Essay by Eric Worrall
Why not just build nuclear and ditch the renewables? Or better still, stick to cheap coal?
Why Dutton needs coal not renewables or nuclear
Yesterday, Opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to embrace nuclear power to secure a clean, cost-effective, consistent electricity supply.
Dutton is right to be concerned that the government’s policy of replacing coal-fired plants with renewables will end in a disastrous shortage of power.
Dutton’s proposal is to replace coal-fired plants with small modular reactors that are on the drawing board in the US, UK, and elsewhere. By locating the new nuclear reactors in existing coal-fired plants, they can tap into existing transmission lines.
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Dutton’s plan has other problems. He envisages using small modular reactors as a backup for a system dominated by intermittent wind and solar power but nuclear power, like coal, with its high capital costs and low operating costs, is not well suited to that ancillary role.
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Read more: https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/why-dutton-needs-coal-not-renewables-or-nuclear/
What can I say? Can anyone imagine former Aussie Prime Minister and climate skeptic Tony Abbott proposing such a daft scheme? Is this really the Aussie opposition party’s idea of a vote winning energy policy?
Can you imagine someone this weak having to deal with a real crisis? If someone invaded Australia, would he need to conduct an opinion poll before deciding whether to send soldiers to repel the invaders?
If Dutton is so scared of standing up to the greens in his own party ranks, that he makes a fool of himself, inserting a superfluous role for renewables in a nuclear energy policy scenario, who will he be prepared to stand up to?
Grow a pair Peter Dutton – nobody is going to vote for a weak leader who tries to please everyone. Much as I detest the Albanese government, even proposing such a ridiculous policy is proof your party is not ready or fit to govern.
Update (EW): Dutton’s full speech
The refusal of most Greens to embrace nuclear power shows that even they don’t believe that there is a “climate emergency”. If they believed their own propaganda, they would be willing to do anything to solve the “climate crisis”.
I think that is incorrect.
Many or most do believe, but they also believe that 90% or more of the human infestation must be eliminated and that can only occur if you don’t have cheap available energy.
8 billion people only exist because of cheap reliable energy, kick that out as well as fertilizer and most of the people will “go away”.
This is what they believe.
The Green movement morphed out of the Ban the Bomb movement ,that is why they will not embrace Nuclear .
I say good on him for raising this as if the Greens really believe that CO2 is a threat that will cook the world they must see that power shortages and blackouts are hurting Australia.
Some sanity has to happen some time soon otherwise all Australia,s heavy industry will move to Asia where most electricity is generated using Australian coal ,which means that emissions actually increase because the coal has to be shipped to Asia and the goods have to be shipped back .
But of course this is not about common sense and never has been
“Some sanity has to happen some time soon otherwise all Australia’s heavy industry will move to Asia where most electricity is generated using Australian coal ,which means that emissions actually increase because the coal has to be shipped to Asia and the goods have to be shipped back.”
Emission will certainly increase due to the shipping of the coal, and the shipping of the goods back to Aiustralia. However, emissions will decrease due to the lower wages paid to the workers overseas, because lower wages equates to fewer ‘fossil-fuel-dependent products’ that the workers are able to buy.
What the net effect would be, would require a very detailed and complex analytical study.
all aus heavy industry will move?
huh
it already DID apart from a handful of smelters(and the UK buyer of whyalla wants that green as well)
no cars no whitegoods and bugger all else of worth left already
I could work out the effect on the back of an envelope.
Have you no idea how economics work Vincent ?
Once Asia has acquired the majority of the worlds heavy industry they wont be giving iron and steel away or any of the things that are manufactured from all material that requires large quantities of fossil fuel .
Asian countries will become very rich and their wages and salaries will rise above all the stupid countries going hard out to de carbonize.
Once any commodity that all countries need is produced by monopolies prices will become inflated .
That is a well known fact that does not require a detailed complex study .
The art of politics is just that, an art.
You cannot govern in opposition, so, this appears to be a “foot in the door” approach that can be subject to modification later without scaring the horses.
I did write to AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator)about this very proposition and they responded with stating the no nuclear policy as it currently exists.
The softly softly approach may just get Dutton into power.
As a somewhat disinterested observer (on the opposite side of the planet), I would agree with Keith and disagree with Eric. You don’t achieve success on a contentious political issue by espousing an uncompromising position.
It’s a small and prudent compromise to pretend that SMRs would be best used for backup to ruinables. Once the SMRs are on line and the ruinables prove to be as useless as we know they are, there will be opportunities to shift more and more toward baseload nuclear and gas peak load, allowing aging bird shredders and slaver panels to be phased out.
Morrison tried to please everybody by never really making a solid decision.
Only call he made was to ban tennis players.
You sit on a fence too long, you end up with splinters in your bum. Make a decision.
I believe it was Pres. Johnson who said that the only things you find in the middle of the road are dead skunks and yellow lines.
Ther is nothing to be gained except expense by adding renewables to nuclear power.
Anyone with a basic grasp of economics knows that once you spend a lot of capital on a low fuel cost plant, be it wind, solar or nuclear, the most cost effective way to run it is ‘always on’.
The only effective cabalnec for renewable intermittency is low capital cost plant with relatively high fuel cost, or hydro.
One can only assume that he made the statement for political reasons. Nuclera has to fight the green blob by stealth
Wind and Solar aren’t Low Cost generators, Wind and Solar are High Cost Subsidy Farms that happen to have free fuel … ultra low density fuel that requires vast acres of land to be covered to produce any meaningful energy.
And unfortunately Solar cannot be run “Always On” the sun doesn’t shine on the panel 24/7 only 4-6/5-7 less in winter and less at higher latitudes. However when it is producing power at its maximum potential (10am til 2pm on any given day) it is just on. No way to tune the power produced to meet demand.
Often Overproduction needs to be “Dumped” to neighboring grids causing the producing utility to have to PAY the neighboring utility to take the power. Only then is the power free to the receiving utility.
Too unfortunately Wind cannot run “Always On” 24/7/365 only when the wind blows greater than 7-9mph and less than 55mph. Below 7-9mph and the blades cannot turn and so generation stops. Conversely at wind speeds above 50-55mph an automatic breaking system kicks in AND generation again stops (to maintain the health of the turbine)
Wind and Solar cannot produce energy to meet demand load so demand is forced to curtail to meet generation.
Gas, Fuel Oil, Coal (FF) and Nuclear and Hydro need to be used to generate to meet peak demand and maintain grid stability.
Solar plus Battery might work if…
You have sufficient battery to meet nightly load requirements as well as backup for several days uninterrupted supply in emergencies.
(Keep in mind that EVs will also be demanding the same battery materials that those above do)
You have sufficient Dedicated Solar generation to fully recharge those nighttime batteries in the 4 hours solar works at maximum capacity
You have access to reliable backup that is capable of producing 100% of your daily load requirements without dependence on fair weather sunshine or goldilocks winds.
OR your prepared to go without energy for extended periods and Unable to recharge your EV while still paying Solar and Wind subsidies even when they fail to work.
Green is shorthand for one sandwich short of a picnic
“”Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet
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I stand alone in the howling, blistering Australian desert, and my Munch-like scream is lost in a shriek of wind. “”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet
From the same sickening article. My addition in bold..
Most scientists agree we now live five minutes or less to midnight, which is the collapse of our society. It is not only that world temperatures are rising faster than modelling suggested and even expected impacts are more severe, called the “new abnormal” by climate scientist Michael Mann, but that the promises of action by national leaders are not being fulfilled, and democratic systems are
incapable of reform tonot being replaced by global sustainable totalitarian regimes quick enough to encompass urgent needs.Author — David Shearman is emeritus professor of
medicine[insert your appropriate descriptor here ] University of Adelaide, South AustraliaClimate Grief is real.
Like Arachnid fear (Aracnophobia) is real though tends to be Phobic in nature (unless you’re a fly)
Climate Grief similarly comes from Climate Apocalypse fear so is really Climophobia
Putting Climophobes in charge of writing energy policy is the same as putting Acrophobes in charge of Highrise design and construction.
Good building would never leave the ground.
There may be a political scandal brewing in the Australian Labor government that will take it down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuuS_0LsTbo
the renewables will become an election issue soon than we think
Care to add some details? I actually listened to that YouTube clip and came away with very little.
ASIC I’ve learned is the Australian Securities & Investments Commission. I gather that PM Albanese has some kind of relationship with a company under investigation by ASIC for some reason.
Is there any realistic chance that the Labour government will be impacted? Being in the US where the regime gets away with multi-million dollar bribes from foreign government agents, this all sounds rather quaint.
That’s what I’ve consistently said – the only fuel I prefer to nuclear is coal.
Actually, gas and coal.
he pretty much said what I did wayback when they first started the climate clamour
IF they really were worried about co2 then the ONLY solution is nuke
and aus wont go nuke
mention the N word ONCE and watch abc and the greens etc all go apeshit crazy within hours across all media
Why is Australia is so anti nuke? Concern for the danger? Concern about the cost? Or just plain crazy lefty/woke stupidity? It seems to me, as an American, that Australia is the most anti nuke nation on the planet and don’t know why.
Yes this…
Strange that it developed that way. Never having visited Australia, my image of it is of hard working down to Earth common sense people- not the sort of elites we find in NYC, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Paris. How did they get poisoned like this? The education system?
You must note that Australia (Tasmania specifically) is generally regarded as the first country in the world to establish a “Greens” political party. It dates back to the early 1970’s with the United Tasmania Party / Group.
The current leader of the Australian Greens is Adam Bandt. This piece of work physically picks up and removes the Australian national flag from behind him when he gives televised press conferences. That should tell you enough. He also describes nuclear powered submarines as “floating Chernobyls” –
Australian politicians seem to think they are big players in the world (probably because the country regularly produces a good cricket team). They just don’t seem to understand that what a country of 25.5m people does in a world of 8.1 billion doesn’t mean very much.
If I were a leader of China, I’d be looking enviously at how big Australia is, loaded with resources, and with so few people. So, in that regard, it does mean a lot for peace in the region.
Yes, this why they purchased Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party of Canada and very likely the Biden family as well.
Oz is like us here in Canada
People here in Calgary who grew up in a prairie town of less than 1000 people (like I did) think Calgary is huge, because they haven’t travelled (as I have) so I know that massive Australia/Canada has less people than dots on the map like Seoul, Tokyo, etc etc
What we do is literally meaningless but yet I know people who think Justin Trudeau is “making a difference” even tho math and 2 seconds of logical thought puts the lie to such ridiculous pretensions.
Australia and New Zealand have no nuclear power plants but Australia does have one nuclear facility producing medical radioisotopes .
This all goes back to ban the bomb when atmospheric atom bomb testing was being undertaken by the French above Mururoa in the Pacific Ocean.
New Zealands now departed Prime Minister Jacinda said that she had a “nuclear moment ” on being elected with the support of the Green party in 2017.
She proceeded to pass laws banning all new exploration and development of oil and gas fields off the New Zealand coast.
I would think that New Zealand takes the prize for as the most anti NUKE nation on the planet with Australia a close second .
Everyone knows the answer…the answer is clear…..Thorium Liquid Salts Cooled Reactors will provide clean safe abundant electricity for Oz. Just do it!
And the number of those TLSCRs currently producing electrical power in a commercial business setting is . . .
Sorry, please help me out with the answer here.
Somewhere between Zero and Zilchillion
Energy Future Unveiled! THORIUM Molten Salt Reactors
Wow! What a sales pitch!
Unfortunately, it fails on some very basic thermodynamic and engineering considerations.
Among the most egregious, at around the 3m50s mark into the video, there is an artist sketch of a 1 GW capacity TMSR power plant that shows the cooling of the steam generation power cycle to be performed by air-cooled heat exchangers of comparatively exceedingly-small size.
If we assume a Rankine steam-based thermodynamic cycle as employed by today’s nuclear power plants, the best thermodynamic efficiency we can expect is about 40% (see https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Nuclear_power_plant# ), meaning that about 0.6 GW of heat will have to be dumped into the air around the TMSR power plant.
This just ain’t gonna happen with the plant infrastructure as show in the sales video. Such a dream plant will have to be located adjacent to a river or ocean just to provide sufficient liquid cooling for the power generation cycle. OOPS.
Let alone the fact that the TMSR power plant being pitched in the video has never been built and demonstrated at even unit scale, independent of the method of cooling employed.
The only things that do exist are websites that sell components that might one day be useful for TMSRs. Kinda like Steorn and their ORBO overunity device that hey designed a testing unit you could buy which would prove the Orbo to be overunity
I guess I need to also mention the flat-out lie told in the video at the 10m16s mark, where the pitch man says that there are still eight of the nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl power plant “still running today”.
“The plant’s remaining three reactors were eventually shut down, the last in 2000. The nuclear fuel has been removed from all of them, and the turbines and other equipment that generated power have mostly been removed.”
— https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/climate/chernobyl-nuclear-waste-power-outage.html#
OK- I’m not promoting nuclear- just entertaining the discussions. I haven’t made up my mind on the subject. Because I don’t think there is a climate emergency, I’m quite happy with fossil fuels- and in my forestry work- we use lots of fossil fuels. But I think long term it seems that nuclear of some sort will be necessary- eventually- as fossil fuels run low and especially for nations that have to import their fossil fuels- they might prefer the security of producing their own energy- without covering their nation with hideous wind and solar projects.
Joseph,
Thank you for your clarification . . . I admit to getting concerned about where you were coming from on this subject based on the video you posted.
Re: you terms “necessary–eventually–”, I agree. But I choose not to worry if “eventually” is 500 or more years into the future, given the exponential rate of progress of science and technology, and I don’t think we’ll run out of fossil fuels within the next 500 years given currently-known in-the-ground resources and the same rate of scientific and technology progress in improving efficiency of use of fossil fuels.
I am confident that if humanity really becomes pressed to meet increasing demands of energy beyond that FF can provide over the next few centuries, that current nuclear (fission) power plant technology can meet the need, albeit the US and the rest of the world will need to greatly accelerate the associated permitting process & construction timeline and improve the storage (hopefully, eventual disposal) of dangerous nuclear waste from such additional power plants.
You run into a problem expending more energy in finding and producing fossil fuels well before you actually “run out” of them. We already search for oil offshore and in the Arctic. The EROI situation is getting worse by the decade to the point where it isn’t even published for the last decade.
Nuclear fuels are the next feasible option for base loads with present technologies, once we are done trying to match afternoon air conditioning loads with hard-to-manage wind and solar generation (with so-inclined investors)…..
Uhhhhhh . . .
“Based on U.S. coal production in 2021, of about 0.577 billion short tons, the recoverable coal reserves would last about 435 years.”
— https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-left.php#
Can’t say same for other countries, since it depends greatly on how they increase their use of coal-fueled power plants in the future and on what their recoverable coal reserves really are.
I only posted it because I was responding to antigtiff who mentioned it- so, knowing next to nothing about nuclear, looked it up and that site came up first- so it seemed like it might stimulate a discussion. I’m well aware that France has a well developed nuclear power industry which has served them very well- while Germany has or will shut theirs down- while Japan is now reconsidering it.
From the video: First demonstration reactor “planned” for 2025 and a commercial plant in 2028.
Let’s check in again in 24 months to see how far the goalposts have moved. My prediction is that come 2025, the demonstration plant will be hoped to be ready by 2027, if they have not already gone bankrupt, but I’m a cynical old bastard.
They propose to deploy 15GW capacity per year “shortly after” the first commercial plant in 2028. Assuming 99.5% capacity factor that would be about 131 terawatt-hours capacity added per year, building 15 facilities per year.
For perspective, world electricity production in 2019 was 617 exajoules or about 171,400 terawatt-hours.
So Copenhagen Atomics hopes to be able to start transitioning 0.076% of world electricity production per year starting in about 6 years. If the world “needs” to transition about 83% of its electricity production off fossil fuels, that would take Copenhagen Atomics about 1,086 years to stand up 16,290 facilities.
To reach NetZero just on electricity at production levels from 4 years ago, without any conversion to EVs and heat pumps, there would need to be 54 production lines pumping out SMRs starting in 2030 through 2050. But electricity is about 20% of total energy use. So we actually need 270 production lines each pumping out 15 facilities per year for twenty years—a total of 81,000 facilities by 2050. Assuming no growth in energy use for the next 27 years.
Again for a sense of scale, there are 38,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide. NetZero will require more than twice as many 1GW Copenhagen Atomics facilities than there are McDonalds restaurants in the world.
I won’t bother delving any deeper than to point out that an ordinary steel logistics building of the sort shown in the presentation is not by any means secure against a terrorist attack intended to act as a radiological dirty bomb.
Who actually imagines this to be practical?
Yes, and 20 years sooner than fusion.
Gas must be the transition agent to a nuclear future, it is the only sensible route – ramping nuclear up and down to shadow support intermittent renewables, is not a competent engineering solution
From the Alan Moran piece quoted in the above article:
“Dutton’s proposal is to replace coal-fired plants with small modular reactors that are on the drawing board in the US, UK, and elsewhere.”
What a display of stupidity by Dutton. Most people with an IQ above room temperature know what “on the drawing board” translates to in reality . . . it means that particular thing (in this case, SMRs) have never been built or demonstrated at a practical scale!
Sure, let’s plan to replace currently working technology (coal-fired power plants) with something that is no better right now than pie-in-the-sky . . . yeah, that’s the ticket!
Also according this terrific 2021 WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach,
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/21/the-latest-co2-fantasy/
considering the goal of reducing CO2 emissions of just the United States by 2030 to half of what they were in 2005 via increased use of nuclear power plants only:
“. . . means we need to find sites, do the feasibility studies, get the licenses and the permits, excavate, manufacture, install, test, and commission two 2.25 gigawatt nuclear power plants EVERY WEEK UNTIL 2030, STARTING THIS WEEK.”
And that conclusion is based on commercial-scale nuclear power plant technology that currently exists . . . feel free to do the math to adjust that daily production rate upward based on the number of “on the drawing board” SMRs it will take to produce 4.5 gigawatts of power.
Not arguing with you
But it’s the only viable path, everything else is time wasting
The phrase “only viable path” has the implication that there is a real need to do something different than continuing the path humanity has been on for, oh let’s say, the last 200 years.
And the proof of that would be . . .?
Hint: based on paleoclimatology, Earth has experienced multiple periods of high variability in both CO2 and “average global temperature”, often with these two parameters being anti-correlated and obviously without any impact from human emissions of CO2.
Well if he is saying wind and solar do not work alone that is progress. But nukes are not flexible so a lot of expensive juice would be wasted while the wind blew and sun shone. They are ill suited to make intermittency reliable.
I would love to see the personal finances of these people. Either they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth or their credit score is so low the only credit card they can get is backed by somebody else. They clearly have no idea how to get value for their money and as such shouldn’t have any control over government money. Unfortunately this is far too often true of our leaders.
Yes, build a couple of nuclear plants… to augment coal and gas.
Run the nukes and coal at their most efficient constant level, and use the gas for juggling the peak.
Remove ANY AND ALL that are not capable of delivering to the grid ON DEMAND.
The cost of maintaining the grid frequency and supply drops to basically zero.