Private capital won’t touch it and the cost curve just keeps getting steeper – unlike renewables and batteries. But still the push for nuclear persists. The federal parliament’s House Select Committee on Nuclear Energy is now holding hearings on the topic while a Canadian savaged the financial record of power reactors in Ontario. That’s the same jurisdiction the pro-nuke Opposition has held up as a global poster child for its nuclear ambitions. Murray Hogarth reports
The four small modular reactors (SMRs) currently planned but not yet licensed for an existing nuclear power station site in Ontario are headed for a $25 billion-plus price tag, Canadian academic expert Professor Mark Winfield has predicted in a heads-up for Australia.
That’s for a total generation capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW), the equivalent of a single large coal-fired power station, and only about a 5 per cent of the outgoing coal generation capacity (21GW) which Australia needs to replace over the next decade or so.
That’s before you get to the doubling to tripling of electricity demand predicted by 2050 through electrification of homes, vehicles and industry, and fast-growing new demand from data centres driven by artificial intelligence.
The Liberal-National coalition is promising to build an unspecified number of SMRs at two sites, one each in South Australia and Western Australia, as well as an unspecified number of large-scale nuclear reactors at a further five sites in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. But it hasn’t released any costing details.
Winfield, who was presenting to an online forum co-hosted by the Smart Energy Council and the Climate Council, is a Professor of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Co-Chair of the Faculty’s Sustainable Energy Initiative, and co-editor of Sustainable Energy Transitions in Canada.
The Smart Energy Council’s CEO John Grimes, presenting at the parliamentary nuclear inquiry on Monday, cited Winfield to say there had been eightfold increase in the use of fossil fuel gas for electricity generation in nuclear-powered Canada.
Grimes also accused the coalition of having anti-renewables as a “core belief”, and faced strenuous questioning from the inquiry’s deputy chair, Opposition nuclear frontman and shadow minister for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien, with verbal sparring back and forth between Grimes and O’Brien.
Ontario currently faces a subsidy bill of $7.3 billion a year to “basically reduce what people end up paying”
In regard to consumer electricity costs related to nuclear energy, Winfield said that Ontario currently faces a subsidy bill of $7.3 billion a year to “basically reduce what people end up paying”.
Winfield added: “Trying to figure out the scale of the taxpayer-funded subsidies is no small undertaking, and governments in Ontario spent the last 60 years figuring out ways to hide that one way or another.”
Unless governments de-risked this, there is no way private capital will touch it
Addressing risks of catastrophic accidents at nuclear plants, Winfield cited forecasts of “$2 trillion for a Fukushima type accident” at one of Ontario’s major reactor sites, adding: “In terms of liabilities, governments also assume ultimate liability for waste management and decommissioning costs. And fundamentally, I mean, unless governments de-risked this, there is no way private capital will touch it.”
Asked about what path Australia should follow, based on Canada’s experience, in weighing up nuclear power plants versus renewable generation, Winfield recommended a focus first on a “least cost lens”, but also with a “sustainability lens”, and indicated that new-build nuclear “just can’t compete”.
The annual CostGen report from CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) overwhelmingly shows renewable wind and solar generation, backed up by battery and pumped hydro storage, having major least-cost advantages over nuclear energy options.
With nuclear, that cost curve keeps going up, and the closer we get to actually having real designs or actually trying to build something, the higher those costs go
“So that’d be my core recommendation is look at this through a least-cost lens,” said Winfield. “But also look at it through a sustainability lens, because, of course, nuclear is unusual in that it carries with it a whole range of risks that just don’t exist in relation to other energy technologies.
“We also have this additional layer of risk that the actual costs on new-build nuclear are unknown at this stage,” said Winfield. “The thing that we are seeing consistently, globally, as to the extent to which we’ve got much to work with, is that those costs are continuously going higher.
“One of the features of nuclear is there seems to be no learning curve. You don’t get what you’ve seen with renewables and now storage, where you get a cost curve that goes down very, very nicely. With nuclear, that cost curve keeps going up, and the closer we get to actually having real designs or actually trying to build something, the higher those costs go.”
Meanwhile, at the parliamentary inquiry today, the CSIRO has doubled down on its earlier GenCost report, advising that developing nuclear energy generation will take at least 15 years, and could be longer – saying it was “a bit of who knows” – from a decision to go ahead, which includes lifting Australia’s current ban on power reactors.
This pushes any electricity production from nuclear plants in Australia into the 2040s, although the coalition is claiming, if it wins next year’s national election, that it could have SMRs running from 2035 and large-scale reactors from 2037.
