Antinuclear

Does nuclear power have a future in Australia? These numbers will help cut through the debate

By energy reporter Daniel Mercer and climate lead Tim Leslie, 11 Jun 2024,  [excellent charts and graphics]

As the shift away from fossil fuels gathers pace, the Coalition has turned to an emissions-free technology that has a long and contentious history — nuclear fission.

To help make sense of what role, if any, nuclear power could play we turned to Alan Finkel, Australia’s former chief scientist, and economist John Quiggin.

These are the numbers that you should keep in mind when thinking about its place in Australia’s energy transition.

Let’s look at nuclear power today

0 grams — The amount of carbon dioxide nuclear power plants emit generating electricity.

There are, according to Australia’s former chief scientist Alan Finkel, four kinds of large-scale power generation that directly emit no greenhouse gas emissions.

Three of them are obvious and fit firmly in the renewable category – hydro-electricity, wind and solar power.  

The fourth is nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gases during operation, but requires fuel in the form of radioactive elements to power it. …………………

Mix of electricity from low carbon sources

Solar and wind now generate more electricity globally than nuclear power.

………………………….. in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, the head of the IEA, Fatih Birol, said nuclear power was not a good option for Australia as it would take too long.

“I have been a proponent of nuclear for many years,” he said. 

“But if there is a country that has a lot of resources from other sources, such as solar and wind, I wouldn’t see nuclear as a priority option. I’m talking about Australia now.”

…………………Australia would need to partner with another country to build a nuclear power plant, but turning to the current leaders in the space, Russia and China, wouldn’t be an option.

John Quiggin is a senior fellow in economics at the University of Queensland.

He said Australia — for obvious geopolitical reasons — would be unlikely to hitch its wagon to either country. 

“I don’t think that requires a lot of imagination,” Professor Quiggin said. “If Chinese firms have any special sauce, that’s no use to us. I would say the Chinese model is essentially not relevant.” 

…………………new nuclear energy is barely keeping pace with closures, and outside of China there is no evidence of a jump in the amount of nuclear energy coming online. 

In another sign of where the world is going, 2023 was the year when global large-scale battery investment overtook nuclear investment for the first time. 

How about how much it costs to build?

1.5 times — At least how much more expensive building nuclear power in Australia would be than renewables supported by batteries.

One of the reasons the Coalition is proposing nuclear is because of the cost of the clean energy transition, but when the CSIRO looked at the figures it found that nuclear was a significantly more expensive option.

Building renewable energy on its own is a fraction of the cost of new nuclear, and in some cases lower than the cost of actually running nuclear power stations.

However, a better comparison is between nuclear and solar or wind supported by storage and transmission.

The CSIRO looked at this in its latest GenCost report, which compares the cost of different ways of producing electricity, and found it was at least 50 per cent more expensive than large-scale wind and solar power backed by “firming” technologies such as batteries.

“We did a lot of work to determine what nuclear power would cost in Australia,” Paul Graham, the chief economist of the CSIRO’s energy business unit, said.

“We’ve previously reported on small modular reactors.

“But this time, we did an update and looked at the cost of large-scale nuclear reactors, and they’re cheaper — on the order of $150 to $250 a megawatt hour. That’s still one and a half to two times the cost of renewables.

…….  digging into the modelling only makes the case worse for nuclear.

When looking at the cost of renewables, the CSIRO factored in the maximum possible figures for grid upgrades, higher than the expected cost.

It also warned that the nuclear cost could only be achieved by building nuclear power at scale, so multiple reactors one after the other. The first power plant would be subject to what’s called a “first of its kind” multiplier, which could double the price from $8.5 billion to $17 billion.

Nuclear isn’t alone in facing this cost, it’s applied to any technology a country hasn’t built before, and we only have to look at the NBN or Snowy 2.0 to see the likely outcome.

But even in the world of big projects, nuclear power stations have among the worst track records for running over time and over cost.

Mega project expert Bent Flyvbjerg has gathered a database of the costs and timeframes for major projects around the world.

It shows nuclear power plants are among the worst for cost and timeframe overruns — on average they come in at more than double the original quoted price. 

Taking this conservative approach means the CSIRO’s figures are far more generous to nuclear than international comparisons.

Global investment bank Lazard has been publishing an analysis of what’s called the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) since 2008. LCOE is essentially how much money a power source would have to sell its electricity for to make any money.

In 2023, the lowest LCOE for nuclear power was $220 a megawatt hour, compared with onshore wind and batteries, which was $65MW/h, more than three times the cost. Even the top estimate of its range for solar and wind was still below nuclear’s cheapest range. ………………………………..

^$88 billion — The latest projected cost of building the 3.2 gigawatt Hinkley C nuclear plant in the UK.

Unlike renewable energy produced at volume, getting an accurate price on nuclear power is tricky. But looking at projects underway indicates it can be a very expensive proposition. 

A big part of the relative decline in nuclear power has been its high cost compared with many of the other technologies vying for political, investor, and social support. 

Exhibit A in this tale is the Hinkley C plant on the Somerset coast of the UK. 

In 2007, the then chief executive of French power provider EDF, which wanted to build the plant, boasted that by 2017 Britons would be able to cook their Christmas turkeys using electricity from Hinkley. 

When EDF finally committed to the giant 3.2 gigawatt plant in 2015, the initial budget was £18 billion ($34 billion), with a scheduled completion date of 2025. 

Earlier this year, following a spate of cost and time blowouts, EDF said the estimated costs of building the plant would soar to as much as £46 billion ($88 billion). 

Completion of the first reactor was not expected until 2029 at the earliest. 

The French utility, meanwhile, did not even bother to give a time-frame for the second reactor. 

What we do know is how much the British public will be paying for power from Hinkley. In order to build the plant the UK government committed to paying $171/MWh for the first 35 years, adjusted to inflation. This means the prices rise in line with inflation, by the end of 2023 it was $245/MWh.  

For context, Australia’s wholesale energy cost in the last quarter of 2023 was $48/MWh.

Dr Finkel described Hinkley’s costs as “stunningly expensive”. …………………………

Let’s talk about timeframes

………………………….20 years — How long Alan Finkel says going to nuclear will delay the shift from fossil fuels.

Dr Finkel is not opposed to nuclear power as an energy source, but said it cannot be thought of as a solution to decarbonising our power system for the next few decades. 

He said a call to go direct from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years. ……………………………..

96 per cent— How much of our grid is projected to run on renewables and storage by 2040.……………………………

10,000 years—   How long the US EPA requires the isolation of nuclear waste.…………………..

What about smaller reactors?

0 — The number of commercial small modular reactors under construction or in operation outside of China and Russia. (COMMENT – and China and Russia have no more than one or two, and not operating well)

3.9 times — How much more a small modular reactor would cost compared to wind and solar supported by batteries.………………..    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-11/nuclear-power-for-australia-cost-and-timelines-explained/103641602?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR390g5b6693i-HFkuGA0gyw1xFQP_10ZYzZ_zsk9fk0qwyp-S7AHZ9wwm0_aem_AUDX1LozQsj9FqEcFeQYTrTgIC8dBhGF8t3bhnH-snEwrlJGR8UxeU5JoNwc0rGGaSx-fHZ9Q5WDutOjBT25sbNz

June 11, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized