THE NUCLEAR FILES: Regional Australia being targeted for nuclear reactors may be in for way more reactors than they might have bargained for. Murray Hogarth finds the nuclear sales pitch to these communities is more revealing than the political spin, and sometimes they reveal more than our politicians do.
Pro-nuke advocates influencing the Liberal-National Coalition want Australia headed for a major nuclear energy power that’s much bigger than first revealed.
A lot more. In total, more than 30 large scale nuclear power stations!
At projected costs of around $377 billion, taking more than 29 years to build through to 2060 at the rate of $13 billion a year.
This would mean producing up to six times more nuclear generation capacity, as most people think the Coalition is currently proposing with its highly controversial energy and climate approach, with more than four times the number of reactors.
Except, what is the Coalition actually proposing? Do we really have any idea? Could there be a big surprise in store?
The total number of individual reactors proposed to be built with government funding and details of what its sketchy nuclear energy plans will cost remains a mystery, even though opposition leader Peter Dutton spoke on the issues a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) business lunch in Sydney on Monday.
There are gaping holes in its nuclear ambition story that many critics denounce as an economic fantasy, a deliberate dead cat on the table distraction, a political hoax, an anti-renewables ruse, and a trojan horse aimed at propping up fossil fuels.
A “big nuclear” future?
Just last week, a major regional community was being wooed to support nuclear energy, based on transcripts from a public event shared with The Fifth Estate, with local people invited to join a very “big nuclear” future.
The invitation came from Robert Parker, founder of Nuclear for Climate Australia, who became a cause celebre for the nuclear lobby earlier this year when Engineers Australia cancelled a nuclear-themed lecture that he was scheduled to give, allegedly because of politicised content.
In the resulting furore, fanned by conservative media, the actively pro-nuclear, coalition-aligned right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) rallied to Parker’s defence and provided him with an alternative platform.
Last week, Parker argued that Australia should have 36.8 gigawatts of nuclear generation by 2060, which implies 30 or more largescale reactors or many more small modular reactors (SMRs).
This will sound like an incredibly optimistic ambition to many, given nuclear energy currently remains banned in Australia and the recent international history of massive delays and cost blowouts on nuclear power station projects. But it’s a future which Parker claims is realistic because:
Canadians, they built 18 reactors in 20 years. The French built 58 reactors in 22 years and put 63 gigawatts on to the grid. Here we’re talking around about 36.8 gigawatts. So it’s a lot less than the French did.
Parker claimed it would cost $13 billion a year for 29 years of construction through to 2060, which implies work starting circa 2031 and a total cost of $377 billion.
Exactly like the Coalition, he forecasted the first 600 megawatts (MW) to be built by 2035, which would be two SMRs at 300MW apiece.
But there was a catch. When pressed by audience members about when this nuclear plan would deliver carbon emission reduction benefits, he admitted that it would be 2060 because we’d be “starting far too late”, which also is too late for net zero by 2050
Is this a dress rehearsal for the coalition’s real agenda?
Parker’s plan begs the question of whether this is the Coalition plan, or at least close to it, being live-tested with a real audience.
Alternatively, could it be a bid to push the Coalition to be more ambitious?
We won’t know the answer until the Coalition releases a detailed plan and costings which it claims to have done already, and will release “in due course”, at a time of its choosing?
If Parker’s go-big projections speak to a real policy agenda for nuclear energy in Australia, it changes everything.
Let’s step this through.
Thus far, most expert observers assessing the coalition’s loosely outlined policy have calculated it proposes about 6 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear electricity generation by 2050.
They’re assuming this would come from a minimum of seven reactors spread across seven named locations in five states, with at least two of them, in South Australia and Western Australia, being SMRs with a maximum capacity of 300 MW or 0.3GW for each one.
According to Coalition policy announced on 19 June 2024, the other sites – two each in Queensland and NSW, and one in Victoria – would host large-scale reactors in the 1.1GW to 1.4GW range based on examples provided, or alternatively could host SMRs depending on future assessments.
One of many problems for the Coalition is that, from an energy and climate policy credibility perspective, one reactor per site isn’t a whole lot of electricity generation capacity in the grander scheme of things.
Especially not when the Australian Energy Market Operator projects that Australia will need about 120GW of new generation capacity by circa 2037, as coal plants retire and electrification of vehicles and the built environment accelerates.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects that by 2050, Australia will have installed about 290 GW of solar and wind capacity, which would make 6GW from nuclear plants look like a fission drop in a renewable generation ocean.
Seven locations, but how many reactors?
But here’s the thing. The number of reactors being proposed has always been ambiguous, whatever observers have assumed.
The Coalition has only named locations for nuclear power plants, not the number of reactors.
Even at his CEDA speech on Monday, Dutton left this open ended, saying: “The coalition’s plan is to place the latest nuclear technologies in seven locations on the sites of retiring coal-fired power stations.”
Meanwhile, Dutton’s nuclear torchbearer, shadow climate and energy minister Ted O’Brien, has been more open, telling ABC-TV Insiders in June this year that: “One of the lessons we’ve learned from overseas is, in order to get costs down, you need multi-unit sites … it is right that we would be wanting multi-unit sites.”
what we do know is that AEMO, which Barr and the nuclear lobby criticise incessantly, remains adamant that high penetration of solar and wind backed up by storage is the best path forward; and that it’s working already, with about 40 per cent of electricity already coming from renewable sources.
Some put the Coalition’s initial target a bit higher than 6GW, in the 7-8GW range, but certainly under 10GW. This underpins a key criticism being directed at the plans: that it’s making a lot of noise, about not that much new generation capacity, which also will take decades to deliver.
In generation terms, 6GW is the equivalent of six large-sized coal-fired power plants, each with a capacity of 1000MW, or 1GW.
It’s only a fraction of the 21-22GW of existing coal-fired generation that is scheduled to retire over the decades ahead, with 90 per cent of it expected to be gone by circa 2037.
Latrobe Valley on the frontline
Last week, the Latrobe Valley, Victoria’s brown coal heartland and retiring coal generation capacity, experienced the nuclear club coming to town, including Robert Parker.
The occasion was a public forum in Morwell, in the Latrobe Valley, where the Loy Yang power station is one of the coalition’s target sites and is now becoming ground zero for the political tug of war between:
- a renewable energy future, delivered sooner and less expensively according to AEMO, including major offshore wind developments now being planned for the nearby Bass Strait
- or a slow build nuclear energy future, with up to four reactors at Loy Yang that prolongs coal and gas
Parker was joined by engineer Dr Robert Barr, who highlighted the valley’s existing capacity with its 500-kilovolt transmission line connection to Melbourne.
He claimed that adding nuclear generation into the energy mix could stabilise electricity costs for consumers at around 31 cents a kilowatt hour (by 2050, compared with a 51 cents/kWh price tag that he attributes to AEMO’s renewables-led Integrated System Plan.
Of course, it’s impossible for the people of Morwell or anyone to know where the truth lies with such claims when Australians have no idea about the cost of reactors.
But what we do know is that AEMO, which Barr and the nuclear lobby criticise incessantly, remains adamant that high penetration of solar and wind backed up by storage is the best path forward and that it’s working already, with about 40 per cent of electricity already coming from renewable sources.
The nuclear club connections to the coalition run deep.
Parker and Barr were among the four leading advocates for nuclear with the other two, National Party MP David Gillespie, founder of the Parliamentary Friends of Nuclear Industries and Dr Dave Collins, who was also at the Morwell public event and who convened the Navigating Nuclear propaganda event earlier this year.
All four were on the US and Canada trip in August 2022 for a “nuclear study tour”.
Subsequently, the four gathered again when Gillespie’s group hosted a two day workshop – co-sponsored by the powerful pro-nuclear lobbying group the Minerals Council of Australia – In the Australian Parliament in November 2022.
It was clear that this event demonstrably influenced Dutton’s original headland nuclear policy speech in July 2023.
