Well, having just posted on this topic a couple of days ago, was heartened to see a nuclear spread in the Weekend Austalian today. All good discussion in my opinion:
Power Vacuum
THE year is 2030 and the picture from space is clear: a robust strip of development that has become known as the Brisbane-Sydney corridor stretches from the northern reaches of Queensland's Sunshine Coast down to the southern Illawarra in NSW.
In the two decades since 2010, burgeoning regional cities such as the Gold Coast, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Newcastle and Wollongong have blended into the expanding boundaries of Sydney and Brisbane to create an almost continuous 1000km coastal sliver where many of Australia's now 30 million people live, work and play.
Farther south around Melbourne, the Victorian mortgage belts have continued to leach unabated into the bush, a suburban creep familiar in Adelaide, too.
Across in the west, after yet another five-year mining boom, three million people call themselves Perth residents, while north to the Northern Territory -- long considered nothing more than a charming outback holiday destination -- Darwin has morphed into a strategic stronghold, Asia-savvy and home to Australia's military and border security operations.
The demands on infrastructure remain extraordinary. State and territory governments struggle to keep up with the need of a mobile, sophisticated society whose high disposable incomes lead to rising consumption of services, goods and housing.
And, of course, energy.
While population projections are rarely pinpoint accurate, one thing is certain: Australia's energy needs will become dramatic and urgent as we head towards 2030. By then we'll be using more than 30 per cent more energy than we do now. So what will be our primary energy source in an era when many worry about carbon fuel and global warming?
On Thursday, federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson flew to Perth to witness the signing of an agreement between Canada's Mega Uranium and a Japanese-backed consortium that aims to kick-start a uranium mine at Lake Maitland, 1000km northwest of Perth. BHP hopes to open Yeelirrie, about 100km west of Lake Maitland, with the backing of West Australian Premier Colin Barnett, who overturned Labor predecessor Alan Carpenter's strong opposition to uranium mining within months of winning office last year.
Also on Thursday, BHP said it would step up uranium exports to China from its Olympic Dam operation in South Australia, a copper, gold and silver mine that produces uranium as a by-product.
Although federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett's much publicised approval of expansion plans for the country's smallest mine, at Beverley in SA, has caused some derision, it signals that, regardless of pastpolitical biases, it's all systems go for uranium mining and exploration.
The 10,000 tonnes of uranium oxide we export each year, enriched in nuclear converters and processing plants in the US, Britain, Russia and Japan, heads to the 450 reactors worldwide.
Demand is strong from France, which gleans more than 70 per cent of its domestic electricity from nuclear energy, the US (19 per cent), South Korea (35 per cent), Finland (29 per cent), Sweden (46 per cent) and Britain and Canada (both 15 per cent). The debate over uranium mining has been fought and won. Australia has one of the world's largest deposits of uranium and the expertise to safely mine it. That said, mining is a dangerous business. Five workers have died at BHP iron ore sites in the Pilbara in the past year.
But the use of nuclear power as a domestic energy source is very much another issue.
In these green-aware times, the Rudd Labor government remains careful to be seen to encourage all aspects of clean energy, such as tidal and wave power and wind and solar, but just can't bring itself, publicly at least, to consider nuclear energy. The political realities dictate that gas and, in particular, coal remain our primary sources of electricity.
This week Rio Tinto urged Kevin Rudd to consider the nuclear option, which sparked the federal Coalition opposition to call for uranium to be used to generate domestic electricity. All this activity has given the nuclear industry a sniff of what might be.
Former Telstra boss Ziggy Switkowski, a nuclear physicist whose 2006 report for the Howard government on the possibilities of nuclear energy recalibrated official thinking on the issue, this week outlined another vision for discussion: the creation of "non-threatening" mini-reactors in remote parts of the country that could power desalination plants, smelters or mining towns up to 100,000 people. This would allow concerned Australians to watch the experiment, then consider whether nuclear energy was a cleaner, more cost-efficient and, most important, safer alternative.
Switkowski, chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, believes public opinion is shifting as more people focus on the environment. While acknowledging that many people are still gun-shy after the horrors of the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union, his antennae are detecting a softening of a once very hardened attitude against nuclear energy.
Australians generally supported nuclear energy as a viable alternative to coal but were less enthusiastic about embracing nuclear reactors, he told a Perth conference on Wednesday.
"We need to have a debate about the facts, we need to have an agreed national strategy about greenhouse gas reductions, we need to create a regulatory regime to oversee the nuclear power industry and we need to have bipartisan (political) support," he said.
But even putting aside the politics of such a monumental decision to introduce nuclear energy, the hurdles are high and many over a very long road.
Costs, reliability, efficiency compared with coal and the greener natural gas, location of reactors, their safe and secure operation, the enrichment process of uranium oxide to U235 fuel and the vexed question of disposing high-level waste in the form of spent fuel rods -- which can be radioactive for millennia -- are some of many concerns.
According to research done by the University of Wollongong with the University of Chicago, figures show that coal remains the cheapest source of electricity, closely followed by nuclear, then wind, gas, tidal, geothermal and solar. The equation used by scientists is dollar divided by kilowatts used over an hour.
But there are plenty of variables when it comes to comparing coal with nuclear, such as the availability of fuel, capital costs of building the plants and reactors, insurance costs (which are much higher for nuclear reactors), operating and maintenance, government taxes and the fuel needed to operate the plant or reactor: the coal, the gas, the uranium. Location is also a factor. We've got plenty of space to build reactors, but with isolation comes big monetary costs associated with transmission of the energy created, the transportation of the water to create the steam that powers the turbines, and the movement and proper working conditions of those who will operate them.
Those costs obviously have not been factored into any potential penalties that may arise when world leaders sit down in Copenhagen in December to consider various emissions targets and carbon trading schemes.
Some experts argue that evolving technologies, such as so-called clean coal and carbon sequestration, may well cancel out various advantages one form of energy generation may enjoy over the other, but the nuclear industry continues to trumpet its safety record since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in the US.
It also argues that regardless of technological advances, burning fossil fuels will never come close to the low-level emissions achieved through the nuclear option. In this politically aware electorate, that is a very big plus.
The nuclear power industry also points to the new generation of reactors, such as the "breeders" being considered across the US and throughout the EU, which can create more fissile material -- material that creates energy through chain reactions -- than it consumes. This dramatically cuts what goes into the reactor and what comes out.
The coal industry is fighting back, claiming that developments and efficiencies have ensured that carbon capture and storage is a safe, green and long-term alternative to nuclear power.
It needs to do something. NSW and Victoria remain the leading polluters through coal-fired power stations in the Hunter and Latrobe valleys, which spew out more than 120 million tonnes of greenhouse gases every year. Those in Queensland, including Stanwell, Gladstone and Swanbank, produce about 40 million tonnes while Western Australia and SA emit about 15 million tonnes.
That said, the Australian coal industry is a leading employer along the eastern seaboard and it also happens to be heavily unionised; not a good dog to kick, particularly if you happen to be a Labor administration on both state and federal levels.
Despite the uncertainties facing the coal industry, it can take some comfort that any gains by the nuclear power industry will be punctuated by one pivotal question above any other: What to do with the waste, which can still be radioactive well into the next millennium? This is, and always has been, the nuclear industry's achilles heel.
There is one repository for the small amount of low-level waste at the country's only research reactor, Sydney's Lucas Heights. ANSTO wants Garrett to expand its capacity as it waits for the Rudd government to consider a central commonwealth waste dump. Three sites near Katherine and Alice Springs were identified by the Howard government. A decision of some sort is expected by 2011.
Overseas, the Swedish government, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, has decided to create a dump more than 500m down into a layer of bedrock near Oesthammar, 200km north of Stockholm. The highly radioactive waste is expected to stay there for the next 100,000 years.
But in the US the issue has become a serious social and environmental problem. President Barack Obama has decided that Nevada's Yucca Mountain, targeted more than 22 years ago as the country's primary nuclear waste dump, is off the drawing board. He has withdrawn budget funding for the site -- violently opposed by locals and politicians for two decades and aggressively fought through the US courts -- and has asked Americans for a serious debate on the alternatives to solve the country's nuclear waste problems.
This would be the defining issue of any public acceptance of nuclear energy in Australia.
Jorg Imberger, from the University of Western Australia's Centre for Water Research and WA's Scientist of the Year last year, believes the start-up costs of a nuclear reactor would be 20 per cent more expensive than a new coal-fired station that produces more than 1000 megawatts of power, but that's not taking into account any carbon penalty post-Copenhagen.
While a strong supporter of geothermal power and other renewable options, he believes they are not technologically ready or commercially viable to be introduced as alternatives to our traditional energy sources. Nuclear energy is.
According to Imberger's calculations, if WA went nuclear, the small amount of high-level radioactive waste -- after 1000 years it would be less than 14 Olympic swimming pools 2.5m deep -- could be easily accommodated in stable, remote geological sites across the state. He believes the next generation of power plants are producing less waste and risk. And he says that, by 2030, fusion, the same process as the sun's heat and which creates no waste -- will be used in the generation of energy.
With the issue of uranium mining in Australia dead and buried, so to speak, the next phase of the debate about our nuclear future is about to begin. And Copenhagen will be the starter's gun.
