2 August 2024
Topics: Zero emissions nuclear energy, Sovereign capability, nuclear fuel cycle, renewable energy.
Matthew Pantelis
The Shadow Energy Minister Ted O’Brien has been in Adelaide this week, where he’s given a speech calling on Australia to develop sovereign capability in the nuclear fuel cycle, so we make our own fuel rods here rather than digging it out of the ground and setting it off overseas where they make fuel rods in other countries. Ted O’Brien on the line. Good morning, Shadow Minister.
Ted O’Brien
Good morning, Matthew.
Matthew Pantelis
Where to next with this, you’ve got the policy, having a nuclear industry in Australia and particularly our own foreign capability if we’re going to go down the path of nuclear power stations, having the capability to make our own rods makes sense, of course.
Ted O’Brien
We think so Matthew, if we if we take a step back and say what does Australia need? Australians need cheap, clean and consistent 24/7 power and your comments before I think are just spot on. You cannot take baseload power out of the system and as it stands right now, the government’s trying to force 90% of our 24/7 baseload power out of the system over the next 10 years, with Buckley’s chance of any replacement and this is where we have to make sure we’re not just thinking short term. In the short term, we have to bring prices down because South Australians are now paying among the highest electricity prices in the world but we’ve got to also be planning for the long term and that is why we need to see zero-emissions nuclear energy, replace retiring coal plants across the country. And we already are a nuclear nation. As you know, we already have a nuclear reactor in Sydney, producing medical isotopes. Were adopting the nuclear propelled submarines in South Australia is going to be critical in that venture and so going to nuclear energy is building on that platform and going one step further. So we have to be big in our thinking, we’ve got to put Australia first and think of our long term energy security, which is why we believe that we shouldn’t just adopt nuclear energy, but we should also become an indispensable part of the global supply chain, which means moving up the value chain and developing expertise at that front end of the nuclear fuel cycle. In other words, when you use your nuclear power plant, we ourselves should have the ability to use the final fuel that we ourselves have created, that maximizes our energy security for the long term and as a nation, energy security is national security.
Matthew Pantelis
You’ve got a few obstacles, the states have already said no to changing their position on allowing nuclear within state boundaries. So you’ve got that issue number one, and number two, we still don’t know the cost of your policy, when will that be unveiled?
Ted O’Brien
I think on that first point, Matthew, there’s two things that I’d like to say firstly, when it comes to building our sovereign capability, we’re not talking here about standing up an end to end supply chain in Australia ahead of our initial nuclear power plants in the mid to late 2030s. We’re talking about here, a long term national endeavor that we have to be mindful of and plan for from the get go. Secondly, then when it comes to the position of state governments, and updated data, Dutton leadership, we’ve been really open about our approach. Things come into opposition and that we are looking at nuclear energy. If there’s a lesson I’ve learned from around the world, from countries that have entered the civil nuclear industry, is the need for trust. The need to be open the need to be transparent. And that’s what we’ve been doing. What that means, therefore, is in taking a very clear and open policy to the Australian people where we are granted a mandate. In other words, Australia’s people say, ‘yeah look, we agree we need a balanced energy mix, and that should include zero-emissions nuclear energy’ ultimately, other politicians and different tiers of government.. I believe they will come on board and the more South Australia for example, understand what’s on offer for Port Augusta, especially when it comes to unlocking industrial capability. I think they’ll come on board. As for the costings, Matthew, we said that the way we’re doing our costing is putting the consumer, the household, the businesses at the centre. That’s what’s important. We’ve got to get prices down. So until we release our policies on gas, for example, and on renewables, we won’t be releasing our full economics of our of our package. And the economics of course deal with with nuclear.
Matthew Pantelis
Are you saying you’re not going to pass on the cost of building nuclear power plants to consumers through power bills? Is that essentially what I’ve just heard?
Ted O’Brien
No, what I was saying was is in terms of when we will.. your question was, when will we release the costings, the economics? And my answer to that is, once we’ve released other aspects of our energy plan, we will, we will then release the economics of our entire energy plan. And that will include the costing with respect to nuclear energy, but when it comes to passing on costs, here’s a big lesson we’ve learned from overseas. Once you get energy in the mix prices come down. So in South Australia this year, consumers will pay around 56 cents per kilowatt hour 56 cents. In the province of Ontario, in Canada, which has 50 to 60%. Nuclear in their mix at any point of the day. They’re paying around 14 cents. 14 cents vs 56 cents. Now, this is not unusual for what we’re seeing around the world. Nuclear can’t do the job on its own. But when it works, complementing renewables and gas in the system, it brings prices down, and that is the primary reason we need baseload in the system. So we can have cheap, clean and consistent 24/7 power that requires a balanced mix including nuclear.
Matthew Pantelis
Yeah, Mr. O’Brien no argument with that at all. We’d all welcome 14 cents per kilowatt hour no doubt, but but somebody somewhere is still going to have to pay for construction and operating the nuclear plants. And I suspect that’s going to be the consumer, the taxpayer, you name it, it’s us that we’ll be paying for it. How are we going to do that? How are we going to afford to do that?
Ted O’Brien
So what we’ve announced is that the Australian Government will be the owner of the nuclear fleet in Australia. Again, as we look around the world, Matthew we see in Europe, probably the best are the French. They’re government owned and in our part of the world in, in Asia, for the South Koreans are the ones who are doing the best job at the moment. And they’re government owned. I just mentioned Ontario before, they’re government owned. One of the reasons why you have these national champions government owned is we’re talking about assets. So a power plant that lasts for 80 years. They’re designed to 80 years, they can probably extend it to 100 years. And that’s why government then comes in. It allows you to basically pay down that asset over time to amortize it over a long period of time. And that’s where you can keep prices down. Keeping it to under government ownership allows us in Port Augusta, for example, to ensure that that community can receive lower wholesale power prices and lower network charges. So that we can ensure that we build our capability on manufacturing as a country, or leveraging the cheap, clean and consistent 24/7 power out of the power station. So this is all part of our plan. It’s very detailed, and it is based on best practice internationally. But it’s all about getting price down.
Matthew Pantelis
Got a question on the text line from Ian who talks about an ingestion zone around nuclear power plants. Every farmer will be affected within an 80 Kilometre zone. No farmland can be within that area. So around Port Augusta around 80kms there is obviously farmland, so where do they stand and other places around the country around nuclear power plants?
Ted O’Brien
With respect to Ian, Matthew. He might be he might be querying a baseless scare mongering campaign that Labor tried to run a couple of weeks ago which was immediately dismissed by the experts. If you look at nuclear power plants in Europe, North America, you see productive farming all the way up to the fence of that power plant. It is it is it is garbage, candidly, to suggest that farmland around a nuclear power plant can’t be used. the opposite. You know you for anyone who’s sort of travelled through the beautiful regional champagne, probably the most romantic and highly productive farming area in the world in France uses nuclear power plants everywhere. To suggest you actually can’t have productive farmland up to up to the power plant. It is baseless.
Matthew Pantelis
Well, talking about low prices per kilowatt hour I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve called in or texted in telling me their solar feed in tariff has dropped to four cents per kilowatt hour. And a colleague recently had a quote to get solar installed 30 grand now got to say there’s no way you’d put that on your roof for that price with such a low feed in tariff, the incentive isn’t there, does that need to change?
Ted O’Brien
I think this is probably just symptomatic of what we’re seeing when you put all your eggs in one basket, which is what’s happening at the moment under the Albanese government. They just want more and more and more renewables. And what they’re not thinking through smartly enough is the fact that when it comes to solar, for example, including on your on your roof at home, the sun comes out at a certain time of the day. And you know, typically let’s say between 11am and 2pm it saturates, including the grid. And so it’s causing some issues there, which is why people aren’t getting the feeding tariff that they once did. Now is there a solution to this? There is. And the solution isn’t to dump the solar panels at all by the way. The solution goes around the combination of storage and to have smart control solutions. These are the sorts of things that allow you basically to time shift when that energy can be used. So yes, you might capture the energy in the middle of the day when the sun is out. But you might decide to use that energy later on. And we’re doing a fair bit of policy work on this as we speak actually, and we’ll have more to say about that when we release the Coalition’s renewable policy.
Matthew Pantelis
Okay. For people though considering it you reckon keep doing it and that’s what you’re saying there, get a battery, save it up use it at night.
Ted O’Brien
Well, the economics have got to work for the individual. And this is one of the challenges that we’ve had is that the economics haven’t been stacking up, and batteries have been too expensive. And that’s why we’re looking at policy options at the moment, but that’s where the solution really lies. We’ve got to start combining these intermittent. technologies with storage. I mean, as a basic principle, that that’s key. And so people should be doing their own stuff. One of the things I love Matthew about rooftop solar. I’m a Liberal, I believe in property rights, I believe the individual and so with rooftop solar unlike some of the industrial scale utility plants around regional communities, you’re a homeowner you decide it respects property rights. And I think that’s a good thing. Also, having solar on your roof means you’ve got energy being generated very closely to where it’s being used. The problem is because they’re intermittent, they are weather dependent. You don’t know when you’re gonna get the energy really, and when it does come through. Unless you can store it, then you can’t use it effectively. So that’s where we look around Australia, and we say we’ve got the highest rooftop solar penetration in the world. But the problem is, we actually are not doing a good job at storage. So we’re coming to a tipping point now where it’s causing problems on the electricity grid, and then households are being punished it all goes back to what’s your policy stance. Our policy stance should not be all eggs in one basket. Just get these renewables on the roof. You’ve got to be smart about it, which is why combining it with storage and Smart Control Solutions has got to be part of the answer.
Matthew Pantelis
Are you concerned support for nuclear may be waning. Now that it’s peaked according to the latest poll. It’s dipped slightly thinking that it’s going the other way now. Concerned about that?
Ted O’Brien
Nah, Matthew. I think I think it depends on which poll you want to look at the honest I know there was a story in one of the newspapers saying that a poll this week said you know, it suddenly dipped. There was another poll that said that people now recognize that with nuclear in the mix, your power bills are far cheaper, so they like it. You know, at the end of the day, the Coalition has decided that based on international research, we need a balanced energy mix. That has to include nuclear energy to work alongside renewables and gas into the future. And that’s in our nation’s best interest. And if we don’t do that Australians will continue to be poor and our nation weaker. So it’s not an easy political debate to have. I’m the first to acknowledge that, but we have to be able to do this as a nation I believe we can. As a nation we we need to we need to be brimming with pride and self confidence. Other countries have been able to do this and make it work. There’s no reason why Australians can’t. And it’s the right thing in our national interest. So that is why we’re taking this on and unashamedly so.