Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal
If you believe Newspoll and the Australian Financial Review, Australia wants to go nuclear – as long it’s small.
Newspoll this week suggests a majority of us are in favour of building small modular nuclear reactors. A poll of Australian Financial Review readers last year told a similar story.
These polls (and a more general question about nuclear power in a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers this week) come after a concerted effort by the Coalition to normalise talking about nuclear power – specifically, the small, modular kind that’s meant to be cheaper and safer. Unfortunately, while small reactors have been around for decades, they are generally costlier than larger reactors with a similar design. This reflects the economies of size associated with larger boilers.
The hope (and it’s still only a hope) is “modular” design will permit reactors to be built in factories in large numbers (and therefore at low cost), then shipped to the sites where they are installed.
Coalition enthusiasm for talking about small modular reactors has not been dented by the failure of the only serious proposal to build them: that of NuScale, a company that designs and markets these reactors in the United States. Faced with long delays and increases in the projected costs of the Voygr reactor, the intended buyers, a group of municipal power utilities, pulled the plug. The project had a decade of development behind it but had not even reached prototype stage.
Other proposals to build small modular reactors abound but none are likely to be constructed anywhere before the mid-2030s, if at all. Even if they work as planned (a big if), they will arrive too late to replace coal power in Australia. So Opposition Leader Peter Dutton needs to put up a detailed plan for how he would deliver nuclear power in time. cr
So why would Australians support nuclear?
It is worth looking at the claim that Australians support nuclear power. This was the question the Newspoll asked:
There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?
This question assumes two things. First, that small modular reactors exist. Second, that someone is proposing to build and operate them, presumably expecting they can do so at a cost low enough to compete with alternative energy sources.
Unfortunately, neither is true. Nuclear-generated power costs up to ten times as much as solar and wind energy. A more accurate phrasing of the question would be:
There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small modular reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?
It seems unlikely such a proposal would gain majority support.
Building nuclear takes a long time
When we consider the timeline for existing reactor projects, the difficulties with nuclear power come into sharp focus.
As National Party Senate Leader Bridget McKenzie has pointed out, the most successful recent implementation of nuclear power has been in the United Arab Emirates. In 2008, the UAE president (and emir of Abi Dhabi), Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, announced a plan to build four nuclear reactors. Construction started in 2012. The last reactor is about to be connected to the grid, 16 years after the project was announced.
The UAE’s performance is better than that achieved recently in Western countries including the US, UK, France and Finland.
In 16 years’ time, by 2040, most of Australia’s remaining coal-fired power stations will have shut down. Suppose the Coalition gained office in 2025 on a program of advocating nuclear power and managed to pass the necessary legislation in 2026. If we could match the pace of the UAE, nuclear power stations would start coming online just in time to replace them.
If we spent three to five years discussing the issue, then matched the UAE schedule, the plants would arrive too late.
Read more: Dutton wants Australia to join the "nuclear renaissance" – but this dream has failed before
It would take longer in Australia
Would it be possible to match the UAE schedule? The UAE had no need to pass legislation: it doesn’t have a parliament like ours, let alone a Senate that can obstruct government legislation. The necessary institutions, including a regulatory commission and a publicly owned nuclear power firm, were established by decree.
There were no problems with site selection, not to mention environmental impact statements and court actions. The site at Barakah was conveniently located on an almost uninhabited stretch of desert coastline, but still close enough to the main population centres to permit a connection to transmission lines, access for workers, and so on. There’s nowhere in Australia’s eastern states (where the power is needed) that matches that description.
Finally, there are no problems with strikes or union demands: both are illegal in the UAE. Foreign workers with even less rights than Emirati citizens did almost all the construction work.
Despite all these advantages, the UAE has not gone any further with nuclear power. Instead of building more reactors after the first four, it’s investing massively in solar power and battery storage.
Time to start work is running out
The Coalition began calling for a “mature debate” on nuclear immediately after losing office.
But it’s now too late for discussion. If Australia is to replace any of our retiring coal-fired power stations with nuclear reactors, Dutton must commit to this goal before the 2025 election.
Talk about hypothetical future technologies is, at this point, nothing more than a distraction. If Dutton is serious about nuclear power in Australia, he needs to put forward a plan now. It must spell out a realistic timeline that includes the establishment of necessary regulation, the required funding model and the sites to be considered.
In summary, it’s time to put up or shut up.
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I thought we'd already had several mature debates about nuclear power, all of which concluded it was a stupid idea.
Purely deflection.. The climate denial industry ramp up the pro-nuclear power propaganda any time a Labor/Labour/Democrat government is in power.
I've modelled the island SWIS grid in southwest WA for all levels of RE penetration using hourly demand projection and weather data and its very clear that baseload nuclear power is a terrible economic proposition at 30% RE as we have today on costs alone. Then there's the obvious delay and high court challenges that would inevitably follow (discussed already by John well I thought). But start looking at a grid with 60% RE or 80% RE or 90% RE and baseload nuclear is an even more terrible economic proposition in this country (as it is most places today, just check out the obscene take or pay PPA contract the UK Government signed up for Hinkley C even after their expert panel advised against the project going ahead).
One of the big problems for NPPs just as it is for coal fired power stations is the dispatch profile of PV and wind on the NEM (almost-national) and SWIS grids. PV dumps cheap or free or negative priced energy into the grid in the middle hours of the day and since behind the meter retail energy economics makes rooftop PV obvious to all with sunshine regularly hitting their roof during the day there's only going to be more PV exports in the middle of the day. It's polticalliy impossible to stop it, and even Time of Use tariffs cant stop new PV being installed on our rooftops. 2/3s of roofs remain waiting for PV (some wont be suitable of course).
The other thing is we have excellent wind resources in Australia and at times the wind is going to be sold in the wholesale market very cheaply, when demand is much lower than annual peak maximum levels and when there's a lot of wind and/or PV hitting the grid as exports. This kills off that overnight baseload market, the one where they used to give you half priced power for your hot water to incentivise night time demand to keep the economics of coal more profitable. (Again, baseload generation hates to ramp daily, let alone twice daily).
When renewable energy hit ~40% in South Australia Alinta summarily packed its bags and closed Northern and Playford coal fired power stations. For the exact same reasons I explained above. Even if they could ramp coal and cutler reactors twice a day, they still ahem to burn fuel when they aren't getting paid a price for the power they export that is more than the cost of the fuel they must burn to ramp them and to keep them on standby.
At this point someone always says French reactors can ramp. This is a half truth designed to confuse us. Some French reactors can ramp slowly to accomodate the old grid demand profile. None of them can ramp quickly to accomodate PV going from 20% output to 100% output in the space of a couple of hours, not when PV is providing a third or two thirds of the demanded power at any given moment in the day. And that is the future we're moving into. Also French nuclear reactors can only ramp early on in their fuel cycle and it comes so at the cost of increased maintenance work and outages. The exact same situation is true of coal power plants.
Further to maintenance, both nuclear fission and coal fired power have tendencies to unplanned outages. Almost all French reactors went offline for either unscheduled maintenance, scheduled maintenance or because of of summer heat making their river water temperature to high to use for cooling the reactors. in Australia we've had our own issues with coal and gas facilities overheating in summer and disrupting the grid with a big loss of generation during a high demand period when RCAC and HVAC cooling are literally keeping people alive.
More people die during bushfire season of overheating than they do by coming into contact with bushfire itself.
It's easy to identify this nuclear "debate" as 100% propaganda once you understand energy markets and the characteristics, costs and leanings rate of various technologies. Nuclear power has the worse record for learnings in the world of any realistic energy technology in spite of 70 years of seven superpowers and others throwing vast sums of public funding at civilian and military nuclear power.
Speaking of the military use of "SMR" technology or small nuclear at least, not so modular, quite expensive. Back of the envelope figures for Virginia class subs (which Australia has been talking into buying second hand) and Astute class RN boats which we'll be buying new from 2040 tell us just how compelling small nuclear is on price and proliferation.
Rolls Royce PWR3 were produced for four submarines under construction for the Royal Navy and would have cost about £3,.77m in 2024 currency => 5,358 million AUD per reactor. Assuming they push about 210 MW of power (I cant find a power rating on line for the PWR3 reactors) similar to Virginia Class sub (rather than Ohio or Columbia) that's 734,086,570 AUD per reactor.
(many conversions for inflation and currency required: £11 Billion per reactor, divided by four => £275,000,000 per reactor (2012 British pounds Stirling currency) => £376,667,170 pounds in 2024 terms => 734,086,570 AUD 2024)
that's a snip at 3,495,650 $/MW for "small nuclear" from UK compared to 1500 $/kW = 1.5 $/MW for utility PV from CSIRO Gencosts 2023-24. to be fair the CSIRO GENCOSTS report estimates $31,000/kW for today and declining rapidly. Not sure where you can buy one so that $30/MW remains speculative in my book, as do their rapid cost declines, that's something the nuclear industry has never managed to do, ever.