From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Opposition party support for nuclear energy appears to have collapsed renewable investment.

Clean Energy Council launches national ad campaign against “nuclear distraction”

Giles Parkinson Mar 22, 2024

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The CEC says there are two key messages from the campaign: “Nuclear is a distraction”, and “Don’t risk Australia’s Future.”

The campaign is already appearing in more than 2,200 locations in city building lifts and lobbies in Sydney and Melbourne, and on animated digital billboards in airport lounges at Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne Airport. 

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The campaign by the CEC follows an intense push by the federal Coalition, amplified and often widely supported in mainstream media, to bring a halt to the rollout of large scale renewables, and keep coal fired power stations open until some sort of nuclear option becomes available.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that the nuclear push is designed to bring the rollout of renewables to a halt – not just temporarily, but for good. 

The Coalition’s chief advisors admit that nuclear, which apart from its extremely high costs, is inflexible and has poor ramping rates, to respond in changes of demand or supply, is effectively not comparable with a grid supplied larger by wind and solar, which needs fast and flexible capacity to support it.

In effect, because the grid is morphing from a system built around centralised “baseload” principles to a more distributed system based around wind, solar and flexibility, the two technologies – nuclear and renewables – are effectively incompatible.

…Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/clean-energy-council-launches-national-ad-campaign-against-nuclear-distraction/

I agree with the Clean Energy Council that the Australian opposition plan to build nuclear on decommissioned coal sites is not the best solution – though given 25+ years of failure to make renewables useful, their advocacy for more green energy is absurd.

Nuclear might be affordable in the long run, but financing high up-front costs is not something financially stretched energy consumers could easily absorb. Building low cost brown coal plants or refurbishing old plants would be a much better strategy for lowering end user energy prices.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of nuclear, and there are plenty of remote sites in Australia where nuclear would be the cheaper option. But ignoring our vast remaining reserves of brown coal does not make economic sense.

Brown coal does not have value as a saleable commodity, because unlike black coal, brown coal cannot be transported economically. Brown coal has lower energy density than black coal, and when stored for transport has a distressing tendency to spontaneously combust. Brown coal’s only value comes from digging it up then immediately shovelling it into an adjacent coal power plant.

Having said this, it is hilarious that an economically challenged opposition plan for dispatchable zero carbon nuclear energy is enough to crash actual investment in green energy.