Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s estimate that it would cost $387 billion to replace existing coal-fired power stations with small modular reactors (SMRs) is unlikely to quieten the advocates of “having a debate” over nuclear.
Indeed The Australian’s editorialist fired straight back, comparing this estimate with a suggested cost of $1.5 trillion to decarbonise the economy by 2050. The fact that the second estimate includes replacement, not just of coal-fired power stations but of all uses of gas and oil (electricity, transport, heating and industry), seems to have escaped the writer.
Nuclear industry has gone nowhere in the past 20 years, with old plants closing as fast as new ones opened. But nuclear advocates’ hopes remain undimmed. Central to their faith is the example of the French nuclear build in the 1970s and ’80s. From a standing start, France built 56 power stations in 15 years, most of which still operate today.
But nuclear advocates have drawn the wrong lesson from the French experience. The crucial factor was not the merits of nuclear technology, but the strength of the French state and the determination of Prime Minister Pierre Messmer, embodied in the “Messmer plan”.
What we need today is not a nuclear renaissance but an Australian Messmer plan for solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind.
The Messmer plan had its origins in the immediate aftermath of the OPEC oil shock of October 1973. Less than six months later, on March 6, 1974, Messmer announced that France would go “all electric, all nuclear” to free itself from dependence on fuel imports.
The speed with which the plan was implemented seems unbelievable now. There was no debate in Parliament and scientific critics were brushed aside. By November 1974, the first concrete was being poured at three power stations. There was no time for environmental impact statements, community consultation or economic analysis. The project was undertaken entirely within the public sector, with access to low-cost finance and unpriced resources.
The Messmer plan eventually ran out of steam. Escalating costs of power plant construction and a decline in the price of oil meant that the “all electric” part of the plan never happened. But at least in electricity, France remains a standout case of a rapid energy transition driven by government action.
The critical point is that the success of the Messmer plan didn’t depend in any way on the fact that the chosen technology was nuclear power. Even with the power of the French state to override obstacles, nuclear plants still took an average of six years to build. By contrast, once the lengthy permitting phase is over, a wind turbine project can be completed in six or seven months. Under favourable conditions, solar PV can be installed even faster.
An Australian Messmer plan would override all the obstacles that prevent a rapid transition to carbon-free energy. The complexities of the national electricity market and its pricing schemes would be swept away. Nimby objections to the appearance of wind turbines and claims about undetectable health effects would be ignored. Transmission lines would be built where and when they were needed, with no need to consult landowners.
The original Messmer plan failed to electrify transport, but that would be much easier today. Importing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles would be banned, and existing vehicles would be subjected to increasingly stringent requirements. Industry would similarly be pushed to electrify as fast as possible.
Obviously nothing like this is going to happen in the Australia of 2023. We have environmental impact assessments and community consultation for good reasons, and that isn’t going to change. Concerns about public debt still limit the scope of public investment. And since the departure of Kevin Rudd (whose announcement of the NBN was almost as abrupt as that of the Messmer plan), there is no-one on the national political scene with anything like the drive of Messmer.
Still, it is important to understand that all these processes come at a cost. Every day the world delays decarbonisation, the climate gets hotter and resulting catastrophes get worse. When the now-inevitable catastrophes of flood and fire return this summer or next, we should consider whether the France of the 1970s has something to teach us about energy transitions.
What do you think of Peter Dutton’s nuclear power proposal? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
The Coalition should be declared a Terrorist Organization…………….
……..their ongoing efforts to deny science, mathematics and logic represent a “Clear and present danger” (as the Yankees would say) to the Australian polity.
Now if we only had a Labor Government, something might get done……………..
“The Peter Dutton-inspired waffle about replacing coal-fired power with nuclear energy deflects serious conversations about decarbonisation.”
Which, I submit, is the whole point of said waffle. Dutton and his owners know the real score with regard to nuclear power. They know it’s a non-starter. However, every week’s delay in decarbonisation equates to millions of extra dollars in the coffers of the fossil fuel companies and their parasitic associates.
The good news, though, is that we only have to decarbonise once. When we’ve done that – when we can meet all of our energy needs through renewables – we will be right for millions of years to come (assuming we are around anything like that long). Dutton’s dragging the chain might delay the process, but we will get there eventually, despite his best efforts.
“when we can meet all of our energy needs through renewables……”
Is this factual, or is there an elephant in the room. Let me explain. I’ve searched for an answer to a question that’s been on my mind for a very long time.
It’s obvious that you can’t use the power from one solar panel to make another solar panel(I’ll stick to solar panels here without including wind turbine for a minute) because of the low voltage it produces, but can that notion be scaled up to say, a solar array of 50,000 panels? Currently solar panels have a large fossil fuel input during their manufacture, so what happens when those same fossil fuels have been made redundant? Could the power from those 50,000 panels be used to fire the industry required to smelt the aluminium frames, to make the glass, the plastic backing (made largely from oil) and make the silicon wafers? Don’t forget those panels are probably helping to keep the lights on in a nearby town or city. It seems to me that a great deal of power would have to be diverted from critical societal needs to replace those panels every 28-30 years. The same with wind turbines which have an even shorter life span.
I haven’t set out to be an anti renewable critic. Far from it. I’d love it to work and I hope it will, but this is a question on which I so far haven’t been able to find any debate. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to direct me to peer supported papers or studies on this important matter. because at the present time, we seem to be locked into at least a limited fossil fueled future.
If the relevant input is simply energy, then yes.
Nonsense. Visit the National Energy Market site and educate yourself.
There is no problem with low-voltage, the engineers can multiply it up. Nor is there a problem with the low wattage – you just invest in enough land with solar panels to power up a big city with its heavy industry. You could have (in principle) a 100% solar city. The elephant in the room is that there is no storage big enough to power the city overnight.
The even bigger elephant in the room is that by far the biggest portion of the overnight demand was artificially created because the coal-fired plants could not shut down…………………….
Most people are asleep at night and consume zero power.
Most businesses close at 5 pm and consume no power.
What do you think the “Cheap Off-Peak” price was for?
Switch HWS to daylight heating and there is bugger-all demand after the evening cooking rush.
You ACTUALLY only need a battery that would cover for about three hours of evening demand…….. and even then AFTER taking out whatever wind power is producing.
So your battery FUD is just that, FUD.
Nor does there need to be.
The western world has constructed for itself over a hundred or more years a system. As this system is now understood to be our undoing we are faced with the urgent need of replacing it. So lets just do it. Keeping in mind that ‘the power’ goes off now and again through weaknesses of varying sorts in our wonderful power system, but with no real long-term effects. The grid power to my house has gone off without warning six times so far this year. So what? In the event that we go all electric and all renewables, and should our wonderful fossil free new system sometimes show defects, then so what? I expect we’ll improve it. The desperate need to ‘keep the lights on’ at all costs is only fossil industry bs. The city office blocks lit up all night every night are because of the impossibility of turning off the coal fires when they’re not needed. How dumb. Ditto street lights, which are shown to have no bearing whatsoever on security and crime rates. How dumb. (To demonstrate the futility of it, half the light goes upwards into the night sky to block out the wonderful stars.)
Every question delays the inevitable and puts your money in the pockets of the people ripping us all off, to their delight.
In world war 2 Henry Ford stopped building cars and turned to building tanks and warplanes, something repeated in every wartime country. It was necessary to defeat the Germans, Italians and Japanese, and the cost had to be borne, regardless. In fact the faster the production and the greater the cost the better, because it brought victory closer. The threat facing everyone now is greater by far than it was in 1939. And we are losing.
Thank you for your civil reply Rodger. I’ll research that further.
Having words like “nonsense” and “educate yourself” spat at me, as in a comment above, doesn’t encourage me at all. I spent over 30 years in a psychiatric role within a State justice system and I’ve seen many self righteous people in my time. I’ve learnt to ignore them 😉
Hmmm. A genuine politely worded question, or a fossil fuel shill working as a plant to sow doubt in an audience that, in the main, would be inclined to support renewable energy?
“I’ve searched for an answer to a question that’s been on my mind for a very long time.”
I found the following link after five minutes’ search: Energy payback time and carbon footprint of commercial photovoltaic systems – ScienceDirect. If only you’d thought of Google! You would have saved yourself many years of uncertainty! The “peer supported papers or studies on this important matter” is a nice touch, though, because unless you have access through an academic source, most people have to pay to download complete peer reviewed papers, and who is going to do that? Although, if the issue concerns you so much, I’m sure you would find it a worthwhile investment.
“It’s obvious that you can’t use the power from one solar panel to make another solar panel … because of the low voltage it produces”. Well, you can. You just have to hook it up with a lot of other solar panels. Or wind farms. Or any other source of renewable energy. It is a nice misdirection, though, because ‘the elephant’ you referred to is the power output of a solar panel over its operational life, which could be thirty years or more, versus the embodied energy of manufacturing the panel. The panel’s output voltage is only one of many factors that contribute to this calculation.
“I so far haven’t been able to find any debate.” I suspect you have not been looking too hard. Try searching for ’embodied energy of solar panels’ or something similar. I think you will find quite a bit.
It is early days in our renewable energy journey, but there is intense research and development going on around the world to improve the production efficiency of renewable generation technologies. Solar and wind may be the first cabs off the rank in terms of transition, that there are plenty of other renewable energy sources that we also may be able to tap in future when we’ve worked out an efficient way to do so. Once we have tamed the immediate threat of the climate crisis by decarbonising, we will have more time to explore these opportunities. The one thing we do know for sure today is that the amount of energy available to us from the Sun and Earth’s gravity combined is many, many times greater than what we will ever need. We just need to work out ways to do so, which we are well on the way to doing.
So not so much of an elephant. A mouse, maybe. Or a gnat.
Really? So “obvious” that no evidence is necessary to support your statement?
Strangely, electricity does not know where it came from. so electricity from a coal fired power station is exactly the same as that from a windmill in your backyard
It is instructive to look at what are called learning curves and how they have applied to the costs of solar energy since the 1970’s.
Here is an example:
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
The technology has improved repeatedly so costs have reduced exponentially – with a negative line an a logarithmic graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
A similar process was observed with microprocessors that power computers. The technology has been repeatedly improved, so that the processing power of computers keeps increasing exponentially.
Solar technology will keep on improving. They are still using the same form factor as in the 1970’s – being embedded in rigid aluminium frames with glass surfaces. We have seen the first flexible solar cells being produced commercially – but they have not taken off yet.
Imagine having solar panels produced in smaller flexible cells so that they can be manufactured like a continuous sheet of PV material, rolled up like fabric, and installed as sheets being glued onto roofs or walls – configured dynamically for an inverter and storage system.
There is still a long way to go with improving the form and scale of solar PV technologies.
Solar film will replace panels soon enough. Maybe you need to get out more often, instead of worrying yourself with minding someone else’s vested interests.
Of course it is, imported deny, delay and deflect PR tactics by proposing nuclear with massive lead times, keeps the status quo and deflects from renewable sources; also includes the old ‘degrowth’ movement i.e. 99% should tighten their belts to improve the environment….
However, Burn-M*rd*ch in the FT rebuts and counters this with clear evidence of economic growth as emissions decline in
‘Data Points: Economics may take us to net zero all on its own. The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions’
“The Australian’s editorialist fired straight back, comparing this estimate with a suggested cost of $1.5 billion to decarbonise the economy by 2050. The fact that the second estimate includes replacement, not just of coal-fired power stations but of all uses of gas and oil (electricity, transport, heating and industry), seems to have escaped the writer.”
Is there a misprint here somewhere? Surely, someone at the Australian couldn’t have estimated that decarbonising the economy would cost only $1.5 billion? If they did, it suggests that they didn’t attention last week when we heard about the multi-billion dollar blowout on Snowy 2.0?
Yeah it should be $1.5 trillion. Misprint in the article.
Snowy 2.0 cost blowout AU$3B. Latest UK nuclear power plant CBO over EU$10B! And decades late.
It’s a shame state capture prevents such a clear pathway to action actually happening – if the gen pop weren’t consistently lied to we’d be on the way to somewhere..
Supporters of nuclear energy ( generally talking up small nuclear reactors) are generally speachless when asked “Are SNRs currently available commercially”. I understand that there are only two currently operating, one in China and one on a barges somewhere in the frozen wastes of Russia. There is no SNR shop where one can be bought, there are some in development but none on the shelf!
Given that nuclear electricity is very much more expensive than renewable the huge size of the current plants to achieve any thing like economic returns, economy of scales certainly suggests that SNRs , if they were available, the electricity cost would be higher than that of the huge current plants.
Correct on all points, I believe.