Nuclear power doesn't stack up: experts
< http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1646649.htm >
Reporter: Stephen Long
MARK COLVIN: The Prime Minister appears to have
put the question of nuclear power firmly on the
agenda, but does nuclear power make economic
sense for Australia?
It was, after all, his Finance Minister who said
it didn't and wouldn't for a century.
By calling for serious consideration of nuclear
power in Australia, Mr Howard appears to be
contradicting the findings of the Government's
own energy white paper.
Economics Correspondent Stephen Long.
STEPHEN LONG: When it comes to nuclear energy,
it's very hard to separate the economics from
the politics, as Hugh Outhred, the Director of
the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets
at the University of New South Wales, observes.
HUGH OUTHRED: The economics of nuclear power has
always been a difficult topic.
The problem, I guess, arises originally because nuclear
power grew out of the military programs that were
started in the United States and in countries like
the UK, Russia, France, and so on.
And that link to the military side and to government
has never really been broken.
STEPHEN LONG: Without the Manhattan Project there would
have been no nuclear power industry. And in various
ways nuclear energy in the United States has enjoyed
a military cross-subsidy.
Even so, credible independent studies have found that
it can't now compete on costs with coal and gas fired
plants. And as for a country like Australia with abundant
reserves of fossil fuels, the answer seems clear.
Hugh Outhred:
HUGH OUTHRED: It's not economic in direct cost terms
compared to our coal fired power stations that we
have in Australia. They're very cheap by world standards,
roughly half the cost of coal fired electricity in
countries that import coal, like, say, in the United
Kingdom. And so nuclear just simply can't compete with
that.
STEPHEN LONG: A view shared by Dr Chris Riedy of the
Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of
Technology, Sydney.
CHRIS RIEDY: We haven't built power stations in the
past, so it's difficult to say what they would cost
here. But on the figures we've seen from overseas, I
mean the UK and the US for example, nuclear power
stations just don't seem to stack up economically.
Wind power is more cost effective. Natural gas power
is more cost effective. Energy efficiency is certainly
more cost effective.
So it's really difficult to see a strong economic case
being made for going down the path of nuclear power.
STEPHEN LONG: Well, some of the advocates say that nuclear
power would become viable if the coal fired generators
were forced to factor in the cost of fossil fuel emissions
to the environment, say, for instance, through a carbon tax.
CHRIS RIEDY: Nuclear power would become more competitive
in that case, but on the other hand so would all your
renewable energy technologies.
Wind power would become much more competitive. Solar
power would start to become more competitive. Biomass
power would certainly become more competitive.
So when these technologies are clean, efficient, and
in most cases well proven, it's difficult to see why
you would choose to favour nuclear power over those
in that situation.
STEPHEN LONG: The Government's own white paper on energy
is also sceptical about the viability of nuclear power.
It affords it the status of a mere "reserve technology",
in other words a fallback option, ranking it in the quest
for a sustainable power source below cleaner coal, wind
energy, biomass and wave energy.
And Hugh Outhred says that in that context the Prime
Minister's comments on the need to debate nuclear power
seem curious.
HUGH OUTHRED: If you look at the present Commonwealth
Government's policy, which is in the energy white paper
that they released in 2004, it doesn't rank nuclear
energy highly. It ranks it as a sort of a fallback option,
rather than one of the Government's leading options to
respond to climate change.
STEPHEN LONG: In the United States, a major interdisciplinary
study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) found
that nuclear energy should be considered as part of America's
future.
Yet it concluded that it wasn't at present cost effective,
that little was known about the safety of the overall
nuclear fuel cycle, and that while geological disposal
of nuclear waste was technically feasible, its execution
was yet to be demonstrated and was not certain.
It also found that the current nuclear non-proliferation
safeguards aren't adequate to meet the security challenges
of an expanded nuclear industry, which raises the question
of insurance and liability. Unless the Australian Government
is willing to bear these costs like governments overseas,
nuclear power won't be viable.
MARK COLVIN: Stephen Long.
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