Nuclear Monitor #920
Jim Green
Australia’s conservative Liberal/National Coalition parties, currently in opposition, are promising to build one or more nuclear power reactors at seven sites around Australia if they win the next federal election, expected to be held in May 2025.
Nuclear power has been illegal in Australia since 1998. The legal ban has been maintained by several Coalition governments since then, and the ban is supported by the current Labor government.
For the first time in decades, nuclear power will be a prominent election issue: both Labor and the Coalition are framing the election as a referendum on nuclear power. A parliamentary inquiry is currently investigating the Coalition’s nuclear plans.
According to the Coalition, Australia cannot meet the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 without nuclear power. That claim is disputed, as is the Coalition’s claim to be serious about climate change abatement.
The Coalition has long been infested with far-right, anti-renewables, pro-fossil fuels, science-denying ideologues and that infestation was reflected in government policy when the Coalition was in office from 1996‒2007 and 2013‒2022.
Former Coalition Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — a moderate conservative who led the Coalition from 2015-2018 due to the ineptitude of his far-right predecessor Tony Abbott — says the “science denying” element in the Coalition is “crazy, and to some extent getting crazier”. Turnbull says the Coalition’s nuclear policy is “bonkers”, that current Coalition leader Peter Dutton is a “thug” who says “stupid things” about nuclear power, and that nuclear power’s only utility is “as another culture war issue for the right-wing angertainment ecosystem”.
Culture-war conservatives in the Coalition promote nuclear power in the hope of fostering division within the Labor Party, the trade unions and the environment movement. But the only divisions now apparent are within the Coalition. One current Coalition MP says the nuclear policy is “madness on steroids”, another says the Liberal and National Party rooms are “in a panic” about the nuclear policy and “they don’t know what to do”, and another echoes Malcolm Turnbull’s view that the nuclear policy is “bonkers”.
Fossil fuels
John Hewson, a federal Liberal Party leader in the 1990s, says the Dutton opposition has become “ridiculous” with its pro-nuclear, anti-renewables stance which is economic “nonsense”, and that Dutton may be promoting nuclear “on behalf of large fossil-fuel donors knowing nuclear power will end up being too expensive and take too long to implement, thereby extending Australia’s reliance on coal and natural gas”.
The Coalition claims to be serious about reducing greenhouse emissions but it opposes the Labor government’s target of 82% renewable electricity supply by 2030 (a doubling of current renewable supply) and wants to greatly expand gas and prolong the use of coal. The Nationals are calling for a moratorium on the rollout of large-scale renewables.
At the UN COP28 climate conference in December 2023, the Labor government joined 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030 — a pledge opposed by the Coalition. The Coalition promises to sign Australia up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear energy generation by 2050.
Expanding and prolonging the use of fossil fuels isn’t a bug in the Coalition’s energy policy. It’s a feature.
The seven sites targeted for nuclear reactors are the sites of operating or shuttered coal power plants. Ironically, the owners of the sites have no interest in a coal-to-nuclear transition. They are planning the retirement of their ageing and increasingly uneconomic coal plants and they are building or planning renewable energy and storage projects:
* AGL is developing coal and gas power station sites into low-emissions industrial energy hubs. AGL chief executive Damien Nicks warns the nuclear debate risks derailing critical investment in the energy transition and says: “There is no viable schedule for the regulation or development of nuclear energy in Australia, and the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive.”
* The renewable energy transition is in full swing in the Darling Downs region of Queensland.
* The last South Australian coal power plant, near Port Augusta, was shut down in 2016 and the region has since become a renewables hub.
* Yancoal Australia has published a scoping report for the Stratford Renewable Energy Hub, which proposes to transition the coal mine to a 330 MW solar farm and 3.6 GWh of pumped hydro energy storage at the end of its working life.
* In the Collie region of Western Australia, a large battery is under construction and contracts have been signed to add a second stage battery to help flatten the growing solar duck curve and replace coal.
The Coalition is more pro-coal than the coal industry. Its energy policy makes absolutely no sense in terms of economics or emissions reductions. The policy has little public support: nuclear power is the most unpopular energy source in Australia. It is strongly opposed by scientists. Coalition leader Peter Dutton, a former policeman in the former police state of Queensland, combines the stupidity of Boris Johnson with the thuggery and racism of Donald Trump.
Despite the unpopularity of its nuclear power plans, there is a reasonable chance that the Coalition will be retuned to government at the next election. The nuclear power plans could be blocked by an obstructive Senate, or by state governments, or by public opposition. But even if the nuclear plan is blocked, a Coalition government could and would savage the transition to renewables, gas would be significantly expanded, and coal companies would be bullied or bribed to prolong the operation of their power plants.
Timing
Introducing nuclear power to Australia would necessitate at least 10 years for licensing approvals and project planning, and around 10 years for reactor construction. Thus, nuclear reactors could only begin operating around the mid-2040s at the earliest. But almost all of Australia’s nine coal power plants will be closed by the mid-2030s (and 11 coal plants have been closed since 2012).
Former Australian Chief Scientist Alan Finkel states: “Any call to go directly from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years.”
A 2020 report by NSW Chief Scientist Hugh Durrant-Whyte, prepared for the NSW Cabinet, said introducing nuclear power would be expensive and difficult and that it would be naïve to think a nuclear plant could be built in less than two decades.
A former Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Ministry of Defence, Dr. Durrant-Whyte said: “The hard reality is Australia has no skills or experience in nuclear power plant building, operation or maintenance ‒ let alone in managing the fuel cycle. Realistically, Australia will be starting from scratch in developing skills in the whole nuclear power supply chain.”
Coal-to-nuclear
The Coalition’s energy spokesperson Ted O’Brien cites a US Department of Energy report estimating that leveraging existing infrastructure at coal sites could reduce reactor costs by 30%. In fact the report estimates cost reductions of 15-35% compared to construction on a greenfield site.
Would a 30% reduction make nuclear power economically viable in Australia? Not even close. Nuclear would still be far more expensive than firmed renewables (i.e. renewables plus energy storage). Nuclear costs would need to be reduced by two thirds to compete with firmed renewables. There is no reasonable expectation that this could or would ever occur.
O’Brien claims that “evidence keeps mounting that a coal-to-nuclear strategy is good for host communities, and especially workers as zero-emissions nuclear plants offer more jobs and higher paying ones.”
No evidence from the US supports O’Brien’s views. Several hundred coal power plants have closed in the US since 2010 but not one has been replaced with nuclear reactors. The same points apply in the UK: 20 coal or oil power plants have closed since 2012, none were replaced with nuclear power, and the only nuclear construction project is on an existing nuclear site.
O’Brien has promoted Terrapower’s plan to replace coal with a nuclear in Wyoming but the company is at the early stages of a licensing process and it is unclear whether finance can be secured or whether the reactor will ever be built.
The Wyoming coal-to-nuclear project could easily fall over, as others have. David Schlissel from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis authored a 2022 analysis of the NuScale reactor project in Idaho and accurately predicted its demise. He says: “There’s every reason in the world to believe that [the Natrium project in Wyoming] is going to be a bigger financial disaster.”
Economics
Nuclear power would be uneconomic in Australia and far more expensive than continuing to build an energy system based on renewables. Nuclear power would result in increased taxes and increased power bills.
The Australian government’s leading science agency, the CSIRO, gave these cost estimates in a recent report:
* Large-scale nuclear: $155-252 per megawatt-hour (MWh)
* Small modular reactors: $387-641 / MWh
* 90% wind and solar PV including storage and transmission costs: $100-143 / MWh
A recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that nuclear power would increase power bills for a four-person household by $972 per year, and that the cost of electricity generated from nuclear reactors would be 1.5 to 3.8 times higher than the current cost of electricity generation in eastern Australia.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s integrated system plan, a roadmap for the optimal future grid, envisages 83% renewable generation by 2030, 96% by 2040 and 98% by 2050. Nuclear power reactors could not begin operating until the mid-2040s. Nuclear power as an option to meet the tiny fraction of electricity demand not met by renewables would be an extraordinarily expensive and unnecessarily risky option.
Reflecting that reality, there is no chance that overseas companies or utilities would invest billions developing nuclear power in Australia so the Coalition proposes government-funded reactors, an odd contradiction in light of its ideological obsession with free-market economics.
Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and co-author of the recent report, ‘Power Games: Assessing coal to nuclear proposals in Australia: Cost, timing, consent and other constraints’.
