The low-tech, no-tech solution

Dr Ziggy Switkowski was interviewed on the ABC show Lateline on June 7, following the announcement he would be the chairman of the Federal Government inquiry into nuclear energy.

The host, Tony Jones, made the point that Australia has enough coal to provide its electricity generation needs into the foreseeable future, so it really does not need to use nuclear energy. He also noted that Australia produces relatively little greenhouse gas (1.2 per cent of the world's total) compared to the rest of the world, so building a few nuclear power plants (which would reduce our greenhouse gas production by less than 3 percent) will not save the world. With these considerations in mind, Tony Jones commented that Australia was inquiring into nuclear energy, “presumably as a lesson to the rest of the world, not in fact, to save the world”.

Dr Switkowski responded that Tony Jones’ comment was “a fair conclusion”.

Giving the rest of the world a lesson on greenhouse seems like a very high-minded ambition for a government that has not signed the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Perhaps the government has another agenda.

One issue that is not on the government’s agenda is reducing immigration to reduce greenhouse emissions. Reducing immigration would be a far more effective way to provide “a lesson to the rest of the world,” but reducing immigration is not under consideration by the government or any major party.

How does reducing immigration reduce greenhouse? Let’s look at a few numbers - just for fun.

Australians use about 10,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per person each year (International Energy Agency). A 1,000 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant running at 70 per cent efficiency would produce about 6 billion kilowatt-hours a year. That means it would serve the needs of about 600,000 Australians. Two 1,000 MW nuclear power plants would serve the needs of 1.2 million Australians.

If Australia reduced net immigration from 120,000 to 20,000 over the next 12 years that would mean 1.2 million less people living in Australia. Without the additional demand for electricity, presumably we would not need those two nuclear power plants. Global warming is a long-term problem and we’ve been told it will take about 12 years to have the nuclear debate and then get the new nuclear plants up and running, so this seems a sensible option to consider.

Another thing to consider is that using nuclear power would not reduce Australia’s other sources of greenhouse gases. Electrical-power generation produces less than half of Australia’s greenhouse gases. The rest is produced by transportation, industry, agriculture, land clearing and waste.

Australians produce about 28 tonnes of greenhouse gas per person every year. That means 1.2 million new Australians would produce about 34 million tonnes a year. The two new 1,000 MW nuclear power plants would save about 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gases if they replaced coal-fired power plants. The other 20 million tonnes of non-electricity generated greenhouse gases per year would still be produced.

Reducing immigration by 1.2 million people would save the full 34 million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, not just the 14 million tonnes produced in making electricity.

Even so, saving 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year is nothing to sneeze at. Nuclear power might be an option that will help. We need to be sure we have a safe method for storing and disposing of the hundreds (or thousands?) of tonnes of nuclear waste produced every year. We also need to find a location that is suitable and where the local people are willing have the waste stored safely for thousands of years. That won’t be easy. Currently most of the nuclear waste around the world is just held on the power plant site until it is time to decommission the plant.

The costs for decommissioning and cleaning up a nuclear power plant and disposing of all the bits and pieces safely are difficult to determine. The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority reports that cleaning up one plant (Sellafield) will cost £30 billion and the other 19 plants it has assessed will cost another £20 billion. Nuclear power opponents say those costs are too low, supporters of nuclear power say they are too high. By my reckoning, £30 billion is more than a 1,000 MW plant will earn in 40 years of operation. Perhaps we will find out in this inquiry what it will cost in Australia.

Of course, if nuclear is not acceptable to the Australian public, we will need more coal-fired power plants to meet our electricity needs. Two 1,000 MW black coal fired power plants would produce about 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year (brown coal would be 18 million tonnes).

The Federal Government has invested millions into a technology called "geosequestration" to store the CO2 underground, but the technology is as yet unproven. There are no big plants using it anywhere. The coal-fired plants would also produce about 200,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide a year and 400,000 tonnes of fly ash and other solids every year. Over 40 years that is like all the sand on a beach 25 kilometres long.

Reducing immigration by 1.2 million would mean that we didn’t have to manage all that waste from nuclear or coal-fired power generation. We also wouldn’t give our children the headache and expense of decommissioning a nuclear power plant.

But wait. There’s more. Reducing immigration won’t just allow us to have less coal-fired or nuclear power plants. It might mean that Sydney does not have to bother with its desalination plant. If half a million of those 1.2 million immigrants move to Sydney, they will need about 125 million litres of water per day and that is the volume that Sydney Water is proposing (pdf file 28.6KB) for the Kurnell desalination plant.

Avoiding the desalination plant would mean the Kurnell residents would be happier and every Sydney Water customer would save $60 per year. It would also mean that 250,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year (assuming we use coal-fired power) were kept out of the atmosphere and 250,000 tonnes of briny wastewater does not get pumped into the Pacific Ocean off Kurnell every day. What a bonus.

Reducing immigration has many clear environmental advantages, but it is unlikely to be one of the considerations in the inquiry into nuclear power. The government will nominate the “terms of reference” in the same way that it did in the inquiry into the bribery by the Australian Wheat Board in Iraq. The “terms of reference” will be designed to get the answer that the government wants. And why not? It is their inquiry. Not ours.

The current government seems willing to embrace high technology (nuclear power) and even pie-in-the-sky technology (geosequestration) options for reducing greenhouse, but the low technology or no technology solution of reducing immigration does not even get a look in. I wonder why?

It’s disappointing that the terms of reference won’t include any options about reducing the rate of immigration, because then the results of the inquiry would really provide a lesson to the rest of the world. The lesson would be that Australia is starting to get serious about tackling climate change and living sustainably.

And if Australia can do it, and we are the world’s best country to live in, then maybe the rest of the world would take a lesson from us and start to try to live more sustainably too.

It’s good to dream.