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I don't know much about the politics of this in Australia, but at you have uranium exports already, wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power?

• Full_Clark 3y ago
  Coal and gas are major domestic industries and major export earners for Australia, so for a very long time it was a) political suicide to do anything that undermined them and b) simply way too expensive to bring nuclear power into the baseload mix compared to fossil-fuel plants. So the government wasn't going to subsidize it and private industry couldn't make a decent ROI on it. A decade ago Australia repealed its emissions trading scheme, which would have made nuclear much more competitive economically. If the politics at the time were different, and a strong carbon market brough nuclear power into the conversation then, some large plants might be nearing completion this decade. They'd be a reasonable chance to make a serious contribution to decarbonizing Australia's energy mix. But it's only in 2022 that the Australian population elected a government that took climate change seriously. With the timing of the net-zero pledges the new government has put in place, it seems like it's just far too late to put nuclear into the mix without paying hefty premiums for speed of completion. Finally, Australia is physically very large but the population is relatively small. Less than one-twelfth of the US population, less than half of the UK or France's population. It might simply be too small of an economy to establish a domestic nuclear engineering industry and training pipeline. If that's true, it'd be a very tough sell telling people it's time to pay extra on their power bill or taxes to stand up a nuclear industry from scratch ... and most of that money will go to foreign companies and immigrant SMEs.
• bananapub 3y ago
  > you have uranium exports already nope! Australia is big into mining - dig a hole, put the contents of the hole on a ship to a country that puts more effort into things, cash the cheques. actually doing things with the contents of the whole is a lot of work and requires whole industries full of expertise and training pipelines and industrial policy, so it's easier to just dig holes->ship contents of holes. even owning the mining companies is not a popular hobby - much better to sell out to a big foreign company and take the cash, then they can worry about even the hole digging. if you've ever heard of the Resource Curse, Australia is one of the rare Rich Western Country victims of it - it's all too easy, and so everything else gets left by the wayside. and then the mining industry is rich, so has lots of lobbyists and pet politicians who cement it's power - even easy things like a Mining Super Profit Tax that would have just cut some of the profits that got sent overseas to fund developing other parts of the economy got scaremongered by a huge mining industry lobbying push and never happened. we are very very fucked if mining stops being easy and/or profitable. > wouldn't it be an ideal country to build nuclear power? nope! a few reasons: - it's a small population - less than a tenth the population of the US. having a nuclear power industry has enormous fixed costs. you need a web of companies that work on the various bits, you need universities and apprenticeships churning out experts, you need absolutely fucking enormous government subsidies, and you need to do that for decades. - Australian politicians are - partly because of the above - very used to not working hard, so trying to convince people that they need to pay even more for electricity to subsidise a new nuclear power industry - and like mining above, that's almost entirely going to be going to foreign companies. - renewables are absolutely fucking easy and cheap and quick. Australia is the size of western europe or nearly as big as the main bit of the USA, so you can just deploy thousands of square kilometers of solar panels or wind, across multiple timezones, across multiple climactic regions, etc. nonetheless, people whinge about this, including actual real federal ministers claiming that wind turbines on farms are "eyesores". - it's too late - even countries that have nuclear reactors take decades to build them, so starting now, even with political will and competence, would take, say, twenty years to turn the first one on. Australia needs to be net zero before then. so if people want to argue about deploying nuclear power in Australia, then go for it, but it needs to 1) not delay actual work now, which will mass deployment of renewables and storage and 2) it needs a plan to compete with renewables costs in 2050. saying "oh hey, let's do nuclear, it'll cost way more and won't be here until your grandkids are born, also you'll be subsidising it" is a very very poor sales pitch.