The low-tech, no-tech solution

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.