Why Nuclear Energy makes no sense for Australia
26 Nov 2006
- It will take too long to make any dent in the global warming problem with nuclear power.
It would take at least 10-20 years to build operational nuclear power plants in Australia. Constructing the plants, mining the uranium, and refining the uranium would all create a lot of additional and ongoing CO2 emissions.
- It would be incredibly expensive and would have to be subsidised by tax payers - billions of dollars upfront and enourmous ongoing costs.
- It would only be a reasonably short term solution because known reserves of high grade uranium ore would not last long with increased usage.
- It would increase the likelihood of Australia having a nuclear weapons programme - reactors and nuclear warheads tend to go hand-in-hand.
- Even when operating normally, nuclear reactors routinely vent radioactive air and discharge radioactive products into waterways during maintenance. This is bad news for anyone living near a nulcear power station.
- It would pose big risks for contamination of our environment with radioactive fallout should an accident occur or should terrorists strike. Nuclear power stations would need to be built near population centres where an accident could cause billions of dollars of damage - potentially causing entire cities to be permanently evacuated - and serious health risks.
- It would take billions of dollars of government funding away from alternative energy source such as solar, wind, wave, tide, geothermal, etc.
The recent report into nuclear power commissioned by John Howard found that the cost would be about $75 billion to build 25 nuclear reactors. (And that is a conservative estimate with others saying the cost would probably be closer to $100 billion). If each of those reactors
had a capacity of 1000 MW, then the total power added to the national grid would be 600 GWH/day.
If that $75 billion dollars was instead spent on clean renewable technology like a 50-50 mix of
solar and wind we would get a generation capacity of about 130 GWH/day* - with no risk of nuclear accidents!
However, solar and wind cannot provide base load power without some energy storage system (such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme) so money
would also have to be invested in developing sufficient load leveling storage. However, with appropriate dynamic electricity pricing based on supply and demand, some load leveling
would occur at the consumer end. Off-peak water heaters currently switch on at night time when demand is low, but this is a legacy
of having so much base load capacity on the grid which needs to be utilised. With solar, the peak supply occurs at the same time as the peak demand, thus helping to level the load somewhat. If cheap off-peak
electricity is no longer available, some demand will switch to times when supply is at its greatest.
With a public campaign to inform people of the need to save energy, demand may be able to be
reduced. Already a lot of people are installing low energy fluorescent lighting. We need to go further and get more people
to install insulation in their houses to limit the need for air conditioning and heating as well. Solar water heaters should
be mandatory for new water heating installations (where practical for the dwelling).
The best part about a policy to support renewables instead of nulcear is that we have the technology to start building solar and wind generating systems immediately. We don't have to wait for 10-20 years. The time we save could make a huge difference to the
amount of global climate change we will experience.
Read Helen Caldicott's latest book for more info on problems with nuclear energy.
See my climate change page for more on climate change issues.
* For solar I've assumed 5 hours mean sunlight per day, and $6 per watt for the cost of the system. For wind I've assumed an average of 8 hours per day of wind, and a cost of $3 per watt of installed capacity.