Energy Scale: Nuclear Powered Future Means Thinking Big & Acting Now

When it comes to reliable and affordable power, big truly is beautiful. There has been plenty of focus on Small Modular Reactors which, in time, promise to revolutionise the generation and distribution of electricity. However, in the here and now, in Australia the heavy lifting is being done by large-scale coal-fired generators, with gas, diesel and kerosene being used for turbine and piston-engined generation.

Occasional bursts of wind power and solar power (weather and wind permitting) get thrust into the grid, allowing operators to collect $billions in subsidies every year.

Those subsidies are helping to destroy what’s left of Australia’s reliable coal-fired power fleet.

What replaces those reliable 24 x 365 generators is a matter of delusional faith (on the one hand) and unmitigated anxiety-filled realism (on the other).

The cult that thinks chaotically intermittent wind and solar, backed up by mythical mega-batteries, can replace coal-fired power plants have another thing coming.

However, as Peter Smith explains below, those pinning their hopes on SMRs as an immediate fix to Australia’s power woes also need a reality check.

What Smith has to say about maintaining Australia’s coal-fired power generation fleet, and progressively upgrading it with High Efficiency Low Emission plants makes perfect sense. However, over the longer term, large-scale nuclear power plants are an obvious choice for a uranium rich country like Australia. Whether Australia’s notionally conservative Liberal party has the stomach for either path is an open question.

Nuclear or Net Zero. It Can’t be Both
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Peter Smith
30 October 2023

It seems clear that the Coalition will go to the next election with an incoherent energy-cum-climate change policy. Sticking with net zero and going nuclear won’t mix. Pursuing the first will effectively rule out the second.

The Coalition is very unlikely to propose building any conventional large-scale nuclear reactors. It will punt for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), each providing up to 300MW. For example, numbers of them would have to be linked to provide the comparable electricity supply of our largest coal power station. At full capacity, Eraring generates 2880MW.

Westinghouse, which is developing SMRs, recently provided a projected cost of US$1 billion for its 300MW model. That’s about $1.5 billion in Australian dollars. So Eraring’s power generation could be replaced for something upwards of $15 billion once all costs have been factored in. A lot of money, but a lot less than the $25 billion or more it would likely eventually cost (including transmissions lines) for storing much less power via Snowy 2.0. Assuming Snowy 2.0 is completed; which, clearly, it won’t be. It’s simply a case of when it will be put out of its misery. Cancel Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministerial pension in small recompense for the sunk cost? Just an idle thought.

Of course, Eraring is just one of the remaining coal-power plants for the chop. Speaking at climate “summits” in July and again in October, Daniel Westerman, the CEO of AEMO, said that the “historic mainstay of the power system — coal-fired generation — is on the way out … two-thirds of coal, or 14GW, could exit the market in six-and-a-half years’ time.”

Relacing fourteen gigawatts of coal would take some 47 SMRs at a cost of about $70 billion-plus. Now we’re talking real money? Not so much. After all, Net Zero Australia, a partnership between the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, Princeton University and an international consultancy group, reported, also in July, that Australia would need to spend “up to $9 trillion on the transition in the next 37 years;” and, of this, $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade. Silly, unachievable, amounts of money. Still, it puts a mere $70 billion in perspective. It’s peanuts. So the Coalition and Australia are on a nuclear winner? Not so fast.

Westinghouse said it hoped to have its first (300MW) SMR operating in the United States by 2033. That’s ten years away and we are a long way from adding Australia to the queue of orders. And I assume that Westinghouse won’t be a laggard among the major companies developing SMRs.

What will Australia need to do before joining the queue and putting in its order? First, the Coalition will need to win the next election and probably the one after that. Second, it will need have the existing legal prohibition on nuclear energy overturned by the Parliament. That means getting a bill passed by the Senate. Third, it will need to identify sites for the SMRs and, critically, for high-level waste disposal. Watch out for underground bones, spiritual connections, and leftist judges of a development-denying turn of mind. Good luck.

But suppose a miracle happens and Mr Dutton eventually puts in an order. I would say you could put things on the same footing as the delivery of the first Australian-made SSN-AUKUS nuclear submarine. To wit, the early 2040s.

Before I go on, let’s never forget, when logically preferencing reliable and continuous nuclear power over unreliable and intermittent wind, solar and pathetic battery power, that refurbishing existing coal-power plants and building new efficient ones is much the best option. It is a tragedy of our age that the climate-change hoax has pretty well ruled that out. The United Nations, the EU, the ABC, the Greens, inner-city latte-sippers, Greta Thunberg, renewable-energy carpetbaggers, and many notables, would all howl. One Nation might stand up to it. The Coalition? Hardly.

But back to where I left off, nuclear by the early 2040s. Not so bad? Sadly, it is so bad. It’s too late. Westerman’s not for waiting. He’s a glass half-full man to whom dire predicaments are opportunities. Apropos:

Our Integrated System Plan is clear that investment is needed at scale. Generation from wind and solar, energy storage systems and other firming capacity, and transmission, all need urgent investment to ensure the lights stay on as our coal-fired power stations retire … the east coast power system needs to triple the amount of grid scale solar and wind by 2030, and triple it again by 2050, from 16 GW today to 141 GW by 2050, while storage needs to expand by a factor [of] 30…to 60 GW. That’s a big economic opportunity in anyone’s language, all in the best interests of energy consumers.

Letting this “big economic opportunity” slip is not on Westerman’s agenda, nor more broadly is it on the agenda of climate influencers and potentates. While things aren’t going nearly as well as hoped. Increasing costs, shortages of skilled manpower and pesky objections to ugly wind, solar and transmission eruptions are slowing progress. Nonetheless, the ship has sailed and, even if they win, no bunch of pantywaist Libs, hitched to net zero, will take enough wind out of its sails (if you’ll forgive the metaphorical pun). By the 2040s, the nuclear option will have come too late to save the day. Too much will have been invested in destroying coal and erecting wind and sun totems to reverse course.

Picture if you will an elderly Dutton weeping over the energy carnage as he pens his memoirs. If only he’d ditched net zero and plumped for coal until nuclear arrived. Yes, he won the 2024 election with a nuclear pitch. Alas, that net-zero albatross eventually did him in. What, not another blackout, he sighed, as he put down his quill in the dark.
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