Peter Dutton’s nuclear ‘policy’ is a classic dead cat

Paul Anderson writes: Someone needs to get the message across that nuclear power is not carbon-free, not by a long way. The carbon costs — think concrete, fancy metals, exotic engineering — are all paid upfront before a single watt is generated. Which is exactly what we don’t need — immediate carbon costs and a promise of compensatory generation sometime in the future.

We can install carbon-free generation equipment right now and supply that power pronto; wind and solar already dominate the electricity market by virtue of their low, low cost.

Nuclear is complicated, dirty and expensive. Like politics.

Greg Eaton writes: Ian Lowe is right, the horse bolted 60 years ago for nuclear power in Australia. We were too small a domestic population then to even use a small percentage of such power economically. These days to use nuclear power in existing proven designs would cost a fortune and also require upgrades to our power grids.

It would be much cheaper, and with a much, much earlier implementation, to put this enormous funding behind multiple properly designed, relatively small, distributed energy storage systems, which would then require little grid expansion and make renewable (and GHG) targets feasible and likely possible in our lifetime.

Peter Long writes: Thank you for pointing out the folly of Peter Dutton’s nuclear “policy”. It’s a classic dead cat, designed (as you point out) to distract us from the real action that is needed. It’s a seductively stupid policy, but please don’t get sucked in and waste too many column inches on it. That’s really what it’s about — don’t fall for it.

Philip White writes: If you believe a recent Newspoll, you might think 55% of Australians support small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). This might be meaningful if small modular reactors actually existed, but they don’t. There are a couple of super expensive “small reactors” operating unreliably in authoritarian countries, but there is no “modular” production, so there are no economies of scale. The most promising SMR plan (NuScale) recently got cancelled because it was uneconomic.

So the 55% was just a function of the misleading nature of the question asked. If you asked a legitimate question, very few would support it, as pointed out by Professor John Quiggin of the University of Queensland.