Antinuclear

‘Cheaper with nuclear’: What will Dutton’s nuclear plan really cost?

The Age, Mike Foley, September 27, 2024 

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is refusing to release the costings of his nuclear energy policy, despite claiming a national fleet of reactors would slash power bills.

But enough work has been done by independent agencies to give us some idea of the potential price tag.

What Dutton said

“We can have cheaper, cleaner and consistent energy if we adopt nuclear power,” Dutton said last week, adding that nuclear plants did not require the thousands of kilometres of transmission lines that link renewables to the grid, and took up less space than wind and solar farms.

A Coalition government would build seven nuclear plants on the sites of existing coal plants, including two small modular reactors and five large-scale plants, and plans to have the first operating by 2037.

Dutton says residents of Ontario, Canada enjoy cheaper power prices – 18¢ a kilowatt-hour (kWh) – courtesy of the province’s eight nuclear reactors generating about 60 per cent of the electricity supply.

He told Nine’s Today program on September 20 that Ontarians were “paying one-third the cost of electricity that we are here”. In July, he said they were “paying about a quarter of the price for electricity that we are here in Australia”.

These claims are overstated.

Power prices

Victoria pays about 28¢ a kWh, NSW 33¢ and Queensland 30¢. So rather than prices being three to four times higher, they are a bit less than twice the 18¢ figure. South Australians pay more than the other states at 45¢, but still less than Dutton’s claim.

However, this comparison is questionable because Australian prices include a range of costs that Ontarians must pay on top of their kWh charge. Network charges – the cost of building, running and maintaining power poles and wires across the grid – are listed separately on Ontario’s bills and can run into hundreds of dollars a year.

Construction costs

The CSIRO’s latest energy cost report card estimated a large-scale nuclear reactor in Australia would cost $16 billion, based on the low-cost construction of plants in South Korea, and take nearly two decades to build. It calculated that cost could fall to about $8 billion per reactor as efficiencies of scale were achieved after at least five and possibly 10 reactors were built.

Britain’s Hinkley Point C plant, which was announced in 2007 with an estimated $18 billion price tag, is set to be completed 13 years late at a cost of $90 billion.

If a Dutton government built reactors in Australia, that cost would have to be repaid, which could come via consumers’ electricity bills……………………………………………………………. more https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/cheaper-with-nuclear-what-will-dutton-s-nuclear-plan-really-cost-20240920-p5kc8z.html

October 1, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics