Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is just terrible public policy.
The truth is that, in an Australian context, with nuclear power more expensive per kilowatt hour than either grid scale solar & storage or coal, nuclear just doesn’t make economic sense.
The UK has a mature nuclear industry. Its new Hinkley Point C plant, started in 2016, is now expected to not be complete until 2031, and costs £35bn.
So how much would it cost to replace all of Australia’s coal power plants with nuclear ones?
We’ll, at current exchange rates, £35bn — that’s the cost of just one Hinkley Point C sized reactors — works out to A$67.6 billion.
So building just 10 nuclear reactors the size of Hinkley Point C costs $A676bn, making the AUKUS subs look like Home Brand corn flakes in comparison.
(Just for comparison, ScoMo’s AUKUS subs cost $368bn, and Daniel Andrew’s Suburban Rail loop is estimated at around $100bn.)
That’s assuming Australia, starting from scratch, could build nuclear plants as quickly and cheaply as the UK, which was one of the first nations on Earth to split the atom.
So is it debt & deficit to fund this? Big new taxes? Even by the LNP’s own measuring sticks, it’s a crap policy!
The Australian Federal Government has previously examined the prospect of building nuclear power plants in the Switkowski report: https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20080117214749/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/79623/20080117-2207/dpmc.gov.au/umpner/docs/nuclear_report.pdf
The big thing that’s changed since it was published is that grid solar + storage is now cheaper than coal or nuclear power.
So would you support holding up the closure of coal plants for 15 years until nuclear plants are completed, then paying substantially more on your power bills, while the federal government pays hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies, while also hiring thousands of additional public servants to regulate it all?
#auspol #nuclear #ClimateChange #australia @australianpolitics
@Ardubal @Lats @australianpolitics We are explicitly discussing the situation in Australia here.
(For what it’s worth, I do think nuclear power has an important role to play in some countries, especially those with an established nuclear power sector. Australia is not among them.)
And in Australia, the right-wing federal opposition (led by Peter Dutton) has put forward nuclear quite explicitly instead of more renewables and storage (as proposed by the current government).
That’s the context here, and why it’s an either/or discussion in an Australian political context:
"The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.
…
“Some observers questioned how the Coalition’s plan to slow renewable energy expansion would avoid power blackouts as old and increasingly failing coal-fired power plants closed over the next decade. O’Brien acknowledged in his speech that 80% of Australia’s “baseload power” was expected to leave the grid by 2035.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/10/coalition-tells-cop28-it-will-tback-tripling-of-nuclear-energy-if-peter-dutton-becomes-prime-minister
There’s a much broader context to all this.
Dutton’s party has a long history of promoting climate scepticism, and accepting donations from coal mining firms.
And as for Peter himself, well…
"Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has been overheard quipping about the plight of Pacific Island nations facing rising seas from climate change.
"Noting that today’s meeting on Syrian refugees was running a bit late, Mr Dutton remarked that it was running to “Cape York time”, to which Mr Abbott replied, “we had a bit of that up in Port Moresby”.
“Mr Dutton then added, “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door”.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-11/dutton-overheard-joking-about-sea-levels-in-pacific-islands/6768324