The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, the opposition’s climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, also said a Coalition government would consider supporting Generation III+ large-scale nuclear reactors, and not just the unproven small modular reactors it has strongly touted.
The statement at the global summit confirmed the Coalition was on a markedly different path to Labor. The Albanese government last week joined more than 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030, but did not sign up with 22 countries that supported tripling nuclear power by 2050.
While only 11% of countries at the talks – mostly nations that already have a domestic nuclear energy industry – backed the nuclear pledge, O’Brien declared “Cop28 will be known as the nuclear Cop”
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Counterpoint, wind and especially solar are now so cheap that the average grid scale solar plant turns a profit in 10 years and continues that profit for the next twenty plus. It’s cheaper per watt than gas and especially coal.
Perhaps govement subsidies should instead go to the less profitable 24 hour sources of power needed to fill the gaps, like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, instead of just making already profitable investments a bit sweeter. There is a reason why well managed grids use a diverse set of sources, so unexpected shortages in one tech don’t limit the whole system.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: Due to renewables becoming cheaper and cheaper, private investment is pumping in capital en masse because the economics work out on their own. There is less and less room for government policy to set the direction. The market will decide.
I honestly don’t know how a nuclear power plant could be anywhere near profitable when 30% of the time we have negative power prices due to rooftop solar. Batteries are already edging out gas plants on a LCOE basis, and they’re getting cheaper by the day.
By the time the Liberals get in and try to implement their nuclear fever dream, there will be no cheaper form of energy than distributed solar + batteries and no sane financier will back anything else.
There are limits to battery production, especially on short time frames. If your expecting every nation to try and deal with storing days of electricity production to cover for a rainy week your going to run out of easily accessed raw materials such as lithium.
You need either reliable generation, absurd quantities of undersea cables, or scalable storage. The only practical storage tech we’ve seen is hydro, and there are limited places to flood in order to construct built massive resivors, and it has far worse timelines and costs than nuclear, so that means on demand generation.
In this category we have nuclear, and location dependent options like hydro and geothermal. All of these are about as expensive, but output constant or at will power.
If you let the market decide, it’s going to do what its already decided to do, which is cheap solar plus cheap gas and coal. If you ban gas and coal, then it will be cheap solar and batteries for nations that can afford them and all gas and coal for the poorer nations that can’t afford the batteries.
Leave the batteries for applications like transport and smaller grids that need them instead of brute forcing them into places where they don’t fit like long term grid storage.
Finally, though this is the most minor, nuclear is by far the winner in local environmental impact, as it lacks the land use and habitat distruction requirements of solar, wind, and hydro. It’s also location agnostic, and unlike batteries gets cheaper and faster as it scales.