Ok folks, it’s time to talk about nuclear power
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Julie Bishop is right. We need to talk about nuclear power. Bishop raised the issue yesterday. It shouldn’t be confused with the emissions trading farce in shadow Cabinet — it wasn’t mentioned there — but she’s right that we need to drop the ideological and emotive approach to nuclear power and consider it seriously in the context of carbon abatement. That’s not to say it might be a viable option in Australia. On the plus side, apart from its low carbon emissions, its polluting by-products are far easier to geosequestrate, and it’s well-established technology. On the negative side, it’s enormously expensive, and even a high carbon price under emissions trading may not be enough to make it competitive with coal. If it needs taxpayer handouts to be viable, then there may be other, better uses of our dollars than smashing atoms. But it’s impossible to have a serious debate on the issue at the moment. The Government’s eyes light up whenever nuclear is mentioned. It conjures visions of power plants mushrooming — sorry — in suburban Australia. That the citizens of the socialist nirvanas of France and Sweden somehow cope with nuclear power gets overlooked. Peter Garrett correctly says we need to invest in solar (presumably by limiting access to the solar panel rebate?) and geothermal — he could’ve added better energy efficiency as well — but neither provide off-the-shelf solutions for the problem of replacing coal-fired base power generation. The Coalition won’t go any further on the domestic nuclear issue than proposing it be debated. You can’t blame them — they can’t afford to if the Government is going to use it as a political weapon. Where they’ve been stronger is on uranium exports. Andrew Robb has consistently argued that we should be selling uranium to India rather than being hung up, like the Government is, on India’s non-membership of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Robb argues that nuclear power currently reduces global emissions by more than two billion tonnes a year and that up to 35% of India’s energy needs could be met by nuclear power by 2050 if they have access to the right technology and uranium. Garrett suggested today that the Indians should focus on clean coal. Presumably he doesn’t mean that India should simply stall its economic development until we come up improved carbon capture technologies, because even Martin Ferguson admits that that’s going to take years. Clean coal’s a nice idea. When it’s anything more, maybe we can pay attention to its advocates. The complicating factor with uranium sales is what to do with the by-products of the stuff we export. There’s a strong moral argument that if we sell the stuff, we should be prepared to take back the waste. No-one likes the idea of a nuclear dump, but Australia is about the best place for one you could find. These are all issues that warrant debate, rather than reflexive opposition. As a species we use vast amounts of energy. Barring the discovery of a miracle source of limitless, non-polluting power, we’re stuck with picking the least-worst option amongst technologies of varying levels of utility, pollution, cost and development. If we’d started doing something about carbon emissions a decade ago, we could have focussed on seriously developing renewable energy options, but it’s too late in the day to rely on that exclusively. We should consider whether existing technologies like nuclear need to be pressed into service here and overseas. |
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17 Comments
Connor Moran: Um, I think I can get my head around some of the complexities of this issue.
Michael James, you are kind to describe Andrew Bolt as a polemicist. I would describe him as a paid political thug. I realize that Rupert Murdoch pays him a fortune for his ill-written rants. However, much as Murdoch may be evil, much as his desire for destruction is greater than his ability to create. Why does he really want a totally stuffed-up planet.?
So the only real questions I have of Andrew Bolt would be; how much does Exxon pay him? Through which branch of Exxon’s various satrapies to fu*k the environment, in order to save their ar*es whilst they gouge out the last oil-well does he receive the money? And, how much does the satrapy concerned pay him? If this sort of information was available it certainly wouldn’t do their cause much good.
Michael James: thank you for your excellent input. Thank you also for trying to get my mind off its perhaps negative opinion about the tardiness of currant ‘slap happy’ alternatives. Of course economics will have the concluding answers to the nuclear options. Although, perhaps Australia could, still using nuclear, come up with a different solution to the economics of nuclear power. Would some of the alternatives, hot rocks. geo-sequestration, clean coal, desalination plants, multiplied by 50 times the size of the laughably polluting one that John Brumby has foisted on us, be any cheaper?
Certainly, the cost of cleaning up the planet will be huge. But as an escapee from Chong Qing-I wasn’t there that long-I can only say that trying to breathe in that city was an effort, and I do resistance training three times a week and am reasonably fit-What are the costs of keeping the old and the very young children (whose lungs can’t cope) alive in places like that? Wouldn’t these costs weigh in favour of a radical solution to our pollution problems?
Roy Milne: As you so rightly say, “We must have another look”. Also, I would add that with the world’s exploding population; time is a luxury we don’t have a lot of.
Cheers
V.
Michael Hutchinson: “Clean” and “Nuclear” being relative terms like when I turn my jocks inside-out and then back-the-front to get four days out of them.
Funny that Bernard picked out Sweden.
Sweden phasing out nuclear energy, aiming to end nuclear power generation by 2010.
Bernard, I have been anti-nuclear for ever. BUT-if we are really serious about reducing CO2-we must have another look.
AND if we continue to export the stuff, we should be prepared to take back the resultant waste.
Perhaps the companies making money from exporting should be required to import and store the waste.
With the right contracts, I’m sure they could actually make a lot of money out of storing the stuff-after all, what other operation goes on for ever!
Oh Bernard, what a breath of fresh air you propose. Actually debate nuclear power in Australia. My lungs feel less congested already. I doubt, however, that nuclear-deniers like Peter Garrett will allow it to happen despite more and more environmental scientists abandoning their opposition to the cleanest form of base load power we have available to us.
Bernard, are you joining the short-term thinkers and leaving the waste/problems to the next generation?
You only need to glance through frankly unbelievable behaviour of the ex-Soviet era at http://bellona.org/ to see what problems await us when the third-worlds of India, China, Pakistan and Indonesia get their plants online.
The USA, UK, France and Sweden have had the stable government and the limitless dollars to ensure (nearly) thorough regulation and just-barely avoid catastrophe. We won’t be that lucky with India, China, Pakistan and Indonesia and we shouldn’t participate by supplying them the fuel.
I’m leaping ahead of the article, because I’ve been wrestling with the idea-really thinking about it-for just over a year. (This is still before reading the article, which is stupid I know) I just do not understand why we shouldn’t go nuclear. On a superficial level; if the French can do it why can’t we? Please Connor, tell me why, why does Australia always dig minerals out of the ground and sell, in some cases GIVE it away (as we have to the Japanese @ 3c a litre, our LNG). FC’sS! There isn’t one commodity found in Oz that the happy miners haven’t had as their first thought. “We can flog it off overseas.!” We’ve got the uranium, let’s use it for ourselves. ALSO Isn’t it time to ask ourselves WHY the first thing deniers rustle up is: Sounds of piteous whining here, “what about the Chinese and the Indians.” What about them? I mean, absolutely WHAT ABOUT THEM? Are we meant not to do anything about ETS; because of the eternal refrain.’What about the Chinese and the Indians?’ I’ve never heard such co*k. Are we meant to be permanently supine or even worse, we are merely shifting our servile groveling from Britain and the USA, to a lockstep grovel “What about the Indonesians, Chinese, Indians;? Why don’t we throw in Sri Lanka, Portugal and Germany?” Are we so stupid that we are unable to think for ourselves. Already we have missed our chance to ‘lead the world,’ as some poor fool has droned on about, in the field of pollution. And it’s people like Connor who perpetuate this furphy. What about Australia,? is the question you should be concerned with Connor. Do we always have to be fifth rate about everything, Connor. Which football team do you barrack for, Connor? Yeah let’s just and sit like a bunch of cane-toads whilst we mine our uranium and give it to the Indonesians, the Chinese and the Indians. Wow, such profound thought, no wonder we are thought of as being a stupid people, interested only in sport. We are so fu*king brilliant that all of you drones will be slathering over our gold medal count at the Olympics, whilst our big companies keep, chipa chopping merrily along turning this country into an irrelevant dust bowl. The Catholics have this negative thinking brain washed into them, at the same time the Brits were teaching us to be servile and reduced us to being a distant satrapy of QEII and the British royal family. NOW CONNOR, we have a REAL CHANCE to throw Oz out the back door, which we will if people like you get the chance.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we thought for ourselves? Why waste what we’ve already got Connor; just on the basis of our near neighbours and their priorities. So what if they misuse the nuclear material we already sell to them? So what, Connor? OK we will have to find somewhere to put the waste. How about using the dust-bowl laughingly referred to as the Murray Darling system, or using the land which the farmers have reduced to clay?
And all you can do when someone agrees with this article is to talk about your frig*in underpants.
Get out of the way, Connor, Australia might be waking up from its terminal sleep. God such negativity makes me sick.
THE RANT IS OVER. Stripped of all the verbal garbage, my comment is still valid. Even if it is expensive technology are we so freaking poor we can’t afford it.? And when the rest of the world’s technology has left us in the dark ages I hope everyone will be pacified by our high morality. “Such dears,” they will intone, “They had it all, but they wouldn’t use it. “Whores, isn’t this what the unfortunate ladies of the night are always being called, because they sell a commodity? But, suddenly it’s morally OK to sell our “bodies” rather than use what we have for our own benefit
I wish writers like Mr Keane would desist from these totally unsubstantiated comments about the ability of Australia to absorb “nuclear waste”. I mean, why is Australia “about the best place for [a waste dump] you could find? Is he just looking at a map, seeing lots of wide open spaces, assuming those spaces are perfect (geologically, socially, environmentally, economically) for a dump - which presumably is some sort of hole in the ground with an armed guard at the gate - and that this is all you need?
I note that the writer reveals no knowledge of how France deals with its “nuclear waste”. Is the stuff just boiling away in tanks somewhere waiting for a solution or do the French have their own Pacific Solution somewhere near Mururoa Atoll? I bet Bernard doesn’t know.
Michael James: Thank you for that quote.
“….its weakness proved to be economics, not safety. Now nuclear generation is just an impediment to sustainable electricity.”
The issue seems so complex for some (Venise), but then someone comes along and shows you how simple the argument can be.
Phillip: “France - they’re now past 80% from nuclear sources.”
According to the World Nuclear Association as at May 2008 they’re at 75% and falling, with two plants (not being replaced) to be in decommissioning before 2010, while 3+% wind power is being brought online.
Your quote would give the unintentional impression that the share is rising.
By all means have the debate but don’t leave out the politics. I lived in France and am in admiration of their nuclear program which is probably the best managed in the world and provides about 70% of their power. I don’t have any real worries about its safety but on the other hand it only takes a single incident to radically alter its status. [An aside: I was only a tiny bit spooked recently as I realized that what I was looking at across the Gironde estuary from Pauillac town was a twin nuclear power station! A little incident there could give future Bordeaux vintages that extra je ne sais quoi!] France is the biggest country in Europe (so location is somewhat less political) and has very few other energy options. The UK has lots of coal and until recently lots of North Sea oil. France has some dirty brown coal and hydro (it is apparently #1 in the world as % of power). But perhaps the most important thing was the political consensus amongst both politicians and voters. Their decision has largely proven correct over the ensuing decades and must have saved them several trillion dollars of imported oil, and it generated a world-beating export industry too.
The situation for Australia is very different. It may seem that we have the geography but actually the generators need to be close enough to the cities (not to mention massive water supply) so that the politics will always remain a problem. It is unrealistic to think we can create a nuclear export industry to compare with those already established. Then there is the myth, alas repeated by Bernard Keane, that nuclear provides a quick off-the-shelf solution. I was living in the UK during their last attempt to build a new nuclear power station but I was gone for a decade (in France) and returned again by the time Sizewell-B was finally built—in 1995 the last one to have been built in the UK. It took about 14 years and anyone who thinks it would be any easier in Australia is kidding themselves. In the US the last completed plant was begun in 1977 and opened in 1996.
Then there is the economics. In France (and Japan, Germany and others) it made sense mostly because of the displacement of oil imports and few other options. This equation does not work for Australia where politics ensures it has to compete with the cheapest coal in the world. The plants are hugely expensive to construct and hugely expensive to decommission so that private industry will only do it if the government takes up these “stranded costs”. Anyone who claims nuclear plants produce the cheapest electricity is being economical with the whole truth.
It might have made marginally more sense in the 1970s when the first oil scare could have greased the politics but its time has passed. The earliest realisitic date we could actually get any power out of an Australian nuclear generator would be 2020. In my opinion if the process was begun we would expend absurd amounts of political will and energy to the endless enquiries (are we more similar to the UK and USA or France?) and in the end it would still fall flat. Meantime we could have done something with geothermal, wind and solar-thermal that would make nuclear redundant. We could have Gigawatts from solar-thermal feeding into the grid in one third of that time if only government would commit. So forget safety and waste issues, think politics, time-to-build and economics. Looks dead in the water to me.
I finish with a quote from commentary in the world’s top science journal.
“As climate and fuel security dominate the energy agenda, the battle between traditional and innovative electricity intensifies around the world, notably in fast-growing economies such as China. After half a century, nuclear power is the ultimate in tradition. It needs climate more than climate needs it. To avert catastrophic global warming, why pick the slowest, most expensive, most limited, most inflexible and riskiest option? In 1957, despite the Windscale fire, nuclear power was worth trying. We tried it: its weakness proved to be economics, not safety. Now nuclear generation is just an impediment to sustainable electricity.” [W.Patterson, NATURE|Vol 449|11 October 2007]
I spent 30 minutes waiting to land at Zurich Airport a few weeks ago and we circled over Switzerland’s only Nuclear power station which has been in operation for well over 25 years and uses the River Rhine for cooling which flows a further 800 km. through France, German and Holland and supplies by natural osmosis the major water source for some 50 million people. I once again had to ask myself why are the Australians so anti-nuclear… you could dig a hole and put all the world’s nuclear waste in it somewhere in Australia and it wouldn’t even show up on Google Earth… instead we have whole landscapes like the L ower Hunter Valley looking like the north of England did 50 years ago.
The Tyranny of Distance… there is so much going on elsewhere in the world and Australia is fixated on Alcopops and 3cents on a gallon of Petrol..
But we would have to make sure that any Nuclear Power stations built here… aren’t on a Qantas flight route!
Dear James Guest,
It is not about you and your small bet. Are you willing to bet the whole future on GW being a myth? Are you ready to put your house and your children’s and grandchildren’s future on the line because of your absolute certainty that the thousands of scientists in peer reviewed scientific journals are totally wrong? Whether or not I am convinced by these other scientists’ claims the alternative is not me doing the same, ie. betting everything in some melodramatic roll of the dice, as you seem to think. No, it is saying that if the chance of AGW being true is, say 1 in 100 (ie. not very high chance), then is it worth spending, say the same amount as we spend on military defense (2% of GDP). Do you think the chance of military invasion of Australia is greater than 1 in 100? This is the insurance concept. Do you not pay at least 1% of your earnings on house and car insurance? Not to mention health insurance? The toxic nonsense being put around (and yes Bolt is one of the worst because he refuses to use evidence honestly) that our economy will be wrecked is ridiculous. Especially if you believe like I do, that if spent wisely, these funds (ETS or direct government spending) will actually create new industries and jobs and wealth. Please, don’t allow Bolt or other people (media, politicians) who are paid to be polemicists to set the argument in such emotive, ideological and unrealistic terms. Think the issue over for yourself and decide just how much you might want to risk.
Away from wild ranting against Andrew Bolt for being no more scientifically authoriative that all the semi-numerate ” scientists” like Tim Flannery (expert on ancient kangaroos) and other acitvisits and totally unqualified members of the cheer squad in the media let me invite people of conviction to put their money where their pens are. Given their tones of certainty I daresay they will offer me at least 3 to 1 against fair minded judges concluding within 18 months that the scientific “consensus” on which urgent action is being based looks pretty dodgy and no longer plausibly able to underpin an expensive commitment to change in Australia’s eonomy. On that basie I will put up $10,000 to cover the stakes of those who will bet against me. Minimum amoung $120. Until very recently I was willing to assume that the IPCC’s reported conclusions were the the proper starting point for policy but merely to note, like Henry Ergas and others of a logical and calculing disposition that the only ratonal action any Australian government sshould take would be designed to give big investors sufficient security for their investments and to ensure we could resist EU attempts to punish us in some way for not making the same pious pretences that its members were going in for. But now, having read papers on solar cycles and how and with what periodicity the may come about, the relative ocntribution of oceanic and fosill fuel burning to the last few decades of ncreases of CO2 in the amostphere, the logarithmic absorption rate of infra red fadiation of quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. - and had hours of careful explanation by their authors, I am willing to make the bet hat I mentioned above. Any takers? If not , why not?
Quick note regarding France - they’re now past 80% from nuclear (or nook-lar, depending on where you vote) sources. The country side seems very healthy (no acid rain perhaps).
Quick note regarding European countries such as Germany phasing out nuclear - there seems to be a greater concern for the environment, perhaps leading to the significant encouragement given to distributed energy sources such as solar.
Quick note RE carbon footprint: I’d like to see a comparison of these countries to Australia now (or even at the baseline time for kyoto 1).