The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn’t really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.
Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.
The time for nuclear was decades ago.
Now it’s being pushed by fossil fuel shills, who’d love nothing more than a gratuitously expensive 20 year boondoggle to let them have free reign over power generation for all that time, and to simultaneously nix any green plans with “but the nuclear is on its way!”
Who would have thought a political appointment is political.
For a country with a huge amount of land and shore, that makes sense for them. But some form of nuclear (uranium fission, thorium fission, fusion?!) continues to be an important part of the world’s weaning off of fossil fuels
The alternative for base load is batteries, not wind and solar renewables, since they are intermittent. We don’t have a good idea yet of just how expensive massive grid storage is yet, but the lead time would definitely be shorter.
That’s really really expensive unless you already have natural upper and lower reservoirs.
The alternative to base load is load shifting, just move most loads to when enough power is available. Or in other words, base load is a thing because big power plants like nuclear and coal are slow and someone’s gotta use that power at all times.
Load shifting is the destruction of economic value, because it means people are making choices that aren’t optimal for their own lives.
Time is often written off in economic considerations, but that’s unwise because time is the most limited resource people have.