The mere act of paying one’s increasingly-horrifying power bills is enough to make you go nuclear – but that’s really more of a metaphorical thing than a power generation strategy.
That said, there’s been a lot of talk lately about Australia embracing nuclear energy, with the nation’s Energy Minister Angus Taylor especially keen to discuss it as a clean energy source instead of that greenie solar/wind/hydro stuff.
it’s a weird choice because Taylor likes to say things like “Australians expect a fair deal on energy, and that means they want to have reliable, affordable electricity and gas. When Australians flick the switch, they expect the power to stay on, they expect the power to come on.”
And that’s true, as far as it goes, but if that’s your goal there are way, way, way easier and cheaper options than nuclear.
And yes, nuclear doesn’t have greenhouse gas emissions (after construction, at least), and is far less polluting than is, say, coal.
But there’s no reason to evoke the spectre of nuclear disasters like Chernobyl or Fukishima, or the fact that we still don’t have any way to store radioactive nuclear waste, to explain why nuclear energy isn’t going to help your electricity bills
For example:
1. It’s staggeringly expensive
Since nuclear energy uses uranium – which is fairly rare and very expensive, and needs to be looked after in very specific ways – the electricity it pumps out is similarly pricey.
The cheapest form of electricity generation, according to international calculations, is hydro. The next cheapest is solar, then government-funded-and-insured nuclear (in France, at least), then wind.
Coal and natural gas are next, and then it’s a fairly long walk to commercial nuclear.
Even if our government did embrace nuclear, the difference between France and Australia is that we don’t have an industry here and would need to import all the technology and all the expertise.
Adding to cost is time. Optimistic estimates on how long it would take Australia to build a reactor still hover around the decade mark, and that’s after the planning permission has been sorted.
And given how bolshy Australians get about the government doing things like putting a bike path in their neighbourhood, that might take a while.
2. Security, security, security
If there’s one thing that conservative governments like more than coming up with reasons to ignore renewable energy it’s touting their keeping-people-safe credentials.
And nuclear has one big security issue in that the process creates plutonium, which needs to be stored securely because it’s the most poisonous substance on the planet. And also because it’s a dream ingredient for dirty bombs.
So aside from all the other expenses, it involves signing up to massive and forever costs to ensure this stuff doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, and also the ensure that the facility doesn’t become a target itself.
All things being equal, that really isn’t a problem solar farms have to deal with.
3. Climate change is making reactors unuseable
Nuclear reactors are all about keeping an atomic reaction under control. And that requires huge amounts of water to help cool said reaction down when it threatens to get overexcited.
The problem is that on a warming planet, cool water can sometimes be a tricky thing to get hold of – as Europe discovered when it sweltered under 40-plus temperatures and the river water used to cool reactors in France and Germany was too warm to use.
A reactor that needs to be shut down when it gets hot isn’t ideal for Aussie conditions, so you can probably rule out Australia using nuclear as a way to reduce power bills any time soon.