As the old political saying goes, never hold an inquiry unless you know what its outcomes will be. And never commission a report unless you know what it’s going to say.
Any report is only as good as its assumptions. Garbage in: garbage out.
Which brings us to the latest attempt to hose down the prospect of a nuclear industry in Australia.
Building a nuclear power plant in Australia would likely cost twice as much as renewable energy even accounting for the much longer life-span of reactors, according to a new report from Australia's leading science agency.
Yes, well, ‘Australia’s leading science agency’ also said we’d have forever droughts. Then the flooding rains came. Now Australian taxpayers are paying tens of millions every year to keep hurriedly-commissioned desalination plants sitting idle. The mothballed plants cost a cool $10 billion, which is, I guess, small change in the scheme of the climate scam.
This is also the ‘leading science agency’ whose rinky-dink climate models utterly failed to predict the multi-decade pause in global warming after 1995. To damn them with faint praise, so did everyone else , which only goes to show that the CSIRO has become captured by the same Cult mentality as too many other so-called ‘scientific’ organisations.
Hence their too-obviously pre-determined opposition to nuclear energy.
The CSIRO regularly releases the GenCost report, which looks at the cost of Australia's energy sources. It has consistently found renewable to be the cheapest option.
This, despite the fact that ‘renewables’ (a meaningless term, given that by the UN’s own definition, both coal and nuclear are also ‘renewable’) are already driving electricity prices to some of the highest in the world. And that’s just the beginning: as I’ve detailed elsewhere, the future costs associated with ‘renewables’ are staggering.
The agency said there was little evidence to suggest nuclear reactors in Australia would be able to benefit from running flat-out around the clock, noting they would face the same forces that are hollowing out the business case for coal.
What “forces” would those be? We know the answer to that one: the river of taxpayer money poured into the pockets of the ‘renewables’ troughers, and the strangling green-tape-throttling coal. Other countries, especially India and China, are not nearly so stupid, of course, hence global demand for coal reaching record highs.
Another “force” distorting the playing field is the so-called Value of Emissions Reduction. VER, dubbed a “shadow carbon price”, adds $70 per tonne of carbon, and is expected to increase to $420 a tonne in 2050.
The conclusions come after the CSIRO copped heavy criticism over a report in May that found Australia's first nuclear power plant would cost up to $17 billion in today's dollars and not be operational until 2040.
At the time, critics including opposition energy spokesman Ted O'Brien, who is spearheading the Coalition's case for nuclear power, said the CSIRO analysis was flawed.
It still is.
For these reasons, [CSIRO chief economist Paul Graham] said there was no "unique" cost advantage offered by nuclear compared with renewable energy projects backed by transmission lines and so-called firming technologies such as batteries and gas plants.
"If we had a 60-year nuclear project and a 60-year solar project where you rebuild the solar halfway through, both require re-investments," Mr Graham said.
Except that nuclear wouldn’t necessitate rebuilding the entire electricity grid, at a cost of trillions. As the Peter Dutton plan proposes, nuclear plants would be built on the sites of existing coal stations and use existing transmission lines. Solar and wind, of necessity built far from anywhere (often by bulldozing vast swathes of native vegetation), require building thousands and thousands of kilometres of new transmission.
The other big dodge of the CSIRO report is over installed capacity.
He said one of the criticisms faced by the CSIRO following its May report was that it had been too miserly in its calculation of a nuclear plant's "capacity factor".
The term refers to the share of a plant's nameplate capacity that is actually used.
It is almost invariably higher in base-load generators such as nuclear and coal plants, which can run around the clock, compared with wind turbines and solar panels, which are dependent on the weather.
Mr Graham said supporters of nuclear had argued the technology should be given a capacity factor of 93 per cent, in line with reactors in the United States.
But Mr Graham said the US was an "outlier" on this score and the average for reactors globally was more like 80 per cent.
One in 10 reactors around the world, he said, was operating at a capacity below 60 per cent.
And what do wind and solar operate at? Typically, it’s a quarter or less of their ‘installed capacity’ – often as low as 10 per cent.
On the subject of lead times to build nuclear, Mr Graham was steadfast.
He said suggestions Australia would be able to build its first nuclear reactor in sooner than 15 years seemed to stretch plausibility.
No less – indeed a great deal more – than the claim that Australia will achieve ‘Net Zero’ by 2030. Does anyone really believe that?
Certainly not Australian voters.
A majority of Australians want the transition towards renewable energy to happen at a “moderate” pace and most are unwilling to accept higher bills to pay for it, according to a major survey by the country’s top scientific organisation […]
At the same time, almost 60 per cent of people were not prepared to risk more blackouts as part of the transition.
Well, too bad – because you’re gonna get them. With only a few mildly hot days so far this summer, NSW and Victoria are already teetering on the brink of mass blackouts, with politicians begging people not to use appliances. In Queensland, meanwhile, energy companies have already remotely shut off hundreds of thousands of peoples’ air-conditioners six times in just two months.
Welcome to ‘Net Zero’, where the crickets are raw and you have to eat them in the dark.
