Australians should be under no illusion about nuclear energy’s shortcomings.
Blink and you might’ve missed Peter Dutton’s conversion to the virtues of clean energy.
No, he’s not spruiking solar panels or wind turbines, nor is he playing word games with reference to ‘clean coal’. In recent months he’s firmed as a proponent nuclear energy, an issue that last reared its head in public debate in the dying days of John Howard’s government.
It’s all a bit hypocritical given Mr Dutton, alongside the Coalition’s hard-right rump, in 2018 helped sink the national energy guarantee and with it an offramp from the climate wars.
Politically, though, it’s nothing but a reprise of his Mr Howard’s sentiments.
As Mr Dutton put it in August last year, Australia’s already a nuclear nation by virtue of the federal government owning and operating a single research reactor in Lucas Heights, located on the fringes of Sydney’s outer suburbs, since the 1970s.
“A national conversation about potential of nuclear energy is the logical next step,” Mr Dutton said.
That’s an especially odd reference for Mr Dutton to have made. In the course of writing this column, I went back and checked prime minister Billy McMahon’s remarks at the opening of the Lucas Heights facility in 1972. The parallels are amusing.
“It is pretty well accepted now that by the end of the ’70s, one or more of our state generating authorities will be building a nuclear power plant,” Mr McMahon said.
“Thereafter, more will follow.
“It is not too much to say that if events develop as predicted, Australia could be involved in a very large capital investment in nuclear power plants before the end of the century.”
Prophetic stuff.
Quick recap: Mr McMahon made those comments six months before losing an election to Gough Whitlam, who was a progressive and a proponent of nuclear power.
Unfortunately for Whitlam, the economics didn’t support it and the idea was soon scotched.
Various reasons have been offered up for why Australia’s nuclear industry never took off, but generally the consensus has been that, with abundant coal and gas reserves, there’s never been any good reason to bring nuclear power into the country’s energy mix.
Climate change notwithstanding, that’s still the case today.
CSIRO, based on work by engineering consultants GHD, last June estimated nuclear energy produced by small modular reactors (SMR) could cost as much as $16,000 per kilowatt, reflecting high capital costs associated with speculative technology.
That’s between 50 and 100 per cent more expensive than energy produced by traditional large-scale reactors, as well as significantly more costly than black coal supplemented with carbon-capture-and-storage or solar thermal power, which are listed among the most expensive generation technologies currently in use.
None of which means Generation II reactors, which are common throughout Europe, make for good investment.
Even nuclear energy supporters, including the Coalition’s energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, have previously stated their opposition to that technology, with Mr O’Brien’s 2019 report for Parliament’s standing committee on the environment and energy outlining his resistance to it.
Instead, he and others in the Coalition favour aforementioned SMR technology.
It’s true that SMRs are thought to be safer than existing nuclear energy generators. They’re also not used anywhere in the world, outside of a single test case in Russia.
Suffice to say if this technology is to comprise part of Australia’s energy mix and make any meaningful contribution to Australia’s transition to net zero emissions by 2050, then federal funds will likely be required to get it off the ground in the near term and make it a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
That’s assuming the country’s private sector continues to express scant interest in funding such a project.
Of course, Mr Dutton, like Mr Howard, has leaned on this being about more than just the viability of Australia’s nuclear industry, but rather an opportunity for Australians to have an ‘honest and mature debate’ on the topic.
Certainly, nobody should stop Australians from doing exactly that.
In the course of that discussion, they’ll find out it’s an expensive industry that requires extraordinary levels of government investment just to break even.
That’s hardly the most appealing debate to have amid an energy crisis.
