So much has been said by the Coalition about what nuclear energy could do for Australia, with so little evidence to back it up, that it can be hard to keep up with the claims.
The key assertion by Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien is that nuclear would lead to a “cheaper, cleaner and consistent” electricity supply. None of this has been supported.
Not cheaper: the available evidence suggests both nuclear and gas-fired electricity – which Dutton says we would need a lot more of – would be more expensive for Australian consumers than the currently proposed mix of renewable energy, batteries, hydro, new transmission lines and limited amounts of gas.
Not cleaner: stringing out the life of old coal plants and adding gas would increase heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
Not more consistent: the Coalition is proposing a small post-2040 nuclear industry that, even in a best-case scenario, is likely to provide only a fraction of Australia’s electricity. It wants less solar and wind but has not explained how this would help keep the lights on as coal plants shut.
There has been less attention on the Coalition’s repeated suggestion that Australia is the only one of the world’s top 20 economies that either doesn’t have or hasn’t signed up to nuclear energy.
It’s a point that has been raised to imply a bigger point: that nuclear energy is flourishing elsewhere and Australia is out on a limb by not having it.
Let’s test that.
Germany, the world’s third biggest economy, shut its remaining nuclear plants in April last year, following through on a commitment after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan to accelerate its shift away from atomic power. It was the end of a nuclear power industry that had operated since the 1960s.
Germany is also using less coal power – it is at its lowest level in decades – and instead backing renewable energy. It has an 80% renewables target for 2030.
Italy, Europe’s third biggest economy, also had a nuclear industry from the 60s, but shut its plants in 1990 after a referendum. Its rightwing government has suggested it would like to reopen the industry. It hasn’t yet.
Germany and Italy are connected to the European power grid, which gets about 20% of its electricity from nuclear energy, mostly from France’s decades-old plants. But to suggest either is a “nuclear country” is to stretch the truth to breaking point.
Indonesia has toyed with the idea of nuclear energy since opening an experimental reactor in 1965 but nothing has been developed. A US company has signed an MoU to study “developing a thorium molten salt reactor for either power generation or marine vehicle propulsion”, and Indonesian officials say they expect nuclear to play a small role in a future grid dominated by renewable energy. But no plants are under construction and the regulatory work to establish an industry has not been done.
Saudi Arabia also has no nuclear plants. It has been considering developing an industry for about 15 years and invited bids to build two large nuclear plants to help replace fossil fuels. But it is mostly backing renewables and has set a goal of 50% of electricity coming from solar by 2030.
Counting Australia, that means five of the G20 has no nuclear industry and attempts to change that are, at best, at an early stage.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. The evidence suggests nuclear energy will be needed for the world to eradicate fossil fuels, especially in places that do not have Australia’s extraordinary access to renewable energy resources. Every country will have to find its own way.
But it is evidence that the Coalition’s claim that nuclear energy is “used by 19 of the 20 biggest economies”, as Dutton put it last week, is misleading.
The data from an annual statistical review by the Energy Institute tells us there is no global wave of nuclear energy investment or construction. Global generation peaked in 2006, dipped after the catastrophe in Japan and has more or less flatlined since.
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Electricity generated from solar and wind, on the other hand, has soared from a near zero base at the turn of the millennium to now be more than 50% greater than the output from nuclear.
Despite some perceptions, the global growth in electricity from renewables since 2010 has also been greater than the growth in fossil fuel generation. The problem for people and the planet is that electricity from coal and gas is still growing at all.
Nuclear might seem ideal on paper to replace them but the reality is much more difficult, especially in developed democracies.
Simon Holmes à Court, a player in these debates as an energy analyst and convener of the Climate 200 fundraising body, says only five large-scale nuclear projects have reached construction stage in North America and western Europe this century.
Four have been hit by substantial delays and cost overruns. In each case construction has taken more than twice as long as initially forecast. The price tags have ended up being somewhere between double and six times initial estimates.
One, Finland’s Olkiluoto 3, came online last year, 21 years after it was announced and 13 years after it was expected to be operational. The other three – Flamanville in France, Vogtle in the US, and Hinkley Point C in the UK – are expected to take between 18 and 24 years from announcement to generation.
A fifth large project at the Virgil C Summer plant in South Carolina was cancelled in 2017 after more than A$13bn had been spent when it became too expensive to justify.
Small modular nuclear reactors, which the Coalition also included in its announcement, do not exist in any commercial sense.
The Coalition’s argument in response to this evidence is that Australia needs these technologies, urgently. And that they would be cheap.
Out on the ground, renewable energy is already providing nearly 40% of electricity in the Australian national grid. The rollout is proving challenging due to problems with planning, grid connections and getting construction deals signed.
But some of the country’s best energy analysts say solar and wind energy have not driven the spike in power bills. And the Australian Energy Market Operator has found renewables plus firming support can meet the country’s baseload electricity demand – that is, the minimum generation needed – at the lowest cost possible.
It found it when the Coalition was in power, and has found it under Labor. Perhaps we should just get on with it.