It would appear as though the two Coalition opposition parties are determined to take the creation of a nuclear power industry to the 2025 federal general election.
It is being presented as cost-effective and relatively risk free way to provide for Australia's future energy needs.
So here are some basic facts to consider when evaluating the propaganda beginning to spread across national newspapers and social media.
CAPITOL COSTS
Annual change in capital costs: Across the board, new build costs have generally stabilised as the impacts of inflation ease. However, cost pressure remains on gas, onshore wind and nuclear SMR. [Draft GenCost Report, December 2023]
The CSIRO Draft GenCost Report 2023-24 stated that Nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) emerged as the highest-cost technology explored in the report. This corresponds with new data from the most advanced SMR project in the US.
SMRs are the type of nuclear power facility favoured by Liberal MP for Dickson & Leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, Peter Dutton and Nationals MP for Maranoa and Leader of the Parliamentary National Party, David Littleproud.
SMRs at this stage exist only as either prototype drawings or development projects - appearing at this point in time to be unrealised technology.
According to the current Draft GenCost Report:
Significant increase in nuclear small modular reactor costs
The cost of nuclear small modular reactors (SMR) has been a contentious issue in GenCost for many years with conflicting data published by other groups proposing lower costs than those assumed in GenCost (ES Figure 0-3). UAMPS (Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems) is a US regional coalition that develops local government owned electricity generation projects. Up until the project’s cancellation in November 2023, UAMP was the developer of a nuclear SMR project called the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) with a gross capacity of 462MW. It was planned to be fully operational by 2030. After conversion to 2023 Australian dollars, project costs were estimated in 2020 to be $18,200/kW which is only slightly below the level that GenCost had been applying ($19,000kW).
While the EFSC Investment Group states that estimates suggest that the construction cost of a coal-fired thermal power plant can range from less than $1,000 to $4,500 per each kilowatt of installed capacity.
That's a whopping $14,000 difference at the high end of the costing range. Making these boutique smaller nuclear power units very expensive if they can be realised.
Then there is the limited service area of nuclear small module reactors (SMRs). Based on the U.S. Carbon Free Power Project SMR with a proposed gross capacity of 462MW, such an SMR would be able to supply a mere est. 31,862 residential households according to Ausgrid 2022-23 electricity consumption figures. Hardly value for money given the high cost to Treasury and Australian taxpayers of building and bringing online these small power plants, by CSIRO estimates around $8.7 billion per SMR.
Lake Macquarie City Library reveals that: The total cost of the Eraring Power Station, built by the NSW Electricity Commission was $1.653 billion. Work commenced with the earthworks on the site in 1976, followed by construction of the station beginning in 1977. Several of the larger components of the station were shipped through the Swansea channel, up Lake Macquarie to the Eraring site. The first generating unit was brought into service in March, 1982, the second and third units in 1983 and the fourth unit in 1984.
The Coalition Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy is fond of tossing out timescales for nuclear power stations builds - from around 5 years to complete construction of an small modular reactor (SMR) to 10-12 years for a large-scale nuclear power plant.
In the first instance it's hard to assign a build timeline to an SMR because one hasn't actually been built yet.
In the second instance, the build time lines for existing large-scale nuclear reactors ranging from 1,000MW-e to 1,350MW-e capacity is fairly well known and historically construction completion took between 19.66 to 25.08 years. These days the optimistic theoretical time given for completed construction of a 1,000MW-e nuclear power station is seven and a half years.
In the case of a nuclear power plant with the same capacity as the Eraring coal-fired power station, without factoring in the long lead-in years of legislative framing, planning and approval processes, actual construction could be expected to be completed in 18 years at the earliest. While the World Nuclear Organisation figures would put the overnight cost of this nuclear power plant in Australian dollars at $9,115 per KW-e as a starting point which comes in at over $17.6 million overnight or $6.4 billion over 365 nights.
So if Dutton & Co were to form government in 2025 and hit the ground running - by my reckoning they might, just might, have one solitary nuclear power station built and online by 2058 at a cost on current pricing in the vicinity of $21 billion. Having achieved nothing nuclear towards the net zero by 2050 policy.
It is interesting to note that the Coalition parties see coal-fired generation as remaining critical to Australia's electricity supply and the Liberal Party makes a point of saying so in its 2025 re-election plan for the resources sector. A plan that doesn't even include the words "nuclear power stations" Indeed one might suspect Dutton and Littleproud of raising the possibility of future nuclear energy as an excuse to maintain all existing coal-fired power stations should they win government again and, that it what makes this particular energy option so attractive a proposition.
Dutton & his nuclear cheer squad are also saying that if elected to federal government that they will not be ruling out including in Coalition policy a crossover to large-scale nuclear power generation on retired or soon to be retired coal-fired power station sites.
A fact that should give communities in places like the Lake Macquarie region reason to pause and consider, given Eraring Power Station is due for retirement soon.
The risks involved with a 2,922MW capacity coal-fired power station already drawing 11 billion litres of salt water a day from Lake Macquarie and returning it after cooling, is a different proposition to a full-scale nuclear power plant of similar capacity drawing at least 7.9 million litres of water a day from an as yet unidentified source, contaminating an unknown percentage of that water with radionuclides – unstable atoms with excess energy – and then seeking to return supposedly 'cleaned' water to the lake.
Given uncontrolled water and liquid effluent releases from nuclear power stations have occurred in the past, some contaminating groundwater, this is one more worry our regional communities do not need.
