Select Committee on Nuclear Energy – Submissions close 15 November.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Select_Committee_on_Nuclear_Energy

The House Select Committee on Nuclear Energy was established by a resolution of appointment that passed the House of Representatives on 10 October 2024.

The Committee will inquire into matters referred to in the resolution of appointment and is required to present its final report by no later than 30 April 2025.  The Committee will cease to exist upon presenting its final report.

Select Committee on Nuclear Energy

We will inquire into and report on the consideration of nuclear power generation, including deployment of small modular reactors, in Australia, including:

 deployment timeframes;

 fuel supply, and transport of fuel;

 uranium enrichment capability;

 waste management, transport and storage;

 water use and impacts on other water uses;

 relevant energy infrastructure capability, including brownfield sites and transmission lines;

 Federal, state, territory and local government legal and policy frameworks;

 risk management for natural disasters or any other safety concerns;

 potential share of total energy system mix;

 necessary land acquisition;

 costs of deploying, operating and maintaining nuclear power stations;

 the impact of the deployment, operation and maintenance of nuclear power stations on electricity affordability; and

 any other relevant matter.

October 24, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Delay-mongers have latched on to nuclear

Australia should be at the front of the queue, positioning our nation as a renewable energy superpower and an economic powerhouse for decades to come.

The delay-mongers have latched on to nuclear power, despite the overwhelming evidence that it can only drive up energy bills, can only be more expensive, and can only take too long to build in a cost-of-living crisis.

I suspect that even those arguing for nuclear don’t believe that we’ll ever build one of these reactors in Australia, and certainly not in time to help manage the exit of coal from the system.

Matt Kean, Former NSW treasurer, 22 Oct 24,  https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/22/matt-kean-fantasy-coalition-energy-policy-coal-nuclear-power?fbclid=IwY2xjawGFBTtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZOLw35JiI_0LOuO7ud0lCdaODH8ws-XTXtm6BjH-aQRT5FT8Ac8UKeUTQ_aem_yTUmsY_z33BOm66Ol9MkEA

Capital markets and the private sector have often been ahead of the curve in the debate over climate change.

They were prepared to discard the nonsense that action on climate change represented a choice between our environment and our economy.

(True economics – the economy is based on a healthy environment)

(False economics – profit is the first priority – consider the environment only later)

That’s because the forces reshaping the global economy are clear, the cost of low emissions technology is coming down, and the appetite of investors to direct capital towards it is surging.

These trends are now embedded and have forever shifted the dynamics of climate policy. Consider the sheer weight of capital now pouring into the low-carbon energy transition right across the world.

It means an economic arms race to capture the next generation of investment, resource projects, exports, jobs and innovation will continue to explode right across the world.

Australia should be at the front of the queue, positioning our nation as a renewable energy superpower and an economic powerhouse for decades to come.

We should have the confidence to be bold, knowing there is a clear capacity to attract the finance for the technology and innovation needed to reduce emissions.

Our track record tells us so we have continued to build the policy architecture needed to give comfort to investors, and we can tell a story of meaningful progress against our emissions reduction goals towards a contemporary clean-energy system, and in pursuit of the next wave of ideas to sustain our success.

The integrated system plan gives us a clear national blueprint for the generation, storage and transmission infrastructure needed to sustain a reliable, secure and affordable national electricity market.

It will also depend on enabling initiatives such as the capacity investment scheme, which is revolutionising our ability to encourage new investment in dispatchable renewable energy, generation and storage.

The scale of the scheme is simply mammoth, with a target of 32 gigawatts of new capacity, comprising 23 gigawatts of renewable capacity and 9 gigawatts of clean, dispatchable capacity.

In total, it’s expected to drive $67 billion worth of investment continuing to inject renewables into the system, backed by storage and firming technology.

It is the best, most affordable way to replace capacity lost as coal-fired power stations exit the system.

That’s the advice of the CSIRO. That’s the advice of the Australian Energy Market Operator, and it’s one of the major assumptions that underpins the recently released sector pathways review produced by the Climate Change Authority, which I’m now pleased to chair.

Perhaps the biggest cost of nuclear is time.

That’s because mature and available technology allows us to step up the pace of change, by building on the rise in clean energy that has seen the transformation of our grid.

More than 40 per cent of the nation’s electricity is now generated by renewables.

We need to consider this simple fact: as renewables have poured into the system, the emissions intensity of the national electricity market, the nation’s largest grid, has dropped by more than a third, and sectoral emissions can be dramatically slashed further if we continue to invest in new solar, wind, storage and firming solutions.

We know that as much as 90 per cent of the coal-fired power that has underpinned our economy is coming to the end of its technical life by 2035. It’s an ageing technology that is already adding to price spikes and reducing reliability for households and businesses.

And if we continue to depend on it, we accelerate the rundown of the limited carbon budget available to us, we would fall behind the curve on our near-term emissions reduction targets, and we would face the prospect of irreversible damage to our environment, our economy and our way of life.

We simply can’t afford to wait and hope that bigger breakthroughs are over the horizon, and perhaps more importantly, we can’t pander to those vested interests and self-serving groups who want to delay clean and cheap energy, seemingly to benefit their own careers or their profits at the expense of the environment, the economy and our people.

Recently, for example, an illiberal drive to intervene in the market-led energy transition has been elevated from internet chat rooms and lobby groups to the national stage.

The delay-mongers have latched on to nuclear power, despite the overwhelming evidence that it can only drive up energy bills, can only be more expensive, and can only take too long to build in a cost-of-living crisis.

I suspect that even those arguing for nuclear don’t believe we’ll ever build one of these reactors in Australia, and certainly not in time to help manage the exit of coal from the system.

But they get their grabs up in the news, while the public get the growing energy bills that they can’t afford to pay.

Perhaps the biggest cost of nuclear is time. It is precious time that neither our economy nor our environment can afford, and it will once again plunge Australia back into indecision and delay.

A regime in flux lacks the stability and durability that investors need. Sensitivities will be further heightened when you add concepts that crowd out investment, forcing government-owned entities to fund, own and develop technology where Australia currently lacks capacity and that is arguably more expensive.

We don’t have the luxury of placing that bet, and that’s why, as chair of the Climate Change Authority, I will always place a premium on science, evidence, engineering and economics; that’s how we build a modern energy system.

We need to continue to give households and businesses the affordable and reliable energy they want. And it’s how we continue to harness the wall of capital washing across the world to create a clean, strong future that lifts our prosperity and protects our way of life for decades ahead.

There is a lot to do, but we can do that. We can get there and deliver cheaper, reliable energy for everyone across the country, and set our country up for a stronger and more prosperous future than any generation of Australians has ever seen. That’s the chance. Let’s grab it.

Matt Kean is the former treasurer and energy minister of NSW. He now chairs the Climate Change Authority. This is an edited extract of his speech at The Australian Financial Review’s Energy & Climate Summit.

October 22, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Nuclear too slow to replace coal by 2035

Financial Review, John Kehoe and Jenny Wiggins, 21 Oct 24

Energy executives say the development of nuclear power in Australia will be too slow to replace ageing coal-fired power plants in the next decade, as Climate Change Authority chairman Matt Kean accuses “delay-mongers” of latching onto the idea for a publicity stunt.

But beyond the urgent phase of the energy transition to renewables and gas-fired power, some executives and the energy market operator said nuclear should be left on the table as a potential energy source for Australia in the long term to keep up with rising power demand from consumers and businesses.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has pledged to build seven government-owned nuclear power stations by 2050 to meet Australia’s net zero emissions commitment. Under the high-level proposal, the first small modular reactor would arrive in 2035, although energy experts say this is overly ambitious and it would likely take years longer.

Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman said, “urgent and sustained investment” in renewables generation was needed to replace retiring coal-fired power stations, as well as investment in storage and transmission lines over the next 10 years.

“That is not a time frame in which nuclear will be available,” Mr Westerman told The Australian Financial Review Climate and Energy Summit on Monday……………………………………………………….

Mr Kean, a former NSW Liberal treasurer who now leads the federal government’s independent climate change advisory body, will tell the Summit on Tuesday that there was overwhelming evidence that nuclear would increase energy bills and take too long to build.

“I suspect that even those arguing for nuclear don’t believe we’ll ever build one of these reactors in Australia … and certainly not in time to help manage the exit of coal from the system – but they get their grabs in the news, while the public will get growing energy bills they can’t afford to pay,” Mr Kean will say, according to his speaking notes.

Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria said that to achieve the Albanese government’s 82 per cent renewable electricity target by 2030, a massive 32 gigawatts of generation needed to be brought online. “You’ll need to double that again in 2040,” Mr Calabria said.

Origin has examined small modular nuclear reactors but believes it is still early days for the technology, Mr Calabria said.

“Commercialisation and cost and scale are at least a decade away … it’s certainly into the 2030s.”

While Origin considered small reactors could be a potential future source of energy, it wouldn’t make a “single bet”, he said.

“We’re certainly not discounting it. I just wouldn’t overstate its role right today.”

The large-scale nuclear reactors promoted by the Coalition have “varying costs” and are also at least a decade away, he added.

“That for us feels much more difficult because we have got an influx of renewable energy that is going to be into the system and therefore is it going to intersect alongside that well?”

Origin is sticking with its revised target of August 2027 for shutting its Eraring coal power station in Lake Macquarie and is “agnostic” over what kind of energy replaces coal, Mr Calabria said.

The Origin boss acknowledged it would be difficult to create a reliable power system to replace coal, but expects solar panels to be installed on rooftops faster than expected.

Gas-fired power would also be needed as back-up power to solar, wind and battery-stored energy, he said.

The Albanese government is scrambling to meet an international commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, en route to a net zero goal by 2050.

Renewable energy including solar, wind, battery storage and pumped hydro forms the backbone of the government’s plan, with gas-peaking plants backing up the intermittent renewables.

NSW Climate and Energy Minister Penny Sharpe said the key challenge for nuclear was that coal will be phased out before nuclear is ready. “Nuclear just doesn’t fit that time frame,” she told the Summit. “Our challenge is to manage the [coal] exit as quickly as we can, while replacing it with renewables.”

……………………………………. Squadron Energy chief executive Rob Wheals said the whole nuclear debate was a distraction.

“It seems like a tactic of kicking the can down the road and actually not focusing on the technologies that we know are available and are available in the time frame that we’ve got,” he said.

Political fight

Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen panned the Coalition’s idea of starting a nuclear energy industry from scratch.

“The real danger in the Coalition’s nuclear scheme is the uncertainty it deliberately creates in relation to our grid. Investment is vital,” he said……………………………………..  https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/nuclear-too-slow-to-replace-coal-by-2035-20241021-p5kjzg

October 21, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Inside the room that loves Nuclear Ted

The Opposition’s fission frontman Ted O’Brien was in his element at Australia’s premier pro-nuclear conference last week, feeling the love from a hot-to-trot audience swallowing every word from a smooth-talking messiah . Freelance Journalist Murray Hogarth was there and imbibed the vibe — but not the glow-in-the-dark Kool-Aid.

by MURRAY HOGARTH., https://thepolitics.com.au/inside-the-rooms-that-love-nuclear-ted/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF8E1hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHeNqjz022ugJko-9VboOWN2DC-94pA7Y5ifdvNwZFTZ_YaikPJPpvYhkNw_aem_dxORDyGfCPnc4VD223hWhA 16 Oct 24

Ted O’Brien MP was confecting political outrage, playing to Australia’s ultimate pro-nuclear audience in Sydney last Friday. The day before, the Albanese Labor government had sprung a pre-election surprise on the Liberal-National coalition, and O’Brien as its nuclear torchbearer, when it forced through a tactical parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy.

“It was hard not to be a little bit suspicious, not just because there’d been zero engagement on this,” he confided, eager to share his take on the backstory to how the Coalition had been politically blindsided and outmuscled.

O’Brien was in high dudgeon about the inquiry’s terms of reference, but mainly about its committee having four Labor government members versus two from the Coalition, a two-to-one ratio, plus one from the crossbench, a teal. That’s a clear government majority, so official committee reports will say what it wants, which is realpolitik at work. But to O’Brien it was a desperate government “very clearly trying to weaponise the parliamentary system to kill the idea that Australia should include nuclear energy as part of its mix”. 

Of course, hypocrisy is quite the thing in politics. It turns out the last parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy in 2019, which was chaired by O’Brien, and which supported partial lifting of Australia’s long-standing nuclear energy ban, was even more dominated by the then Coalition government — 5-2 also plus a single teal.

The Coalition under PM Scott Morrison then squibbed it on running a go-nuclear policy at the 2022 elections, which it lost to Labor. Yet, as the opposition, it now expects a Labor government to overturn the nuclear ban that the Coalition introduced in 1998, under the conservative leadership of PM John Howard.

Nothing for O’Brien to melt down over here. But don’t let facts get in the way of a convenient story.

Smug, glib, righteous and on the Right

O’Brien approaches a speaking platform with a radioactive level of smugness and glibness that makes me feel queasy to the core. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been overexposed to him in the past six months as I’ve tracked the emerging nuclear story: three live speeches and seemingly endless videos and television interviews. His own productions. 7.30. Insiders. Four Corners. Sky News on loop. 

A committed spruiker, in an Americanised preachy showman kind of way, the ambitious O’Brien is both righteous and on the Right. To paraphrase him: nuclear is vital to our future energy mix and to achieving net zero. Labor’s 100% renewables can’t do it. Blah blah blah. Oh, and we’ll make public the costs and other key details “in due course”.

Last Friday, in contrast to my gut feeling, there was love vibing in the room when O’Brien returned to his people at Australia’s premier pro-nuclear event, the annual conference of the Australian Nuclear Association (ANA). Among this fraternity, he’s Nuclear Ted, the reactor-evangelising federal Liberal from Queensland who’s putting the fission back into the politics of energy in Australia, with a touch of frisson too for this audience.

It’s a pro-nuke constituency that has been in the Australian political wilderness seems like forever, but at least since the 1960s. Now a smooth-talking messiah has emerged, vowing to lead it to its promised land: a nuclear Australia. 

If you’ve been thinking it’s mainly renewables-hating, climate-denying National Party political malcontents who are behind the Coalition’s plans — which include prolonging coal and expanding gas generation — think again.

Friends in high places 

ANA conferences are where corporate big nuke and its international and local lobbyists meet Australia’s nuclear true believers. Weirdly, however, this gathering of 200 or so delegates has the Australian government as its long-standing principal sponsor. That’s right. The Albanese Labor government is sponsoring a platform for O’Brien, its would-be nuclear energy policy nemesis, to attack the government. And unsurprisingly he keeps coming back to do just that. It’s almost like the government wants O’Brien out there, talking his talk.

The government’s sponsorship comes via its main nuclear advisory agency, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), which operates the nation’s only reactor, a research and medical isotopes facility at Lucas Heights in Sydney. The other event sponsors include the Canadian nuclear engineering powerhouse AtkinsRéalis, and the Australian lobbying outfit SMR Nuclear Technologies.

ANSTO definitely isn’t meant to play politics, challenge policies of the government of the day, or otherwise advocate for nuclear energy. So it’s worth pointing out that the ANA’s president, and the conference’s main host, Dr Mark Ho, is a senior ANSTO scientist in his day job, and the event’s key organiser, Dr John Harries, is former ANSTO, as are many in the ANA orbit.

Beyond the conference, the ANA is increasingly involved in promoting nuclear energy. It and Ho helped organise the Navigating Nuclear forum in May, where O’Brien was a surprise guest speaker after it had been promoted as being “free of politics”. 

The Nuclear for Australia campaign thanked Ho for joining its first public event in Lithgow — one of the Coalition’s targeted communities for nuclear reactors — several weeks ago, and Ho was billed as a speaker at an ultra-conservative, anti-renewables, pro-nuclear forum in western Sydney in September where Barnaby Joyce was a pop-up speaker, as previously reported in The Politics, before Harries stepped in to replace him.

I missed Lithgow, but I was at the Navigating Nuclear and western Sydney events. Hence my delicate stomach.

The Coalition is all over this

O’Brien gave a keynote at the ANA’s conference last year too, lambasting the Albanese Labor government then as well. His National Party colleague Dr David Gillespie MP, who spoke at the end of last Friday’s event, has been a regular at these conferences since 2018. Gillespie used the 2022 conference as a springboard for pro-nuclear lobbying through his chairmanship of the Coalition-dominated Parliamentary Friends of Nuclear Industries. 

With O’Brien, they played a key role in shaping Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s headland nuclear energy policy announcements in mid-2023. Indeed, O’Brien passed on Dutton’s greetings to last Friday’s conference, and indicated Dutton’s wish to attend a future event “in due course”. 

The irony of this phrase choice may have escaped O’Brien in the moment. But he and Dutton are constantly promising the media and the Australian public that they will announce the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy costs and other details “in due course”. Thus far there is no sign of them.

As the day-long conference played out last Friday, it became more and more clear this wasn’t just a political speaker and an audience with a common interest. It’s more like they are collaborators, private sector interests included, working not just for a nuclear Australia but for a global nuclear renaissance. 

One of the main industry sponsor presenters, for example, mentioned a recent economic assessment it had undertaken looking at nuclear generation for the NSW Hunter region that “isn’t public”, saying that “hopefully David and Ted can use that going forward”. Very cosy. It’s all very reciprocal and transactional. The kind of thing which Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed master of the deal turned political leader, might applaud.

It’s a fair bet that if Trump returns to the US presidency after next month’s election the Americans will be all over Australia to buy its nuclear energy technologies and services — a number of which were showcased at the 2023 ANA conference, especially Brookfield-owned Westinghouse, already on Dutton’s reactor design shopping list, and Bill Gates’s TerraPower.

The dream merchant

O’Brien, meanwhile, hung around the conference for an extra Q&A session, and actively canvassed for political support via the ANA community, inviting delegates to mobilise their networks ahead of the federal election, and make wide-ranging submissions to the Labor-dominated parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy now underway, without feeling constrained by “Labor’s terms of reference”.

In return, O’Brien is promising the realisation of their nuclear dream. If only the Coalition can return to political power, they’ll get nuclear power, or at least that’s the bait, whatever happens down the years ahead. At one stage in the Q&A he even indicated that a future Coalition government could help promote nuclear energy development ambitions with other nations across the Asia-Pacific. 

Standing in the way, however, as O’Brien the reactor evangelist tells it, is a Labor government at odds with the nation’s patriotic spirit, and “Team Australia” to revive a favoured Tony Abbott line:

“This is about Australia  … But it is people in this room and beyond, who’ve been doing the heavy lifting for years. It is the intellectual capacity of people in this room and the willingness to be patriots, to put Australia first … It is very much a Team Australia effort of patriots who are prepared to engage and assist along the way.”

Oh dear, I’m feeling queasy all over again.

FOOTNOTE: A key conclusion from delving into O’Brien’s nuclear journey, and that of the Dutton Opposition over the past couple of years, is that they haven’t gone to energy experts to work out if and how nuclear fits into Australia’s energy future. Rather, they’ve gone to nuclear vested interests and true believers, and surprise! surprise! they are all for it! As are fossil-fuel diehards, who know a strategic distraction when they see one.

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