14 thoughts on “Honest Government Ad: New Nuclear in Australia”
Yeah – Engineering with Rosie’s also weighed in against the idea, for the same good reasons, but she’s a PhD engineer (wind turbine blade design) but she brings numbers to her argument of the pros and cons of nuclear, and specifically of that in Australia.
I still think keep good ones running where they are, but don’t wait for new ones and don’t follow the centralized fossil generation playbook of encouraging nuclear over the use of the fast deployable wind, solar, batteries. Build towards zero fossil and let nuclear catch up if it ever can. In the meantime, train people on electrification, grid, etc.
I’ve got a small suspicion that the sudden push in Australia for nuclear might not just be a fossil fuel hail-mary for centralized thermal generation – the AUKUS switch of Australia from diesel submarines from France to nuclear subs from the USA might be goosing a desire for nuclear engineers, too. But that’s just my hunch.
“I still think keep good ones running where they are….”
That is my take, too. However, even existing nuclear power plants are vulnerable to climate change, especially the overheating of coolant water causing reactor shutdowns while heat waves are creating higher power demands to run air conditioners. (Or the nuclear power plant in Texas that had a coolant system freezing during the Feb 2021 Deep Freeze.)
Engineering with Rosie also ran a video on Switzerland moving to zero carbon power with ‘no need for nuclear !’ – ignoring that they get 25% of their power from nuclear, same as hydro. Plus imports from nuclear-majority France, the powerhouse of Europe.
Jenny Chase is a solar power pioneer who lives now in Switzerland. On Michael Liebreich’s renewables-leaning podcast, ‘Cleaning up’, asked about solar’s problems with long winter lacunae, and discouragement of investment in other power sources by flooding the midday market, she says ‘Actually, as a solar analyst, and also someone who really wants to stop climate change, I really think we should build more wind, and I would probably also build a bit of nuclear, because diversity is good..’
Aiden Morrison’s critique of the CSIRO cost study cited in the ‘honest’ ad points out that it doesn’t include the billions to be spent on transmission and storage, to accommodate RE, before 2030, treating that as ‘sunk costs’. It also ignores the billions citizens are expected to spend on PV and EVs, and assumes those investments will go ahead even if the midday market is swamped to negative pricing, and your car is expected to be available to be tapped whenever the grid’s tight. https://www.google.com/search?q=cleaning+up+jenny+chase+youtube&oq=cleaning+up+jenny+chase+youtube+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvb
John, you said “Engineering with Rosie also ran a video on Switzerland moving to zero carbon power with ‘no need for nuclear !’ – ignoring that they get 25% of their power from nuclear, same as hydro. Plus imports from nuclear-majority France, the powerhouse of Europe.”
Well, she clearly discussed nuclear, and twice showed their 2022 electrical generation chart (from IEA) that showed for electricity, hydro was 52% and nuclear was ~38%. She also discussed nuclear by describing the choice of the Swiss voters to allow their four nuclear plants to run to end of life and not build more, and that the voters again supported that in a 2017 referendum.
Here’s the bookmark where that part begins – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP5dEsiCicM&t=135s
By the way, if you look at the “trade in electricity” part of the link below, between 2000-2023 they net exported power 16 years, net imports only 8 years. Switzerland’s the third-biggest exporter of power in Europe, and the giant pumped hydro storage Rosie mentions, along with future dams storing water in formerly-glaciated valleys will boost that ability. https://www.iea.org/countries/switzerland/electricity
The IEA page also shows that for net energy, Swiss nuclear is bigger than hydro, so I assume they have process heat in there, but didn’t try tracking it down. But for electricity, hydro, then nuclear today.
France is a net exporter (except for the very hot 2022 when they had shutdowns from cooling water temps plus a large shutdown to do urgent repairs on a significant part of their aging fleet. And they’re Mediterranean so heatwaves are getting worse fairly rapidly – and they lost the knack for building nuclear rapidly, while solar and wind are cheaper.
I agree with mixing up the different types of power, but the Swiss made a choice on nuclear – not as catastrophically abrupt and the dumb decision in Germany, but that’s where they are now. Things might change, but as the Rosie video also notes, building efficiency is driving down power needed for that sector, and the simple fact of EVs is that they are becoming part of the more dynamic grid as they increase and as power electronics design makes grid service availability a normal option for people to choose when parked and plugged in.
PS – I’d seen that Cleaning Up episode, too, but as the Swiss move along, they might go more with wind, but their power exports are increasing and a more-integrated European grid could also mean they start importing from Spanish wind, French nuclear and whatever else is in the larger geography.
I understand the Swiss government has been moving towards reversing their nuclear ban – as Sweden has already done, Italy is doing now, and Spain will hopefully follow with.
There are only a few villages in the Aare valley benefitting from nuclear district heating at present. That’s an area with much more potential, China is hooking up an entire city to a couple of its new Westinghouse reactors, and there’s been some work on simple low-pressure pool type reactors just for heating.
The Swiss used to get about 45% of their power each from nuclear and from hydro (same as the Swedes), but both countries retired reactors and boosted RE over recent decades. Both countries, as you note, are major exporters (much of the flow from France to Switzerland is re-exported to Italy and Germany.) Lately, though, heavy demand on hydro-rich grids from, especially, Germany, has been raising prices, and tempers. The Norwegian government just lost its majority over the issue, while Poland and Czechia have grumbled for years about German demand and supply peaks disrupting their grids. Italy, the UK, and Germany are all in the range of 8:1 to 20:1 imports over exports. Italy has been chronically underpowered for decades, and now Germany has closed its nuclear and some of its coal, it’s about as bad.
By the way, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute has just signed a deal to test Copenhagen Atomics’ prototype molten salt reactor. Fission is illegal in Denmark, so they plan to ship the thing across Germany this year, run it at one megawatt thermal for testing, then back to Copenhagen for assessment and hopefully, mass production. There are already two full-size reactors running with 700C salt (electrically heated) while they perfect pumps, heat exchangers, etc. Design fits in a shipping container size, and is planned to make 100MW thermal (=40 MW electric), and eventually breed its own fuel from thorium. Game changer if it works.
My first response was too long, but darn if the second isn’t also. I’ll say a couple of points about the shifting grid economics and leave it at that for now in this enjoyable discussion. But I can’t get convinced small reactors will take off in a big way.
1 – as you say, solar can easily result in “midday market being swamped to negative pricing”, and the cost of solar panels is continuing to drop, and will continue as bifacial, thin-film and multi-layer technologies keep improving. Wind also generates at low cost once the turbine’s built and hooked up, but solar promises to keep dropping to the point where it’s not big investors driving a lot of the deployment. If buildings, for example, can generate some power with window films that also cut their A/C demand, they’ll be doing that. This moves us away from supply=demand operation that the grid had been operating as.
2 – use of batteries and other storage (like new efficient water heaters) and demand response systems means that parked EVs – from consumer’s self-interest – will happily charge during lowest-cost times if the car is not in use and is near a charger. And so will businesses storing heat, and power providers doing price arbitrage, and possible other uses like heating rock or fluids for driving district heating and other uses. We’re entering a produce and use-OR-store electricity world. I’m even looking at the new electric stove that incorporates a battery, because it let’s me, in an older building without wiring for all the apartments using 220V induction, to charge the battery during low-price and cook from the battery. Saves me needing to update my fuse-box and run a 220V line, too.
3 – Copenhagen’s design talks about a shipping-container-sized molten salt breeder reactor, built by “receiving components from hundreds of sub-suppliers and assembling reactors in sequence.” They also mention in milestone #3, the goal of testing “volatile fission product removal.” So that’s a very complex supply chain to build smallish devices full of molten salt and radioactive materials, some usable in bombs. And with complex components at hundreds of degrees C? Steady running will be pretty important, so they’d need batteries or a thermal sink to buy their output just like wind and solar during peak supply intervals. https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/copenhagen-atomics-the-story-so-far/
I’m sure from an engineering point their milestones can be accomplished, eventually, but “fission product removal” touches on the fact that a thorium reactor doesn’t involve just thorium. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, tanks, artillery and now drones are able to do damage to things the scale of a shipping container, even if that thing is one of the reactors they intend to produce in great number, during what’s promising to be a very turbulent century.
Here’s a pro for molten salt, and a con for molten salt, and even the pro mentions the need to deal with removing fissionable materials during operation. The “con” piece also mentions thorium’s initial attractiveness was based on a perceived uranium shortage that (except for Russian control of much of the market) isn’t really a shortage (see polymer extraction of uranium from seawater, for example).
The fact that these kinds of reactors can reduce the lifecycle of the radioactive waste, even down to 300 years, to me still points to choices where:
a) we get cheap generation, overproducing sometimes, and store and move the power around
b) we try to scale thermal generation that suffers if cycled frequently to small, but that increases materials-related risk management while making economics worse.
So there might be niche markets for tiny nukes (I know GE pitches to the oilfields) but for producing the electricity in nations around the world? We’ll see what the next thirty years bring.
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Wikipedia on Gina:
Georgina Hope Rinehart AO (née Hancock, born 9 February 1954) is an Australian billionaire mining magnate and businesswoman. Rinehart is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock.
Fast talking hard sell propaganda selectively pointing out FOAK updated designs and using France as an example! France built 50 some reactors in 17 or so years yielding something like 80% clean zero carbon electricity generation. Find another country that’s not a tiny hydro rich backwater that, even today, can make a claim like that with renewables.
Capacity factor of US solar was 23.5% in 2023, US nuclear was 93.1 %, so building 200 GW of solar would be equivalent to 50 of nuclear, other things being equal. (Other things are far from equal, of course – basing your grid on solar would be like the foolish man building his house upon the sand.) Any road, the US industry brought 95 GW on line between 1970 and 1990.
Yeah – Engineering with Rosie’s also weighed in against the idea, for the same good reasons, but she’s a PhD engineer (wind turbine blade design) but she brings numbers to her argument of the pros and cons of nuclear, and specifically of that in Australia.
“Four Reasons Why Nuclear Power is a Dumb Idea for Australia”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_47LWFAG6g
I still think keep good ones running where they are, but don’t wait for new ones and don’t follow the centralized fossil generation playbook of encouraging nuclear over the use of the fast deployable wind, solar, batteries. Build towards zero fossil and let nuclear catch up if it ever can. In the meantime, train people on electrification, grid, etc.
I’ve got a small suspicion that the sudden push in Australia for nuclear might not just be a fossil fuel hail-mary for centralized thermal generation – the AUKUS switch of Australia from diesel submarines from France to nuclear subs from the USA might be goosing a desire for nuclear engineers, too. But that’s just my hunch.
“I still think keep good ones running where they are….”
That is my take, too. However, even existing nuclear power plants are vulnerable to climate change, especially the overheating of coolant water causing reactor shutdowns while heat waves are creating higher power demands to run air conditioners. (Or the nuclear power plant in Texas that had a coolant system freezing during the Feb 2021 Deep Freeze.)
No, that was just a sensor bleed pipe on the actual turbine (which is in the open air, not in a turbine hall.) Reactors shove out enough hot water, one was recently used for a controlled release to melt a frozen river, to prevent sudden thaw causing flooding. https://abc7chicago.com/kankakee-river-ice-jam-wilmington-flood-warning-nuclear-power-plant/14337532/
Engineering with Rosie also ran a video on Switzerland moving to zero carbon power with ‘no need for nuclear !’ – ignoring that they get 25% of their power from nuclear, same as hydro. Plus imports from nuclear-majority France, the powerhouse of Europe.
Jenny Chase is a solar power pioneer who lives now in Switzerland. On Michael Liebreich’s renewables-leaning podcast, ‘Cleaning up’, asked about solar’s problems with long winter lacunae, and discouragement of investment in other power sources by flooding the midday market, she says ‘Actually, as a solar analyst, and also someone who really wants to stop climate change, I really think we should build more wind, and I would probably also build a bit of nuclear, because diversity is good..’
Aiden Morrison’s critique of the CSIRO cost study cited in the ‘honest’ ad points out that it doesn’t include the billions to be spent on transmission and storage, to accommodate RE, before 2030, treating that as ‘sunk costs’. It also ignores the billions citizens are expected to spend on PV and EVs, and assumes those investments will go ahead even if the midday market is swamped to negative pricing, and your car is expected to be available to be tapped whenever the grid’s tight.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cleaning+up+jenny+chase+youtube&oq=cleaning+up+jenny+chase+youtube+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvb
John, you said “Engineering with Rosie also ran a video on Switzerland moving to zero carbon power with ‘no need for nuclear !’ – ignoring that they get 25% of their power from nuclear, same as hydro. Plus imports from nuclear-majority France, the powerhouse of Europe.”
Well, she clearly discussed nuclear, and twice showed their 2022 electrical generation chart (from IEA) that showed for electricity, hydro was 52% and nuclear was ~38%. She also discussed nuclear by describing the choice of the Swiss voters to allow their four nuclear plants to run to end of life and not build more, and that the voters again supported that in a 2017 referendum.
Here’s the bookmark where that part begins – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP5dEsiCicM&t=135s
By the way, if you look at the “trade in electricity” part of the link below, between 2000-2023 they net exported power 16 years, net imports only 8 years. Switzerland’s the third-biggest exporter of power in Europe, and the giant pumped hydro storage Rosie mentions, along with future dams storing water in formerly-glaciated valleys will boost that ability.
https://www.iea.org/countries/switzerland/electricity
The IEA page also shows that for net energy, Swiss nuclear is bigger than hydro, so I assume they have process heat in there, but didn’t try tracking it down. But for electricity, hydro, then nuclear today.
France is a net exporter (except for the very hot 2022 when they had shutdowns from cooling water temps plus a large shutdown to do urgent repairs on a significant part of their aging fleet. And they’re Mediterranean so heatwaves are getting worse fairly rapidly – and they lost the knack for building nuclear rapidly, while solar and wind are cheaper.
I agree with mixing up the different types of power, but the Swiss made a choice on nuclear – not as catastrophically abrupt and the dumb decision in Germany, but that’s where they are now. Things might change, but as the Rosie video also notes, building efficiency is driving down power needed for that sector, and the simple fact of EVs is that they are becoming part of the more dynamic grid as they increase and as power electronics design makes grid service availability a normal option for people to choose when parked and plugged in.
PS – I’d seen that Cleaning Up episode, too, but as the Swiss move along, they might go more with wind, but their power exports are increasing and a more-integrated European grid could also mean they start importing from Spanish wind, French nuclear and whatever else is in the larger geography.
I understand the Swiss government has been moving towards reversing their nuclear ban – as Sweden has already done, Italy is doing now, and Spain will hopefully follow with.
There are only a few villages in the Aare valley benefitting from nuclear district heating at present. That’s an area with much more potential, China is hooking up an entire city to a couple of its new Westinghouse reactors, and there’s been some work on simple low-pressure pool type reactors just for heating.
The Swiss used to get about 45% of their power each from nuclear and from hydro (same as the Swedes), but both countries retired reactors and boosted RE over recent decades. Both countries, as you note, are major exporters (much of the flow from France to Switzerland is re-exported to Italy and Germany.) Lately, though, heavy demand on hydro-rich grids from, especially, Germany, has been raising prices, and tempers. The Norwegian government just lost its majority over the issue, while Poland and Czechia have grumbled for years about German demand and supply peaks disrupting their grids. Italy, the UK, and Germany are all in the range of 8:1 to 20:1 imports over exports. Italy has been chronically underpowered for decades, and now Germany has closed its nuclear and some of its coal, it’s about as bad.
By the way, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute has just signed a deal to test Copenhagen Atomics’ prototype molten salt reactor. Fission is illegal in Denmark, so they plan to ship the thing across Germany this year, run it at one megawatt thermal for testing, then back to Copenhagen for assessment and hopefully, mass production. There are already two full-size reactors running with 700C salt (electrically heated) while they perfect pumps, heat exchangers, etc. Design fits in a shipping container size, and is planned to make 100MW thermal (=40 MW electric), and eventually breed its own fuel from thorium. Game changer if it works.
all good luck to them. Hope it works.
My first response was too long, but darn if the second isn’t also. I’ll say a couple of points about the shifting grid economics and leave it at that for now in this enjoyable discussion. But I can’t get convinced small reactors will take off in a big way.
1 – as you say, solar can easily result in “midday market being swamped to negative pricing”, and the cost of solar panels is continuing to drop, and will continue as bifacial, thin-film and multi-layer technologies keep improving. Wind also generates at low cost once the turbine’s built and hooked up, but solar promises to keep dropping to the point where it’s not big investors driving a lot of the deployment. If buildings, for example, can generate some power with window films that also cut their A/C demand, they’ll be doing that. This moves us away from supply=demand operation that the grid had been operating as.
2 – use of batteries and other storage (like new efficient water heaters) and demand response systems means that parked EVs – from consumer’s self-interest – will happily charge during lowest-cost times if the car is not in use and is near a charger. And so will businesses storing heat, and power providers doing price arbitrage, and possible other uses like heating rock or fluids for driving district heating and other uses. We’re entering a produce and use-OR-store electricity world. I’m even looking at the new electric stove that incorporates a battery, because it let’s me, in an older building without wiring for all the apartments using 220V induction, to charge the battery during low-price and cook from the battery. Saves me needing to update my fuse-box and run a 220V line, too.
3 – Copenhagen’s design talks about a shipping-container-sized molten salt breeder reactor, built by “receiving components from hundreds of sub-suppliers and assembling reactors in sequence.” They also mention in milestone #3, the goal of testing “volatile fission product removal.” So that’s a very complex supply chain to build smallish devices full of molten salt and radioactive materials, some usable in bombs. And with complex components at hundreds of degrees C? Steady running will be pretty important, so they’d need batteries or a thermal sink to buy their output just like wind and solar during peak supply intervals.
https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/copenhagen-atomics-the-story-so-far/
I’m sure from an engineering point their milestones can be accomplished, eventually, but “fission product removal” touches on the fact that a thorium reactor doesn’t involve just thorium. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, tanks, artillery and now drones are able to do damage to things the scale of a shipping container, even if that thing is one of the reactors they intend to produce in great number, during what’s promising to be a very turbulent century.
Here’s a pro for molten salt, and a con for molten salt, and even the pro mentions the need to deal with removing fissionable materials during operation. The “con” piece also mentions thorium’s initial attractiveness was based on a perceived uranium shortage that (except for Russian control of much of the market) isn’t really a shortage (see polymer extraction of uranium from seawater, for example).
https://inl.gov/molten-salt-reactors/how-molten-salt-could-be-the-lifeblood-of-tomorrows-nuclear-energy/
https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/molten-salt-reactors-were-trouble-in-the-1960s-and-they-remain-trouble-today/
The fact that these kinds of reactors can reduce the lifecycle of the radioactive waste, even down to 300 years, to me still points to choices where:
a) we get cheap generation, overproducing sometimes, and store and move the power around
b) we try to scale thermal generation that suffers if cycled frequently to small, but that increases materials-related risk management while making economics worse.
So there might be niche markets for tiny nukes (I know GE pitches to the oilfields) but for producing the electricity in nations around the world? We’ll see what the next thirty years bring.
Wikipedia on Gina:
Georgina Hope Rinehart AO (née Hancock, born 9 February 1954) is an Australian billionaire mining magnate and businesswoman. Rinehart is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock.
Fast talking hard sell propaganda selectively pointing out FOAK updated designs and using France as an example! France built 50 some reactors in 17 or so years yielding something like 80% clean zero carbon electricity generation. Find another country that’s not a tiny hydro rich backwater that, even today, can make a claim like that with renewables.
“Find another country that’s not a tiny hydro rich backwater that, even today, can make a claim like that with renewables.”
China installed a total of 357 gigawatts (GW) of solar and wind power combined last year alone.
The United States installed 200 GW of solar over the past 16 years.
In the first half of 2024, India added 15 GW of new solar PV capacity.
Germany installed 7.5 GW of new PV capacity in the first half of 2024.
Capacity factor of US solar was 23.5% in 2023, US nuclear was 93.1 %, so building 200 GW of solar would be equivalent to 50 of nuclear, other things being equal. (Other things are far from equal, of course – basing your grid on solar would be like the foolish man building his house upon the sand.) Any road, the US industry brought 95 GW on line between 1970 and 1990.