As in every election over the last 20 years, at stake will be the question of whether Australia chooses a clean energy future, or prolongs the life of coal and gas – an outcome the nuclear plan relies on.
In that sense, nuclear energy is shaping up as an election fig leaf like no other.
John is on Mastodon @johnquiggin@aus.social. I’m not sure if me tagging him here on Lemny federates to Mastodon ?
Because according to the coalition’s own report that came out a few days ago at best nuclear will cost about five times as much as wind and ten times as much as solar.
This means using the same limited funding they would only displace one fifth to one tenth as much coal and gas, and doing so would take fifteen years instead of five.
Nuclear was the answer when we discovered we needed to end fossil fuel use seventy years ago, it was the option when all the nations of the world agreed that fossil fuel use must end thirty years ago, and it may have been viable fifteen years ago, but there is a reason that the same fossil fuel companies that spent the last seventy years throwing billions at anyone who would say nuclear bad suddenly changed their mind, not coincidentally at about the same time battery backed solar and wind replaced coal and gas as the lowest cost of reliable electricity production.
The other major advantage Nuclear has for coal and gas companies is that once funding is locked in and construction started, it is very easy for them to sue, delay, and give millions to any resident who wants more nuclear, but just not this specific plant, and to ultimately turn a ten year construction timeline into a thirty year one.
That’s means they get at least ten, probably twenty to thirty years of selling coal and gas that they don’t get if the finding goes to solar and the same generation capacity is built in three to five years.
This also is all before noting that the coalition’s report also expects that as cars, cooking, and heating go to all electric demand for electricity will shrink for some reason, so we better not build enough nuclear to even supply the Australia of today, much less the Australian of 2040 when these plants start to actually produce power, and as such it’s possible Australia could be burning just as much coal and gas in thirty years as we do today.
By contrast, if Australia takes advantage of being the best country in the world for solar between its vast sunny desert and being the world’s largest lithium producer than the last fossil fuel plant is dead inside of ten years.
See this is one I don’t get, why should an extended nuclear construction time be displaced by building more coal and gas plants instead of renewables, other than the fact that the only party who says they want to build a nuclear plant is using it to justify continuing to build more coal and gas?
Because fossil fuel plants are a lot cheaper to build than renewables, though far more expensive to run, so if a plant is temporary and only expected to be needed for a few years than you have found the one place where financially fossil fuel power production is cheaper.
Moreover, in this scenario the government is already spending basically all of its infrastructure money on the nuclear plants, while our friendly oil companies will give you the fossil pants for free.
That being said, I would expect it to be less building new fossil fuel plants, though given the aging coal plant problem it might be some, and more keeping existing fossil fuel plants running because after all, ‘we just need it for a few more years’ and ‘natural gas is a great brige fuel to net zero’.