There is lots of controversy over whether nuclear energy is more expensive than solar and wind.
These debates are always best settled by looking at the real world facts.
Germany has aggressively installed solar and wind energy over the past decade. Now it gets one-third of its electricity from solar or wind sources. It has shut all its nuclear power plants. Germans pay 54 cents per kWh for electricity.
Instead, France has kept its nuclear plants. Two-thirds of its electricity comes from nuclear energy. The French pay just 33 cents per kWh for electricity, 40 per cent lower than Germans.
And, this is not just one isolated case. Across the developed world, countries with above average shares of nuclear power have power prices that are 25% lower than developed countries with above average shares of solar and wind power.
The International Energy Agency concludes that ” … electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation.”
So why does the Labor Government persist in claiming that renewables are the cheapest form of power? They base their conclusions on a CSIRO study known as the GenCost report. There are just a few problems with this study though.
First, the CSIRO does not evaluate the cost of existing nuclear technologies. The CSIRO only provides estimates for the cost of nuclear energy from Small Modular Reactors in 2030. You can hardly use the CSIRO report as a basis to rule out existing nuclear technologies when that report does not even assess them.
Second, the CSIRO use estimates from an engineering firm Aurecon for its calculations on solar and wind energy. Aurecon are heavily involved in renewable energy projects. The GenCost report is marketed as if the calculations are from an independent government agency but the numbers come from a company with an interest in the results.
Third, the CSIRO has had to admit recently that its costs for solar and wind energy do not include all of the necessary transmission and storage costs to support renewable energy. As the CSIRO recently admitted to *The Australian* newspaper, “All existing generation, storage and transmission capacity up to 2030 is treated as sunk costs since they are not relevant to new-build costs in that year.”
The bottom line is that the CSIRO’s work provides little to no useful information on the relative cost of nuclear energy.
Yet, Australia continues to be one of the few countries to ban nuclear energy and we continue with the ban largely due to the CSIRO’s inadequate analysis.
The critics can no longer sensibly claim that nuclear is unsafe given that we are buying nuclear submarines. If a nuclear reactor is safe to sail around our coasts and dock in our ports, how could it be unsafe on land?
Our ban on nuclear energy already risks our energy security but it now risks our national security too. We would only be the 7th country to have nuclear submarines yet all of the others have large domestic nuclear energy industries to support their defence forces.
Given the national security threats we face, now is not the time to experiment with unproven approaches.
All of these facts are why myself and other LNP Senators tabled a report last week calling to remove the ban on nuclear energy.
Our nuclear ban never made much sense but now it is out of date, out of step and we are running out of time to keep our lights on and to get power prices down for families.
It is time to give nuclear energy a go.
