Sustainability, yes, but also a Plan B

May 19, 2025

While moving to a sustainable future, we need to ensure a balance between emerging forms of energy supply and use, and existing ones, primarily fossil fuels, in Australia. One key aspect of this, though, is the need for back-up (redundancy).

There has been a relatively recent volcanic eruption in Lombok, one in Iceland and one in Tonga. In 1275, a volcano in Lombok, Samalas, erupted with a force eight times that of Krakatoa in 1883. Dust from 1275 has been found in Svalbard in the Arctic. The climatic aspects of the 1275 eruption were still being felt in not just the Southern but the Northern Hemisphere in 1315.

There was a mini ice-age. Temperatures had fallen, crops had failed, there were famines. If we now put too many energy supply eggs in the solar and wind baskets, another Samalas would make the four years of COVID seem as nothing by comparison. Layers of cloud and ash for months, if not years on end, rendering solar panels ineffective due to lack of sun and constant need for dust removal. Wind patterns might shift, affecting wind turbines, not to mention caking of dust on the blades, requiring them to be somehow cleaned often. Biofuel production would also be affected. So we need to retain a mix of energy sources. Large batteries wouldn’t offset months of no sun or to a lesser extent changed wind patterns,

So I think we need to continue a discussion about some nuclear power, because we urgently need to reduce carbon combustion. I wonder what it is about Australia that we talk of 15 years to build a nuclear plant. The first one in the UK took only four years to build and that was with 1950s knowhow. Mind you, 3½ years into AUKUS, it seems that design of the SSN nuclear-powered craft hasn’t even begun. As to cost of reactors, China has just built the Linglong modular reactor in Hainan, but I have been unable to get cost figures from the Chinese nuclear authority, the CNNC.