Antinuclear

Nuclear power: Peter Dutton changes gear in favour of big reactors not small modular ones,

Mr O’Brien told The Australian Financial Review in June 2022 that SMRs, not large-scale power plants, were the future of nuclear.

Mr Dutton is now saying modern giant power plants would be the backbone of the Coalition’s energy policy.

Phillip Coorey,  https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/dutton-changes-gear-on-nuclear-plans-pm-dismissive-20240305-p5f9vg 5 Mar 24

Plans by the Coalition to build large nuclear reactors on the sites of old coal-fired power stations would be prohibitively expensive, take more than a decade to implement, and would not work in most cases because such reactors need to be near water, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

Mr Albanese, who as shadow environment minister two decades ago fought plans by John Howard to consider nuclear power plants near populated coastal communities, said little had changed in terms of the political difficulties of such a proposal.

“He is now speaking about large nuclear reactors. They need to be near populations, they need to be near water,” he said of Mr Dutton.

“I look forward to him announcing the locations for nuclear reactors in Australia and for there to be an appropriate debate about that.”

Mr Dutton and his energy spokesman Ted O’Brien are proposing nuclear power be used to provide baseload power to firm renewable energy and ensure Australia can achieve new zero emissions by 20250.

Rather than build, as Labor is intending to do, 28,000 kilometres of poles and wires to transmit renewable energy from wind and solar farms, Mr Dutton is proposing building nuclear power pants on the sites of coal fired plants as they are decommissioned.

The proposal builds on the original plan, which would involve a strong focus on small modular reactors.

Mr O’Brien told The Australian Financial Review in June 2022 that SMRs, not large-scale power plants, were the future of nuclear.

“Nobody wants old Soviet technology, you wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,” he said.

But SMR technology is still embryonic, and Mr Dutton is now saying modern giant power plants would be the backbone of the Coalition’s energy policy.

“It doesn’t resemble anything that you’ve seen in the past. It’s like comparing a motor vehicle you’re driving off the showroom floor today in 2024, compared to something in 1954,” he said.

“So, the technology is unbelievable compared to what it was 50 or 70 years ago.”

He said bipartisan support for nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS deal had removed any opposition to nuclear power on the basis of their needing to have a high-level nuclear waste dump.

Mr Albanese said the nuclear argument had changed little since Mr Howard had businessman and nuclear physicist Ziggy Switkowski examine the option in 2006.

“Every 10 years, there are these proposals, we’ve seen the Switkowski report come and go,” he said.

“What never comes is any investment, because it simply doesn’t stack up commercially.

“I look forward as well to him arguing where the financing will come [from] for such reactors, or whether taxpayers will be expected to pay for this.”

The Opposition argues Mr Albanese should lift the moratorium on nuclear power and let the market decide.

Mr Dutton said Mr Albanese was out of touch with public opinion which, according to opinion polls, is warming to nuclear power.

“It’s … supported by a lot of younger people because they’re well-read, and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system,” he said.

“The government’s got sort of a wing and a prayer at the moment where they think if we have 100 per cent renewables in the system, the costs will go down, or there can be reliability. Neither of those things will happen, in fact, the opposite.”

March 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Peter Dutton’s climate denial is morphing into a madcap nuclear fantasy. The ban should stay

And don’t think for a moment that the Coalition, if in power and with no nuclear ban standing in its way, would not propose some mad-cap scheme to lock in some unproven projects from the first nuclear salesman that turns up at their door.

And don’t think for a moment that the Coalition, if in power and with no nuclear ban standing in its way, would not propose some mad-cap scheme to lock in some unproven projects from the first nuclear salesman that turns up at their door.

Giles Parkinson, Mar 5, 2024,  https://reneweconomy.com.au/peter-duttons-climate-denial-is-morphing-into-a-madcap-nuclear-fantasy-the-ban-should-stay/

The energy tropes on social media are getting so bizarre it is sometimes hard to imagine how anyone would take them seriously.

Welcome to the Trumpian world we now live in: Say something often enough and people may end up believing it. And just when you think it could not get any more weird, up pops the federal Coalition with a plan for nuclear power.

There is a lot to be said about nuclear energy, and despite its exorbitant costs some countries are still trying to build nuclear plants because it either supports their military complex, or because they feel they have no choice.

In most countries, the arguments in favour of nuclear power are usually based around the promise and determination that it can accelerate the transition towards net zero and low carbon economies.

Not in Australia: The Coalition makes their position very, very clear. They don’t buy into the renewables thing, they think it is reckless and will ruin the environment, and the economy. And they are not particularly interested in accelerating, or even meeting, net zero emission targets.

Far better, they say, to stop the renewables transition in its tracks, keep coal fired power stations open and wait for small modular reactors. Which, if they ever arrive, cannot realistically be deployed in Australia before 2040, if then.

Even the large nuclear reactors suggested on Tuesday by Coalition leader Peter Dutton – maybe he realises that SMRs are indeed a fantasy – could not be built before 2040, more likely 2045.

The push for nuclear over renewables, and keeping coal fired power stations open, is an argument you can only prosecute if you happen to believe that climate science is a load of crap, and the result of some UN-based conspiracy to deprive us all of our liberties.

Which just happens to be a core belief of key members of the Coalition, its loudest media mouthpieces, and what appears to be its main advisory body, the Gina Rinehart-funded Institute of Public Affairs.

As Michael Mazengarb reported last week, a whole cast of right-wing so-called “think tanks” are prosecuting the argument for nuclear, attacking renewables, and helping feed the social media frenzy against this and other technology solutions – battery storage, EVs, and the very concept of demand management and smart energy.

The nuclear debate is moving into the mainstream. Surveys, most with loaded questions, suggest there is majority support for nuclear and the removal of Australia’s ban of the technology. That’s questionably, but even Australia’s pre-eminent business commentator, Alan Kohler, bought into the argument this week.

Kohler argued the ban against nuclear should be removed, but won’t matter much because the market will decide, and investors will not put money into nuclear because they don’t want to bury themselves under a wall of debt and absurdly expensive production costs.

“The market will decide” is a key Coalition and nuclear booster talking point.

Kohler is wrong. And so is the Coalition. The market will not decide. The market has not decided the fate of nuclear power stations for decades – they are funded, owned and often enough bailed out by governments and state-owned entities.

And there are not that many actually being built. The Coalition’s “nuclear renaissance” is a mirage and a fiction. According to a report from the International Energy Agency this week, new solar installations across the world rose to 420 gigawatts in 2023, new wind to 117 GW, and new nuclear slumped to just 5.5 GW.

And they are not doing much for emissions either. In the five year period from 2019 to 2023, the IEA says, solar accounted for 1.1 billion tonnes of avoided annual emissions. Wind accounted for 830 million tonnes of avoided annual emissions, and already installed nuclear just 160 million tonnes.

That won’t phase a Coalition government in Australia. The nuclear ban should stay because the country’s ruling parties, and the Coalition in particular, have shown a penchant for hare-brained and vanity projects that make little or no financial or strategic sense.

Think of the Aukus deal – $368 billion for six nuclear submarines, which, as was feared, as acted as a kind of Trojan horse for the nuclear boosters. Think of Snowy 2.0, already costing $12 billion and counting for a project that won’t deliver anything like the benefits claimed, and that does not include the cost of transmission.

Snowy 2.0 is an interesting case.

It could be argued that Snowy 2.0 has done more damage to the Australian renewable energy transition than any other project, or policy position. And you could also argue its parent company, the government-owned Snowy Hydro, could provide the perfect vehicle for Dutton’s nuclear dreams.

The sheer scale of Snowy 2.0 has caused countless of smaller, more sensible and more distributed storage projects to be delayed or cancelled.

The Snowy Hydro rhetoric in support of the project – that battery storage is not feasible, and household batteries are a waste of money – has helped deflect the media and policy debate away from where it needed to be: consumer energy resources.

Snowy Hydro didn’t like want to change their primacy in the market with new fangled ideas. Demand management, its former CEO Paul Broad liked to say, is akin to “forced blackouts.”

Their push against CER and smart energy solutions is much reported and quoted position that has caused pain across the grid and for consumers, and helped derail plans for a sensible and fair transition. Regulators and policy makers only now realise they have been led up the garden path and are scrambling for ways to repair the situation.

And the transmission lines that have been fast-tracked to support Snowy 2.0 – the HumeLink and VNI-West, most notably – have been rushed and poorly handled, and have provided a trigger point for the anti-transmission and anti-renewable agenda that now floods the airwaves.

Snowy Hydro is still at it. During a recent media tour of the stalled and costly Snowy 2.0 tunnelling project, CEO Dennis Barnes was quoted by one of the invited journalists as saying that “no other technology” exists that can deliver more than four hours storage.

“There may be technologies in 15, 20 years, but there is no commercial technology other than pumped hydro that goes beyond four hours,” Barnes was quoted as saying by The Australian.

That would be news to global energy giants such as RWE, BP and Ark Energy (owned by Korea Zinc) who have contracted to build eight-hour batteries for the NSW government as part of their plan to fill the gap that could be created if the Eraring coal generator does close as planned in August next year.

Those eight-hour batteries will all be up and running well before Snowy 2.0.

But it’s merely a symptom of the nonsense and misinformation that must be stated by developers to justify projects that are not such as great idea.

The nuclear cartel and its supporters are no different, and have been emboldened by Trump’s triumph with fake news: Facts don’t seem to matter so much any more.

The energy world, particularly in Australia, is moving away from “baseload” to renewables and “flexible” dispatchable capacity. Rooftop solar is expected to increase four fold over the next two decades, and be accompanied by a mass switch to electrification (business and households), and electric vehicles.

The switch to EVs is significant, because it causes consumers to think on a near daily basis how and where they will charge the electric vehicles, and at what cost.

It makes them focus on their options for solar, and storage, and smart software, and whether they are getting a fair deal from the current market that is now so focused on big centralised power.

The Coalition wants to throw that transition into reverse.

Exactly how the Coalition expects to jam baseload nuclear into a grid where rooftop solar accounts for all grid demand and more during the day is not explained. Don’t expect an answer, because they haven’t thought about it yet, and when they do it will probably feature curtailment and more storage.

See Alan Pear’s comment: How can nuclear fit into a renewable grid where base load cannot compete

And don’t think for a moment that the Coalition, if in power and with no nuclear ban standing in its way, would not propose some mad-cap scheme to lock in some unproven projects from the first nuclear salesman that turns up at their door.

Private investors won’t put up the money for nuclear power plants, but the Coalition – be it the LNP in Queensland with their state-owned utilities, or the Dutton-led Coalition in Canberra with Snowy Hydro – won’t need them.

Perversely, Snowy Hydro, might provide an attractive synergy for the Coalition’s nuclear plans, and not just for their shared disregard and disdain for consumer and distributed energy resources and smart energy solutions.

EdF, the French government-owned utility that runs its nuclear power plants, is also the biggest operator of pumped hydro in the world, because much of the world’s pumped hydro was built half a century ago with the specific task of backing up nuclear energy. As the name suggests, Snowy Hydro, has lots of hydro.

(Yes, nuclear needs back up power, and a lot of it. Because of that, and because its business model is based around “baseload”, it doesn’t really help in the renewables transition. In a country like Australia with world-leading wind and solar resources, it competes against it).

And, like the French government which shields French consumers from the soaring cost of nuclear (it cost $40 billion in 2022/23 alone after half their fleet went offline), the Coalition can dip into the Commonwealth budget for funds – as they did for Aukus – for which the current crop of MPs and Senators will never be accountable.

Their denial of economic reality is total. The only small modular reactor that has got close to regulatory approval and to actually being built, was the NuScale technology in the US, which got pulled because the costs spiralled beyond what even the technology’s naysayers were predicting.

But we are told repeatedly that nuclear isn’t expensive at all. “Billionaires are demanding Australians refuse cheaper, reliable, emission-free nuclear power,” Vikki Campion, the wife of National MP and anti-renewable ring-leader Barnaby Joyce, writes in the Murdoch media. Cheaper than what, exactly? Nothing much.

The Coalition has been trying to stop the renewable energy revolution for the last two decades, and is now launching attacks against institutions such as the CSIRO and AEMO.

Maybe it’s time people paused to reflect about why that is. Exactly whose purpose are they serving, whose interests are they defending? Why was it so important for Dutton to fly to Perth last week for an hour to celebrate Rinerhart’s birthday?

The fossil fuel mafia ganged up on John Howard over the then mandatory renewable target and the proposed carbon price, and right through Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to Dutton, it’s been the same story. Malcolm Turnbull might have been different, but his legacy is Snowy 2.0.

Labor is now in power, its climate policies still fall short of what the science demands by 2030, but it is having a real crack at meeting the 82 per cent target modelled in the market operator’s Integrated System Plan, and which is now an official target.

Even the biggest energy users – those that run the smelters and the refineries – are demanding the transition to renewables, and are acting on it.

Curiously, the renewables industry stays largely mum on the nuclear issue – relying, perhaps, on the notion that rational thought, science and economics will prevail. We don’t live in that world any more.

Nuclear is nothing more than a distraction, and a dangerous one at that. The ban should stay.

March 6, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Talk of nuclear power plant sites ‘conjecture’, says Liberal MP amid internal division on Dutton’s policy

Rowan Ramsey says overturning ban on nuclear first is the ‘most logical thing’ to do as opposition leader prepares to nominate up to six locations

Paul Karp Chief political correspondent, Guardian, 5 Mar 24

The Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey has said any talk of where nuclear power plants would be built or waste would go is “conjecture” that cannot sensibly be tackled until after the nuclear ban is lifted.

As the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, prepares to announce an energy policy nominating up to six possible sites for nuclear plants, he faces internal divisions about the level of government support required, proposed locations and questions about storage of nuclear waste.

On Tuesday Dutton all but confirmed the Coalition will propose locating nuclear power plants on the site of retiring coal power plants, claiming that this would save having to build new transmission infrastructure for renewables.

The plan would suggest that the Labor-held seat of Hunter, independent Andrew Gee’s seat of Calare and Coalition-held Flynn, Maranoa, O’Connor and Gippsland are on the shortlist for nuclear power stations.

The Gippsland MP, Darren Chester, has argued that his community would need to receive “direct economic benefits” if it were to host power plants.

The Liberal MP for Sturt, James Stevens, has argued that community concerns must be allayed by explaining where and how waste will be stored. This opens another can of worms for the Coalition, as Australia has failed for decades to build a dump for its slowly accumulating intermediate nuclear waste.

Ramsey told Guardian Australia that Kimba, a proposed site for a waste dump in his South Australian electorate of Grey, was “never envisaged, planned or promised to hold high-level waste”……..

It is unclear how the Coalition’s nuclear policy hopes to overcome the enormous cost, long lead-in time and lack of private investment to make new power plants a reality.

Stevens said on Monday that “embracing nuclear generation for civilian electricity purposes is not something to be done on a whim” and that Australians would rightly want to know “how we will deal with some challenges, such as the custody of waste, the location of these generation plants”.

But the Liberal candidate for Cook, Simon Kennedy, who is likely to take Scott Morrison’s seat in parliament, argued on Tuesday that voters in his electorate are “used to” the idea of nuclear waste, because the Lucas Heights reactor – for production of medical and industrial isotopes – is “right outside the electorate”.

Kennedy told Sky News that Australians want “clean, cheap and reliable” power, accusing the Albanese government of being “ideological” for not considering nuclear.

Chester told Guardian Australia he has an “open mind when it comes to the public debate regarding nuclear energy in Australia”.

“It is premature to rule regions in or out as potential locations for a nuclear power station because there’s no proposal on the table,” he said.

“But as a matter of principle, you would need to be able to demonstrate to a potential host community, including Gippsland, that any safety concerns could be ameliorated and there were direct social and economic benefits to our community.”……………………………………

Jason Falinski, the former member for Mackellar and the New South Wales Liberal party president, told Sky News on Monday that “nuclear energy is not something that we are necessarily advocating for”.

“What we’re saying is that it should be part of the mix, part of the option available for Australian policymakers.”

On Tuesday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, questioned where financing will come from and whether “taxpayers will be expected to pay” for nuclear, because “we know that nuclear is not only the most expensive form of new energy, it is also more than a decade off”.

“I noticed in today’s reports, [Dutton] seems to have backed away a little bit from talking about a technology that does not exist in small, modular reactors that he’s been speaking about,” Albanese told reporters on the sidelines of the Asean conference in Melbourne.

“He’s now speaking about large nuclear reactors. They need to be near populations and need to be near water.”

Albanese said “investment never comes” into nuclear because “it simply doesn’t stack up commercially”.

Dutton told reporters in Brisbane that nuclear is “the only credible pathway we have to our international commitments to net zero by 2050”.

Dutton would not rule out support for large-scale reactors, saying only that the Coalition wanted the “latest technology”.

“We’ve said we’re only interested in sites where you have an end-of-life coal-fired generation asset, so that means you can use the existing distribution network.”

Asked if taxpayers will have to support nuclear, Dutton did not respond but cited the Canadian province of Ontario and the United States as examples where businesses and households pay less for power with nuclear in the mix  https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/05/peter-dutton-liberal-coalition-nuclear-power-plant-policy-locations-waste-rowan-ramsey

March 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment