There is a “growing backlash” to the Coalition’s nuclear plan, with community groups furious at the lack of consultation and angered that the policy would not give local communities the power of veto and that nuclear plants would be built regardless of local opposition.
Opponents say the pro-nuclear lobby group Nuclear for Australia has been hosting information sessions but that it makes it overly difficult for people to attend and ask questions, and is not able to answer those questions that are posed.
Wendy Farmer, who has formed an alliance of the seven regions affected by the Coalition’s pledge to build nuclear reactors on the site of coal-fired power stations, says Australians should be “very angry” that they will not be able to veto any planned nuclear generators in their towns despite the Coalition’s promise to carry out a two-and-a-half-year consultation.
She refuses to call the policy a “plan” because of that lack of consultation. “They haven’t even looked at these sites,” she said.
Wind turbines at Port Augusta. Photograph: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
Dave Sweeney, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s nuclear free campaigner, says it is “more con than consultation”. And he says in his many years in nuclear-free campaigns he has never seen so many sectors – including unions, state leaders, energy producers, businesses and protest groups – aligned against nuclear.
The Coalition has pinpointed Tarong and Callide in Queensland, Liddell and Mount Piper in New South Wales, Loy Yang in Victoria, and small modular reactors (SMRs) in Port Augusta in South Australia and Muja, near Collie in Western Australia.
It says the $331bn nuclear plan will make electricity cheaper, while critics have called its costings a “fantasy ”.
The Liberal party did not respond to questions about the lack of consultation and lack of veto power.
The alliance said there “has been no consultation or free prior and informed consent from traditional custodians”.
“You never asked locals if they want nuclear reactors in their back yards, instead you threaten compulsory acquisition and federal overrides with no right to veto,” it said in a petition to the Coalition .
Where in Australia would Peter Dutton’s nuclear reactors go? – video
It said the plan was a “distraction” designed to “create false debate” when communities are already transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Jayla Parkin, a Collie resident and community organiser for Climate Justice Union, said pro-nuclear information sessions had not provided any answers and had tried to stop First Nations people from entering.
Nuclear for Australia has held two information sessions with “expert speakers” in the town.
One elder was “devastated” after initially being refused entrance to a meeting last year, Parkin said. “She wanted to get the information,” Parkin said. “Not everyone is simply for nuclear or against. We are for being informed on what’s going to happen.”
At a January meeting, elders were told they couldn’t go in because of something wrong with their registrations, which Parkin then sorted out. Once inside, she said questions had to be submitted via an app.
“Not a single question could be answered … like ‘Where is the water coming from?’, ‘How will this benefit Collie?’, and ‘Where are you going to store the radioactive waste?’” she said.
Since then, the community had heard nothing, she said.
Nuclear for Australia, founded by Will Shackel and boasting the entrepreneur Dick Smith as a patron, describes itself as a grassroots organisation with no political affiliation.
Information sessions have featured Grace Stanke, a nuclear fuels engineer and former Miss America who says being called “Barbenheimer ” is one of her favourite compliments.
Shackel told SBS that Nuclear for Australia Google people when they try to register for the sessions.
“If we believe that someone is a known protester … someone who could cause a physical threat to people in there, we will not allow them in,” he said.
Farmer, also the president of Voices of the Valley, said Nuclear for Australia was “silencing people” by only allowing questions through an app and filtering them.
Nuclear for Australia has also taken out ads in local newspapers claiming 77% of coal jobs are transferable to nuclear plants and that nuclear workers are paid 50% more than other power generation-related jobs.
The fine print shows those claims come from a US nuclear industry lobby organisation and refer to the situation in the US.
Farmer said that, “adding insult to injury”, the advertisements misspell Latrobe Valley as La Trobe Valley and, in one case, an ad aimed at Latrobe was put in an SA newspaper.
“Regional communities are desperate for jobs now,” Farmer said. “Nuclear is not the answer.”
Protesters heckled the opposition leader, Peter Dutton , for not meeting with the community when he visited Collie in October last year.
“Collie doesn’t like it when people like that come to our town and hide,” Parkin said. “People have questions … at least openly answer them.”
In Perth last week Dutton was asked about criticism from Collie residents that he hadn’t heard their concerns about nuclear power and whether he would commit to visiting the town during the election campaign.
“I’ve been to Collie before,” he said. “There are seven locations around the country, and I won’t be able to get to all of them.”
Those communities knew the Coalition was offering them “the ability to transform”, he said.
Greg Bannon is from the Flinders Local Action Group, which was formed to oppose plans to build a nuclear waste dump in SA.
He said the community had not heard much apart from a February information session held by Nuclear for Australia. He said there were concerns about the safety of any power plant and the impact on the local environment. “Port Augusta … is probably the most stupid place to put a nuclear power station in the world,” he said, pointing to the unique nature of Spencer Gulf and its flat “dodge” tides .
“Any leakage … the water would end up in the top end of the gulf, with only one place to go, through Port Lincoln, the fish nurseries, the mangroves … only 50km further south is Point Lowly near Whyalla, where the annual migration of the southern giant cuttlefish occurs, which is a unique event in the world,” he said.
The other point, Bannon said, was that the region had already transitioned away from baseload power to renewables.
Guardian Australia has approached the Coalition and Nuclear for Australia for a response.
Tom Venning was preselected to replace retiring MP Rowan Ramsey in Grey, the federal electorate that Port Augusta sits within. He said he supported the policy as part of a “credible path to net zero” and that if the Coalition formed government there would be a two-and-a-half-year community consultation and an independent feasibility study.
“I’m committed to keeping my community fully informed and involved,” he said, adding that he would take any concerns seriously and would work with local leaders and the energy minister to address them.
Sweeney said the Coalition already appeared to be backing away from its commitment to nuclear and appeared reluctant to bring it up.
On Friday Dutton said people would flock to nuclear if they subsidised it but that they could “subsidise all sorts of energies”.
“I don’t carry a candle for nuclear or any other technology,” he said.
Farmer said: “There is a growing backlash.
“We are keeping it as a hot topic – because the Coalition doesn’t want to talk about nuclear, we will.”
Gas is the talk of the town, while nuclear is not, but a massive increase in solar power generation capacity has already put Australia on the fast track to a 100% renewable energy future. Solar cell engineer Andrew Blakers explains.
An academic living in cold Canberra retired his gas heaters a few years ago and installed electric heat pumps for space and water heating. His gas bill went to zero. He also bought an electric vehicle, so his petrol bill went to zero.
He then installed rooftop solar panels that export enough solar electricity to the grid to pay for electricity imports at night, so his electricity bill also went to zero. That Canberra academic will get his money back from these energy investments in about eight years.
I am that academic.
Solar energy is causing the fastest energy change in history
effectively a problem solved impossible to exhaust
solar and wind are becoming a superhighway to a future of 100 percent renewable energy.
While the technological arguments for solar and wind power are compelling, it’s clear renewables have to overcome obstacles.
One is the division over the impact of the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure. It has divided affected communities
There is also the political debate about what form Australia’s energy transition should take.
Solar surge
Yet, beyond those issues, solar offers unlimited energy for billions of years and provides the cheapest energy in history
That explains why solar energy generation is growing tenfold each decade and, with support from wind, dominates global power station construction markets, while global nuclear electricity generation has been static for 30 years and is largely irrelevant.
In 2024, twice as much new solar generation capacity — about 560 gigawatts
There will be more global solar generation capacity in 2030 than everything else combined, assuming current growth rates continue. Solar generation will pass wind and nuclear generation this year and should catch coal generation around 2031.
About 37 percent of Australia’s electricity already comes from solar and wind, with an additional 6 percent from hydroelectric power stations that were built decades ago.
More solar energy is generated per person in Australia than in any other country.
Solar is by far the best method of removing fossil fuels, which cause three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, from the economy.
In Australia, 99 percent of new generation capacity installed since 2015 has been solar and wind, and it is all private money. The energy market is saying very clearly that solar and wind have won the energy race and energy policies are consistent with reaching the government target of 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030.
Solar on the roof coupled with energy storage in a hot water tank, an EV battery and a home battery allows a family to ride through interruptions to gas, petrol and electricity supply and that energy resilience can apply at domestic, city, state and national levels.
Managing the balance
Balancing high levels of solar and wind energy to avoid supply interruptions is straightforward at low cost using off-the-shelf technology available from vast production lines. New transmission brings new solar and wind power into the cities and also smooths out the vagaries of local weather by transmitting solar and wind electricity to where it is needed.
For example, if it is raining in Victoria and sunny in New South Wales, then electricity can be transmitted south. Storage comprises batteries for short-term storage of a few hours and pumped hydro energy storage for hours to days.
Together, batteries and pumped hydro solve the energy storage issues.
Pumped hydro energy storage provides about 95 percent of global energy storage. It typically comprises two reservoirs located a few kilometres apart and with an altitude difference of between 500 and 1,000 metres.
Image: Sirbatch, Wikimedia Commons
On sunny or windy days, renewable sources like solar or wind power are used to pump water into the uphill reservoir, and during the night, the water flows back downhill through the turbine to recover the stored energy.
The same water can go up and down between the reservoirs for 100 years. Global potential pumped hydro energy storage is equivalent to two trillion electric vehicle batteries.
Australia has about 300 times more pumped hydro energy storage potential
Globally, the world has more than 820,000 potential pumped hydro sites
When eventually complete, Snowy 2.0 will provide 85 percent of energy storage in the national energy market at a cost 10 times lower than equivalent batteries and with a lifetime that is five times longer.
Myths and misconceptions
There are those — often vested interests — who throw up arguments against solar energy, regardless of what the facts say about its merits.
Here are a few:
It takes up valuable farmland. Most of the area in solar is very small The rural landscape can’t fit in any more solar and wind farms. Heat maps developed by researchers at the Australian National University show the vast number of good locations for solar and wind farms.Renewable infrastructure is a blight on the landscape. Hosts of solar and wind farms (and their neighbours) are generously compensated, while hosts of transmission lines are paid more than $200,000 per km. All the solar farms, wind farms, transmission and pumped hydro are in regional areas, which means that vast amounts of money and employment are flowing into regional areas. Solar farms are usually invisible from other properties. Open-cut roads, buildings, open-cut coal mines and gas fields are also visible in the landscape. People in cities have a far more cluttered view from their windows than rural people.We will run out of critical minerals. No critical minerals are required, only substitutable minerals. Solar panels require silicon for the solar cells, glass, plastic and conductors, which are made from extremely abundant materials We will drown in solar panel waste. The amount of solar panel waste generated when all energy (not just electricity) comes from solar amounts to about 16 kg per person
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info ™.
Andrew is a professor of engineering at The Australian National University. His primary research interests are in advanced silicon solar cells — increasing efficiency and reducing costs — and detailed analysis of energy systems based on 50 to 100 percent wind and solar photovoltaics supported by storage.
