Some Issues With the Energy Minister’s Claim That Nuclear Is Just ‘Hot Air’

Steam rises from the cooling towers of the Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant at night near Grafenrheinfeld, Germany, on June 11, 2015. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Commentary

If you can’t be a good leader, then being a good follower is just as good.

It seems at last that the Australian people have come around to the question of nuclear energy, judging by the latest Newspoll.

With that, Australia’s Energy Minister Chris Bowen should follow them.

According to Newspoll, 55 percent of Australians support using small modular reactors, while 31 percent oppose it.

Significantly, the highest support at 65 percent was amongst Australians 18-34, the group that is most environmentally conscious, and also most likely to vote Labor or Greens.

Support has been building for a while, but Labor continues to oppose it.

My think tank did a poll on nuclear three years ago. While our sample doesn’t allow for the same absolute degree of accuracy as Newspoll, it found that 47 percent supported nuclear while 39 percent opposed it.

Much of the support three years ago was because thinking Australians had concluded that it was impossible to run a grid on wind and solar energy, and therefore impossible to meet net zero, or anything like it, without the only non-emitting baseload source of power—nuclear—in the mix.

I suspected before that that attitudes had changed through conversations with left-leaning, particularly female, friends who had reluctantly come to the conclusion nuclear was inevitable to fight climate change.

The change of mood was confirmed for me when the USS Ronald Reagan, powered by two 70 MW nuclear power generators, was berthed for a couple of weeks in the Brisbane River without fear or even comment in 2019.

People even toured the ship with two small modular nuclear reactors humming around them, and keeping the lights on.

In the 60s at the height of anti-nuclear hysteria, there would have been a flotilla of rainbow-decorated kayaks and surf skis trying to block the ship from berthing. In the 2000s—nothing.

Yet Mr. Bowen continues with his opposition, bizarrely claiming in an op-ed in The Australian that the opposition’s embrace of nuclear is a “culture war.”

At the COP28 conference held this year in Dubai, 25 countries signed up to the Declaration of Triple Nuclear because their engineers are telling them it is impossible to reach net zero at anything like a reasonable cost without nuclear in the mix.

These countries include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, and South Korea.

Is the minister suggesting we are in a culture war with some of our most important allies and trading partners? Or is this the cookie-cutter political rhetoric of a man who tuns the same phrases on his political opponents, no matter what the issue?

Nuclear Is Unpopular?

Mr. Bowen’s article carried a large number of untrue, or deceptive, claims.

Typical of many renewables advocates he boosts the amount being installed by substituting capacity for output. It may be true that, “Last year, the world installed 440GW of renewable capacity. This is more than the world’s entire existing nuclear capacity.”

Except that 440 GW of renewable capacity only operates around 30 percent of the time, while nuclear can manage over 90 percent, so it’s more like one-third of existing nuclear capacity.

Currently, there are 80 GW of nuclear capacity under construction, the equivalent of around 240 GW of renewables, 117 GW planned, or 351 GW renewables equivalent, and 360 GW proposed, or 1,080 GW of renewables equivalent.

He also claims that by next year, renewables will surpass coal as a share of power generation.

As the graph below, derived by Our World in Data from International Energy Association data, demonstrates, this is only likely in a parallel universe.