fuel assemblies are separated from each other to an extent that greatly improves their ability to be cooled by air convection in the event that the pool loses its coolant water. Moreover, a dry cask storage area, which has passive cooling, is less vulnerable to either accidents or sabotage than a spent fuel pool.
In the aftermath of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan, in which there was a risk of spent fuel assemblies igniting, the NRC considered forcing US utilities to expedite the transfer of all sufficiently-cooled spent fuel assemblies stored in overloaded pools to dry cask storage. The NRC decided against implementing such a safety measure.
To help justify its decision, the NRC chose to analyze only one scenario that might lead to a zirconium fire: a severe earthquake. In 2014, the NRC claimed that a severe earthquake with a magnitude “expected to occur once in 60,000 years” is the prototypical initiating event that would lead to a zirconium fire in a boiling water reactor’s spent fuel pool.
The NRC’s 2014 study concluded that the type of earthquake it selected for its analyses would cause a zirconium fire and a large radiological release to occur at a densely packed spent fuel pool once every nine million years (or even less frequently). Restricting its analyses to a severe earthquake scenario allowed the NRC to help allay public fears over the dangers of spent fuel pool accidents. (At the time of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, the New York Times and other news outlets warned that a zirconium fire could break out in the plant’s Unit 4 spent fuel pool, causing global public concern.)
There is good reason to question whether severe earthquakes pose the greatest threat to spent fuel pools. A widespread collapse of the US power grid system that would last for a period of months to years—estimated to occur once in a century—may be far more likely to lead to a zirconium fire than a severe earthquake. The prospect that a widespread, long-term blackout will occur within the next 100 years should prompt US utilities to expedite the transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage. Utilities in other nations, including in Japan, that have overloaded pools should follow suit.
Solar storms, physical attacks, and cyberattacks have the potential to cause a nightmare scenario in which the US power grid collapses, along with other vital infrastructures—leading to reactor meltdowns and spent fuel pool fires, whose radioactive emissions would aggravate the disaster.
Vulnerability to solar storms……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Vulnerability to physical attacks.……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Vulnerability to cyberattacks. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Insufficient public safety.…………………………………………………………………………………….
Overloading spent fuel pools should be outlawed. Safety analysts have warned about the dangers of overloading spent fuel pools since the 1970s. For decades, experts and organizations have argued that in order to improve safety, sufficiently cooled spent fuel assemblies should be removed from high-density spent fuel pools and transferred to passively cooled dry cask storage. Sadly, the NRC has not heeded their advice.
In the face of the NRC’s inaction, Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced The Dry Cask Storage Act in 2014, calling for the thinning out of spent fuel pools. The act, which Senator Markey has reintroduced in subsequent congressional sessions, has not passed into law.
The relatively high probability of a nationwide grid collapse, which would lead to multiple nuclear disasters, emphasizes the need to expedite the transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage. According to Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs emeritus at Princeton University, the impact of a single accident at an overstocked spent fuel pool has the potential to be two orders of magnitude more devastating in terms of radiological releases than the three Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns combined. If the US grid collapses for a lengthy period of time, society would likely descend into chaos, as uncooled nuclear fuel burned at multiple sites and spewed radioactive plumes into the environment.
The value of preventing the destruction of US society and untold human suffering is incalculable. So, on the issue of protecting people and the environment from spent fuel pool fires, it is surprising when one learns that promptly transferring the nationwide inventories of spent fuel assemblies that have been cooled for at least five years from US pools to dry cask storage would be “relatively inexpensive”—less than (in 2012 dollars) a total of $4 billion ($5.4 billion in today’s dollars). That is far, far less than the monetary toll of losing vast tracts of urban and rural land for generations to come because of radioactive contamination.
One should also consider that plant owners are required, as part of the decommissioning process, to transfer spent fuel assemblies from storage pools to dry cask storage after nuclear plants are permanently shut down. So, in accordance with industry protocols, all spent fuel assemblies at plant sites are intended to eventually be placed in dry cask storage (before ultimately being transported to a long-term surface storage site or a permanent geologic repository). https://thebulletin.org/2024/04/spent-nuclear-fuel-mismanagement-poses-a-major-threat-to-the-united-states-heres-how/
Nuclear regulators should weigh climate change risk to power plants, report says
A GAO report found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to factor more risk from the impact of more extreme natural events in how it licenses the safety of power plants.
CARTEN CORDELL, Managing Editor, Government Executive, APRIL 2, 2024, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/04/nuclear-regulators-should-weigh-climate-change-risk-power-plants-report-says/395412/
With the possibility of climate change driving more extreme weather events in areas where nuclear power plants operate, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to incorporate those events into the safety planning of the facilities, a new report has found.
The Government Accountability Office said in an audit Tuesday that 75 operational and shuttered nuclear power plants in the U.S. reside in areas expected to be further impacted by climate change-driven weather events like drought, extreme heat and floods.
The NRC is tasked with developing the safety regulations and for licensing those power plants, with the agency mandating that nuclear facilities are designed to withstand earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods without harm to the public, largely by ensuring that their reactors remain cooled through a series of redundancies.
The report noted that while the NRC issued new safety requirements following the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant — where an earthquake-triggered tsunami caused the meltdown of three reactor cores —the agency does not factor climate projections data in its safety risk assessments, instead leaning on historical data to predict potential future risk.
“In such a case, NRC expects the event to occur only once in 10,000 to 10 million years, depending on the hazard,” the report said. “NRC officials we interviewed told us that they review regional climate projections information for some hazards but do not incorporate site-specific climate projections data, which include hazard assessments, design bases or determining the adequate safety margin for plants.”
The agency also doesn’t reevaluate natural hazard or climate-related events in its license renewal process, beyond a power plant’s initial 40-year licensing period, instead focusing on its aging impacts and retaining its original natural disaster risk-informed design.
The report noted that as of January, the NRC “had issued license renewals to 49 of the 54 operating nuclear power plants, meaning most plants are operating on the basis of assessments of natural hazard risk that are over 40 years old.”
The NRC inspection process also doesn’t factor in the climate projections, but agency officials told the GAO that other criteria such as the historical record of severe natural phenomena at a power plant site — known as conservatism — safety margins and multiple independent and redundant layers of defense “provide an adequate margin of safety to address climate risks to the safety of nuclear power plants.” However, GAO officials said that the NRC has done no assessment to affirm that assertion.
“According to NRC officials, using site-specific climate projections data for extreme hazard levels in nuclear power plant design and safety reviews is challenging because of the uncertainty associated with applying these data to specific sites” the report said. “However, NRC regulations do not preclude NRC from using climate projections data, and new sources of reliable projected climate data are available to NRC.”
The report also notes that since 2017, the agency uses an information system dubbed Process for the Ongoing Assessment of Natural Hazard Information to log and document historical hazard data and assess potential risk, including events driven by climate change.
But GAO officials said that the NRC has not developed new regulations as a result of the system, hasn’t used it to assess potential changes to all natural hazards and hasn’t comprehensively reviewed natural hazards on a regular basis.
“NRC conducts POANHI assessments for one hazard at a time, and the agency does not have a schedule for reviewing natural hazards beyond the assessment of seismic hazards currently underway,” the report said. “As such, POANHI is used to react to new hazard information or events when NRC staff become aware of them.”
GAO officials offered three recommendations, including assessing whether licensing and oversight processes address increased risk from climate change, that the NRC develop a plan to address gaps in its assessment process and that the agency finalize guidance incorporating climate projections data into its processes.
NRC officials said the recommendations were “consistent with actions that are either underway or under development,” but asserted that its conservatism and defense-in-depth processes provided reasonable assurance to natural hazards and potential climate change.
GAO officials said the agency “cannot fully consider potential climate change effects on plants without using the best available information—including climate projections data—in its licensing and oversight processes.”
Companies serious about climate change should boycott CoP 29
Jonathon Porritt, 3 Apr 24, https://www.jonathonporritt.com/companies-serious-about-climate-change-should-boycott-cop-29/—
At some point over the next couple of months, Chief Sustainability Officers will be making decisions and recommendations about this year’s CoP in Azerbaijan at the end of the year.
My advice to them: spare yourselves the hassle. Just don’t send anyone. And then tell the world why your company has decided to call time on the corrupt, preposterous pantomime that the entire CoP process has become.
Some considerations you might like to take into account:
Learn from experience. CoP 28 in Dubai was a disaster. Nothing substantive was agreed (and, please, never confuse verbiage with substance), and the deeply malign influence of the oil and oil and gas industry was fully “out” for all to see.Baku will be worse than Dubai – as the capital of an even more corrupt, even more misogynistic, and more autocratic petrostate than the UEA.Think about it carefully: just by being there, your company will be conferring credibility on a process that has comprehensively squandered whatever credibility it might once have had. “By your presence/absence shall your company be judged” – as it were!The notional benefits of being there for your own company will be marginal at best, and zero at worst, with a lot of performative blather masking the hydrocarbon horror story that lies behind.The “networking opportunities” that you’re no doubt factoring into your thoughts about this are just so many ephemeral blips on the road to climate meltdown.
So, do yourself (and your CEO and other Execs lining up for a bit of superficial CoP cred) a favour. You know that the gap between what the science tells us and the policy response to that science is getting wider, not narrower. You know CoP 29 will see that gap widen even further.
Be true to your privileged knowledge. Not many people understand how things really are as well as you do. Give the lie, once and for all, to the absurd proposition that any individual company – even one as “progressive ” and “responsible” as yours surely is – can make a blind bit of difference at this level as the politicians drive us ever closer to the abyss.
Looking forward to a lively debate with all you CSOs out there!
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 