Some big news (at least for me). I’ve just been appointed as a member of the Climate Change Authority. I was pleasantly surprised by this – although I’m a strong supporter of the carbon price policy, I’ve been highly critical of the current government in other respects.

As regards the blog, the main implication is that I’m going to avoid posting anything that might constrain me as a member of the Authority (for example, views on policy issues) and also avoid polemical statements about climate issues. I’ll still post relevant information on the topic, and welcome debate in the comments section, but I won’t take an active part myself.

That’s the headline on my Crikey article on the revised Proposed Basin Plan for the Murray Darling Basin. It’s over the fold.

Read More »

Despite Fukushima and the failure of the US “nuclear renaissance”, nuclear power still has plenty of fans in Australia. A question which opponents routinely ask is “where are the nuclear power plants going to go?”.

That’s obviously a difficult question, but there’s a subtly different, and even nastier, question behind it, namely “How should we decide where a nuclear power plant should go”. There are obviously all kinds of issues to be resolved. For example, should it be on the coast, and therefore potentially vulnerable to a tsunami? Should it be near or far from population centres?

If we in Australia made a decision to go for nuclear power, then decided to answer all these questions from scratch, it would take years, maybe a decade or more before we even picked a site (look how long we took over the much easier question of a site for the national capital). And, until we answered the siting question, any estimate of the costs of nuclear power would be a stab in the dark anyway. A plant located in the centre of the Nullarbor would be about as safe as you could get, but hopelessly uneconomic.

So, the obvious answer is; Look at what other developed countries have done when faced with the same problem. But it turns out there is a small difficulty. The answer, according to the US, Britain and every other developed country I’ve looked at, is “put your plant next to an existing one, so there won’t be any more trouble than you already have”.

Of course, it’s logically impossible that they always worked that way. But, as far as I can tell, the last time a new site was picked for a nuclear power plant in a developed country was in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, let alone Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even supposing that experience were relevant, it’s lost in the mists of time – the decisionmakers involved are long since gone, and any records they left are probably buried in the archives.*

So, unless we can solve a problem that every other developed country in the world has chosen to duck for 30-odd years, we will never even get to the starting gate with nuclear power.

*Update It turns out to be fairly easy to retrieve material from the National Archives, for example, on the proposal, made in the late 60s and abandoned in the early 70s, to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay. Thanks to commenter Andrew for picking me up on this.

*Further update Contrary to the claim in the post, a Finnish company has announced a proposed site for a new reactor, though it is not clear that any proper approval process has been undertaken. I doubt that Finnish administrative processes will translate easily to Australia, but it looks like a counterexample to my claim.

Since lots of readers are interested, or, perhaps, a few are very interested, I thought I would mention that the US Department of Energy is beginning an effort to promote the development of modular nuclear reactors in the US. The plan is to choose two designs, with the object of having them in production by 2022. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that one of them will be the Westinghouse SMR, a cut down version of the Westinghouse AP1000 which is the only serious contender remaining as far as conventional reactors are concerned. That leaves one spot for another contender, call it SMRX.

I therefore need to revisit my previous conclusion on SMRs, namely, that none of them except the Westinghouse have any prospect of being in operation before 2020. First, I think it’s pretty clear that the designs that don’t make the DOE cut are finished – in a generally dire funding environment, who is going to back a horse that has already placed third or worse. Second, the DOE 2022 date is an aspirational target that is virtually certain to be missed, at least by SMRX. But, if things go well, 2025 is a possibility. So, by then we might have one conventional design and two SMRs in production on a serious scale.

That’s the title of my latest piece for The National Interest. The first three paras are below.

In the wake of the meltdown last year at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the viability of nuclear power has been called into question yet again. The Japanese government has closed down all but one of the country’s nuclear plants (though there are plans to start reopening them), and Germany has abandoned a previous decision to keep existing nuclear plants operating. Concern about nuclear power has also increased in the United States, with most opinion polls now showing a majority opposed to further expansion of the industry.

On the other hand, some commentators have been struck by the fact that the disaster did not cause any direct loss of life and that estimates of the adverse health effects of the radioactive releases are very modest. A striking example is English writer George Monbiot. An opponent of nuclear power before Fukushima, Monbiot has switched to the view that nuclear power should be supported as a response to climate change.

Unfortunately, this debate has taken place without much attention to the economics of electricity production. The critical question is whether nuclear power can be a cost-effective alternative as compared to renewables, investments in energy efficiency or even such long shots as carbon capture and storage. A look at the economic cost of the Fukushima meltdown suggests that the path to a nuclear future is steeply uphill.

I’m too busy to referee another fight over nuclear power today, so I’m delaying opening comments here until tomorrow. The TNI post is open to comments there, so that will give everyone a chance to get started straight away.

The news that both the Opposition and the Greens are to oppose the reduction in company tax proposed by the government (to be financed by the Minerals Resource Rent Tax) gives the Gillard government a golden political opportunity, if they are competent enough to take it. All they need to do is put the bill up once and, when it is rejected, announce that they will come back again next year. Meanwhile, they can bank the proceeds which will go a long way towards meeting their (ill-advised) commitment to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13. Then, next year they can do a deal with the Greens to make a cut for small business only. That will leave Abbott promising both to reverse the small business cut, and to impose a new levy on big business to pay for his parental leave scheme. This seems to me to work pretty well for both Labor and the Greens, and it gives Abbott the outcome he has chosen, so maybe it’s a win all round.

Meanwhile, and perhaps more significantly, some news on EU cabon prices, which have been the subject of numerous beatups to the effect that a low price will create budget problems for the government. The EU recognises that the low prices means they can make bigger cuts in emissions at low cost. A proposal to do that was vetoed by Poland at a recent ministerial meeting. But a similar proposal is going forward and will be the subject of qualified majority voting in the EU Parliament, probably in June. The most ambitious versions will require emissions cuts of 80-95 per cent by 2050, with milestones along the way.

One of the issues in the debate over CSG and fracking is the timeframe over which the global warming potential of methane (in the form of leakage from both conventional and unconventional natural gas projects) should be assessed. The leading critics of fracking, Robert Howarth and his team at Cornell have used a 20-year time-frame. Since methane has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but has a greater warming potential over that time, the use of a 20-year time frame makes methane seem more serious than if a timeframe of 100 years or longer is used.

The original justification put forward by Howarth for the 20 year timeframe was that this was the likely life of a project. This is nonsensical, and (to me at least) undermines Howarth’s credibility. The world is still warming as a result of coal burned in power stations that closed decades ago, and no one suggests that we should not worry about this.

Howarth has now adopted a new justification that, on the surface at least, is more plausible. Most attention in the debate over climate change has been based on the assumption of a gradual increase in mean global temperatures, equilibrating to a new higher level some decades after concentrations of greenhouse gases have stabilized, with effects that will then play out for centuries. Since stabilization is unlikely to be achieved before 2050, that implies that we should be looking at timeframes of 100 years or even longer.

However, there is also a risk that we will pass some tipping point, after which the entire process will be irreversible. We don’t know much about tipping points, but, as Howarth observes, “”the world runs a high risk of catastrophic climate change in the period of 15 to 35 years from now.””

That’s true, but unfortunately for Howarth and for us, it doesn’t help his case.
Read More »