Antinuclear

Dutton’s nuclear plan stops decarbonisation, punishes consumers and hurts the economy.

Matt Kean, Climate Change Authority Chair, 17 Dec 24 https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-s-nuclear-plan-stops-decarbonisation-punishes-consumers-and-hurts-the-economy-20241216-p5kyru.html

Achieving net zero by 2050 is non-negotiable. Australia and our global partners have agreed to targets that limit warming and maximise the chance to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, such as more natural disasters, rising sea levels, and species and habitat loss.

But the pathway to decarbonisation matters too. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions as far and fast as possible now can reduce the amount of temperature rise experienced in the years ahead and help curb the risks to our economy, communities and way of life.

That’s one reason why accelerating work to create a new electricity network built on renewables such as wind and solar – backed by storage, firming and peaking gas – is essential.

It’s the biggest abatement opportunity available in the short term and the most cost-effective form of new energy generation needed to underpin progress on decarbonisation across the rest of the economy. And the race to pull forward investment in renewable energy generation is on because the owners of existing coal-fired power stations have begun to close them.

The first shutdown occurred at Lake Munmorah, NSW, in 2012, and more have since exited the system. It’s now expected that 90 per cent of the existing coal-fired generation capacity will depart the system by 2035.

Against this backdrop, the Climate Change Authority will undertake analysis of the Coalition’s
nuclear proposal. We want to give the Australian people an economic and science-based
understanding of the impacts on the grid, the climate and their energy bills. But at first glance,
Peter Dutton’s nuclear policy stops decarbonisation, blows the carbon budget, punishes
consumers and harms the economy.

Under any scenario contemplated, Australia will be more dependent on coal-fired power stations for longer. The CSIRO says the best case for delivery of a single new nuclear facility in Australia is 15 years. And that assumes the legislative, regulatory, workforce and other issues can be resolved – and the cost blowouts and time delays witnessed overseas aren’t repeated.

Yet to replace all of Australia’s confirmed retiring generation capacity with nuclear as a zero-emission alternative would require deploying at least 15 to 17 large-scale nuclear facilities, or more than 50 proposed small modular reactors, by 2040. In the meantime, Australia will need to depend on coal-fired power that is increasingly unreliable and the cause of price spikes and blackouts. It would be strange to subsidise the ongoing operation of plants that can’t be guaranteed to actually keep the lights on.

It also compounds the challenge of reducing our emissions in the short and long term. Relying primarily on electricity from fossil fuels for longer would also delay necessary and achievable cuts to emissions in other sectors such as transport and industry, which depend on the availability of zero emission energy for their own decarbonisation pathways

The authority has calculated that for every percentage point that Australia falls short of achieving 82 per cent by renewables by 2030, about 2 million tonnes of harmful emissions will be added to the atmosphere.

The other element the authority will consider is cost – to the economy, taxpayers and consumers. For example, the proposal doesn’t just appear to slow decarbonisation, but the economy too. Some initial forecasts have already suggested it assumes an economy 40 per cent smaller than the alternative.

Assuming there will be far less demand for electricity means assuming far fewer Australians take up EVs or electrify their homes. It means assuming fewer industrial and manufacturing businesses switch to efficient, electric production processes.

The sensitivities are heightened given the proposal involves taxpayers funding nuclear power stations, which risks sending private investment now attracted to renewables offshore in pursuit of better returns.

The CSIRO, AEMO and the authority have all also made the point – a system built on renewables will lead to lower power prices for households and businesses compared with nuclear. It would take an astonishing leap of faith to suggest otherwise, but the modelling published last week in support of nuclear seemed to take that path.

The debate over Australia’s energy transition should be based on sober analysis, rooted in economics and engineering. It’s why markets, scientists and experts keep defaulting to a system based on renewables.

Alternatives that place faith in a technology that does not exist in Australia, risks slowing our economy, undermining energy security and stalling our bid to reduce emissions deserve scrutiny. That’s what the Climate Change Authority will do.

Matt Kean is chair of the Climate Change Authority. He previously served as a NSW minister for energy.

December 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

The Coalition is playing voters for mugs once again with its nuclear costings

the Coalition documents released on Friday don’t seem to get around to mentioning is that its proposal for nuclear power involves taxpayers taking on all the massive financial risks (apart from the other sorts) and costs.

By Laura Tingle, 7.30 ABC 17 Dec 24

The August 2010 federal election campaign was conducted amid continuing shock waves from the Julia Gillard coup against Kevin Rudd a little less than two months earlier.

So, you may be forgiven for forgetting much that happened in the actual campaign, and specifically, how the federal Coalition didn’t bother releasing the costings of its election promises until just 48 hours before voters went to the polls.

It had already refused to submit the policy promises for independent analysis — which in those days was done by Treasury and the Department of Finance rather than the Parliamentary Budget Office.

That refusal might not have mattered too much to the broad sweep of history if the election result had been different. But a knife-edge result left three crossbench House of Representatives MPs to make the call on which side of politics would get their support and, therefore, be able to form government.

In making their decision the “Three Amigos” — Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and the subsequently infamously loquacious Rob Oakeshott — relied heavily on a Treasury and Finance analysis requested by them post-election.

Its findings? That the Coalition’s claimed budget savings were out by almost $11 billion. In the current age of announcements measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that might not sound like a lot.

But given that the claimed cost of Coalition policies was originally only $31.5 billion, that’s a rather spectacular …. miscalculation.

It felt for all the world like the work of an ill-prepared, lazy opposition that thought it could coast to office amid the chaos of a dysfunctional government. And it almost did.

A perfectly timed announcement

There’s something spookily familiar about the circumstances now, as the opposition finally unveiled its much-promised nuclear energy costings on a Friday one week before the country closes down entirely for Christmas.

There may be a lot more detailed modelling in the document prepared by Frontier Economics for the Coalition than there was in 2010.

But the modelling, and more importantly the Coalition’s political message wrapped around it, doesn’t answer the myriad of questions raised by the idea of nuclear energy. And this belated release of what we are led to believe is a signature policy for the election comes as the Coalition still hasn’t released details of most of its other key policies — from tax to immigration.

The decision to release the costing on December 13 feels like the Coalition is once again playing voters for mugs at a time when it is up against a federal government that has spent the year apparently determined to prove it is not very good at politics, or persuading voters that it knows what it is doing.

The Frontier modelling does implicitly raise important questions about the government’s own energy plans: just how much coal-fired power will the system need as we move towards a system that is dominated by renewables, and for how long?; how much gas will be needed (and is it in the right place) to be used to “firm” or underwrite the system?; how much can we really rely on battery technology that is still evolving to store renewables? and just how much transmission infrastructure do we need (and where) for a mostly renewables future?

The government has “sort of” answered these questions. Most analysts will tell you that it is almost impossible to answer them precisely because the wheel is still in spin. Prices and technologies are changing.

But, up against an opposition leader who is better at cut-through messages, it will need to do a lot better than that.

Crucial to the political debate is the fact that much of the uncertainty around these decisions arises because they are being made by individual investors who are taking on all the risks in building new energy capacity.

And this must surely be the threshold point of difference with what the federal Coalition is proposing.

For the one thing that the Coalition documents released on Friday don’t seem to get around to mentioning is that its proposal for nuclear power involves taxpayers taking on all the massive financial risks (apart from the other sorts) and costs.

The Coalition wants this big shift to be overseen by a public sector which it usually loves to point out is notoriously bad at running big projects, either directly or via massive subsidies.

The nuclear divide

The electorate is a lot more disengaged than it was in 2010, but the politically dangerous part of the nuclear policy from the government’s perspective is how it plays to regional Australia and, a bit like Brexit, likely divides the country into two very different blocks of voters.

Many regional voters, most pollsters will tell you, are worried about job losses as coal mining disappears, are unconvinced renewables offer job replacements, and are very exercised about the proliferation of wind and solar farms, and by the transmission lines to link them to the grid.

Earlier talk of small nuclear reactors has disappeared from the model set out using the Frontier modelling, and that modelling doesn’t seem to make provision for the fact that there are usually high costs for a first build, or that most expert opinion says it will take until at least 2040 to have the regulatory system and build in place for a first nuclear reactor to be functional, not 2036………………………………………………………………..

The Coalition has been pledging all year that its plans would lead to lower energy prices for stressed households.

But Peter Dutton had to sidestep on that issue on Friday because there is no clear mechanism for his plans to bring down those costs any time soon.

All the energy experts will be poring over the details for days. One could say they would be poring over them for weeks but (almost as if it was planned that way) the media coverage and the debate seem likely to come to a screeching stop in a week’s time as everything shuts down for Christmas.

Like the 2010 election costings, not many voters may remember the details of any analysis.

But the Coalition will have to be hoping there is no political equivalent of the Three Amigos to answer to this side of the 2025 election.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/politics-dutton-release-nuclear-costings/104723416

December 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment