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
Well, grid battery storage is using LFP batteries that don’t actually have any of those expensive and dangerous materials.
Second, OP isn’t talking about solar, they’re saying solar and storage is cheapest. The cost of batteries is dropping like a rock, and we even have sodium batteries ramping up production and available for sale right now. They don’t contain anything valuable.
Nuclear would get cheaper if we were manufacturing dozens of plants each year, but economies of scale work for solar and battery production too. It’s not a magical advantage unique to nuclear. Batteries got something like 30% cheaper last year.
A nuclear plant that we started building today would maybe be up and running by 2035, and it’d be expected to operate until 2075 or so. Even if you make a case for nuclear vs 2024’s solar and storage, it’d actually be up against 2035’s solar and storage on opening day. And it’d need to be competitive vs solar and storage for its entire lifetime. It isn’t.
While nuclear has traditionally been government owned and operated, so was the power grid and telephones. Any new nuclear is going to bring in private investment and non-government ownership like Hinkley Point C did, and they’re going to want those corporate profits.