Skip to main content

Hitting Pay Dirt in Australia

We published a sour editorial the other day from Australia to show we had to go down under for a negative view of our loan guarantee. But let’s not sell Australia short – we’ve run enough material over the last couple of years to show the country is grappling seriously with ending its long standing ban against nuclear energy. Our experience is that once the conversation gets going, it’s hard to imagine it not getting to its conclusion – which is usually to the good of the atom.

Tony Owen told the Paydirt 2010 conference the "enabling investment" would allow Australia to have a serious debate on a nuclear industry. He said nuclear power was likely to be the nation's best option after 2030.

Professor Owen, who heads the Australian energy campus at University College, London, said new power generation plants over the next 20 years would be fired by gas or renewables, the latter driven by government support and eventually a price on carbon.

Well. on the one hand, he would say that and still on the same hand, the Paydirt conference is all about uranium, so this kind of talk is catnip, or perhaps paydirt, to the audience. Here’s another take:

Yet connecting the dots between now and 2050 for electricity should be clear. The widespread use of coal makes way for gas as the primary fuel in Australia, after which nuclear power becomes the load-bearing girder for baseload electricity generation (including that required to power an electric vehicle and hydrogen economy) by mid-century.

And another:

If Australia really wants base-load energy security and an industrial future, together with cost effective carbon reduction, it should follow South Korea's example. South Korea has recently won an international tender to build four nuclear power stations for the United Arab Emirates. Within a few decades it anticipates a nuclear power order book in excess of $300 billion.

Although there is still a lot of anti-nuclear energy activity in Australia – it and neighbor New Zealand were once the least nuclear friendly countries around – that’s rapidly fading, or perhaps, more accurately, being engaged by a strong pro-nuclear contingent with good arguments to offer.

Still a ways to go here, but worth keeping an eye on.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Australia is taking small and consistent steps towards nuclear.
They are considering nuclear power for their new submarine designs. This is exactly the same path by which the US adopted nuclear power in the 1950s and 60s. They will grow an industrial infrastructure, and a technical pipeline of talent by following this path.
They are doing all of the necessary steps to make a competent entry into nuclear power.

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin