There is a lot of talk about whether people want to have a nuclear power station in their “backyard”. But talk is cheap.
A few months ago, a four-bedroom house in Sydney, which is less than 2 kilometres from a nuclear reactor, sold for $1.76 million.
The new homeowners seem happy to live next door to the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, which has operated safely for more than 60 years.
And others in the suburb do not seem to have an issue, with 200 houses sold, at an average price of $1.35 million, over the past year.
Likewise, as someone who lives in Central Queensland I welcome the announcement that a Liberal-National Government would build two nuclear power stations in my backyard.
We need power stations to maintain our thriving economy. Without reliable and cheap power, we will lose thousands of jobs. If that happens not many homes in my area would sell for $1 million.
There is a legitimate debate about how much nuclear energy would cost although the International Energy Agency concludes that nuclear is “the least cost option for low-carbon generation”. What there should be no debate about is that our current energy policy is not working.
Despite common misconceptions, Australia has embarked on the largest and most ambitious rollout of solar and wind energy in the world.
According to the Australian Energy Market Operator, Australia has installed, in per person terms, four times more solar and wind power than Europe or North America over the past four years.
The result has been the destruction of our once reliable grid and skyrocketing electricity prices for Australian businesses and households.
Our energy regulator must now regularly intervene in the energy “market” just to keep the lights on.
Since the Renewable Energy Act was introduced in 2000, electricity prices have more than tripled and Australia has lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs.
Australia’s experience has been repeated in every country that has gone down this path. The experiment with solar and wind energy is now more than 20 years old, yet there is still not one country in the world that has reduced its electricity prices by installing lots of solar and wind energy.
We urgently need a different approach, especially given that things could get a lot worse before they get better.
Over the next 10 years we plan to retire four times the amount of coal-fired power than has been retired over the past 10 years.
As the recent decision of the NSW Government to delay the closure of the Eraring coal-fired power station showed, we are not ready for this transition.
We cannot afford to continue to put all of our eggs in the renewable energy basket. I have never been against some solar and wind power. What any modern industrial economy needs is a mix of different types of electricity.
Take data centres for example. They are essential for the development of AI technologies, but they require power that is always on at a level of reliability greater than most heavy industrial plants.
One data centre builder told me that his contracts include a condition whereby he is penalised 20 per cent of his annual contract value if power is out for just five minutes at the data centre.
The intermittent energy supply provided by solar and wind energy is not suitable for the strict reliability requirements of AI. So Microsoft and Amazon are turning to nuclear energy to meet their needs.
If we do not look to install nuclear energy soon, we will not just lose industrial jobs, we may miss out on information jobs too.
We also need gas to provide efficient backup power and as a feedstock to industrial processes such as fertiliser production. Half of the world’s population is fed from fertilisers made by fossil fuels.
We need coal too, to maintain jobs in aluminium smelting and other energy-intensive industries. No large-scale aluminium smelter is powered by solar, wind or nuclear power.
My message that we need a balanced mix of energy types is often lost in a debate where everyone is searching for an impossible silver bullet.
Obsession leads to excess. If we move to Labor’s 82 per cent renewable energy target millions of hectares of Australia’s bushland will be desecrated. Wind requires 360 times more land than nuclear and solar takes up 75 times more land.
Solar and wind require ripping up many more backyards than nuclear.
Perhaps that is the reason why Sydney has had a nuclear reactor for 60 years but is yet to install its first industrial size solar or wind facility.
