South Wind

There are plenty of important questions to be asked about the prospect of Australia going nuclear under a Peter Dutton-led Coalition, including a singular, critical one.

First, the non-critical questions. The Coalition says it has costed its seven nuclear plants – some with more than one reactor – but maintains that premature release of the figure would be a distraction from the important issue of “baseload” power.

A distraction it most certainly would be, and for good reason. Rod Sims, former ACCC head and now chair of the energy think-tank The Superpower Institute, said last week the Coalition’s nuclear plan would increase power bills by over $200 a year – “at best”.

He told ABC Radio National that a megawatt-hour of wind and solar energy firmed by a mix of sources including batteries currently costs about $110, but the same from new nuclear plants in Europe and the US is as much as $300. He said that CSIRO’s apparently high capital cost estimate for nuclear was actually “incredibly optimistic” – about half the cost of plants currently being built in Western countries.

Another curly one: in South Australia rooftop solar currently supplies all grid demand, and shortly the same will happen in Western Australia. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) forecasts that power from rooftop solar will increase from 20 gigawatts to over 70 gigawatts by 2040, when the Coalition expects nuclear plants to come on line.

Sims pointed out that “renewables will always get on to the grid because they come in at a zero price”, meaning that the only way AEMO will be able to accommodate nuclear power will be to shut off renewable energy – “which seems like a really silly thing to do”. Silly, and you’d think electorally suicidal given the number of households now getting paid for their rooftop power.

The Coalition’s “baseload” argument – that nuclear offers constant and uninterrupted supply to keep industry going – is less of an issue where there is a widely distributed renewable network. A reconstructed multi-state power grid will be able to access many energy sources at any given time, eventually including large-scale wind farms out in the restless ocean. 

There’s the question of radioactive waste. Peter Dutton claimed that new-age small modular reactors (SMRs) will produce vastly less waste than today’s reactors. But a 2022 Stanford University study concluded that SMR waste would be at least double that from standard reactors and possibly as much as 30 times greater – a bad sign in a country that can’t even find permanent storage for nuclear medicine waste.

All the above questions pale into insignificance alongside this, the big one:  On the basis of IPCC advice that the world faces catastrophic climate change unless it reduces carbon emissions this decade, what will nuclear do to help?

Answer: it will be a serious obstacle. The Coalition says it’s committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, but from the moment it takes office its funding focus will be on a power source that’s unavailable before 2040. Large-scale renewable rollout –  essential to cutting emissions this decade – will be curtailed and the crucial 2030 interim target will be abandoned. 

The Black Summer fires of 2019-20 and the record-breaking floods that followed  showed what global warming of just 1.2C can do to us. Left as they are, current national policies will see global temperatures rise between 2.3C and 4.5C, most likely around 3.5C. What’s that going to look like on the ground?

In her June Quarterly Essay, Highway to Hell, leading Australian climate scientist Joëlle Gergis reminded us that science expects the Paris Agreement’s danger threshold of 2C to be breached, with “profound and immeasurable” consequences, by the early 2040s – “within the lifetimes of most people alive today”. That’s about when the Coalition’s zero-emissions nuclear is supposed to kick in – sadly too late.

Gergis cited a 2023 Griffith University survey of 4000 Australians indicating that while most of us accept that climate change is real, only 15 per cent consider the problem to be “extremely serious”. Peter Dutton’s Coalition is clearly part of the remaining 85 per cent, but since PM Anthony Albanese and his cabinet continue to support gas and coal exploration, processing and export, should they be there too?

Cracks are appearing in the edifices of authority everywhere – including in the ageing leader of the world’s most powerful democracy – while at the same time humanity, in the words of UN chief Antonio Guterres, is heading for a clifftop with its foot on the accelerator. Democratic leaders seem powerless to lift the foot, while opponents, many of them climate change deniers, bay for their blood. 

Back to the drawing board. Ideas are most welcome.

The village of my childhood comprised a dozen or so company houses on the main road, our family home on the hillside above and the farmhouse of my father’s youth down on the river flats – and a newsprint mill along the riverbank.

The great fire that swept down the Derwent Valley on a scorching February day in 1967 burned down the old farmhouse and killed my father’s sister, one of over 60 Tasmanian deaths on that day, but no-one else in the village lost their home or their lives.

Corporate decision-makers did what fire had failed to do. Within 25 years the mill had removed all those homes, those props for old memories, so it could expand. All that now remains is a pattern of driveways and house footings. That’s progress.

Weeks after those fires I moved to Brisbane, where in the wake of the devastating 2022 floods something similar is now happening. Authorities in this “city with a river problem”, as Margaret Cook described it in her history of Brisbane floods, are now helping owners to relocate to higher ground by buying vulnerable homes and demolishing them.

With an annual rainfall double that of either Hobart or Melbourne, the Brisbane River’s catchment is six times bigger than the Yarra’s and half the size of Tasmania. Brisbane’s intense recent flood events have laid bare its vulnerability. 

In an essay in the May issue of The Monthly, novelist Ashley Hay wrote of her surreal experience walking the dog in her riverside suburb of Fairfield, named for the bountiful soils of the floodplain on which it was built. Houses keep disappearing, to be replaced by grass.

As Hay explains, as of mid-March this year, 100 properties in her council ward and hundreds more across Brisbane have been demolished or removed under a voluntary home buyback scheme offered by the state’s Reconstruction Authority in the wake of the 2021-22 floods, out of a total of 678 offers across southeast Queensland. 

In Lismore and nearby centres in northern NSW hit by unprecedented flood disasters in 2020 and 2022, that state’s Reconstruction Authority has bought hundreds of properties. While owners decide whether they can afford to relocate their vacated homes to higher ground, a group of homeless locals and itinerants called Relaim Our Recovery is occupying them and resisting official attempts to evict them.

The process of recovery and reconstruction is fraught with complex, competing needs, as authorities are now discovering. We don’t know if Lismore or Brisbane – or Latrobe in Tasmania or Windsor in NSW or Shepparton in Victoria or numberless other low-lying towns across the country – will suffer a deluge this year or next or any time. We just hope that they don’t.

But as a nation we have to look at at places most vulnerable to flood – or for that matter coastal storm surge, or fire, or drought – and work out how to mitigate damage and heartache when the big events inevitably happen. This month the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions released a report which pushes hard for a national strategy for relocating communities facing an escalating risk as a result of climate change.

The report finds that on top of the 250,000-odd Australians internally displaced by fire, flood and drought since 2008, over coming decades an increasing number of communities living on river floodplains and low-lying coasts and in places susceptible to bushfire and extreme heat will be forced to move to safer locations.

The institute’s head of disaster solutions, Roslyn Prinsley, told ABC Radio National this month that research led by the Climate Council indicated that by 2030 river flooding will see one in 25 homes across the country become uninsurable as a result of river flooding.

In the most affected regions, that figure rises to one home in 10: “So what we’re thinking is that those people should be moved now, pre-emptively, rather than wait till they’re in that situation,” Prinsley said. Hence the empty blocks in Hay’s riverside Brisbane suburb and the vacated Lismore homes waiting to be moved, or to fall down.

The residents of flood-prone homes don’t know when the next deluge will force them to flee, any more than I in my Hobart forest retreat can know when the next fire will come. But there is a trend, measured year on year by rising home insurance premiums. In the case of some floodplain dwellers these are already unpayable.

The ANU study is a good guide for authorities as to which settlements are likely candidates for wholesale relocation. Whatever the cost nationally, estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars, it will be cheap compared to the cost of repeated disasters.

How does this work? The Coalition lost the 2022 election in large part because its decades-old climate policy of pretence, denial and delay hit a wall. Now it’s heading for another poll promising more of the same while it experiments with nuclear energy.

This makes no sense without one key factor. Certain influential people in the Coalition – mainly but not entirely in the Nationals part of it – have always believed that the science of greenhouse warming is at best wrong and at worst a cult, or a conspiracy to make us all poor. 

Barnaby Joyce MP and Senator Matt Canavan are leading examplars but far from alone. While pretending to remain committed to a net-zero 2050 target their leader, Peter Dutton, has now placed their climate denialism on centre stage for all to see.

These people have never taken seriously what the entire gamut of relevant sciences – physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, you name it – has been saying for decades with increasing unanimity. That is, that human carbon emissions are causing the climate to get warmer and wilder, that the threat is mounting rapidly, and that the only solution is for rich nations to eliminate carbon from their energy mix, quickly.

As if it’s just gossip or a scary fairy tale, Peter Dutton has let all this wash over him. In offering nuclear as an alternative to Labor’s all-out solar and wind rollout he’s kicking the can down the road for short term gain, counting on the near-term pain of rising living costs eclipsing all other concerns until after the next election.

The rise of populism in this month’s European elections suggests this tactic might work for him, just as it might work for Donald Trump in November’s US presidential elections. That bleak scenario would see climate action gone from the US agenda and the prospect of the same happening here.

The 2022 election promised to be a turning-point for fossil fuel fortunes. But coal and gas, supported as exports by the Albanese government, will both be buoyed by a Coalition energy manifesto requiring that old power stations keep going until nuclear is ready to plug into their transmission lines.

Last year I wrote that while Australia was right to focus on wind and solar, nuclear energy could not be ruled out long-term. CSIRO’s GenCost report last month advised that as the technology now stands nuclear power would be as much as twice the cost of wind and solar with batteries (a lot more if we go for much-touted small modular reactors or SMRs), and that the first reactor could not be up and running before 2040.

A current commercial move to extend operation of a Hunter Valley coal mine to 2050 has been described by the NSW Environment Protection Authority as the state’s “largest coal mining proposal ever”. The coal is intended for export, but a guaranteed long-term supply would fit neatly into the Coalition’s nuclear plans.

The impact on Australian carbon emissions of the Coalition’s coal-to-nuclear plan would be catastrophic. The desperately tight timetable for meeting Australia’s legislated 2030 emissions target of 43 per cent below 2005 levels would be gone (requiring new legislation) along with our recently-acquired reputation as a nation that cares about climate change. And we would effectively be pulling out of the Paris Agreement, which expressly forbids weakening interim targets.

The diminishing number of city-based Liberals know all about the potential electoral cost of so carelessly reversing that target and the reputational gain that came with it. You could see and hear it on the airwaves last week, in their tense, glum expressions and trigger-happy responses to interview questions. 

They went through the motions of trotting out the Coalition talking points – the impact on power prices of Labor’s impossible 2030 emissions and renewables targets, exaggerated costs of carbon-free nuclear, their continuing commitment to Paris and net-zero by 2050 – but there can be no denying that they are deeply worried.

No such concern was evident from their leader, nor from leading proponents of the Coalition’s crash-and-burn policy shift, the likes of Joyce and Canavan and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien. They continue to pay lip-service to the science where convenient while patently rejecting or ignoring those parts that don’t fit. Their demeanour conveys the absolute conviction of a new-age Spanish Inquisition.

There’s a dark cloud hanging over Peter Dutton’s new energy narrative in the form of persistent questioning about the location of nuclear plants. Nuclear risks are doubtless being exaggerated, but given the Coalition’s record of misinformation about renewables and climate change, their leader is in no position to complain.