It must be the silly season. The old arguments are all back on the agenda, and none of them is more thoroughly worn than the one about Australia going nuclear.
We have endured it in one form or another for at least the past 50 years and there is every prospect that another generation will be rehashing the same debate at the end of this century. The impasse over nukes has a half life longer than that of plutonium.
The basics are simple. There is no doubt that nuclear power is a viable source of industrial and domestic electric power; it has proved itself over large areas of the world and will presumably continue to do so unless and until an equally reliable alternative (perhaps the holy grail of controlled fusion) becomes commercially available.
Once the plants are in place they are non-polluting; when working efficiently the only gas they emit is water vapour. This, of course, is the basis of the case for using them as a replacement for coal-fired plants; they may be more expensive, but they’re clean.
Well, up to a point. There is still the intractable problem of disposing of the nuclear waste or at least of safeguarding it; as the quantities increase and maverick states and terrorist groups proliferate, the chances of theft or misadventure become greater and graver.
And while the design of modern plants is a huge improvement on Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, there are still very few people who would choose to live next door to one — or indeed, anywhere within rocket range. The buggers don’t even like living next to windmills. The political cost of making the switch might well be comparable to the financial one, and that in itself would be huge.
Julia Gillard has made it clear that she just doesn’t think it’s worth it and it is pretty certain a large majority at next year’s national party conference will agree with her. Meanwhile, Tony Abbott doesn’t even want to talk about the subject. He is happy to see it as a wedge within the Labor Party but he is not prepared to risk a similar debate among his own troops. So Realpolitik suggests that the nuclear debate will end, again, not with a bang but a phut.
But there is another line of argument: the moral one. Australia is happy, indeed eager, to sell its enormous deposits of uranium for other countries to use. We say we’re only doing it under stringent conditions to countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty but we know that is sophistry; once the stuff’s on the boats, we effectively relinquish control of it. We certainly aren’t interested in taking responsibility for the nuclear waste it generates.
So if it’s so dangerous and evil that we won’t use it ourselves, what is the justification for flogging it to others? Are we no better than merchants of death, on a par with arms salesmen and drug dealers?
Gillard and most of her colleagues would see this line as out of date. They no longer claim that nuclear power is dangerous and evil; it’s simply unsuitable for Australian conditions. And of course even if we went down that path, it would be many years — perhaps decades — before we could build enough plants to close down the coal-fired stations. We can’t afford the delay — climate change again is a real and urgent problem. We need action now! A carbon price, that’s the ticket.
Meanwhile, keep those freighters moving. Of course most of them are carrying coal, which we have now realised is definitely dangerous and evil. But we’ve already decided this is a debate about practicality, not ideals.
The Australian should really have a new kicker under its masthead: not “The Heart of the Nation” but “It’s All About Us!” It s preoccupation with its own self-importance has reached the level of self parody.
The case of Julie Posetti finally proves it. It started when Posetti tweeted a report of what a former writer for the paper, Asa Walquist, said at a small and closed conference. No one too much notice until Crikey ran some of the tweets and The Australian’s unusual editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell decided that Walquist’s remarks were defamatory of himself and announced that he would sue not Walquist for making them, but Posetti and Crikey for publishing them.
Actually still no one took much notice; as The Australian’s own environment editor Graham Lloyd noted rather complainingly, “the story has barely raised a ripple in the mainstream media”. So to remedy that, and incidentally to ensure that the alleged libel was spread as widely as possible, The Weekend Australian devoted an entire page to self justification.
The argument, such as it was, maintained that Mitchell had been eminently fair and reasonable about climate change, even if the paper had given the sceptics and denialists a lot of space. But the paper really, truly believed in man-made climate change and had said so, and now Mitchell wished he had sued Clive Hamilton as well.
And that, in about 40,000 not very well chosen words, was the news. The Australian. Think. Again.
And as an unenthusiastic outpost of the sport in the wrong hemisphere and the wrong time zone we never had any real chance of hosting the 2022 World Cup, and should never have been in the bidding.
But since we apparently had a lazy $45 million to spend on the caper, wouldn’t it have been simpler to cut out the middlemen and just sling the 22 voting delegates a couple of million each? Sure, we still would have lost, but at least we would have had enough left over for a decent piss-up.
Ah, Mungo. Stirring still, as cagey as ever.
The focus on energy supplies will sharpen remarkably once the blackouts start, perhaps as early as mid-2011. That piffle about ALP conferences and reverse Lib double twist and bend over wedging of Federal ALP on the subject of nuclear energy will evaporate once the electorate – not the few dozens who make up the ALP’s membership, but the actual electorate – let their politicians know that they are responsible for provision of basic services, including power. There simply won’t be alternatives which offer safety and reliability, at anywhere near the cost of nuclear power. Job done.
[There is still the intractable problem of disposing of the nuclear waste or at least of safeguarding it;]
This in an Australian context is a trivially easy problem to manage. Australia’s total nuclear waste burden, assuming 100% of stationary power came from nuclear generators and our entire private light motor vehicle fleet was on the grid tomorrow would be about 35 tonnes per year — a tiny fraction of the volume of Co2 that we have no technical means of storing and which hangs about in the atmospheric flux for as long as silicate weathering takes — (i.e. about 50-100,000 years). In practice that will be stored on site while the plant is operational (about 60 years) and assuming that during that time window we develop fast spectrum reactors this once used nuclear fuel will again be used, further degrading it. Then it will be put into longterm storage in some remote place for the 3oo-500 years when there is a marginal hazard to humans. Here in Australia, we have such places. Of course, during this 300-500 year timeframe, our descendants may discover an even better way of dealing with it.
[as the quantities increase and maverick states and terrorist groups proliferate, the chances of theft or misadventure become greater and graver]
How many terrorist groups or maverick states are there in Australia, Mungo? The broader point of course is that radioactive hazmat from nuclear plants is not remotely easy to fabricate into weapons — it would be far easier, cheaper (and more low profile) to extract uranium from seawater or rivers and do the same job, assuming one had the expertise. The objective change in risk is zero. In fact it might be less since demand for MOX fuels would be at the expense of the pool of weaponised Pu.
[And while the design of modern plants is a huge improvement on Chernobyl and Three Mile Island …]
A massive understatement — rather like comparing modern aircraft with the Kitty Hawk, or a contemporary passenger sedan witha Trabi.
[there are still very few people who would choose to live next door to one — or indeed, anywhere within rocket range. ]
That’s just silly rhetoric. People live near airports and petrochemical plants and these are far more risky.
Yep – better to live near an airport or a petrochemical plant where on decommissioning, they don’t have to be monitored for thousands of years for emissions of radionuclides.
Better to live near the above sites than near “the 450 uranium projects in Western Australia currently being reported to the global financial markets” where Premier, climate sceptic, megalomaniac and hazardous waste shill, Colin Barnett’s running amok:
http://www.abnnewswire.net/press/en/61048/
[And of course even if we went down {the nuclear} path, it would be many years — perhaps decades — before we could build enough plants to close down the coal-fired stations. We can’t afford the delay.]
Again, this is simply not so, as a quick look at China will show. They will be adding about 20GW of capacity between now and 2020. There is no technical or cost reason for supposing that we could not do something similar, particularly if we used existing brownfields sites — where an EIS would be simpler — such as existing coal or sewerage treatment plants. Replacing Hazelwood would immediately improve the amenity of Morwell and the surrounding districts. And if we stick to one or two well proven designs, mass manufacture the components, have them all checked for compliance in one go while doing the environmental approvals, the delay should be minimal.
What is lacking is political will.
[So Realpolitik suggests that the nuclear debate will end, again, not with a bang but a phut.]
This is certainly possible, but it has nothing to do with whether nuclear power ought to be rejected.
[Australia is happy, indeed eager, to sell its enormous deposits of uranium for other countries to use. ]
Just so. It’s a legitimate thing to do, apparently, and to date Gillard declines to explore the implications of the reality she endorses.
[We need action now! A carbon price, that’s the ticket.]
I agree, but … unless there are technologies with a low enough carbon footprint that can meet the standards we demand of our existing dispatchable technologies, all this can achieve is a higher price on power and possibly, up to the level at which demand is elastic, a depression of demand. At the moment, the least implausible renewable technologies (wind and solar thermal with storage) that might be deployed on the timeline we need (i.e the next decade) would only be viable at a price on carbon about seven times the price advocated as the interim price by the Greens. At the moment, given that the Greens’ proposal is controversial, this would not be any more readily accepted than nuclear, and the principal objectors (the right) would hate this more than nuclear power.
Significantly, neither of these technologies has the potential to supplant any signicant amount of coal fired power at any price that would fit within a budget that would be politically saleable. One would need massive amounts of redundancy and massive storage in order to ensure system reliability and the debt service on this would put an even larger price on Co2 than implied above. And of course capacity constraints far larger than those attaching to nuclear power would immediately present themselves since the concrete, steel and requirement for cable would be far larger. You point to the time to build nuclear plants, but each wind farm or solar thermal plant which would of necessity be a first of a kind plant built on a greenfields site would be enormous.
I can’t but wonder why you would put this case.
Go Nuclear young man!