Some issues with the energy minister’s claim that nuclear is just ‘hot air’

Yet Mr. Bowen continues with his opposition, bizarrely claiming in an op-ed in The Australian that the opposition's embrace of nuclear is a "culture war." At the COP28 conference held this year in Dubai, 25 countries signed up to the Declaration of Triple Nuclear because their engineers are telling them it is impossible to reach net zero at anything like a reasonable cost without nuclear in the mix.

These countries include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, and South Korea.

Is the minister suggesting we are in a culture war with some of our most important allies and trading partners? Or is this the cookie-cutter political rhetoric of a man who tuns the same phrases on his political opponents, no matter what the issue?

Nuclear's unpopular?

Mr. Bowen's article carried a large number of untrue, or deceptive, claims.

Typical of many renewables advocates he boosts the amount being installed by substituting capacity for output. It may be true that, "Last year, the world installed 440GW of renewable capacity. This is more than the world's entire existing nuclear capacity."

Except that 440 GW of renewable capacity only operates around 30 percent of the time, while nuclear can manage over 90 percent, so it's more like one-third of existing nuclear capacity.

Currently,

there are 80 GW of nuclear capacity under construction, the equivalent of around 240 GW of renewables, 117 GW planned, or 351 GW renewables equivalent, and 360 GW proposed, or 1,080 GW of renewables equivalent.

He also claims that by next year, renewables will surpass coal as a share of power generation.

As the graph below, derived by Our World in Data from International Energy Association data, demonstrates, this is only likely in a parallel universe.

(Our World in Data)