I thought I should respond to the latest suggestions from Department of Industry and others that nuclear power is an option worth considering for Australia. While I’m at it, I’ll add some updates on global developments.
* The most striking feature of recent Australian discussion, beginning with the Australian Energy Technology Assessment from 2011 is the claim that “small modular reactors” represent an appealing option for Australia. AETA listed these as being one of the cheapest options for 2020. with an estimated levelised cost of between $75 and $125/MWh. That’s both ambitious and remarkably precise for a technology that does not yet exist, even in prototype form. Leaving aside niche technologies like the Russian proposal to adapt nuclear sub reactors as floating platforms, the only serious contender in this field is the US, where the Department of Energy has provided grants for the development of two pilot plants. The target date (almost certainly over-optimistic) for these to begin operation is 2022. To get any idea of economic feasibility, it would be necessary both to undertake commercial deployment (in the US, obviously) and to to accumulate some years of operating experience. To get this done by 2030, or even 2035 would be an ambitious goal, to put it mildly. Again assuming everything goes well, Australia might be in a position to undertake deployment of SMRs by, say, 2040. But obviously, if we are going to reduce emissions on anything like the scale we need (80 per cent by 2050), we need to phase out most fossil fuel electricity well before that. Obviously, all these points apply in spades to proposals that exist only as designs, with no active proposals even for prototype development, such as the Integral Fusion Reactor. As I’ve argued before, to the extent that nuclear power makes any contribution to reducing CO2 emissions on a relevant time scale, it will have to be with current technology, most likely the AP1000.
* Talking of the AP1000, the builders four plants under construction at two sites in the US have just announced another 6 months delay, pushing the operations date out to 2017 or 2018 (release from FoE, but links to originals)
* Most interesting of all are projections released by the International Atomic Energy Agency last year for the period to 2050. Currently nuclear power accounts for around 11 per cent of global electricity. The IAEA “low’ projection has that falling to 10 per cent by 2030 and 5 per cent by 2050. The “high” projection, which includes steady growth in both North America and Western Europe as well as spectacular growth in Asia, has the share remaining roughly stable. So, even on the most optimistic projections of the world’s leading nuclear agency, nuclear power won’t play any significant role in decarbonising the electricity sector, let alone the economy as a whole.
I’ve come to the conclusion that nuclear power advocates, like climate delusionists (virtually all climate delusionists are nuclear fans, though not vice versa) are essentially immune to empirical evidence. So, I’d prefer no comments from our usual advocates (hermit, Will B etc) unless they have something genuinely new to say.
John Quiggin 
What is the role, if any, of the Thorium/molten NaCl reactor in this debate?
Very interesting to watch. Highly dependent on somebody investing in the idea. Not commercially ready any time soon given current lack of interest.
I guess if you want to go zero carbon emissions, it’s really nuclear vs. renewables rather than nuclear vs. gas, coal etc., and I assume this is implicit in the post. I know you’ve argued it before, but I think other countries are more important than Aus for this sort of thing, and I’m yet to see any big cities going to only or at least mainly renewables (e.g., Beijing), especially those in places where you don’t have lots of space . So the pie-in-the-sky arguments about nuclear don’t seem a whole lot worse than pie-in-the-sky arguments about some types of renewables to me. So it might be bad vs. bad compared to bad. vs good.
That being said, I don’t see why we (and indeed most countries) can’t substantially reduce carbon usage quite cheaply within the near future without worrying about grandious things. Things like electric cars seem just around the corner (GMs very recent concept car looked pretty good to me — who wouldn’t buy a slightly more expensive car that used no fuel?) and should pretty much kill a lot of carbon used in cars, and I don’t really see why a lot of other transport and energy couldn’t use solar (etc.) as it follows the path of all other technology (i.e., getting much cheaper).
Given this, to me a lot of the more important arguments about carbon usage are how much these other technologies can reduce carbon quickly rather than getting to zero, and, apart from what I think are the obvious (e.g., electric cars) I’d like some real situations which show how low you can get things easily (i.e., examples where it really has been done). If you can get rid of 70% in the near future, for example, and just use 30% gas, that obviously leaves a lot of time to think about how to get rid of the other 30%, and you needn’t really worry as much about nuclear. vs others.
The moment has passed now, but I thought there was one location that was ideal for nuclear power.
At its maximum planned extent, the Olympic Dam project in South Australia was set to consume more power than the city of Adelaide. They had set aside $2b just for diesel to operate the machinery that would scrape away the surface layers to create the mine pits. Given that uranium was one of the key products of that project, a nuclear reactor would have made sense to create the energy necessary to run such a huge undertaking.
The owners would have incentives to both be efficient and avoid accidents due to the fact that any mistake would shut down the project, and that efficiencies would boost their bottom line. They would have incentives to train people (the lack of an Australian workforce trained in nuclear technologies is a factor often overlooked). It would have been a great opportunity for a proof of concept, boosted by the commitment and credibility that comes from “eating your own dog food”.
But, the Olympic Dam project is not going ahead. This means, as confirmed by the Switkowski review of 2005 or so, that the positives and negatives of nuclear power are pretty much where they were in 1970 when the Gorton government first floated the idea. When someone like Josh Frydenberg MP ‘calls for a debate’ on this issue, they are pretty much calling for a rehash of those proposals and a discount of projections that unit costs of solar and wind power are dropping fast.
@conrad
I see it that it’s grid vs renewables and the grid has allies eg nuclear hydro coal gas etc. I include hydro as they seem to spend their time creating power during high $ periods and pumping the water back up the hill during off peak periods.
Renewables are shaking the energy tree.
i would have thought it was a slam dunk after this week.
data courtesy of ronald brak at monday message board indicate the south australian energy network, with a significant proportion of renewable energy sources in the mix, coped so well in unprecedented extreme conditions that they were in a position to export power.
some consequences of nuclear power:-
1/ more interference in gov’t decision-making by transnational energy corporations & investors -versus- no avenue for transnational energy corporations to pressure our gov’t.
2/ an unprecedented security state for all parts of the cycle -versus- a state that administers things not people.
3/ centralistion of the power supply in the hands of for-profit transnational corporations, so big & so crucial to the economy & so protected by treaty, they can stand over our gov’t even against our interests -versus- energy farms & self-service smart metered electricity for all australians collected from where people work & live, farms & backyards and distributed and billed for by coordinating offices. and don’t tell me its to expensive -v- nuclear power.
they hate renewables because renewables lock transnational energy corporations & their corporate investors out of the future.
they love nuclear because it locks us the people into dependence on corporations to supply – at cost to us & dividend to their investors – what the we the people could get for ourselves for next to nothing for ever.
alfred venison
I doubt we’ll ever be at a point where change seems so urgently necessary that we tackle the problem full on. And by full on, I mean the way you do in a war.
And just for the fun of it, maybe we should start referring to coal reactors, gas reactors and oil reactors.
Douglas Clifford asks
It depends on what debate you are talking about. If it is the issue of research, development and pilot/demonstration funding, then it would be criminally negligent to (globally) not put significant resources into it along with other Generation IV nuclear technologies. In general such funding for all energy technologies is seriously deficient – by a factor of three according to the IEA. One would think that given all the multiple issues with future energy supply, that R&D funding would be going up, but it isn’t.
If it is discussion of deployable energy technology scenarios, then the rudimentary state of MSR development precludes realistic inclusion of MSRs – at this time.
Unfortunately, some (but certainly not all) thorium advocates conflate the two issues and wrap it in a crude and often very badly informed narrative demonizing uranium. They are fooling themselves if they believe they are going to gain political advantage from this.
There is one and only one Western, passively safe reactor design with advanced fuel recycling available right now for construction of demonstration units and that is the General Electric – Hitachi PRISM. All it’s fundamental technologies are already proved at engineering scale at Argonne National Lab in the US in the largest nuclear US R&D program of it’s era. Nothing comparable has occurred with any molten salt reactors. As for the rest of the world, the Russians are saying that the demonstration BN-1400 fast reactor, now approved for construction, will be design to full commercial and Generation IV standards, but there seems little info available, at least in English.
The Chinese are the only players in serious MSR development at this time and have published some very provisional timelines. Full blown LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) are well into the 2030s. There is a lot of very serious engineering involved. Not the least being the on-line recycling of extremely radioactive molten salt. This is going to be challenging and as far as I can see the Chinese are being realistic in their projections. Throwing more money at it may help, but we don’t really know yet. What we do know is that however long it takes, it is extremely likely that there will still be plenty of carbon emissions to abate.
The other tack the Chinese are taking is a kind of hybrid with TRISO fuel particles or pebbles in molten salt. This will be less challenging and the projected time lines are shorter. TRISO fuel is uranium covered in layers of special grade carbon and silicon carbide. Among other attributes it withstands extreme temperature that might occur in a serious accident, thereby offering higher levels of safety. TRISO fuel will be available to the MSR researchers from the high temperature gas cooled project under way in China. This molten salt/pebble technology may prove to be very useful in it’s own right.
It is important not to conflate any of this with small modular reactors which are (mostly) evolutionary designs based on light water reactor technology used in applications ranging from submarines to power stations for decades. Though at least one improvement claimed by NuScale (the recipient of one of the US DOE grants) is very significant. They now say their design is indefinitely passively safe in event of complete loss of electrical power. Fukushima style accident not possible. This is a first for light water reactors.
@alfred venison
Exactly, Alfred Venison, exactly. It’s all about control by private interests of things and services we cannot do without.
We shouldn’t even discuss the proposition of creating more nuclear waste until we have a proven safe way of dealing with the nuclear waste we already have.
@alfred venison
I wonder why they would export power when it was more expensive in SA: http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Data/Price-and-Demand/Average-Price-Tables
Seems a bit silly to export it when they could have got a higher price in SA.
We have a giant fusion reactor positioned safely at just under 150,000,000 km from earth. This fusion reactor is free, self-regulating and has about 5 billion years worth of fuel left.
Given that the primary issues of nuclear power are not technical, but extreme over-reactions to delusional ideas about risk – there is no real discussion to be had about it. Since the public started fearing nuclear power because of scaremongering, it is impossible to build or move forward on plants. But the reasons have nothing to do with engineering, they are legal and regulatory. My brother did surveys for the EPA of radiation levels in the USA. The highest levels, by far, were in hospitals because of medical use. If the wee nuclear plants, they would be shut down.
You see discussions about how “one hot particle” in your body will cause cancer and kill you. This is just not true. The human body under normal conditions experiences 4400 disintegrations per second. (4400 Bq). Our bodies are very good at DNA repair. DNA is not that stable – that’s why it’s useful to us. If DNA was rock-solid stable, it wouldn’t be able to split, unwind, transcribe, copy, etc..
A coal fired plant will cause roughly 90 deaths per year for its life span (typically 40 years). If we take the worst credible estimate for Chernobyl of 4,000 deaths, that’s pretty close to the casualties from a single coal plant. In other words, we could have a Chernobyl every year and not hit the casualties from coal. That’s leaving aside that only one cancer has been shown to have excess diagnosis from Chernobyl, and that is thyroid cancer at 43 diagnoses above baseline. Note that a diagnosis of thyroid cancer is not death. Thyroid cancer is one of the most treatable cancers. Why? Because most thyroid cancer takes up iodine. So radioiodine is used to treat it.
Compare 40 some proven cancers from I-131 to the death toll from evacuation. At Chernobyl, the data is fuzzy. The USSR broke up, things went severely downhill. But estimates are in the tens of thousands dead from evacuation. At Fukushima we have a careful count. It was 1645 last I checked. That is more people dying from the stress of evacuation than from the tsunami itself. And nobody has died from Fukushima. At most a handful of people might get cancer.
The linear no threshold model of cancer induction is not based on evidence, which most people are quite unaware of. Quite a few physicians don’t know this either. LNT goes against what we know, and against what we have learned from half a century of radiation treatment of cancer. http://radiology.rsna.org/content/251/1/13.full.
LNT is also inconsistent with our data on atomic bomb survivors (a very well studied cohort). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22171960.
Most people think that if they get dosed with radiation, they can’t have children because their children will have mutations. This is flat wrong. It comes from a 1955 estimate by JBS Haldane. He did the best he could at the time to come up with a safe figure. But he had next to no data, and estimated a mutation doubling dose of 0.05 gray. We now know the real doubling dose. It is at least 2 Gray, and probably 4 Gray or higher. In other words to get mutations in germline requires mortal doses. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9576899.
People also think that “the ocean is pure” and any release of radioactivity into it is a terrible disaster. The ocean has 4.2 billion tons of uranium dissolved in it. What that means is that if you do the math, Tokyo Bay alone has enough U-235 in it to make 24 Hiroshima sized bombs. There’s enough U-235 to make at least one atomic bomb for every 15 people on earth.
The math on wind and solar is worse than nuclear. We may find improvements to the energy cost of manufacturing solar panels. But today, if panels are installed and maintained optimally, it takes 2-5 years (latitude dependent) to get the energy back that went into them. If they are not installed optimally, (which is most of home installs) it can take 5-15 years to get the energy back out. What that means is that the choice to go solar forces massive consumption of fossil fuel.
Circling back to thorium, India his moving on a thorium cycle system because India has lots of thorium. The USA had a thorium reactor going at Oak Ridge for years. Ironically, one of the reasons Nixon cancelled it is that it didn’t produce plutonium for weapons. Short-sighted, but that’s politics. Far-sighted politicians are pretty darn rare.
It isn’t actually true that modular reactors aren’t available now. South Africa has them. http://www.pbmr.com/index2.asp
There is a big problem with modular reactors. (And with reactor design in general.)
The problem is the design-academioc-industrial-government complex. Each group of engineers/companies/academics in every nation wants to design their own new pet project. These government funded projects employ engineers, and they can make the reputations of academics involved with them. They will also generate lots of patents in the process, which will protect the investment of the companies. Those big companies employ high priced lobbyists to push for nuclear power construction – pushing for their own proprietary designs. I’m sure an academic can see how that motivation circuit works, both on the commercial side and the academic side.
As far as the government funds are concerned it’s all about winning the construction bid. Those construction bids are far more lucrative for big, complicated LWRs of various designs. The construction of plants becomes primary, because the construction firms have zip to do with running the end product. (They can, but most of the big subcontractors don’t do anything except build.) So it’s the lucrative construction contracts that become a primary goal whenever nuclear power is involved. And lets not forget the law firms who stand to make beaucoup bucks representing the power plant and the inevitable plaintiffs wanting to stop it.
Reality is, Australia could buy modular reactors now from South Africa, and start installing them in a few years. That Australia won’t do that has nothing to do with availability, and everything to do with politics, lobbying, and feeding at the public trough.
What happens to the climate if you apply the same ’empirical’ standard to renewables that you want to apply to nuclear? Global renewables investment has fallen for two years running. Its emissions abatement track record is woefully inadequate.
On the other hand, the only country to have demonstrated decarbonisation of the required magnitude remains nuclear France. The weight of empirical evidence for climate effectiveness thereby remains with nuclear.
To assume no modern economy could achieve what France did in two decades from the 1970’s, which was to build a fleet of nuclear power stations to almost eliminate their dependence on coal is curious. France saw an existential threat from the ‘oil shock’ of the early 70’s, decided they were at the mercy of imported energy, and went to war on fossil fuels. Unlike every other “war on [insert enemy]” France actually won that one!
Currently, after spending many hundreds of billions of Euro on solar and wind, Germany still produces over 450g of CO2/KWh and it’s been rising for the past two years. Meanwhile, France has been producing 80g for each kilowatt hour for decades.
The clear message is that diffuse energy forms (solar/wind) are very expensive to harness, are very intermittent, and need some form of base load or back up to keep a grid system balanced to the load which far exceeds the output from these sources. For example, Australia’s much lauded “one million rooftop solar PV” installations only produces about 1% of Australia’s total electricity output. How many billions of dollars did that cost? (And how utterly inefficient, even compared with a purpose built solar PV farm.)
As for small modular nuclear reactors, they exist already. What powers the world’s fleet of nuclear warships? Hint: it ain’t hamsters! They’ve been around a long time, but improving the designs is not like inventing something completely new, like say…oh, for example mass storage of electricity to make renewable energy actually economic. We’ve had lead acid batteries since the late 19th century, and the improvements on that in terms of energy density/cost have been marginal to say the least.
I’d put my money on improved, self-contained, non-refueled small modular reactors being in use way before any storage system ever gets out of a lab.
Spain boasted a large wind component in its output last year and that it’s emissions actually went down. Germany’s did not, despite all that expensive wind. So why the difference?
Simple, Spain has not turned off its nuclear reactors, and Germany’s are rising because they’re burning more coal to replace the lost clean nuclear electricity.
It’s a hard world, and energy is the mother of all problems, but without nuclear, we will continue on the road to hell, even if it’s paved with pretty green intentions all the way.
@Chrispydog France certainly managed a rapid expansion of Generation II reactors in the 1970s, and has had fairly good performance from them. It’s just about impossible to work out the economics of their construction in retrospect (a big government program, probably with cross-subsidies from the military program). But whatever France did then, the secret has been lost – Superphenix was a disaster and the EPR plant now being built at Flamanville is years late, and billions over budget.
As for your silly snark about submarines, you obviously didn’t read the post where I mentioned that idea before dismissing it – the economics are hopeless, except where you absolutely need something compact and mobile (eg a submarine).
On storage, are you really so ignorant as to suppose that the lead-acid battery is state of the art. Again, it’s optimised for a particular use and subject to particular constraints.
Finally, given that California has just mandated over 1GW of storage, I’ll be happy to take your bet
@Mark Duffett
It’s silly to cherrypick stats like this. Solar PV installations are predicted to rise to 50GW this year. Not nearly enough, but (even allowing for lower availability) much more than we are going to see from nuclear any time soon, even disregarding closures. Wind is in a minor downturn, but still likely to be around 40GW IIRC. Both of these numbers are up from approximately zero 10 years ago
I wonder if SMRs could influence the design of gigawatt reactors the way the latest desktop computers are ‘all in one’ like a laptop with the processor built into the monitor. That means majority factory prefabrication of reactors could greatly speed build times. I notice that Finland having experienced delays and cost overruns with a French reactor has now ordered their next reactor from Russia. What some see as dithering over SMR licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission could mean Russia and China grab the market.
It’s hard to say with or without renewable energy targets/obligations/portfolio standards around the world whether wind and solar will continue recent build rates. Tas Hydro say they will not build the 600 MW King Island wind farm absent the RET. Nonetheless when cheap nukes do become available they will need to complement an already existing stock of intermittent generation. SMRs are said to have better output variability as modules can be offlined.
A slight overall decline in coal burning has been noted (maybe not last week, wait for the stats) but there will have to be a reliable replacement for the big coal baseload plants such as the Vic Latrobe Valley and NSW Hunter Valley. Maybe we can cut the need for baseload somewhat but as the limbo dancer asked ‘how low can you go?’. I think Australia needs at least 20 GW of low carbon price stable and reliable generation that can cover a week of rain or a continent wide high pressure system. Hamsters on treadmills?
@Andrew Elder
The OD expansion is a golden opportunity to use SMRs and thereby ‘break the ice’ on commercial nuclear power in Australia. The original plan was to build a gas pipe to Roxby Downs and run a 250 MW air cooled combined cycle plant. Another 400 MW or so would be drawn from the SA grid but they can’t spare it. In fact other states are grumbling SA lacks reliability..see yesterday’s SMH article. A reverse osmosis desalination plant was to be built at Whyalla and fresh water pumped 320 km to the mine. All of it now mothballed.
It was to be SA’s biggest ever project. Holden close in 2017 and the air warfare destroyer contract finishes in 2018. Then what?
@Hermit
Both the SMH and AFR articles re energy use and role of solar within the heat wave weren’t as nuanced as the following: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/solar-23763
The big question for nuclear (and as per the coal-fired Loy Yang A) is what happens when it’s too hot and sufficient cool water is not available for use within the steam cycle? Particularly one centred in the middle of the SA outback.
Economics of nuclear as discussed have never approached paper estimates; forgetaboutit… Concentrated solar with storage is here now, approaching generation costs of coal given unaccounted externalities.
@John Quiggin California can ‘mandate’ whatever it wishes, it just can’t mandate the laws of physics comply with them. Unlike pumped hydro, no battery storage system will scale to grid size. There’s not enough lithium on the planet to store more than a few days of US demand. The constraints in battery technology are not an economic issue, they are chemistry and physics limits.
“Are you really so ignorant” (can I can use your own polite language back?) not to understand there’s no such thing as 1GW of storage? Sure, they can build storage for 1GWhr or 1GW day, but one is 24 times bigger than the other. Therein lies the problem with using meaningless terms like “1GW of storage”. An hour, a day a week? Horrendously expensive to do for any amount of time and with about 25% energy loss it’s looking like good money after bad to appease the renewables lobby.
The efficiency of lead acid is not much improved by other technologies, it’s not orders of magnitude, and to make it economically feasible on scale, batteries need to be several orders of magnitude more efficient. It’s an energy density to cost problem, that has not been much improved for a very, very long time.
So what France did is a “lost secret”? I understand it might be difficult to get the data to cost it, but let’s just note that Germany’s retail electricity prices are the second highest in Europe (after Denmark’s) and France’s the lowest.
As for the economics of nuclear vessels, maybe you should do some reading on what it costs to keep liquid fuel pumped into conventional ships.
@Hermit Many experts in energy would agree with you, we need a mix of nuclear/wind/solar and some gas or sequestered coal fired power. (Forget concentrating solar, it’s LCOE is always at the high end).
What economists don’t seem to realise is that it’s not numbers, it’s physics. If we can build 10% of our electricity generation from wind/solar, then it does not follow that 10 times more makes us independent of fossil fuels.
Even allowing for the horrendous scale of the input costs, the vast areas of land, the long transmission connections, there is still the unreliability. And no, we are nowhere near being able to store more than a fraction of that energy at eye-watering cost.
And then of course…hamsters for backup!
@Megan
megan…We have solved the nuclear waste problem in the USA. It is called Yucca mountain. Completely built and codified in law as the place we( the US ) is to place spent nuclear fuel. All that is needed is to drive the stuff through the gate. of course Obama and Reid cut the funding for the NRC to sign off on it( they have been building it for 30 years yet they require a study to know if it is safe or not). The fed also have a place called WIPP which takes transuranic waste and stores it in a salt mine. One could be built just like down the road for other kinds of waste. Political challenges not engineer challeges
PG&E built a power storage facility in California about 20 years ago. It’s a reservoir in the mountains that they pump water up into. When they need the power, they run it back down through turbines. That facility was built to take advantage of off-hours generation capacity, and to provide surge capacity.
It is 13% efficient. For 100 KWHr use to pump water up, 13 KWHr of energy comes back to the grid.
They looked at batteries. But batteries have serious issues.
1. Large scale battery farms are a very different kettle of fish than small scale. People have talked about lithium batteries here for large scale power storage. But, as Tesla is finding out, it doesn’t scale smoothly, and batteries that are merely the size to power an automobile are capable of going up in a fire. Lithium is highly reactive – that’s why its power density is high. At scales we are talking about, just dumping heat from the system would be a serious issue.
2. Similarly, lead-acid batteries at large scale have corrosion and maintenance problems. The cost is huge.
3. I have done the calculations for an engineering project to determine uptime of a system. That’s dependent on meant time to failure (MTTF) of each component. For any components linked together, it is the multiplicative product of the uptime fraction over some time period. If you are going to spend a billion dollars on something, you better be sure it’s going to work and be reliable.
Put all those factors together, and that’s why PG&E went with a 13% efficient system.
@Brian That’s what I’ve seen elsewhere, which confirms that battery storage on anything like grid scale is a revolution away (as is fusion!).
I do not live in Australia, If I did I would support anything that did not use water. Take a look at salt cooled systems. yes molten salt reactors look good. But why not salt cooled gas plants or solar plants. Why not take advantage of the high tides in the northwest part of the continent? Hydro is the cheapest by far although it costs a bunch up front but it keeps giving and giving. Austria has a population the size of the state of Texas and no nuclear regulatory equivalent of the US or Europe. so much of the regulations would have to be imported or copied from other counties. But other countries with small population do nuclear. countries such as Finland or south Africa.
The average wholesale price of electricity in Australia is around 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour. At today’s exchange rate that’s less than a third of the minimum price Britain’s Hinkely C nuclear plant will be paid once it start operating. When the sun is shining in Australia point of use solar outcompetes electricity from the grid from any source and the cheapest new utility scale generating capacity in Australia is wind. My state’s largest windfarm, Snowtown II, will be completed this year and at a 5% discount rate will provide electricity for under 5 cents a kilowatt-hour. (The Australian Reserve Bank cash rate is currently 2.5%.) It is not economically possible for nuclear power to compete in this environment without the use of magic. And as Japan showed us not so long ago, nuclear power can suffer rare but extremely expensive accidents which may make the cost of insuring nuclear power in Australia higher per kilowatt-hour produced than the current wholesale price. So, barring the use of magic, Australia will not build any nuclear power plants.
#23 Brent,
Just for starters, if you had to pick the part of the continent most distant from the load centres, that would be the northwest. High voltage transmission lines are expensive. As I recall, at least $1 million per GW per kilometre. Perhaps more – somebody may have some accurate figures. Those costs will be inflated by construction costs in remote areas – construction costs always are. There is little prospect of cost reduction as they are just towers and wires with no learning curve.
Put generation technology that only has moderate capacity factor at the end of those transmission lines and the cost problem escalates. If the capacity factor is 50%, then to transmit an average 1 GW you will probably need close to 2 GW transmission capacity to deal with the peaks. Transmission costs double.
If estimates for the Severn Barrage are anything to go by, tidal barrages are very expensive. And they will be even more expensive in remote areas. Add all this up and the result would be eye wateringly expensive electricity. It’s not going to happen.
So often when the topic of nuclear power comes up, such schemes are cited as alternates. They almost never are. Time to tackle energy in a hard headed and informed manner.
There is also a problem of the merit of sticking vast industrial installations on what is basically pristine coastline. What has happened to traditional conservation values? All too readily thrown under the bus, as long as some project can be stamped “renewable”. Avail ourselves of the benefits of the very high energy density of nuclear power and such issues can be largely avoided. Tiny footprint.
@Ronald Brak That wind has a capacity factor of around 30%, while nuclear is typically 90 plus. It’s not that some wind in a grid isn’t feasible, it’s that beyond a certain amount, its cost effectiveness diminishes rapidly as its spikes in output cannot be used by the demand, and the long periods of much less than nameplate capacity must be made up by something, usually either coal/gas or of course nuclear.
The other thing that is most often not mentioned in such numbers is that the typical modern reactor will have a life of 60 years, and both solar PV and wind are typically given 25yrs.
Scale, reliability and longevity are very important factors in designing a grid if you’d like your electricity supply to be available 24/7 in all weather conditions.
The real savings will be in proper optimizing of the energy use, not so much in creating new sources.
Many people are taking their time and effort to learn about free energy systems. The drive to be independent of corporate powers is driving inovations of people to do something about it. Many internet communities are tinkering with HHO optimizing of their cars, using exces power of alternator for producing HHO and increasing MPG of their cars.
Many are driving purely on water which requiers aditional tinkering with car electronics. Look for Joe Cell. Many are completely converting to water powered cars using Stanley Meyer resonant HHO cell and injectors.
Many are investigating the Searl effect generators, Ottis Carr’s, Victor Shauberger’s inventions, Ed Leedskalnin’s Coral Castle machinery, Keshe machines, Vietnamese water-electric stoves and much more.
Johann Grander water is alredy making sales in treating water against pollutants and bacteria growth saving many bucks in treatmant facilities. A monk is selling contraptions without using any power that are reppeling moisture from walls in basements. Some new catholic churches are being built with Freemasons knowledge using resonances to control energy of underground water.
All these are based on what is sometimes called zero point energy, using energy of the sun. ZPE iz coming, slowly but it will be here prety soon. Seeing milions of amateurs are working on it, give some 20 years and it will be here.
@chrispydog
That wind Ronald is refering to has a cf of 43%.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/snowtown-project-shows-wind-costs-below-80mwh-17727
The average cf of all Australian wind is 33%.
In any case, comparing the cf of wind and nuclear is irrelevant. The final costs are what is relevant.
#27 Jordan,
If you want to put your faith in pseudo science and scams, go ahead. But could you please leave it out of serious discussion of the climate/energy problem.
It is noteworthy that this stuff also rears it’s head when the subject of nuclear power comes up.
Interestingly our former dear leader in Qld – Bjelke Petersen – was at one stage promoting this twaddle about water power cars.
@chrispydog
I have a fairly detailed post up there with several citation links to papers that is still awaiting moderation. It discusses the false understandings of radiation dangers primarily.
Crispydog, does the fact that wind is an intermittent source of electricity magically make nuclear power (plus insurance) cost less than 5.6 cents per kilowatt-hour? No? Well then that’s not going to make nuclear power competitive in Australia. You’ve got to beat that 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour barrier, including insurance, before you can build a nuclear power plant here. Do you have the magical power to do that? It doesn’t look like it because if you had the ability you could have made a heap of money in the UK.
@John Quiggin
It’s far more egregious cherrypicking to talk about constructed capacity without reference to capacity factor (~0.25-0.3 for solar and wind, not matched to demand; 0.8 for nuclear).
The recent investment data is what it is. It signifies a trend that’s barely even in the right direction, let alone one adequate for the decarbonisation task. Particularly in the case of wind, the growth of the last 10 years has taken up much of the low-hanging best site fruit.
In the end, the only stat the atmosphere cares about is how much emissions have reduced. On that score, it’s emphatically nuclear with the runs on the board. If we’re truly facing a climate emergency, it’s unacceptable that the ‘secret’ of effective nuclear construction is unrecoverable (or only privy to the Chinese).
@Ronald Brak
We should keep checking sites like WattClarity to see how much the existing stage one Snowtown wind farm helped out in last week’s heat wave. We do seem to be getting more winds in heatwaves; such conditions were once called ‘brickfielders’. I was emailed a phone photo of Wattle Point SA wind farm not moving a muscle in a hot spell a couple of years ago. We are still paying a premium price for wind if you include the 3-4c per kwh LGC subsidy for a service that lets us down when most needed.
According to this article during the last heat wave energy providers redirected power to high paying customers creating blackouts for domestic users.
Hermit, are you suggesting that nuclear power can meet peak demand during heatwaves? HAHAHAHA! Oh dear oh dear… Let me explain Hermit, you see, nuclear power plants cost a huge amount of money to build, but their fuel costs very little. As a result, if you only run a nuclear plant half the time, you more or less double its cost. This means that nuclear power, which is currently far too expensive to meet baseload demand, becomes even more far too expensive if someone tried to use it to meet peak demand. You know what they do instead in some countries with nuclear power? They build pumped storage because its cheaper than having idled nuclear plants sitting around. Nuclear power can only meet peak demand with huge amounts of energy storage.
You could have stopeed there, John.
Of course belief in the technology fairy is far more widespread than belief in the confidence fairy.
Regarding emissions reductions, I’m of a mind with Jorgen Randers (in 2052). Our political classes will do nothing material until the problems are completely undeniable, say around 2035. At which time we’ll be hit with all four of the costs of dealing with the damage and illness from ongoing extreme weather, the costs of beefing up the built environment to cope with the weather and sea level rise, the costs of replacing formerly ‘free’ ecosystem services, and the costs of trying to get rid of the root cause in a great hurry.
Look up EDGCM and run the models. See how long it takes to modify climate.
@Ronald Brak
I’ve seen figures of 5-15% for nuclear fuel as a proportion of average running cost as opposed to 50% fuel cost for combined cycle gas. I don’t think reducing the output of a nuke saves much so the average idled cost is about the same as full power. The problem is the ramp rate. The French seem to manage load following with ~80% nukes I presume they use hydro for a lot peak power. Their Alps being somewhat grander than ours. Australian hydro is already close to max but as mentioned in another thread it was a big helper last week. The French don’t use so much gas for home heating so their peak must be winter.
A good question is what do we do for peaking plant circa 2030 when we’ve flogged our best gas reserves. ZCA suggest burning hay bales delivered by electric trains. Google Avedore 2 power station Denmark. Could be why their electricity is even dearer than Germany. Maybe SMRs or mini-nukes can help by quickly adding or subtracting increments say of 100 MW. Note eastern Australia needed 34,000 MW a few days ago even with some big users taking a voluntary power cut.
@Brian Likewise for a good analysis of the costs of Finnish nuclear versus German solar…the post is in moderation due to the link, but just do a search on Breakthrough Institute/german solar/Finnish nuclear.
By the way, despite the cost overruns, the Finnish electricity will be four times cheaper.
Reality really does bat last.
So Hermit, then you understand that nuclear cannot provide peak power and that it basically provides the same portion of electricity generated during peak periods as wind does?
thank you Hal9000 at #9
this tangential is for you!
have a happy new year.
a.v.
“It’s far more egregious cherrypicking to talk about constructed capacity without reference to capacity factor (~0.25-0.3 for solar and wind, not matched to demand; 0.8 for nuclear).”
Which is why I did refer to it. I can’t be bothered dealing with dogmatists who don’t even take the trouble to read what I wrote. Nothing more from you, Mark Doggett, or from Chrispydog, please.
@Ronald Brak
Don’t accept that at all. Nuclear is likely to perform near its rated capacity any time. Wind power could go as low as 5% of its nominal output. I seem to recall the summer capacity credit for SA windpower was just 3.8% in 2011. Reference SASDO2011. Admittedly the tall new 3 MW turbines should turn over in light winds.
The cheapest way to deal with heat wave peak demand may be to give big users a special deal to cut back. By ‘cheap’ I mean so that pensioners can run an air conditioner until mid evening if needed. Strangely I agree with ZCA to assume inadequate gas in the long run. They say too much carbon and indeed some peaking plant (essentially bolted down jet engines) is nearly as CO2 intensive as supercritical coal. However I also say we’ll squander most of our cheap gas in the next 20 years. I think we can assume there will be no Gwh scale energy storage breakthrough.
@John Quiggin
I think most people here (and elsewhere) seem to worry a lot about the price of commissioning new reactors. But to me a bigger worry is the price of _decommissioning_ them, estimates of which go up and up all the time (this is a problem for France), and so you should add this also. This is seriously problematic because if they are privately owned and had been forced to stick down a bond, then the bond ends up not being enough if they go broke (I believe there is a reactor which this happened to in the US), so that becomes a “people’s cost”. With governments, if your country happens to become poorer, then you can end up with a situation where the only power you have is a reactor that should be closed because it is dangerous and you can’t afford to close it and build something new. So you end up with dangerous reactors. It’s hard to estimate the cost of this, but it’s also a serious potential cost.
Just in case anyone is confused about the cost of solar power I”ll point out that in Australia nuclear power, or any grid supplied source of electricity, would have to produce energy at below zero cents per kilowatt-hour to compete with rootop solar. To avoid further confusion I will point out that this does not mean Australia will get rid of grid generators and make do with just rooftop solar, but it does mean that Australians will continue to install solar on their homes and businesses and the electricity it produces will push down the wholesale cost of electricity in the daytime and make nuclear power even less economical than it is currently.
High retail electricity prices and low solar feed in tariffs also mean that Australians with solar will start installing home energy storage as doing so will save them money. This is likely to happen quite quickly as the electric car industry has really pushed down the cost of high performance, high reliability batteries and they may now cost less than $150 per kilowatt-hour of storage. Unless retail electricity prices drop or feed in tariffs rise, this home and business energy storage will reduce the evening peak and lower wholesale electricity prices further. It also means we may see a shift away from fixed charges as a significant portion of retail electricity bills to prevent people with home or business energy storage buying a small generator and dropping off the grid.
Hermit, generally speaking a one 1 gigawatt nuclear plant will run at its full capacity and generate one gigwatt of electricity all the time. Operators do not reduce the output unless they have to because their costs stay almost the same while losing revenue from selling less eletricity. So outside of scheduled down periods and unscheduled interuptions, nuclear power is constant.
Wind power is variable because the wind is variable. A wind turbine will produce electricity about 80% of the time. While it is possible for morning and evening winds to match periods of peak demand, generally speaking the output of wind turbines will vary but if you average it over time you will see it provides about the same portion of the electricity it produces during peak periods as nuclear.
If you don’t understand I have an anology with flipping coins I can tell you.
Ronald,
There is a good agument for installing battery storage for charging at iff peak rates yo power the house during high peak periods. This will particularly attractive where smart meters have been installed.
The UK has contracted the installation of 15 million smart meters for both electric and gas users. The contract amount suggests that these meters”