[Peetwo]

Nuclear Energy v Aviation Down Unda: 'Is the air and laws of physics different down here??'  

I note that in the hallowed halls of our Parliament the rational, commonsense arguments for Australia adopting nuclear energy are slowly but surely gaining momentum...    

From BJ 2 days ago:

Nuclear Energy

 

Mr JOYCE (New England) (18:49): It's great to get this opportunity to take you for a little wander around the world, which I want to do right here. I want to take you for a wander around the nuclear world and enlighten people about how Australia is now an outlier—a ridiculous outlier.

Let's start with who uses nuclear power in North America. Remember, North America has Death Valley; it's got hot areas; it's got sunny areas; it's got windy areas; it's got everything—every asset that they attribute to Australia. Well, Canada uses nuclear power. In fact, even Ontario's power is about half the price of the power that we have. The United States has nuclear power. And Mexico has nuclear power. So we have a clean sweep in America—not in Central America but in America.

You might say, 'Well, that's unusual, or not unique,' so let's go for a wander around Europe. Who uses nuclear power? Spain uses it; France uses it; Belgium does. These are the people that actually have nuclear reactors. The ones with nuclear reactors that produce electricity from them are Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland and Sweden. And then you might say, 'Oh, hang on—you've left Germany out.' No; they use nuclear power from France. What France is doing at the moment is: their power is around about our price, and people think, 'What's the trick there?' Well, they are making a bucketload of money out of the Germans, because the Germans are using the French nuclear power, and so they're absolutely creaming it in France. And the Germans are trying to refurbish their coal-fired power plants.

But then you might think, 'Maybe it's just a European thing or an American thing.' So this is the one that's interesting. Oh, by the way, going back to Europe: the other countries that are developing it are Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Italy. They're actually in the process of developing it. So you've almost got a clean sweep through Europe. You've almost got clean sweep through North America. And you've virtually got a clean sweep through Europe. There are only a couple of countries that do not use nuclear power. Ireland is one, and possibly Portugal, but they could be using it from Spain. There's Denmark, but maybe they actually pick it up from France as well; they could be picking it up from the Netherlands; and then, when Poland gets going, they could be picking it up from Poland.

Let's go to Africa. Now, I think that we've probably got some advantages over Africa.

An honourable member: They can't afford it.

 Mr JOYCE: Oh, no; you're dead right! This is the myth: 'You can't afford it, it's so expensive.' Well, there are a few countries that apparently believe they can afford it! South Africa already has it, and these are the countries that are now developing it: Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia. So I hope the penny is just starting to drop, somewhere, that the world has changed! The world is moving on, and it's leaving us behind with Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and a couple of other countries that are just like us—Angola is just like us; it's not looking at it either. Oh, and Somalia—we've got a friend in Somalia; they're not looking at it. So this is ludicrous.

Let's go to the Middle East. The countries there that use it are Iran, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.
Of course Russia uses it. We don't even need to say Russia.

But these are the countries that are now developing it: Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt and of course the United Arab Emirates. Oh, by the way, the United Arab Emirates have got four plants. It took them eight years to get the first one up and running. It was operational, producing electrons for the grid, within eight years.

What's so frustrating about this is that there's a lot of Australian expertise that actually assists in this. From helping them to draw up the legislation to world's best gold-standard practice, Australians are actually in that process—technicians. The one place these Australians can't work is here, because we don't actually have it! But maybe it's just in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and North America.

So let's go to South-East Asia. China, of course, in the next 15 years, will be in the process of developing 150 new nuclear reactors. I'll repeat that: in the next 15 years they're looking to go into the production and the planning of another 150 new nuclear reactors. And they're using it as a mechanism, with Russia, to leverage their influence in other countries, where they're saying, 'We'll provide you with the technology to do this.' This is why a lot of those countries in Africa are on board. If we want to have a moral movement of effect in the world, wouldn't we be saying, 'Use our technology,' so that we could put our fingerprints on this?

Let's go through South-East Asia. Japan uses it; South Korea uses it; China uses it; India uses it—in fact, they're expanding it. In fact, South Korea and Japan are at the forefront of the technology of developing nuclear reactors that they sell to other countries. But then let's go to the people who are developing it: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. They're all in the process of development; they're way ahead of us.

There are two countries—away from Angola and Somalia—known in the world that have gone nowhere near this: New Zealand and Australia. We are out there. We are really out there. Even Greta Thunberg supports nuclear energy. It is this ridiculous position that we have got ourselves into, in this country, where we are sort of Luddites. We are sitting back decades—we are literally sitting back in the last century—in our view of this technology. And the world has moved on.

There's a really simple thing about most of these nuclear reactors. Enrichment for plutonium for atomic weapons—which is very dangerous—is 98 per cent. With these nuclear reactors, we're talking about nothing—most of it is not beyond five per cent. It's a completely different technology that so many people are just unaware of. The people who are most unaware of it—who are the most, basically, nuclear-power illiterate—are us. We have a nuclear reactor bang smack in the middle of Sydney, and incredibly smart people, but as to the production of nuclear power, we're the ones that are illiterate. The reports we rely on to underwrite our ignorance are Australian reports, but Australia doesn't produce nuclear energy. We should be using the Finnish reports, or the French reports, or the Canadian reports, or the American reports, or the Chinese reports, or the Russian reports, or the Estonian reports, or the Spanish reports, or the Brazilian reports, or the Argentinian reports, or the Mexican reports—reports from all these other parts of the world.

Our role—we're seeing it right now. Right now, or in a few hours, they're going to start—or they've already started voting in America, actually. They started in New Hampshire—

An honourable member interjecting— 

 Mr JOYCE: All six of them. But what we've got to understand is that Australia has one role. To be quite frank, the rise of totalitarianism in comparison to democracy is vastly more evident and vastly more powerful than it was before the Second World War. There is absolutely no doubt about it. If you look at the totalitarian countries, like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—who are sending their troops over to Ukraine now, so this is real—they're vastly more powerful than the comparative power of the fascists before the start of the Second World War. What does that mean for us? It means don't panic, but become as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible. Every section of what you do must be at the top. You must be at the top in education. You must be at the top in agriculture. You must be at the top in manufacturing. You must be at the top in nuclear technology and power. You must be at the top. This is one of the areas where we've just got to accept the reality of where the world is, and get on board.

I'll give you another little epiphany. Sweden has 14 offshore swindle factories—windfarms, or whatever you want to call them. Anyway, they're closing 13 of them down. They're out of it. It's not working for them. They've got massive environmental concerns about them. They've got massive strategic concerns about them, especially with submariners and strategic issues as to how sonar works and the problems that has caused. I don't want our nation to be up to our throat in an obsolete technology, so that reality can just come and belt us on the head and say, 'Why on earth did you do that?' The answer was right before you. It was right in front of you, but your own a wilful ignorance took your nation to a weaker spot.

 
This is solid GOLD! - 

Courtesy Nuclear for Australia, via YouTube:

Hearing gets HEATED: Nuclear Expert Adi Paterson challenges Dan Repacholi

PATERSON, Dr Adrian (Adi), Founder and Principal, Siyeva Consulting

CHAIR: I have some questions now. My questions are around timeframe. The 2035 to 2037 period that the
coalition has put together seems to be, from our previous hearings, very unrealistic. If the coalition were to win
the next federal election, it would spend the next 2½ years—essentially the whole term—on community
consultation and site studies for its nuclear program. Do you think this is a reasonable first step?

Dr Paterson: We have an excellent regulator in the form of ARPANSA. You would have to increase the
number of people at ARPANZA. It's a world-class regulator. It's way better than the NRC, and I have the highest
regard for them. ASNO is a world-class regulator for security. You could beef up that regulatory structure in six
months.

CHAIR: That regulatory structure is very different, though, from the current one that we have—

Dr Paterson: It's exactly the same. It is absolutely no different. It's exactly the same. It is a furphy to say that
the regulator, ARPANSA, could not do that job. They are globally respected.

CHAIR: I didn't say they couldn't do the job, Dr Paterson; I did not say that at all.

Dr Paterson: What did you say? You asked me a question.

CHAIR: What I did say was that they're two very different things, having a small—

Dr Paterson: No, they're not. They are both nuclear reactors.

CHAIR: Yes. They're very different sizes, though, aren't they?

Dr Paterson: But size—

CHAIR: There are also state regulations that we've got to go through.

Mr TED O'BRIEN: Chair, can we hear his response? You're interrupting. He's trying to give his response.

Dr Paterson: With the greatest respect, Chair, there is no difference between the size. The risk is not related
to size. The risk is related to security safeguards and safety. The safety of modern generation III+ nuclear plants is
absolutely assured. They have been licensed around the world. If credit is given through the international
licencing agencies for the licensing that has already happened to the plants that are being built, does Australia
need to do it again? Is there something about the Southern Hemisphere that we don't know? When we took the
licensing of aircraft and we generalised it to single licenced aircraft internationally, it reduced the cost of air
travel. It was done much more rapidly. Our travel today is based on mutual recognition between respected
regulators in free countries that are democratic. We are not free in respect to nuclear, so, with the greatest respect
to your view that this will take a long time, if we recognise others who have done this work to the gold standard
that has been established all around the world, we wouldn't have to do the reregulation in order to persuade
ourselves that the laws of physics are different in Australia; they're identical.

CHAIR: Going with that, let's say it's 2028, and a site has been selected. How long would it take for the
studies, the preparation, the planning and the documents to pass through the planning process, including
objections, to run to international tender for construction, to sign the contract and to arrange finance, to start
mobilisation on site and to complete all civil works required for construction and then to build the actual reactor
and then to commission the reactor? How long do you think that would take?

Dr Paterson: It would take about three years longer than it took for the OPAL reactor.

CHAIR: And how long was the OPAL reactor?

Dr Paterson: That was eight years.

CHAIR: So you're saying it will take 11 years to do.

Dr Paterson: Yes, which is about as fast as the current process, if it were properly regulated and ecologically
controlled, for a row of wind turbines. But the problem with the wind turbines is that they're only available two
days a week. The problem with solar panels is they are only available one day a week. What are you going to do
about the problem of 100 per cent electricity for Aussies all the time at a reasonable cost? It cannot be done. I've
told you about Riddell's work. We know from the published engineering literature. My sense of urgency is that
whatever people say about renewables is true—they can do certain things. But they cannot provide, under the
AEMO plan, reliable electricity to Australians. We have a plan that will fail. If we allow our engineers to work on
a proper plan when the bans have been lifted—who would do a career in nuclear in Australia at the moment? It's
banned.

CHAIR: If we go to Czechia, for instance, it's taken 16 years from tender to commercial operation for their
plant to be done there, and they've been in the nuclear industry for 66 years. That's 16 years for a group that has
been involved in it for a long time. Let's go to a new one where they didn't have nuclear to start with, which is the
UAE. They had 15 years, and they got theirs through in that time. How would Australia get one through in that
period of time considering we don't have the workforce, considering we don't have all of the experience that
Czechia had, for instance, and considering we also have health and safety measures for our workforce that the
UAE currently don't have in and around what happens to their workforce. How could we get it done in that
timeframe?

Dr Paterson: I'll start with the UAE.

CHAIR: Could we be quick on this please because we've only got two minutes left

Mr TED O'BRIEN: The question went for about that long. I think we should give him enough time to answer
the question comprehensively.

Dr Paterson: They are very good questions, and I really appreciate the chance to answer them. In the case of
the UAE, they started from a zero base. They had no nuclear capacity in the country, and they needed to build up
their workforce, and the workforce had to do the job effectively. They went from not having a regulator and not
having any infrastructure, and they set themselves what they called the gold standard—they would meet all the
international requirements fully and do it in a period of time. If you take the set-up that we wouldn't have to do,
which is establish regulators and do all of that sort of stuff which they still had to do and pass all those laws, and
then if you take the period that it actually took from first concrete to first electrons, depending on if you use the
US system or the UK system, that was either 12 years or eight years. From a standing start, they built Korean
APR-14,000 plants with the workforce they sourced internationally, including a whole bunch of Aussies. They
put them together and turned them into a machine to make nuclear reactors, and they did it in that period of time.
We need about the same set of skills and the same number of people just to build the grid that we have to build.
The question is: how long will it take us to build the grid? If we take the people who would be employed to build
the grid and give them really interesting jobs—building nuclear power plants where you don't have to go out and
run up and down a new grid, where you can be close to the grid, you can get skills that you can take to the second
plant and the third plant, and you have an integrated plan with everybody working together—that would be an
absolute wonderful thing to do.

Czechia is really interesting. They still make cars. They understand the value of energy density; they're a small
country which is highly technical. Why did it take them so long? They've got an incredible population density.
Their challenge is finding a place where you can put up a plant where you cannot bump into a whole lot of
people. The remarkable thing about Czechia was that it took them a bit longer to get the social licence on the
ground, but, because they have all of the technical capabilities in their economy, they didn't have to bring
anybody in to do it.

Remember that the timescales you're talking about are two battery life cycles. Batteries last 9.8 years. You
have to replace them every 10 years; I'm a battery expert. So every battery we build in this country, which is
apparently cheap and is going to save our lives, is going to be replaced every 10 years. What does that do to our
workforce? What does that do to our economics? If we don't go for the best energy with the lowest carbon and
with the highest reliability in the world and if we maintain the bans, I'd say simply to you: lift the bans, create an
enabling environment, let the market do its work and create the labour force that will benefit from working at the
cutting edge of the next generation of technology for hundreds of millions of people around the world who need
Australia to be the place that takes our nuclear energy into their developing nation.

CHAIR: I just need a yes or no answer to this question, please: are you saying that we could build seven
nuclear power plants within 11 years in this country?

Dr Paterson: If you and I sat in a room and planned it, we could do it.

CHAIR: Thank you for your time today. If you have been asked to provide any additional information,
including questions on notice, please forward it to the secretariat by Monday 25 November. Please note that the
responses to questions on notice will be published on the website as submissions to the inquiry. If any of the
committee members have extra questions they would like to ask, please forward them to the secretariat. You will
be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence to assist you with answering questions taken on notice today, and
you will have an opportunity to request corrections to the transcript. Thank you.

Hmmm...why does this quote ring so many bells??

"...The safety of modern generation III+ nuclear plants is absolutely assured. They have been licensed around the world. If credit is given through the international licencing agencies for the licensing that has already happened to the plants that are being built, does Australia need to do it again? Is there something about the Southern Hemisphere that we don't know? When we took the licensing of aircraft and we generalised it to single licenced aircraft internationally, it reduced the cost of air travel. It was done much more rapidly. Our travel today is based on mutual recognition between respected regulators in free countries that are democratic. We are not free in respect to nuclear, so, with the greatest respect to your view that this will take a long time, if we recognise others who have done this work to the gold standard that has been established all around the world, we wouldn't have to do the reregulation in order to persuade ourselves that the laws of physics are different in Australia; they're identical..." 

However for mine the best example of a well researched, learned understanding of the truths, science and costs of nuclear energy generation vs the renewables fantasy, coupled with a negation of the politics of nuclear energy, then IMO you can't go past the consummate Senator David Fawcett...  

Former Experimental Test Pilot Explains CSIRO Modelling On Cost Of Nuclear

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad the minister made that last comment, because as somebody with a background in science and a qualification in science, and as a former experimental test pilot in the military—in fact, having commanded Australia's flight test centre and worked in a systems engineering environment where we were very much based on facts, data and engineering, but with a good dose of modelling in there as well—I'm actually very familiar with the sort of approach that the CSIRO has taken. As the minister indicated, we do have things like Senate estimates, and I did take the opportunity to go to Senate estimates to speak to the CSIRO about the GenCost report. It may come as a surprise to the minister that, when I asked the head of the CSIRO to speak about the GenCost report, having made it clear to the committee that I intended to appear at those estimates hearings to ask about the GenCost report—therefore, the expectation is that the agencies that are being quizzed will bring the appropriate officials in order to be able to answer detailed questions at estimates—I was told that the appropriate officials were not there, and the only responses that I got to some reasonably detailed questions were very generic. So, contrary to what the minister has indicated, estimates actually proved completely useless in terms of interrogating the CSIRO over the GenCost report. I can't speak to the motivation of CSIRO in not bringing those officials, but what it meant was that members of the Senate, on behalf of the taxpayers of Australia, were not able to scrutinise them in any detail.

If we took the minister's contention that he just outlined then and applied it more broadly, there would be no point in having committees of the parliament at all. In matters to do with health, for example, we might ask the AMA to draft our policy and scrutinise it. In matters to do with defence, we would rely on the defence department and perhaps defence industry, and there would be no point in having any scrutiny on behalf of the Australian taxpayer. Yet the minister knows full well, because he has been a member of committees in this place, that the whole function of committees and the Senate committee process—getting a range of witnesses who are stakeholders affected by policy or who are subject matter experts who understand the technical details, whether in health, in economics or in defence; you name it—is so that we can unpack and understand what is behind a policy or a piece of evidence. - P2: Plus indeed the aviation industry..

The last point I'll make on this, since the minister has so kindly given me this introductory runway to approach this issue, relates to the 2019 House of Representatives inquiry into the possibility of a nuclear power industry. This is going back to the 2018 GenCost report. I will look at the Hansard records from that, from Wednesday 16 October 2019. I respect the CSIRO, as somebody who has a science degree; I respect the whole discipline of science, which is observation, measurement and proof. But when the CSIRO were quizzed in this parliamentary inquiry about the GenCost report—and I'll paraphrase here, but those of you who would like to read it can pull up the Hansard from Wednesday 16 October 2019 for the House of Representatives Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy—essentially the narrative went like this: CSIRO said, 'We don't have any expertise in electricity generation by nuclear energy,' so the committee asked, 'Well, where did you get the figures that you used in your report, then?' They said, 'Well, we contracted an external consultant to provide those figures for us.' If you look through the Hansard you'll see the committee met on a sequence of days. Why did they do that? Because, as each piece of evidence unfolded, they dug a bit deeper.

They had that consultant come in and they said, 'Describe for us where you got the information from.' What the consultant said was, 'Well, we don't have any expertise in nuclear power generation, so we went to the website of the World Nuclear Association to find information.' The following day there was another hearing, this time with a representative from the World Nuclear Association, and the committee asked them, 'Did you have this figure on your website?' They said, 'No, we didn't have it on our website, and, more to the point, we think it is grossly inflated and unrepresentative of what the true costs would be.' To the CSIRO's great credit, they took all that on board, and I think they have been far more robust in how they've approached it since. But, to directly address the minister's point, the benefit of a committee process with a range of witnesses that were able to challenge the assumptions that have been made was that it highlighted that the 2018 GenCost report was not based on any robust analysis of the facts of the cost of electricity generation, let alone any analysis of the likely price to the consumer.

I will leave that there, but I'm hoping that that completely debunks the minister's assertion that there is no value in a parliamentary inquiry. Estimates has not worked—and he proposed it would—and a parliamentary committee did highlight that, in this particular domain, the CSIRO did not have expertise in the paths they went down and that they delivered figures that were proved, on the public record, to not be robust. Why do I support this? Partly it's because I believe in that committee process, but it's also partly that, as someone who has worked in an engineering environment using modelling and as someone who has a qualification in science, I recognise that the GenCost report is largely a modelling activity, as opposed to science. If you search the PDF of the latest GenCost report, the word 'assumption' appears some 54 times, and, like in most modelling, they've had to make assumptions. There are a range of assumptions in GenCost that the CSIRO themselves identify as not necessarily representative of the complete suite of factors to be considered.

I have some empathy for them; it's a complex problem, but there are a few things that the Australian public need to be aware of. When Mr Bowen and others cite this as the be-all and end-all—the gospel according to the CSIRO that shall not be challenged—it needs to be said that it is a modelling exercise with assumptions based on an incomplete set of data. There are other expert bodies in Australia and around the world who have also done modelling and come up with quite different answers to the same questions. That's why we should give the Australian people the opportunity to have different experts in the field address their modelling, their assumptions and, more importantly, their lived experience so that the Australian people can decide whether this is something that we should be moving towards.

The first point is that this modelling is not designed to understand the most effective way to get cheap and reliable electricity to the Australian consumer, whether that be mum and dad at home, a small business or an industrial sector that will probably go offshore if the power prices continue to increase. In paragraph 1.1.1 of the latest GenCost report, which describes the roles the CSIRO and AEMO had in the report, it says 'to provide an update of current electricity generation and storage cost'. It's not about highlighting the cheapest way to get electricity. That paragraph also talks about the levelised cost of electricity, which is all about the factors affecting the cost to generation, as opposed to the full system's costs.

The third point I would make is that they highlight, in paragraph 1.2 on page 16 of the GenCost report:

As discussed in Graham (2018) it is not possible to undertake spreadsheet type modelling to create a transparent but accurate estimate of the cost of integrating renewables.

This is one of the significant factors that affect the analysis of whether a renewables based approach can be comparable in terms of delivering reliability and low cost to the consumer versus baseload type approaches, whether that be high-flow rivers providing hydro or things like nuclear power. So they're saying here that they can't provide a transparent and accurate estimate costs of integrating renewables. The report states:

If it were, this would have been the preferred method of implementation in GenCost.

Again, they quote Graham:

Graham (2018) concluded an electricity system modelling approach must be applied, where the details of the calculations are written in code that call on proprietary optimisation algorithms which unfortunately results in a loss of transparency.

I'm not saying that the CSIRO is in any way being malign in how they're approaching this, but their chosen vendor, their chosen model, their chosen algorithms and their chosen assumptions are but one set that feeds into a model that gives an outcome of cost degeneration.

Other equally expert bodies—and I'm talking here about bodies like the International Energy Agency, the OECD, or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and their subsidiary, the NEA, the Nuclear Energy Agency—have worked together over a number of years to model not the cost to generate but the cost to the consumer. In terms of that simple measure, the levelised cost of electricity, which even GenCost recognises is not a suitable cost for this analysis and comparison, the OECD report that came out in April 2022 looks at a systems-wide approach and demonstrates very clearly that what they call 'long-run nuclear power', even on a levelised cost of electricity basis, is the cheapest form of electricity. If you run a plant for a long time, it becomes, over the life of that asset, the cheapest way to generate power. They also highlight in that analysis that even new-build nuclear is on a par with grid-scale renewables but is cheaper than others. For example, it's actually cheaper than rooftop or offshore wind et cetera.

If people who are interested look at pages 35 to 37 of that OECD report, they then break down the elements into the generating costs, the systems costs and the broader environmental costs. They highlight that, as we seek to move to curb emissions, we will probably get to 2030 with rising, but not unaffordable, power prices. But, if we seek to get to net zero by 2050 just using variable renewables with firming by things like batteries, as more coal and gas comes out of the system in order to achieve net zero, prices will go up exponentially, and their conclusion is that it is unaffordable. This is not the coalition saying that. This is the OECD and the International Energy Agency. That is why people like the IPCC are saying we need to have nuclear power as part of the mix, and that's why so many nations around the world are looking to double or triple the amount of nuclear power generation they have.

So another point I'd make is that, despite the government's claim that nuclear is the most expensive form of energy, the lived experience of people in countries like Canada says otherwise. If you look at some of the information coming out of Canada, you can see that nuclear is even cheaper than hydro and is certainly cheaper than gas, wind, solar and bioenergy, in terms of how the Energy Board in Ontario manages things. That's partly because of the broader costs that variable renewables have in terms of the additional infrastructure.

My last point will be around the Net Zero Australia project done by three universities and a consultancy, which highlighted that the cost of all the additional transmission and firming as well as new generation is going to cost us in the order of $1.2 to $1.5 trillion by 2030, and $7 to $9 trillion by 2060. The nuclear option is actually far cheaper than the variable path the Albanese government has us on.

For the sake of the GA industry, bring back Senator Fawcett...  

MTF...P2 

[Peetwo]

Lefties Losing It | Pauline Hanson's Please Explain

And from JL..



Luv it! -

MTF...P2