The press conference is currently still live so this was the best short video I could find on the topic.
To begin, I’m absolutely against this proposal, but I want to see a discussion - hopefully a constructive one - between Aussies (comments are always turned off for Australian news on YT) to gauge some idea of how people generally feel about the idea.
Fire off.
The thing is, if Labor had announced such a completely undercooked policy - no timelines, no validation, lots of contradictions, and most importantly, no costings whatsoever - the media would be collectively crucifying them. And I’m not talking about the polite way The Guardian or The Conversation are dissecting the policy and bringing counterpoints. No, it would be open season in the most derogatory and aggressive language possible.
The fact that Dutton can bring this to a press conference and not get laughed out of the room is just utterly sad.
I just saw an opinion piece by Chris Kenny in the Australian whinging that the “majority” of the media isn’t giving Dutton a free ride on nuclear. Bro you are the majority of the media. ABC and the Guardian have much smaller audiences
Existing nuclear tech is dramatically more expensive than every competing low carbon power generation alternative and will never have any place in Australia.
Future nuclear tech (be it fission or fusion) may be a different story, but our power plants are at end of life so we need new power gen now, the world is dying so we need carbon neutral now.
We can’t sideline this for 20 years to wait and see what happens, the strategy should be the roll out renewables to the point where the grid doesn’t need any major changes. When we hit the point where the grid does need big investment, reassess available alternatives. If nothing has changed, roll out the grid changes and more renewables or if fusion drilling geotehermal or nuclear or whatever has come viable work it out then.
The LNP could not build car parks.
There is zero chance of this happening even if they got into power, controlled the Senate and had the individual States green light it.
Have they released who is going to pay for these power plants? Because if they put it on my monthly bill, I’m going off grid and I bet half the rest of the country will too.
It’s really just kicking the can down the street. My expectation is if they got into power, they would say the figures are more than they realised, say they have to fix Labor’s economic mess and they’ll come back to it when the economy is in the black. Like others, I would have seen it as viable 20 years ago, but it is just so expensive, they’ve cancelled builds overseas because of cost blowouts and Europe is turning off reactors because of all the renewable energy in their grid. The claim it would be cheaper annoys me the most, as it is an outright lie. All the liberals do is shovel shit and coal
There is nothing to discuss, its not a real plan, its a fever dream. It wont happen.
That is my hope but I hear people say things … stupid things. Things like, “I like Peter Dutton, actually.” 🤮 Which makes me lament the thought that the public can be easily persuaded to vote for these shysters at the next election and we will be stuck with their corrupt scams and BS for yet another decade!
Worse than that, it’s an intentional miss direction so that their billionaire benefactors can continue to squeeze the fossil fuel sponge well into the future. They want to get every last almost free drop out of our resources.
Should be nuclear + renewables, not nuclear vs renewables.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Energy is bid into the market at the spot price. Because the marginal cost of producing energy from renewables is so cheap, this will displace energy from all other sources when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. This is what’s already happening with the coal generators today.
By the time any nuclear gets built, there will be so much solar in the system that nuclear will have to be forcibly shut off at least 40% of the time or operate at a loss. This capacity factor is then on par with wind, so you may as well just build more of that - it’s way cheaper.
The concept of baseload power is dead and has been dead for a while. What we need is more dispatch-able generation and storage.
Right so what happens when there’s no sun for a week or two
This is explicitly addressed in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan but the tl;dr is that in a national grid with geographically diverse renewable generation and a little more transmission, the chances of there being a weather-related shortfall are exceedingly rare.
For these cases we have pumped hydro being built, and we can still fall back to gas peaking plants for whatever unmet demand is left.
Yes, gas is not carbon free, and it will be expensive to run in these cases, but it won’t run often, it is already built and will allow us to operate at well above 80% renewables until we can built enough long term storage to make it redundant. This meets our international abatement obligations, and more importantly reduces the area under the emissions curve, which is all that really matters tbh.
Just need to be prepared for events like krakatoa erputing that darkened the sky globally for years in the late 1800s
This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect fossil fuel investments. If it creates political division and an impression of leadership then it is icing on the cake. I would expect the coalition to become increasingly divided if this was ever realistically pursued. Coalition voters do not want to foot the bill for this idiocy. The market has already voted. Renewables won on time to market and ROI.
For context I am not opposed to nuclear power generation at all. There has been a lot of misinformation about safety and waste for generations that has poisoned debate and I would like to see a more rational debate. I think it irresponsible for countries like Germany to turn away from nuclear and create huge energy security issues as well as increased emissions.
Carbon emissions are a global problem and each country has a responsibility to address it as effectively as they can. We can support nuclear power by supplying uranium and it doesn’t matter for carbon reduction if the reactors are in Australia or overseas.
Our construction costs are very high and we don’t have local expertise. Our research reactor was designed by Argentina. As much as some of us would like to see nuclear power come to Australia it is fantasy economics.
I don’t know how much you know about Germany, but energy security is not a huge problem over there. Over 60% of generated electricity is now coming from renewables. Nuclear peaked as early as 1995 (30%) and has been declining ever since. At the same time, Germany is steadily reducing its dependency on Russian fossil fuels.
The worst thing about this ‘plan’ is the media treating it like it’s an actual real thing that will actually happen if the LNP get in power.
You always know when the coalition is in opposition- that’s when you hear about their nuclear plans. In power, it’s crickets.
It’s all noise, distracting us from other more important things which need our attention now
Yes. I was saying to my daughter this morning that they platform these crazy people and enable them. But then it is also true that they are in our govt so it moreover says a lot about a public that voted them into those positions and elevated their voice.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. However if the media were more concerned with journalism than audience metrics. I think the bullshit might have less standing in the eyes of the public.
I’m not fundamentally opposed to nuclear. The country’s power needs are only going to keep growing, and I could see an argument for having multiple options for sourcing that power. It’s a very expensive argument though, and one that’s hard to swallow when all the experts are saying renewable is the way to go, and I haven’t seen any projections that show that we’d necessarily need anything other than renewables in the foreseeable future.
The thing I’m strongly opposed to with regards to nuclear is rerouting funding away from renewables to pay for it. It’s an expensive technology that won’t be ready for decades, so I just don’t see the need to pivot to it. If we’d started the transition to nuclear three decades ago things would be different, but the LNP was strongly opposed to the technology back then, funnily enough.
And it’s absolutely absurd to then announce a cap on renewables spending as part of their plan to get to net zero by 2050.
The whole thing is a farce, and the LNP hasn’t given any good reasons why nuclear is the way forward over renewables. They haven’t said much of anything other than shout about it being the better option, but then that’s been the LNP’s go-to political strategy for as long as I’ve been old enough to vote so no surprise there.
The Tories’ anti-renewable culture-war is based on the premise that fossil and nuclear electrons have bigger balls than wimpy renewable-generated ones. It’s a transparently absurd idea, but Adolf Kipfler is hoping to ride it into the Lodge nonetheless.
Indeed. To me there is no debate: renewables are the only immediate way to bring us to net zero by 2050. The LNP are presenting this alternative as though we have time ahead of us - as if the planet is not already retaliating against our existence.
As an aside, the only somewhat valid argument I’ve heard is that nuclear would make future Australia an energy powerhouse for the region and allow for exponential growth, which is not something to dismiss flippantly. But in that I would think we would only need one, not seven! However, trying to put my paranoia aside about nuclear power plant meltdowns, that tech would need to be absolutely foolproof - and from my understanding, that is apparently true of modern nuclear generation tech available today. Yet, a solution for long-term storage of waste is still another huge and costly hurdle, let alone how you communicate the toxic danger of the area thousands of years into the future.
The problem of nuclear waste isn’t actually a problem, and the 1000 year thing is a bit of an outdated myth. I wrote more about it here: https://aussie.zone/post/10867702/9731416
Energy storage is actually the biggest problem in energy right now (save for a crazy discovery like perpetual energy, or cheap mass produced super conductors that could optimize the absolute shit out of our energy transmission infrastructure and reduce the amount of energy that we need to produce in the first place).
The energy storage problem is actually the biggest reason why we need nuclear with our renewables.
Nuclear can run our baseloads, renewables plus storage can run our peakloads.
It’s renewables AND nuclear, not renewables vs nuclear.
Happy cake day!
The thing about nuclear is that it just is too expensive, and it’s never going to be ready in time. We need to be getting off of greenhouse emitting energy sources a decade ago. Renewables can get us there so much faster than nuclear can, because it’ll be over a decade before we get a single plant operating even if we ignore all the political difficulties in getting started. With the political issues, it’ll easily be 2040 before anything is online. That’s just not soon enough.
As for cost, nuclear doesn’t compare. It’s much more expensive upfront than renewables, and it’s still multiple times more expensive over its lifetime. There’s no way of looking at it that sees nuclear as a more affordable option than renewables.
The overall expense of this endevour seems to be the biggest factor against nuclear, especially for a relatively small population separated across a vast landmass.
Recycling is incredibly expensive as well, and still requires extensive storage pools for the waste to cool for several years before it can be recycled - granted not for thousands of years, but a lot of short-term storage space would still be required.
Not all the used fuel is suitable for recycling either. And I’m of the understanding that thus far, only about 30% of spent nuclear fuel has been recycled in countries that do it (though I believe this is a capacity issue, not a suitability of waste fuel issue).
I’m not yet convinced on the safety of modern nuclear plants in natural disaster/apocalyptic scenarios, but I agree that an Australia of the future could benefit from being OP.
The cost of nuclear is only at the commissioning and decommissioning of the plant. But during the runtime of the plant is remarkably cheap. People just balk at the initial price because so much of the cost is up front.
Another thing to remember about recycling is that we as a species were producing nuclear waste before we had reactors that could use recycled waste so globally speaking we currently have a surplus of waste. Recently the US had to restart a reactor because they didn’t have enough materials to use for powering deep space probes. It’s not implausible that we could run out of waste to use and have to produce more fresh fuel.
On the topic of safety though, modern reactor designs require power coming in to keep the fissile material frozen to continue the reaction.
As soon as the power is cut, the coolant is cut, part of the plant is destroyed, or something else goes wrong, the plant stops working. If the plant stops working, there’s nothing to cool down the fissile material.
The fissile material’s own radioactivity heats it up to the point that it melts and pours away over what’s essentially a pyramid plinko drain splitting up the liquid into many separate pools. (If it helps, think of your bath’s drain if the pipe splits into two, which split into four, which split into eight, and on and on until a bath tub’s water has been separated into an ice cube tray the size of a tennis court.)
Fissile material only reacts when it’s next to enough fissile material.
And since it’s separated and spread out, there’s more reaction.
If you cut the power for the coolant pumps, the fuel melts, separates (by the power of gravity) and the reaction stops.
If the coolant leaks, the fuel melts, separates and stops reacting.
If you crash a plane into the reactor itself, the cooling mechanisms don’t exist anymore and the fuel melts and pours out the nearest holes (either the drain or spilling outside the reactor into the containment structure, or even outside if need be), spreading out, separating, and reacting no more.
Modern reactors have more in common with an ice-cube hoisted above the great pyramid of giza than they do the fukushima or chernobyl plants. Both of those were designed to require power to prevent a dangerous meltdown which turn into a runaway reactions, whereas modern reactors make it so a meltdown prevents reactions.
The cost of the commissioning and decommissioning (+of course running and wast management) is enough to make it more expensive than renewables with enough storage and transmission though. Nuclear was a great idea 30 years ago. In Australia where we have incredibly good renewable resources it’s a terrible idea today.
I think a lot of the pushing for nuclear now is just as a distraction to keep fossil fuels in the mix for as long as possible, so those politicians can get their cosy board positions on fossil fuel companies after they quit politics
It makes no economic sense. Fucking idiot.
Even when in power and offering cash incentives, the LNP couldn’t convince the power industry to extend coal power plant lifetimes or build new generators. Renewables have already won the free market, they will likely never be beaten in our lifetime. Good fucking luck getting any company that wants to actually make money to invest in nuclear.
The only reasonable argument left for nuclear is the baseline and storage argument, but again the writing is on the wall, industry can see the trajectory that batteries and storage tech is on and know that by the time they spend 2 decades investing in current gen nuclear, it will probably be beaten by storage in the free market anyway.
fwiw Sabine has a history of commenting outside of her area of expertise and having some very bad takes.
She’s an astrophysicist. Listen to her closely when she’s talking about what’s going on in space. But her comments on other subjects such as climate, trans rights, and, yes, nuclear energy, should be taken as those of a random interested layperson. Maybe they’re right from time to time, but they don’t deserve any special consideration.
In that video, for example, she herself admits to ignoring the planning stage, and she’s only talking about countries that already have large nuclear industries. Australia has no nuclear expertise to begin with, so it’s guaranteed to take a lot longer for us than it does in places like Germany and America. And even then she ends up admitting it’s at least twice as expensive as alternative options. She tries to downplay this by making a joke about astrophysics and orders of magnitude, but here on Earth that’s a big difference, and that’s in the best case.
I think it’s a well balanced and well researched video. I don’t think she concludes that nuclear is a clear winner. And in our case it may not make sense. But both sides are guilty of cherry picking facts to fit their narrative.
The only reason I can think of to go nuclear is if renewables can’t meet our power needs. I think it’s a hard problem for the grid to manage distributed power generation in such varying amounts. Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow enough. Can batteries fill the gaps? I hope so. But I wouldn’t be opposed to a small bet on nuclear at the same time.
@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:
Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.
An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.
And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.
The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.
Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.
Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.
And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.
@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath This type of “small bet” would cost 10x more than the same bet on batteries and grid upgrades. The nuclear option is nothing more than a massive carbon tax, except this time it’s a nuclear tax, and it’s funding the nuclear instead of reducing it.
Every time someone proposes to spend NBN levels of money, or multiples of NBNs, ask yourself what the coalition would say if they were against it.
I think you misunderstood me. The small bet I was referring to is not the coalition’s plan. It would be more money to research next generation reactors.
@DavidDoesLemmy oh just research? I can’t see any harm in running experiments if they’re for thorium or fusion. But the real billions need to be spent now, on batteries & factories for batteries. We can be a big player exporting these … this decade! If we had the courage.
Whats the link?
I mean, it’s one way to solve the Gippsland problem: abandoned town tours after the private sector RBMK’s the fuck outta Traralgon. Because let’s be super clear here: private industry has a dog shit safety record, and IF the thing gets build (it won’t) they’ll build the cheapest fucking reactor they can. If the government try to regulate (they won’t) it’ll be too cost inefficient to work (it already is) so we’d gonna end up with an industry that’d make a Soviet engineer worried!
I think Australia should be investing heavily in nuclear. The cost doesn’t make sense for the private sector to bear, but the govt can afford it as long as it doesn’t take away from renewable investment like the libs are proposing here. Future debt is easier to solve than carbon emissions.
We need large scale base load power generation to fill in the gap that electrification of everything will bring. Electrical demand will increase as we replace fossil fuel for heating, cars and transport, etc…
Link the east and west coast grids to let afternoon solar on the west coast flatten the evening east coast peaks, pick a big old chunk of desert in South Australia for wind and solar, throw in a few gigabatteries and tart up some hydro systems, done.
Probably only be $10-15 billion or so.
Thing is, Renewables are already cheap. By the time Nuclear is built, batteries and solar will be hugely cheaper than the price they are now (and in 10 years, its reasonable to expect more than half the price again).
The same thing that happened to NBN will happen to nuclear (basic Game theory). With NBN, competitors undercut the NBN with 5G, because FTTC and FTTN was so bad, and it wasted everyone’s money.
In this case, if they start building, everyone knows that power costs will be expensive, so renewable energy companies will target the prices, and encourage people to install solar and batteries anyway… If batteries are 1/5 of the price they are now, everyone will simply install 5x more batteries, more panels (because they’ll also be more efficient and cheaper than they are now, and work during worse conditions) and remove themselves from the grid. From a game theory point of view, Solar/batteries have a 10-15 year head start and are already cheaper. At the moment 12kwh seems to be the common capacity for batteries… However, if batteries drop a lot, 30-40kwh might be the normal. And it’s likely by the time Nuclear can be built that Lithium will no longer even be the norm for batteries (or if it is, they’ll probably be solid state and low risk). Sodium batteries were already introduced last year and are 25% cheaper instantly. Battery density doesn’t matter for houses (only cars), which really opens up options (all that matters is upfront cost and $ per kwh)
I bought my 6.6kw panels maybe 3 years ago, and 10kw is apparently already cheaper. If I wait 5 years, 15-20kw will probably be cheap (and I have more than enough roof space, so the only thing limiting me would be weather the power company allows it)
I have no idea why anyone would want a centralised grid. Last major power outage here in Victoria during storms was triggered because Loy Yang coal fell offline, and non-solid state power generation takes ages to come back online (it needs to sync up to the grid). Solar and batteries sync up immediately, so if its available, they will always beat Nuclear, and nuclear will simply be sitting there burning rods increasing our taxes and power prices (because nobody wants to use it, and its ultimately taxpayer money)… Similar to what happened with NBN (they ended up having to replace a lot of the copper anyway, and now yet again, they’ve had to upgrade to fibre)
If nuclear could come online tomorrow, it would make sense simply to get rid of coal. However Nuclear is basically playing a game where the competition has a 10 lead, and any innovation can be introduced to the market instantly. With Nuclear, whatever we start building now, we’re stuck with. You can’t simply just start incrementally updating parts
