Australia Debates Going Nuclear

I get the sense that Nuclear energy is inevitably going to be the future of the West, especially given recent advancements and safety improvements in the tech (mitigating meltdowns, less radioactive waste, better efficiency, etc). It seems like old ideas about nuclear energy being scary and dangerous are sticking around stubbornly though, and as a result countries radically cutting fossil fuel use who are not replacing it with nuclear are struggling.

Pile the rise of electric cars on top of that and you have a situation like some places in the West where the common position for a largely disengaged, ordinary individual who wants to be compassionate and socially aware is essentially a position of anti-industrialism. One could be forgiven if they assumed leadership of such places is intentionally disrupting the ability of the countries to continue growing, or even to maintain existing functioning institutions. What's more, the people doing their best to limit growth and move toward deindustrialization don't believe what they're selling in regards to the planet and its future.

If the Liberal-National coalition takes power after the next election, and goes ahead with this plan, it will be Australia's Brexit.

The owners of the coal fired plants that the Coalition wants to replace have their own plans for reusing those sites, and the Coalition didn't bother consulting them before announcing this plan.

Australia is a federation of states like the US, and the Australian Constitution assigns responsibility for land use planning to the states. The Coalition have said they'll overrule the states, but there's no way for them to do that.

It is a long-standing arrangement that the cleverest and most talented Australians live outside Australia. Consequently, there will be great difficulty in staffing nuclear power plants. The ANSTO reactor at Lucas Heights is for research and medical isotope production; I gather that power-generating plants require different skillsets.

But like David Cameron's Brexit referendum, this isn't a serious plan - it's just a way to introduce uncertainty into the Australian energy market, to discourage investment into renewable energy. The Liberals may likely talk about free markets and the Nationals might like to wear Akubra hats like their constituents, but when it comes to policy, the Coalition is becoming to the Australian Minerals Council what Sinn Fein was to the IRA. Renewable energy is a threat to the Coalition's donors, so anything that maintains the coal-fired status quo - such as a multi-decade nuclear white elephant - is in their interest.

Please do.

We need renewables, yes, but we also need an almost-zero-pollutant power source that can be ramped up and down as needed when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

And yes, modern non-breeder reactors produce very little significantly radioactive waste. That even trends to zero when you recycle those leftovers through Thorium reactors - the waste from those reactors is only mildly radioactive for a few hundred years.

Let’s have solar and wind and hydro (where possible) first, sure, but an extensive network of nuclear power plants must be our well-implemented backup plan.

No we're not. What's happening is, Labour(left wing) has invested a chunk of change in renewables, and the Liberals(right wing)(Owned by mining & gas & fossil fuel companies) wants to keep their owners fossil fuel gravy train rolling.

So the liberals have proposed "nuclear" as "renewable" while trash-talking solar & wind, then provided a very poorly thought out plan for how to get to nuclear.(I'm not joking, for example, their plan for a power plant in Adelaide is to put it where an old coal power plant was. However, it's been shut down, decommissioned, and the land re-zoned. Also, Adelaide meets about 100% of their energy use with cheaper renewables already and is too far from anywhere else to sell the surplus. Also South Australia has said they don't want any nuclear plants.)

The purpose of the nuclear plan is the small print "We'll defund solar & wind as nuclear is our preferred renewable energy, and then we'll invest 'tens of billions of dollars' into oil and gas and coal until nuclear is ready." It'll never be ready. They'll let every interest group & nimby have their say, and just keep funneling money to oil & gas & coal all the while.