Australia is a nation that is the size of the likes of China and the United states, with roughly a fiftieth and a tenth of the population, respectively. As a country, we are one of the highest emitters of CO2 per capita on the planet. So you’re probably thinking that perhaps it might be a good idea to consider alternatives for power generation, right? Maybe you’ve come across the likes of a guy named Peter Dutton, who, as a politician of the currently-in-opposition Liberal party, is running a massive campaign to spread the idea of Australia adopting Nuclear Power as its next big power source. Now, whilst many of you out there, who probably already live in the United States or Europe where Nuclear has a pretty strong foothold might think that this is a fantastic idea, do not let this fool you for a second. There are several reasons why Nuclear would not make sense for Australia, and despite what some of the naysayers out there will say, a lot of it has absolutely nothing to do with safety whatsoever. It all comes down to the economics, logistics and geographically restrictive factors of Australia, which makes Nuclear energy pretty much a non-starter for us Aussies.
In other words, Despite what the press in Australia would have you believe, Dutton is lying to you. Nuclear power is nothing more than a distraction tactic to continue Australia down the path of continuing its dependence on Fossil Fuels.
Some historical context.
Anti-Nuclear sentiment has been a big thing in Australia, and it dates all the way back to the early 1950s. Previously, Australia was used as a testing ground for british-made nuclear weapons. This began back in 1952, when the at-the-time Liberal government, headed by Robert Menzies, passed the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952, which allowed the testing of Nuclear Weapons on crown land in remote parts of South Australia, and in the Montebello islands off the coast of WA. These tests were conducted by the British. The general public was generally left unaware of the nature of these tests, and as the “Ban the Bomb” movement grew worldwide in the 1950s, knowledge of these tests began their own variant here in Australia. By the 1960s, sentiment had grown so badly towards the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons, that in 1963, Australia became a signatory to a Partial Nuclear test ban treaty.
In 1969, a 500 megawatt nuclear power station was proposed for the Jervis Bay Territory. Local campaigners pushed back against the push for this plant, and the South Coast Trades and Labor council announced that it would refuse to build this reactor. By 1971, the Australian government deemed the project to be economically infeasible and politically destructive, so it canned the project.
French nuclear weapons testing in the 1970s further accelerated anti-nuclear sentiment, and in 1973, we as a nation sifned the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation accelerated their campaigns and began funding grassroots anti-nuclear campaigns. (the ACF is a fantastic organisation by the way. If you have a few bucks, chip in a few to give ’em a hand.)
Existing uranium mines such as Rum Jungle and Ranger became significant environmental risks due to concerns that tailings and runoff were damaging local ecosystems and the operations were damaging northern Aboriginal communities; with Moss Cass in 1975 quoting “Nuclear energy creates the most dangerous, insidious and persistent waste products ever experienced on the planet.”
In 1976, 7,000 people marched across Australian cities to protest uranium mining. In April 1977, 15,000 marched. In August? 50,000 people. This lead to Labor passing a motion in favour of fighting for an indefinite moratorium on uranium mining as part of their national conference (basically a giant meeting of Labor members which helps them to draft the underpinning ideological goals of the party at the time) In 1982, this was pushed back to a “one Mine Policy” meaning that there would only ever be one active uranium mine in Australia. In 1984, this was expanded to a “Three mine policy” which is what lead to the existence of our current three Uranium mines. Narbarlek, Ranger and Roxby Downs/Olympic Dam.
In 1977 through to 1979, Charles Court of the Liberal Party of Western Australia announced plans for a nuclear power reactor at Wilbinga, 70km north of Perth. The WA government at the time, cited the need to build 20 nuclear power plants to keep up with the energy demands of future WA power demands, by the end of the century. None of this ever eventuated. These announcements lead to mass protests across the city.
Australia’s only nuclear energy education facility, the former School of Nuclear Engineering, closed down in 1986. In the late 1980s, the Chernobyl disaster lead to a global plunge in uranium prices. Plans to build a nuclear waste dump in 1998 were scrapped, despite this being extremely remote and being capable of holding 20% of the world’s spent nuclear waste.
The McLelland Royal Commission spurred on a cleanup of the former Maralinga testing site, which cost the Taxpayer a staggering $100m. Uranium prices began to grow again in the early 2000s when proponents of the energy type saw it as a potentially valid response to global warming. Motions were attempted to be passed through the senate in 2005, but were knocked back. John Howard, leader of the Liberals at the time, pushed the idea of nuclear power on environmental grounds, despite it’s previously mentioned, woeful environmental record.
The Rudd Government, in 2007, openly expressed its disdain for nuclear energy, and the Anti Nuclear movement continues to fight against the development of nuclear power and waste storage facilities. Indigenous groups, state-level governments and the wider community have consistently pushed back against these nuclear energy initiatives on both economic and environmental grounds.
A statewide uranium mining ban was put into place in Western Australia in 2002. The ban was lifted in 2010 when the Liberals took power in Western Australia, with BHP planning on developing a Uranium mining project in Yeelirrie, to the tune of $17bn in costs. Lake Way, pursued by Toro, and Lake Maintland, pursued by Mega Uranium, were also considered, but seeing as Uranium prices are as of late, extremely low, any significant investment into these projects by private companies would not have been able to cover the cost of development.
Following the Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster, experts in the field of Science, such as Professor Emeritus at Deakin University, Ian Lowe, state that Nuclear Power is a risky, unworkable move for Australia. Nuclear power has an expensive up-front cost which would have to be borne, with insurmountable problems associated with its waste disposal and potential for weapons proliferation, and argues that Renewable energy is quicker to implement, less expensive, less environmentally destructive and, more importantly, cheaper, than nuclear energy.
This leads me into the main reasons as to why Nuclear Power is completely infeasible for Australia.
Reason 1: Logistics.
Yeah, i know. Kinda boring, right? I go on about all these wishy washy ideas of saving the planet or whatever, without considering for a second that one of the biggest reasons as to why Nuclear power is infeasible, is purely because we lack the logistical capability of getting uranium from where it comes from, to where it’s needed.
Without expensive infrastructure projects that would either require the construction of nation-spanning pole-and-wire projects, or highly secured, nation-spanning rail networks, or relying on private companies to get materials from ore sites to processing centres, the sheer logistical effort required to get Uranium from where it’s mined to where it needs to generate power would honestly make your head spin.
Currently, as of the time of writing, approximately 40% of Australian homes are currently powered by some form of Solar Photovoltaic system mounted on their rooftops. In Western Australia, we generate so much solar energy that the DEBS recently had to cut the cost of solar payouts from 10c/kWh to 2c/kWh, meaning that exporting solar is pretty much worthless now, or to put it politely, solar power is so cheap that they simply cannot pay you to export it. So much of it is being generated during daylight hours that oftentimes, grid operators have to shut off or capacity-restrict the export of solar power.
The fundamental problem with Solar is the duck curve. The spike in power which begins when the sun goes down, and you come home, turn on the telly, cook a meal, fire up the air conditioner, and so on. This is where power demand is at its highest, and this is where power is at its most expensive to generate.
Nuclear power would merely be an expensive, costly side-step to this. To generate nuclear power you firstly, have to mine the materials, namely Uranium. Then you have to ship the radioactive ore to the power plants. This means you either have to place the plants on the coast, where there is access to water for both its cooling systems and to supply materials, or you have to place the plants inland, where the risk of a nuclear meltdown is less prominent, at the expense of extra logistical costs.
Then you have to enrich the uranium to become fissile. Uranium is radioactive as it is, but only a certain portion of Uranium can actually be used as a fissile fuel for a nuclear power station. Certain isotopes of Uranium need to be extracted and enriched to either become more fissile isotopes, or to become a completely different element, in the form of Plutonium. This material will then break down when inserted into the reactor, creating heat as a byproduct.
You will also require a source of other materials, such as Cobalt-60 and create advanced manufacturing facilities for high-purity graphite, for the control rods which will allow the plant to ramp up and ramp down based on demand.
Then you will also need to plug the plants into the grid, find a place to store all that waste when it’s done being fissile, so on, so forth.
Now the most Viable location for this in Western Australia, is perhaps Muja, in Collie, where our existing Coal-fired power plant sits, due to its already existing interconnects. Muja is a 1.09GW power station, which at the time of writing only generates around 894MW of power due to its age and wear. It is also one of the single biggest emitters of air pollution in Australia, where it was found to have emitted somewhere in the realm of 5.75 megatons of CO2 to produce 5.05tWh of electricity in 2009 by the Carbon Monitoring for Action organisation. Collie, its nearby sister plant, doesn’t fare much better.
Speaking of Collie, there’s some good news to be coming out of that site, with the WA Government building two grid-scale batteries at the site, in order to assist with reducing the need for the use of the plant as a primary power source. Coal plants are shutting down left, right and centre, citing operating costs as their primary cause for closure.
This site is also one of the many sites the Liberals have proposed as a site as a part of Dutton’s proposed nuclear power plant rollout. Meaning that the sites of the old plants would have to be demolished, and then new plants constructed in their stead. Keep in mind, that both Muja and Collie are placed right next to a rather large coal mine, Premier Coal, which supplies both of these stations with black coal for their operation.
Currently right now, as of the literal time i am writing this, Western Australian homes are generating 1.04GW of solar power from rooftops alone, and roughly 60% of its daytime running energy from Renewable energy sources. With the coal plants closing by the end of the decade, open and closed-cycle gas plants will likely pick up the slack taken up by coal, which whilst it is still a fossil-fuel based energy generation source, is logistically easier to implement, cheaper and more feasible based on existing infrastructure. This is right up until the point where homes start to take on battery storage, that is… Which leads me on to my next point.
Reason 2: Cost.
I want you to take a second to read this report. This is the 2023-2024 GenCost report from the CSIRO. This is a report which factors in the potential cost of replacing coal-fired power stations with Nuclear power stations, and their overall cost, as well as the cost of implementing the so-called wonderchild of the nuclear fantasy, Small Modular Reactors, into the energy mix.
The report determined some pretty damning things for Nukeheads.
Nuclear power is going to take at least 15 years to implement, including construction of the plants themselves, as well as to build up the regulatory, security and safety steps needed to safely operate the plants in the first place. Seeing as Peter Dutton wants these plants to be state-owned enterprises? Expect this to take considerably longer.
The report found out that the cost of renewables was considerably cheaper, and that there is no potential way for Nuclear power to be functional by 2030, in time for coal-fired power stations in states like Western Australia to be transitioned to new sources. In fact, solar and wind with firming capacity from grid-scale and home-scale batteries was found to be the cheapest form of power per megawatt-hour and Nuclear power, to be the most expensive form of power generation per megawatt-hour in both present-day implementation and in future implementation.
In fact it’s estimated that the cost of Dutton’s nuclear energy plan could hit $600bn and would generate just 3.7% of Australia’s overall energy by 2050, if it was implemented after the next election. This basically makes the previous deal done by Scott Morrison and his merry men for the AUKUS subs look like kind of a bargain, right? And both would be just as effective at fighting national security risks to Australia.
Climate Change is a serious national security issue. We need to take action as quickly and effectively as we possibly can. Doing this by means of spending $600bn to only generate a mere 3.7% of our energy in frankly, one of the sunniest and most resource rich countries on the planet, where mining operators are literally tripping on Lithium deposits left right and centre.
To put things into perspective, $600bn is a lot of money. Wanna know how much money it is? Okay. Let’s do a little napkin math. Now you have to keep in mind, i’m just a regular punter who is not really an expert on energy generation, but I am an expert on figuring out if something is a good deal or not. So, let’s assume Dutt Dutt’s plan to roll out Nuclear energy is going to be a $600bn cost. Let’s compare this to doing a nationwide solar panel and battery rollout.
My current solar power system is a 7.4kW panel, 4.9kW output power system which consists of 14 REC panels and 14 Enphase IQ7a Microinverters. As far as solar power is concerned, this is the creme of the crop of solar systems. This setup cost me $12,000 to purchase and install, after rebates. Frankly, it was really expensive, but the reduced cost of maintenance overall and the multiple layers of redundancy, as well as the packaging that Enphase Micros provide are the sole reasons why I chose it over cheaper setups.
Let’s say we gave every home in Australia one of these PV systems, you know, for free. Well, there’s 10.9 million homes in Australia. This would work out to a cost of a mere $130.8bn to give every home the best solar panel and inverter setup on the market, for free.
Now, let’s give every single one of those homes say, a 15kWH Enphase battery system to match. That’s a Trio of Enphase IQ Battery 5Ps and a Gateway device. Well, installed that’d work out setting you back about $20,000 and guarantee you energy storage for 15 years. That’s $216bn in overall costs to give every home in Australia a free set of batteries.
For the cost of half of what Dutton is planning to spend on Nuclear Power, you can give every single home in Australia, free solar power and batteries. This is also ignoring the fact that four out of every ten homes in Australia already has some sort of solar PV system equipped already, and roughly 10% of those with solar have battery storage already, so the costs would be considerably less. This also doesn’t factor in the existence of Apartments, strata title units and units where solar installations would be tricky. Luckily Strata Titles Acts have a way to get around this.
Now in saying this, that’s a lot of lithium to mine. Luckily Australia just so happens to be the single largest producer of lithium on the planet, with Australian Lithium making up 55% of the world’s global output. A lot of this lithium is in areas where there really isn’t much “environment” to speak of, deep in the inland deserts of Australia, whereas Australia’s Uranium deposits just so happen to be close to some of the most pristine and ecologically sensitive places on the planet, such as Kakadu National Park, where Ranger, Jabiluka, Narbarlek and Koongarra are located.
This whole cost-to-produce argument, combined with the frankly, horrendous logistics of it all, leads me to the next reason why Nuclear Power is completely infeasible for Australia.
Reason 3: Security
Coal plants are set to close across Australia beginning in 2030, as we are attempting to do our bit to cut our per-capita emissions. Australia has been reducing its emissions quite drastically over the past decade or two.
Emissions per-capita in Australia have been on the decline since 2004. Partially because we have a much higher population now than we did back then, but also due to the effectiveness and success of renewable energy projects, and the gradual switch from coal to gas-fired power, as well as the improved uptake of public transit, hybridised and electric vehicles, and the proliferation of rooftop solar power. In 2022, we overtook the United states. But do you wanna know who’s kicking all of our collective-asses in this front?
That’s right, the Qataris, the Emiratis, and the Saudis! These dinosaur juice guzzling chucklefucks are the primary reason why we even have to fight climate change. That, and the Americans and British who of course, started it all in the first place. These oil-rich nations have all the money to gain from a world run by fossil fuels.
Dutton’s nuclear plan isn’t costed, but even by the previously mentioned estimates it will only produce 3.7% of energy in Australia by 2050, and won’t be ready to come online before 2030. As such, during the time we’re waiting for our nuclear power plants to come online, guess who’s going to be benefiting from all of this. That’s right, fossil fuel producers like Russia, the Gulf States, and of course, the Americans. Glencore is curently rubbing their hands over the idea of a laggy implementation of Dutt Dutt’s nuclear plan.
Now, sure. Coal isn’t oil. But this doesn’t mean that it is something that we should rely on either. The price of coal is also beholden to a global price market, and coal producers could hilariously, do with coal what the Gulf states did to us with oil in the 1970s. Indeed, they’re kind of already doing that to us as a country now, with power prices surging across the country, no pun intended, due to higher fuel costs.
This leads us down the path of a more self-reliant source of energy, renewables. Australia is one of the sunniest countries on earth, with millions of tons of all the minerals we need to build Lithium-Ion batteries of a variety of different chemistries, as well as the deposits of sands needed to produce our own solar panels. If, say for example, war kicked off, we would be able to more sustainably generate energy to run factories to produce weapons and ammunition in a time of conflict, instead of having to depend upon rogue actors.
Now sure, you could argue that we could do the same for nuclear, given we also have that resource available too. But China’s really been eyeing off taking Taiwan by 2027, you know, at the 100-year anniversary of the CCP. I seriously doubt this will happen, but if it did kick off (once again, it’s extremely unlikely due to how intertwined the American and Chinese economies are), it’d lead to a global economic crisis, the likes which we haven’t seen since WWII.
Given the logistical requirements for us to facilitate running nuclear power plants, this would leave an awful lot of exposed infrastructure, just waiting to be attacked by a potential adversary, with the need to either also float a lot of these resources down to cities by ship, or alternatively, build costly rail infrastructure which needs to be secured from potential terror threats. With a country as sparsely populated as Australia? That’s going to be difficult.
To create a more secure power grid, you need multiple points of redundancy against failure. Rooftop solar has already been extremely successful in Australia, so much so that government rebates have lasted through both two Labor terms and one extremely long Liberal term since their implementation by the Australian government back in 2007 under Kevin Rudd. Battery rollouts would be the next big step to take to shore up energy security.
With power and commodity prices in flux, batteries would do more than to just stabilise the grid during power spikes, they’d stabilise power prices full stop. Adding more generative capacity is absolutely needed, but redundant battery backups, in the form of grid-scale and house-scale batteries would work out being a much cheaper and cost-efficient outcome for the average taxpayer, vs a costly, slow and insecure nuclear power plan.
Power stations are also vulnerable targets for cyberattacks. Nuclear power plants, even more so, due to the potentially devastating and catastrophic effects of failure of a plant’s control systems.
There is something that is also worth considering as well, we do not have the regulatory capacity nor the training capacity to securely implement nuclear technician training, nuclear safety training, nuclear safety inspections, so on and so forth. There will need to be at least a 7-8 year overhead, with training undertaken with allied countries on how to safely operate and oversee energy from nuclear power plants. We need to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that nuclear power plants, regardless of who owns or operates them, are run competently and are overseen by competent people. Incompetence was the primary reasoning behind
Reason 4: Politics.
Politics is a messy, disgusting, and dirty game. War is simply what happens when Politics and Diplomacy die, and we are left to fight with guns instead of words. Dutton’s plan to stop our already, frankly monumental progress on Renewables with funding this nuclear power grift is nothing more than a way for him and his party to play to the rules that the coal, oil and gas lobbies fund them to stick to. I was watching a FriendlyJordies video the other day, where Dutton recently attacked Chris Bowen’s use of governmental planes to travel to electorates and conduct his job. Now, as a federal politician, you kinda need to do this. Dutton complained that he wasn’t able to use the jet becasue it was being used by Labor politicians to perform the work they need to do to, i don’t know… Run the country?
What did Dutton want to use the plane for? Well he wanted to use it to go take a tour of a mine run by Gina Reinhardt, of course! Oh, and also to discuss their strategy for using nuclear as a scapegoat for Dutton’s real agenda.
The plan goes like this. Dutton will keep his costings close to the chest. The Australian public, facing pressures from this frankly, global issue of cost-of-living, will turn their back on Albo and vote him in, thanks to a scare campaign from the frankly, incredibly hostile Australian Media.
He’ll then announce the costings, say they cost too much to implement, (as Labor’s been saying all along), and then we’re stuck with another twelve years of fossil fuel dependence. Gina’s happy because her company can keep digging coal and poisoning the planet, she’s also happy that Dutton will roll back the Stage 4 Tax Cuts, cutting funding to the ATO, creating more tax loopholes and emissions loopholes for these fatcats to keep spewing bile into our planet, and to keep growing their Ferrari collections. Gambling ads will penetrate further into our kid’s minds, and people will buy more Dodge Rams to line the pockets of SCD Remanufactured Vehicles’ cocaine-addicted CEO.
The point? Nuclear Power is a poltical football. If Dutton does a Scotty and actually follows through with the plan, it would frankly, be the most hilarious thing the Liberals ever did since that time that their Prime Minister got caught in Hawaii during the bushfires… Or that one time the former Home Affairs minister funnelled $400mn of taxpayer money to a shack on Christmas Island.
This is typical ideological posturing by the Liberals. Saying one thing and doing something else to appease their donor mates. Renewables are the future, and we need to ensure we keep them that way. Once government funds are locked away for a fixed purpose, they have to be used for that purpose. If Dutton does indeed commit to the $600bn needed to roll out Nuclear energy, you watch. It’ll be in a sort of generic sounding “Nuclear technologies” fund or something. That money will be used to more than likely, prop up some of the most nasty, evil corporations on the planet. Arms and weapons companies who are looking to build more sophisticated ways to eradicate people. Power plants that serve no purpose other than to be a literal radioactive cancer on the planet.
Reason 5: The Environment.
This leads me all the way back to the political struggle fought by anti-nuclear advocates in the first place. They had a reason as to why they fought tooth and nail to stop nuclear power in Australia. It’s an environmental disaster. Rates of cancer are increased within the radius of most nuclear power facilities. Thyroid cancers, Leukaemia and Lymphomas are cited to be the biggest cancer risks. Damage to ecosystems caused by Uranium mining is staggering, and an ongoing battle is being fought in Kakadu over whether or not Ranger should even keep operating in the first place.
Spent nuclear waste takes 200,000 years to decay to a safe level. That is longer than you, or I, or our kids, or our grandkids, and their grandkids, and their grandkids, and their grandkids, will be alive. That’s 2,000 generations. That’s the difference between us living in literal ice-age era caves, and the time where we are in now. The english language won’t even exist as a language by that point, or it’ll be so comprehensively different that it’d be unintelligible by almost all but the most seasoned scholars of a future human (if we could even call ourselves that by that point) species.
…That’s to suggest even if humans even last that long due to the effects of climate change, the damage we would do to our environment as a result of committing to nuclear energy, would be catastrophic. This is also not to mention the side-effect of nuclear power. Nuclear weapons. Look into the countries that all adopted nuclear power at a mass scale. France, the United Kingdom, Russia, The United States, India, Pakistan and China, all have nuclear weapons, as well as large-scale nuclear-power generation. The weapons are just a “happy side-effect” of nuclear power generation.
Instead, what we should be looking at is the lowest environmental, societal and financial cost way to generate energy when looking forward. Wind, Solar, Hydro/Tidal and Geothermal energy all are options that we can implement, at a much lower societal, environmental, financial and security risk than any other source of energy, including nuclear power. If your country already has Nuclear power? fantastic, keep it going. You’re going to need it. But for us Aussies? Nuclear is expensive, environmentally destructive, politically divisive, and more importantly, ineffective in our fight to protect our survival on earth. There are peaceful uses of nuclear technology, and we already use them. Nuclear medicine, radiography and nuclear non-destructive testing techniques are already saving lives without the need to build cumbersome and dangerous energy-scale nuclear reactors.
In conclusion…
This is why I will not be supporting any form of nuclear energy in Australia. Australia has all the resources and infrastructure it needs to implement a mass-rollout of solar and wind power, so why not just stick to what we’ve already been doing? In fact, i’d sooner recommend that the Federal Government continue its FBT-Exempt status for EV Leases, as well as improve access to home-based batteries through incentives to allow the 40% of Australians who own solar panels on their homes to further reduce their demand on the grid, by allowing the ROI equation of batteries to be just that little bit sweeter through incentives. Hell, a 30% incentive on LFP and LTO batteries for homes would improve the ROI on those batteries to the point where they would pay themselves off halfway through their cycle lives, if the cost of batteries continues to be on the decline as it’s currently been.
For Australia, Nuclear power is expensive, logistically difficult, insecure, and underwhelming in terms of its impact. I understand the perception from other nations and in particular from conservatives, of nuclear power being a way to prop-up existing companies who depend on the extraction of coal, oil, and gas, but keep in mind, even though those industries will still exist, even in a net-zero world, they won’t be making as much profits as they used to. Steel will always need carbon to coke it. Oil will be needed for lubricants and plastics. Gas will be needed to make Hydrogen and provide fuel for small gas-powered appliances. But the need to depend on these sectors as a primary energy source needs to dwindle, for the sake of our environmental and economic security. We need to step away from the idea of using finite resources to fulfil something that will only have a growing demand in the future, therefore we need to make the decision now, to build out, scale up and diversify our renewable energy portfolios. You need to prioritise voting for any politician who wants to continue to build out renewable infrastructure. Labor, The Greens, The Teals, whatever. Any party who is at least somewhat making in-roads with renewable infrastructure rollouts must be prioritised in the upcoming 2025 Election if we have any shot of building a nation that is secure in diplomacy, politics and energy.
I hope you’ll all make the right decision.
Beano Out.