It’s almost like renewable energy was suppressed for years and now that we have it somehow it actually works?!? What?
Who suppressed it?
* nonsense Australian opposition talking point intended only to extend the life of fossil fuels in this country. https://reneweconomy.com.au/duttons-plan-to-nuke-australias-...
Theoretically I'm not against nuclear power. It's miles better than coal and oil, and Reactor design and safety has come a long way. France is a great example of a country who has made it work.
However. It kind of seems unnecessary at this point. Solar and wind are cheaper, and already have industries in hockey-stick growth - including Lithium which Australia is also getting better at (locally and with Australian-owned companies abroad). Australia's key strength has always[1] been digging stuff out of the ground, and we still get to do that in a renewable future.
Solar and wind also don't have black swan risks like nuclear - regardless of how much safer its become - and they're distributed, with fault tolerance / buffers built in by batteries. I assume the Libs' nuclear plan does not include building a ton of batteries to address those issues.
I feel like we've just leapfrogged Nuclear as a useful solution, similar to the way many developing countries will be able to leapfrog entire industrial revolutions once clean energy is ubiquitous.
Investing in nucalear at this point would literally be going backwards.
[1] "Dale dug a hole"
If you only read (or skim) one technical report on Australia's energy needs and potential solutions:
GenCost: cost of building Australia’s future electricity needs
Each year, CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) collaborate with industry stakeholders to update GenCost. This leading economic report estimates the cost of building new electricity generation, storage, and hydrogen production in Australia out to 2050. Large-scale nuclear technology costs included for the first time.
Renewables remain the lowest cost new build electricity technology.
It's not policy, it's relatively neutral CSIRO advice.
Six page summary: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2023-24Fi...
Nuclear came out as not available for quite some time (in Australia) and even then still the most expensive overall which caused the report to slammed as a product of anti nuclear lefty scientists by the Liberal | Murdoch crowd. (For a year prior to release it was hailed as the report that would prove doing nothing until off the shelf nuclear was a thing was the one true way).
The purpose of nuclear power in the current Australian debate is purely to stall renewables in favour of fossil fuel. That’s it.
Presumably there’s a money trail leading to certain hyper-wealthy, vocal Australians.
Beyond the political, here's some more technical reasons why Australia shouldn't pursue it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40747810
Suppression is probably the wrong term, but it's naive to believe that there isnt a counter campaign against their uptake being funded by various pure play fossil fuel providers.
I used to work for a company who was one such organisation, we had several PhDs funded through industry bodies we ultimately funded directly and through subsidiaries who had sold their soul to produce material using their "doctor" titles to demonstrate that coal was good for the environment, that wind turbines killed birds in extraordinary numbers and sent people mad, and the solar was poisoning the environment because of a lack of recycling capability. All largely false claims and often based on 30-40 year old early availability chemistry which was no longer in use. It was absolutely disgusting behaviour.
There are obvious failures from pushing renewables - Germany springing to mind, or any number of solar subsidies that proved uneconomic - and it was completely reasonable to wait for some demonstrated successes.
But let's look at some numbers Australia, 2023:, renewable 1/4 the cost of nuclear: https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/husic/media-r...
IRENA, 2022: "For the last 13 to 15 years, renewable power generation costs from solar and wind power have been falling. Between 2010 and 2022, solar and wind power became cost-competitive with fossil fuels even without financial support. The global weighted average cost of electricity from solar PV fell by 89 per cent to USD 0.049/kWh, almost one-third less than the cheapest fossil fuel globally. For onshore wind the fall was 69 per cent to USD 0.033/kWh in 2022, slightly less than half that of the cheapest fossil fuel-fired option in 2022."
Germany, suffered from early mover issues in ~2015 combined with poor winter planning, however is now reaping the benefits of cheaper generation cost to offset gas supply shortages for baseload due to European supply restrictions, 2021: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
Even the UK prime minister Boris Johnson, a conservative pundit, went on record as stating that renewables were the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to shore up the energy grid and remove dependence upon Russian oil and gas. This is a nice nod to the fact that the UK has been bulk importing Scottish renewable energy to ward against the massive price increases caused in Europe by the gas supply restriction: http://scotsman.com/news/environment/sustainable-scotland-wi...
Failing any rational risk taking due to the above illustrations, it's also critical that we reduce our greenhouse emissions. Another topic that is hotly debated when it really is straight forward. Even if renewables were to cost more, the educated policy makers would still steer toward either making them cheaper or installing them if the difference was marginal simply to ensure long term stability, maximising distributed generation and attempting to minimise the effects of a changing climate.
1) Australia's energy situation is humiliating. We've been gifted what might be the most unreasonably energy-rich land in the world and have managed to build this 2nd-rate grid that is not operating anywhere close to the efficiency we could manage. It is so bad that people would often rather go almost off-grid with solar than deal with the costs we manage to impose on ourselves for no obvious reason. We're also technophobes over here, being the only advanced economy that didn't even have the expertise to build a commercial nuclear reactor and having succeeded to an impressive extent in driving any local solar panel expertise off shore to China.
2) Germany's per-capita (and total; their population isn't shrinking) electricity generation has rolled back 50 years of progress into the modern era [0]. I want to reap the opposite of whatever benefits they are reaping, I like to look at their energy stats because it makes Australia look well managed, by comparison. Last time I checked they had the most expensive power in Europe.
3) The UK is also obviously being squeezed for energy availability [1] and appears to be worse off than Germany (!). In line with a lot of other European countries that are struggling.
The problem renewables have with this history isn't some sort of "negative sentiment campaigns". The problem appears to be that their track record is appalling and was pushed by a bunch of people who are now in the history books for woefully mismanaging the key input for modern comfort and prosperity. It looks like the future is going to be different because a rational person would choose to be involved now; but the outcomes so far are eye-wateringly bad. The image commercial renewables have is both unreasonably good and improving remarkably quickly given the circumstances we came from; fortunately capitalists are very forgiving to things that start making money.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/united-kingdom
Whilst I'd like to see us get nuclear power up and running, I also do not want to see it happen under Voldemort. I'm in his electorate, and the only reason he's in is because we have a number of conservative hicks and nut jobs.
The issue Australia has is it was illegal to build a nuclear plant for far too long, and even now I would be suspicious of what the balance of opinion is for the topic on the left flank of politics. It doesn't matter what the coalition thinks when there is that level of political risk, nuclear may well be uninvestible in Australia until Labor (and the Greens) commit to it with some level of enthusiasm. I have a vague memory of Labor removing the "No Nuclear" line from their policy documents a few years ago, but that is hardly the endorsement we need for people to start risking capital.
Things like that is why I would term our energy policy an international embarrassment. Our high-tech play is "no". Our solar tech play is "people got so sick of the grid they bought panels from China and installed them themselves". Which is better than it could be, but crikey it is not good policy on the energy regulation front. I'm still horrified that this seems to be doing well compared to the Europeans.
I find myself wondering something along the lines of: if it's 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant, that's potentially 3, possibly 4 governments. How will a single power plant project make it through, let alone e 2, 3, 4.
Additionally, at that time will we see breakthroughs in fusion technology that means we are building into old tech? Not that this point can be helped without a crystal ball, bit it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Penance for 60 years of inaction and lack of commitment to nuclear technology?
I really don't see it myself. Particularly when we look at the Gillard government which had to rely on the Greens to get legislation through and that ended up with them negotiating a carbon tax. That sort of action against the nuclear industry can completely scupper a plant. There is huge sovereign risk in these things that we've seen materialise in Ukraine/the USSR, Germany and Japan. Even to a lesser extent in the UK and US with their approval processes. With a global record like that, I really don't see how the coalition's opinion matters in Australia; they've always been lightly pro-nuclear. Labor's opinions matters, and the Greens to an uncomfortable extent for an investor.
The energy from the wind farms built over the last few years are priced of a Contracts for Difference basis i.e. if energy price is under a set price we pay the operator, if it’s over the operator pays us
The largest impact on electricity prices has been the war in Ukraine, and as electricity prices are set by the highest cost generator then domestic prices have risen (and fallen) in line with oil / gas prices
What’s clear though is the renewables are cheaper than oil and gas for electricity generation and are largely stable enough to meet demand (we also have the option of importing from France or Scandinavia for non-fossil fuel produced electricity)
In this post you've identified that the UK had given marginal pricing power of already costly energy to Ukraine (a highly corrupt country 3 borders away, poor and as it turns out in a geopolitical hotspot). The UK has not only no ability to keep the region stable. In fact it's foreign policy has been assisting the US in escalating the conflict by pouring in weapons and military aid in to the region.
That suggests indefensibly stupid energy policy. It is hard to fail worse than that without week-long blackouts. This is something that India and China have managed not to suffer from and they're managing energy for a population of >2 billion people. China is also doing better than the UK on a per capita basis just to really rub salt in to the wounded pride, using a mix of technologies that the UK couldn't hope to match.
He is not particularly known for the virtue of truthfulness. Turning the UK into “the Saudi Arabia of wind” has not gone the way he planned. Offshore wind costs have been rising, and the narrative of industrial growth has ceased to hold water. Also why is onshore wind still so hard to construct in England? The PM had a large majority and yet failed to enact legislation to permit such development. I guess he could have been arguing to place all bets on offshore, which seems foolhardy given how often ocean cables seem to break/be broken.
> The rejections ignored the incoming economy of scale and ramping of manufacturing, instead focusing on an immediate cost comparisson
One might say the same of other energy sources… a consistent campaign of construction brings costs down.
This masked the true cost of fuels from public.