Australia’s nuclear power debate refuses to die. The phenomenon was neatly summarised by Bernard Keane in Crikey in August:
“Nuclear power has to be the single most boring and ossified ritual in Australian public policy. Someone on the right will call for a “debate” on nuclear power. Critics will point out that nuclear power is ludicrously expensive, takes decades to build, and is prone to multi-hundred per cent cost blowouts.
“The right will then invoke, reflexively, small modular reactors, which aren’t operating anywhere in the world despite having been promised for 30 years. Someone else will then ask which electorate the proponents propose to put a reactor in. Rinse, repeat.”
As repetitive as the debate has become, there are interesting contributions from time to time.
Dr Ziggy Switkowski led the Howard government’s nuclear review in 2006 and was arguably Australia’s most prominent champion of nuclear power.
But, to his credit, Switkowski has been following the dramatic cost reductions of renewables and the equally dramatic cost escalations of nuclear power. In 2019, Dr. Switkowski dropped an atomic bombshell, stating that “the window for gigawatt-scale nuclear has closed” with renewables winning on economic grounds.
Former NSW Premier Bob Carr is another former supporter who has been swayed by the facts. Carr noted in The Australian last November that “nuclear is lumbering, subject to breakdowns and cripplingly expensive” and that “the contrast with the surge to renewables is stark.”
Conservative commentator Paul Kelly poured cold water on the Coalition’s nuclear crusaders in The Australian last November.
Kelly’s column pointed to the “popular pull of renewables” and their falling costs. He noted that “nuclear plant construction remains poor in advanced OECD nations, the main reason being not safety but its weak business case”.
Kelly also questioned the rhetoric around small modular reactors given that “none has so far been built in developed nations”.
On the politics, Kelly wrote that
“The populist conservatives have form. Before the 2019 poll, they campaigned on the mad idea that Morrison follow Donald Trump and quit the Paris Agreement. Now they campaign on the equally mad but more dangerous idea that he seek to split the country by running on nuclear power… As for those conservatives who say Morrison’s job is to fight Labor, the answer is simple. His job is to beat Labor. That’s hard enough now; vesting the Coalition with an unnecessary ideological crusade that will crash and burn only means he would have no chance.“
Some Coalition MPs seem incapable of understanding the politics. On September 28, nine ultra-conservative Coalition Senators introduced a private members bill to Parliament calling for the repeal of Howard-era legislation banning nuclear power.
But the Liberal and National senators don’t even have the support of their own parties, so their private members bill was dead on arrival.
Matt Canavan was among the group of nine Senators. He claims to oppose policies that will drive up power prices but supports nuclear power even though he has himself noted that it would increase power bills.
Perhaps he should read Paul Kelly’s column in The Australian. And he should read the work of CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator which dispels any notion that nuclear power is economically viable in Australia.
“Advanced” nuclear power
A 2019 federal parliamentary Environment and Energy Committee inquiry was controlled by Coalition MPs who were, in principle, exceedingly enthusiastic about nuclear power.
However the Committee’s report argued that the government should retain legal bans prohibiting the development of conventional, large nuclear power reactors. Committee chair Ted O’Brien said “Australia should say a definite ‘no’ to old nuclear technologies”.
The Committee’s report called for a partial repeal of legal bans to permit the development of “new and emerging nuclear technologies” including small modular reactors, but that was quickly ruled out by the Morrison government.
Nonetheless, propaganda about ‘advanced’ nuclear power persists and the Australian Conservation Foundation has released a new briefing paper debunking that propaganda.
Conventional (or ‘light water’) reactors are fuelled by uranium and cooled by ordinary (‘light’) water, which also slows (or ‘moderates’) the neutrons that maintain the nuclear chain reaction.
Advanced nuclear power generally refers to reactors – large or small – with different fuels, moderators and coolants.
Most of these concepts are far from advanced: previous R&D projects have been underwhelming or outright failures and have therefore been abandoned. In other words, most ‘Generation IV’ nuclear concepts could best be described as failed Generation I concepts.
David Elliot – author of the 2017 book Nuclear Power: Past, Present and Future – notes that many ‘advanced’ nuclear power concepts “are in fact old ideas that were looked at in the early days and mostly abandoned. There were certainly problems with some of these early experimental reactors, some of them quite dramatic.”
Physicist Dr. Edwin Lyman has written an important report for the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking claims that ‘advanced’ nuclear power concepts offer significant advantages over conventional nuclear power. The report considers sodium-cooled fast reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and molten salt reactors.
Dr. Lyman writes:
“Based on the available evidence, we found that the designs we analyzed are not likely to be significantly safer than today’s nuclear plants. In fact, certain alternative reactor designs pose even more safety, proliferation, and environmental risks than the current fleet. Developing new designs that are clearly superior to LWRs [light water reactors] overall is a formidable challenge, as improvements in one respect can create or exacerbate problems in others. For example, increasing the physical size of a reactor core while keeping its power generation rate constant could make the reactor easier to cool in an accident, but it could also increase cost.”
Small modular reactors
If developed, ‘small modular reactors’ (SMRs) would have a capacity of under 300 megawatts (MW), whereas large reactors typically have a capacity of about 1,000 MW. Construction at reactor sites would be replaced with standardised factory production of reactor components (or ‘modules’) followed by installation at the reactor site. (The term ‘modular’ can also refer to the option of building clusters of small reactors at the same site.)
SMRs don’t have any meaningful existence. Some small reactors exist, and there are hopes and dreams of mass factory production of SMRs. But currently there is no such SMR mass manufacturing capacity, and no company, consortium, utility or national government is seriously considering betting billions building an SMR mass manufacturing capacity.
Just two SMRs are said to be operating – neither meeting the ‘modular’ definition of serial factory production of reactor components. Both exhibit familiar problems of massive cost blowouts and multi-year delays.
Russia’s has a floating nuclear power plant (with two 35 MW reactors). The construction cost increased six-fold from 6 billion rubles to 37 billion rubles (A$964 million), equivalent to A$13.8 billion / gigawatt (GW).
According to the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, electricity produced by the Russian floating plant costs an estimated US$200 (A$308) / megawatt-hour (MWh), with the high cost due to large staffing requirements, high fuel costs, and resources required to maintain the barge and coastal infrastructure.
To put that in perspective, the Minerals Council of Australia states that SMRs won’t find a market in Australia unless they can produce power at a cost of A$60-80 / MWh — about one-quarter of the cost of electricity produced by the Russian plant.
Rapid construction timelines are said to be a feature of SMRs, but the Russian floating plant took 12 years to build. Russia’s plan to have seven floating nuclear power plants by 2015 was not realised.
China’s SMR
The other operating SMR is China’s demonstration 210 MW (2 x 105 MW) high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR). A 2016 article said that the estimated construction cost was about US$5 billion (A$7.7 billion) / GW – about twice the initial cost estimates – and that cost increases arose from higher material and component costs, increases in labour costs, and project delays.
The World Nuclear Association states that the cost of the demonstration HTGR is US$6 billion (A$9.3 billion) / GW. Those figures are 2-3 times higher than the US$2 billion (A$3.1 billion) / GW estimate in a 2009 paper by Tsinghua University researchers.
Wang Yingsu, secretary general of the nuclear power branch of the China Electric Power Promotion Council, said in 2021 that HTGRs would never be as cheap as conventional light-water reactors.
Construction of the demonstration HTGR began in 2012 and it was completed in 2021 after repeated delays. Thus it was a nine-year construction project, undermining claims that SMRs could be built in as little as 2-3 years.
NucNet reported in 2020 that China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Corp. dropped plans to manufacture 20 HTGRs after levelised cost of electricity estimates rose to levels higher than a conventional pressurised water reactor such as China’s Hualong One.
Likewise, the World Nuclear Association states that plans for 18 additional HTGRs at the same site as the demonstration HTGR have been “dropped”.
False promises
SMRs would be more inefficient than large reactors in every respect, and hence more costly.
A 2016 European Commission report notes that decommissioning and waste management costs of SMRs “will probably be higher than those of a large reactor (some analyses state that between two and three times higher).”
The 2016 South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission report stated: “SMRs have lower thermal efficiency than large reactors, which generally translates to higher fuel consumption and spent fuel volumes over the life of a reactor.”
A Nuclear Technology journal article notes that integral pressurised water SMRs (iPWRs) “are likely to have higher requirements for uranium ore and enrichment services compared to gigawatt-scale reactors. This is because of the lower burnup of fuel in iPWRs, which is difficult to avoid because of smaller core size and all-in-all-out core management.”
Prof. M.V. Ramana notes that “a smaller reactor, at least the water-cooled reactors that are most likely to be built earliest, will produce more, not less, nuclear waste per unit of electricity they generate because of lower efficiencies.”
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 concludes that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than conventional large reactors due to the use of neutron reflectors and/or of chemically reactive fuels and coolants in SMR designs. The study finds that water, molten salt, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste by factors of 2 to 30.
SMRs are being promoted as important potential contributors to climate change abatement but the primary purpose of the Russian floating plant is to power fossil fuel mining operations in the Arctic. Russia’s pursuit of nuclear-powered icebreaker ships (nine such ships are planned by 2035) is closely connected to its agenda of establishing military and economic control of the Northern Sea Route — a route that owes its existence to climate change. China General Nuclear Power Group plans to use floating nuclear power plants for oilfield exploitation in the Bohai Sea and deep-water oil and gas development in the South China Sea.
Too expensive
SMRs will inevitably suffer diseconomies of scale: a 250 MW SMR will generate 25 percent as much power as a 1,000 MW reactor, but it will require more than 25 percent of the material inputs and staffing, and a number of other costs including waste management and decommissioning will be proportionally higher. Potential savings arising from standardised factory production will not make up for those diseconomies of scale.
Every independent economic assessment finds that electricity from SMRs will be more expensive than that from large reactors.
A study by WSP / Parsons Brinckerhoff, commissioned by the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission, estimated costs of A$225 / MWh for SMRs based on the NuScale design under development in the US. As noted above, the Minerals Council of Australia states that SMRs won’t find a market unless they can produce power at a cost of A$60-80 / MWh — about one-third of the WSP / Parsons Brinckerhoff estimate for NuScale technology.
In its July 2022 GenCost report, CSIRO provides these 2030 cost estimates for Australia:
* Nuclear (small modular): A$136-326 / MWh
* Wind and solar PV with integration costs (transmission, storage and synchronous condensers) necessary to allow these variable renewables to provide 90 percent of demand in the National Electricity Market: A$61-82 / MWh.
Australia’s energy future is renewable, not radioactive
The pursuit of SMRs or ‘advanced’ nuclear power in Australia would be expensive and protracted. The South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission stated in its 2016 report:
“Advanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment.”
The federal Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources expects 69 percent renewable supply to the National Electricity Market by 2030. The Albanese Government’s target is 82 percent renewable supply to the National Electricity Market by 2030.
State and territory governments (including Liberal/Coalition governments) are focused on the renewables transition. Tasmania leads the pack thanks to its hydro resources. South Australia is another pace-setter: wind and solar supply 64 percent of local power generation and SA could reach its target of net 100 percent renewables within a few years.
The pursuit of nuclear power would slow the transition to a low-carbon economy. It would increase electricity costs. It would unnecessarily introduce challenges and risks associated with high-level nuclear waste management and the potential for catastrophic accidents.
The pursuit of nuclear power in Australia makes no sense whatsoever. Australia’s energy future is renewable, not radioactive.
Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and co-author of the ACF’s briefing paper, ‘Wrong reaction: Why ‘next-generation’ nuclear is not a credible energy solution’.
