Nuclear power maybe, but coal yes

The simple brutal truth is that we will build the first nuclear power station in Australia immediately after we build the next big coal-fired plant.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The simple brutal truth is that we will build the first nuclear power station in Australia immediately after we build the next big coal-fired plant.

There are two ways to take my point.

First, that there is zero, zip, nada chance of getting either nuclear or coal.

No new coal stations, because they are impossible in a nation committed to net zero.

And, what tends to be completely forgotten, if indeed barely known out there, is that we are committed not just to zero CO2 emissions in our electricity and gas generation systems – that’s the “easy” bit – but net zero across the entire economy and society.

Net zero emissions from everything.

Except perhaps, and I say it with some uncertainty, on exhalation.

But then, secondly, if we do ever regain our national sanity and develop an aversion to national suicide, we can go back to a prosperous future built on big coal (and gas) stations.

Like China, India, and now it seems even “net zero Germany”.

We’ve got plenty of both. We really don’t “need” nuclear stations.

Even in a newly relatively sane again nation, it’s still going to be a tougher ask for nuclear.

I make two points.

First, if we can’t build even a low-grade nuclear, mostly medical, waste plant in the most sparsely inhabited continent, and we can’t, how can we ever build a nuclear power station?

I like to remind people that planning for our completely anodyne waste disposal project started around the same time in the 1980s as Hong Kong set out to build its second airport.

HK got that airport in 1998 – a full quarter-century later, we are still waiting.

My guess, is that we’ll get that waste facility, on and around the 12th of Never.

Followed immediately, on the 13th of Never, by that nuclear power station.

The “problem” with nuclear is the ability for activists to bury it in never-ending, red, green and black tape.

This extends any “approval (read: rejection) process” out, quite literally, decades (even where it’s not banned) and makes the cost horrendous.

If you could actually build nuclear power stations – with all the safeguards, but without the unnecessary delays – it would be cost-competitive.

Personally, I would see a grid built on a mix of coal, gas and nuclear as the path back to a future where electricity was cheap, plentiful and reliable.

Again, like China and India.

Indeed, such a grid could even have a place for wind and solar; a very minor place, but where those power sources made sense.

Of course, the $387bn number projected by the minister for destroying the Australian energy system, Chris Bowen, as the cost of a nuclear-based grid was ludicrously too high.

But the biggest joke of it was on Victorian premier, Chairman Dan, and even more so on eight million (permanently) suffering Victorians.

If $387bn is too much to spend to give the nation a whole fleet of new power stations, what does it say – as my friend Ken asks – about the $150bn Chairman Dan is spending on a single train line between two Melbourne suburbs?