Neither renewables nor nuclear can save our grid

Initially, between 1952 and 1957 Australia (for defence reasons) allowed the British to conduct 12 major atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Eventually, public opposition to the tests justifiably grew, and a moratorium on such testing began from November 1958.

Activists like Helen Caldicott from the 1970s opposed nuclear power, largely on (exaggerated?) safety grounds. In 1984, the Nuclear Disarmament Party was formed as the political arm of the Australian anti-nuclear movement. It's entire raison d'êtreseemed problematic because it is hardly possible to un-invent nuclear technology, and established nuclear powers were unlikely to unilaterally give up their weapons.

Australia introduced a legislative ban on nuclear energy via a Greens amendment in the Senate on 10 December 1998. The Howard Government at the time conceded to the ban as a means of getting legislative support for building a new nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights.

The only good thing that can be said about the ban is that it was largely immaterial at the time because coal generated power was so much cheaper than nuclear (and for Australia still is!). Cost, however, was never an impediment to governments from Rudd onwards promoting "renewable" energy, destroying almost all price signals to consumers in the process by means of massive subsidies and regulations favouring wind and solar. The extent of Australia's rooftop solar is almost entirely the result of high electricity prices, over-generous, but now reducing, feed-in tariffs, and extensive subsidies from government.

Malcolm Turnbull proposed Snowy 2.0 in 2019 as a means of overcoming issues with storing intermittent energy. It was supposed to cost about $2 billion and be commissioned by 2021. It got the go ahead without a market or engineering assessment, cost-benefit analysis or indeed even a feasibility study. The scheme had seemed a political "no-brainer" because it facilitated "renewables" and moved away from coal.

Snowy 2.0 (if now ever completed) will nominally have an energy storage capacity of 350,000 MW hours, with capacity to generate for up to 7 days at full capacity without refilling. For technical reasons, of the pumped hydro capacity promised by the project, less than half can actually be delivered A succession of cost blow-outs and time delays also mean that Snowy 2.0 is now estimated to cost at least $12 billion and will not deliver its first power until at least 2027. It is obvious that the project is totally uneconomic, and would have been scrapped several years ago, if political considerations did not prevail.

There was a related debacle with the contracted acquisition in 2016 of 12 French submarines at a cost of $50 billion. Essentially, opposition to nuclear power led the Turnbull government to reject buying the proven off-the-shelf French nuclear designs. Australia (at substantial extra cost) instead sought to dumb back a well-functioning nuclear design to a conventionally powered version. Eventually common sense prevailed, and the deal was cancelled at a taxpayer cost of about $5 billion. Australia now hopes to have eight nuclear-powered vessels in the water by the 2050s under the Aukus agreement.

A huge issue, largely overlooked in Australia, is that world-wide neither net zero nor even a reduction in CO₂ emissions look achievable into the future.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has modelled likely changes in emissions. By 2050, energy-related CO₂ emissions forecasts vary from a 2 per cent decrease to a 34 per cent increase compared with 2022. At country level, rapid growth in emissions from India and China are more than offsetting (now faltering) restraint in emissions in Western countries.

The main success story in reducing COâ‚‚ emissions has been the US. Since 1990, gross US greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 3 per cent. This has been mainly due to increased electricity generation from natural gas. Contrast the US with Australia, where use of natural gas has been discouraged and exploration curtailed. New household gas connections are now banned in Victoria and the ACT, and authorities seem stupidly reluctant to embrace gas-fired electricity, which can be fired up quickly to counter deficits from "renewables".

Australia contributes just over 1 per cent of global COâ‚‚ emissions. Former Chief Scientist Finkel was asked at Senate Estimates, what would happen if the world was to reduce its carbon emissions by an amount equal to Australia's rate of emissions. His answer was that the impact would be "virtually nothing". If net zero on the part of Australia would achieve virtually nothing for the climate, then why are we pursuing this objective at great national cost?

This all brings us to the question of why the Australian public has been so taken in by net zero and "renewables" ideology.