Peter Dutton's nuclear plan is just terrible public policy.
The truth is that, in an Australian context, with nuclear power more expensive per kilowatt hour than either grid scale solar & storage or coal, nuclear just doesn't make economic sense.
The UK has a mature nuclear industry. Its new Hinkley Point C plant, started in 2016, is now expected to not be complete until 2031, and costs £35bn.
So how much would it cost to replace all of Australia's coal power plants with nuclear ones?
We'll, at current exchange rates, £35bn — that's the cost of just one Hinkley Point C sized reactors — works out to A$67.6 billion.
So building just 10 nuclear reactors the size of Hinkley Point C costs $A676bn, making the AUKUS subs look like Home Brand corn flakes in comparison.
(Just for comparison, ScoMo's AUKUS subs cost $368bn, and Daniel Andrew's Suburban Rail loop is estimated at around $100bn.)
That's assuming Australia, starting from scratch, could build nuclear plants as quickly and cheaply as the UK, which was one of the first nations on Earth to split the atom.
So is it debt & deficit to fund this? Big new taxes? Even by the LNP's own measuring sticks, it's a crap policy!
The Australian Federal Government has previously examined the prospect of building nuclear power plants in the Switkowski report: https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20080117214749/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/79623/20080117-2207/dpmc.gov.au/umpner/docs/nuclear_report.pdf
The big thing that's changed since it was published is that grid solar + storage is now cheaper than coal or nuclear power.
So would you support holding up the closure of coal plants for 15 years until nuclear plants are completed, then paying substantially more on your power bills, while the federal government pays hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies, while also hiring thousands of additional public servants to regulate it all?
#auspol #nuclear #ClimateChange #australia @australianpolitics
@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics Given the accelerating collapse of ecosystems globally, developing nations barely have a shot at evolving the energy sector, let alone industrialized nations that easily keep renewables and nuclear at a 10% market share.
Whether you do a deep-dive into #6thMassExtinction or not, we're in one.
@NuModular @australianpolitics My post is quite explicitly not about developing nations.
It's about Australia.
Nuclear might make sense in other parts of the world, but it is not a substitute for renewables and storage in Australia.
@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics My post explicitly scaled less-to-more developed, industrialized nations. You isolate value spaces because you can't, or won't, do the "developed" math.
Reap what you sow. Your ilk are why fossil fuels so easily maintains a 90% market share, and future generations are in genocidal jeopardy.