Pearls and Irritations

Coalition plans to join hands with North Korea and fast-track nuclear power, how Melbourne is stretching to the South Australian border, a bipartisan board of censors to purge dirty books from public libraries. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic and political issues.

Australia’s energy transformation

Hydrogen isn’t going away; it’s just shifting in the green technology mix. The Coalition has dug itself into a 1950s model of electricity supply. Let’s not take our eye off transport emissions. Let’s not forget the workers who have been providing us with electricity for 136 years.

Other economics

Confused thinking about “regions” has us overlooking Los Angeles-style urban sprawl. What’s driven privatisation – stupidity or crony capitalism? Measuring what matters. How to support philanthropy without subsidising the rich. What researchers discovered when they paid students to put effort into exams.

Politics

We’re fortunate in Australia because our far right is disorganised. Celebrating compulsory voting.

Public ideas

Sex and politics. Immigration and taxation. Cancel culture in libraries. What we would pay to be rid of social media.

Matilda, a cautionary tale for lying politicians

Editors’ note: Republished below is a full section of Ian MacAuley’s weekly round up. Click on the links above for more of the same:

The Coalition’s nuclear power idea is based on an obsolete model of electricity supply

Circulating in the media are three arguments against nuclear power in Australia. One is based on safety, an emotive issue, involving unresolved questions about future costs, and the dangers are probably overstated. The danger issue doesn’t need to be argued, however, because the main problems with the Coalition’s nuclear power plans have to do with cost and the long time before the first kWh would be generated.

Those impediments were confirmed in a speech earlier this month by AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman: Australia’s energy transition: What’s needed to keep the momentum going. He said:

Our ISP [Integrated System Plan] does not model nuclear power because it is not permitted by Australian law, and development of nuclear power generation is not a policy of any government. But we know from our work with the CSIRO on the GenCost report that nuclear is comparatively expensive, and has a long lead time. Even on the most optimistic outlook, nuclear power won’t be ready in time for the exit of Australia’s coal-fired power stations.

The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering has just released an assessment of the viability of small modular nuclear reactors, which feature strongly in the Coalition’s proposals. These reactors are still at an early development stage: it will be many years before they become established. Although the study does not explicitly address costs, it does point out that early adopters are likely to face much higher costs than those who wait for SMRs s to become a mature product. As ATSE President Katherine Woodthorpe explains on ABC Breakfast, small modular reactors are unlikely to become a realistic energy source in Australia for decades, and our large coal-fired generators are closing in the next few years.

Writing in The Conversation Asma Aziz of Edith Cowan University reminds us of another cost component not covered in the Coalition’s plans: Without a massive grid upgrade, the Coalition’s nuclear plan faces a high-voltage hurdle. The Coalition’s idea is about replacing retiring coal-fired generators with nuclear plants, plugged into the existing transmission infrastructure. But as she points out, demand for electricity is growing rapidly, which means the cost of upgrading the transmission network should be included in the Coalition’s plans. (It is already included in the costings for renewable energy.) The other point she stresses is that all power plants, whatever their technologies, are subject to outages, planned and unplanned. A distributed set of comparatively small solar and wind plants therefore need less transmission redundancy than large centralized nuclear plants.

There is a fourth, and more basic problem with the Coalition’s nuclear proposal. It’s based on an old and inflexible “base load” model, which was determined by the technology of coal-fired generation. There has to be enough capacity in the system to cope with demand peaks, and that was achieved by keeping the boilers hot, keeping the generators spinning, and shovelling in heaps of coal as demand rose. Nuclear is a little different, in that shovels aren’t involved, but the principle is the same.

There are now more flexible and lower-cost ways to meet peaks.

Maybe nuclear power could be supplemented with peaking gas capacity – as is envisaged for renewable systems – but if there is a large nuclear base-load capacity, renewables would be a bloody nuisance. This is illustrated in a Conversation article by Bill Grace of the University of Western Australia: No room for nuclear power, unless the Coalition switches off your solar. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build, and as he says “the only way to make nuclear power work in Australia is to switch off cheap renewable energy”.

Under the AEMO Integrated System Plan, there is no fixed “base load”. With a geographic distribution of renewable sources (including some well to the west where the sun still shines while it is setting on the east coast), there will be enough electricity to meet our needs. That pattern of supply, however, won’t meet our hour-by-hour needs, which is why some type of storage is needed – batteries to meet instant short-term demand, pumped hydro to meet demand over a few hours.

Think of those storage facilities as a bank account into which you make big deposits and withdraw in many small transactions. For reliability there will be peaking generators – natural gas for some time, and in the future green hydrogen as pipelines and burners in power plants are replaced. This is not hypothetical: it’s the way South Australia is heading as Bill Grace explains. It’s the way that state will be operating in a few years’ time, as Rosemary Barnes, of Pardalote Consulting explains in a 12-minute discussion on Radio National: South Australia’s ambition to reach 100% net renewables.

Battery technology is pushing ahead quickly, lowering the cost per kWh to store electricity. In the last ten years that cost has fallen from $US780 to $US139 for lithium-ion batteries. Maybe the future will not see such a rapid cost reduction for lithium-ion batteries, but we are now seeing the development of sodium-ion batteries, which rely on much more plentiful materials than lithium and cobalt, crucial ingredients in lithium-ion batteries, as Peter Newman explains in The Conversation: Sodium-ion batteries are set to spark a renewable energy revolution – and Australia must be ready. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, but they have a lower energy density. That means per kWh stored they are heavier, which would rule them out, for now, for applications such as cars and light trucks. But they should be ideal for stationary storage to firm renewable-sourced electricity.

All the above is in the context of a debate about the comparative cost of nuclear energy and renewables. The Australian community is being distracted from that debate, because the Murdoch media and Coalition-aligned think tanks are spreading absurd misinformation and disinformation about the cost of renewable energy. They’re hard to take seriously: they’re in the same category of idiocy as Putin’s claim that Ukrainian Jewish Nazis are waging a war of aggression against Russia.

Even if nuclear power plants were cheaper than renewables (they’re certainly not), there is no way they could replace coal-fired stations as they come to the end of their lives. The lead time for nuclear power is just too long. As Michael West explains, there is a constellation of forces, including the Institute of Public Affairs, Putin’s mate Tucker Carlson, and the Murdoch media, pushing to keep oil and gas burning. That would have to involve new “base-load” coal-fired stations: there is no way to extend the life of our old stations for twenty or more years while nuclear power gets developed.

The other driver of the Coalition’s policy is an intention to cripple the renewable industry through creating uncertainty. That way they can confirm their claim that the government’s renewable plans are failing. It’s doubtful that any seriously cashed-up investor is convinced by the Coalition’s nuclear argument, but the belief that next year’s election could see the election of a government of Trumpian crazies is enough to make investors cautious. We are hearing accounts of local campaigns against renewable projects, based on spurious scientific and environmental claims, illustrated in a current campaign against a solar farm in Colbinabbin in central Victoria. The Investor Group on Climate Change notes that investors are getting cold feet because of the uncertainty raised by the Coalition. There is even a risk that the Greens, in their tried ways of over-wedging Labor, could be mustering people with local environmental concerns to stall clean energy projects, as the ABC’s Jacob Greber and Melissa Clarke explain. The Business Council wants the government to get on with the job of building renewable energy capacity.

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