A month ago, NSW Premier Bob Carr uncorked the bottle holding the nuclear power genie.
This week, Marcus Godhino used these pages to try to replace it. His daily double was on climate change and nuclear phobia.
Bob Carr had a road to Damascus conversion.
This silently acknowledged that his policies have left New South Wales vulnerable to power shortages and escalating prices.
Carr had previously heeded the Green activists' calls for reduced energy consumption, using renewable energy to fill additional needs, and totally rejecting the nuclear power option.
He prevented new coal power station development, even as a bridge to a future based on "smarter" energy use, and windmills and other exotic renewables.
But this year the NSW Government's energy policy paper resoundingly deflated the ideas of such a future.
Contrary to the activists' claims, nuclear power is actually the safest source of electricity and long term storage of nuclear waste is not a problem.
There are many sites available for this but agitators can be relied upon to whip up scare campaigns every time one is suggested.
Even so, 60 years of "temporary" storage of nuclear waste has resulted in not one mishap.
Chernobyl in 1986 added impetus to an anti-nuclear lobby comprising the ban-the-bomb crowd, who were blind to the difference between peaceful and war-like uses.
THE effects of that, the only serious accident involving nuclear power, have been systematically exaggerated.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths were claimed from it whereas 20 years on, official UN reports find the total loss of life was fewer than 100 and probably under 50.
Compared to loss of life from other energy sources, including even hydro, this is very small.
The clamour from Chernobyl led to massive over-engineering of safety equipment. More importantly, it has brought excessive development costs.
So any new proposal for a nuclear power station is now fought all the way through the politicised planning processes that most countries have introduced. Those same processes are also being used to prevent conventional power development.
One such battleground is planning approvals for Victoria's Hazelwood expansion.
This would normally be confined to consideration of local matters, but the Victorian Government has incorporated "global sustainability" clauses into the planning acts.
Together with the Bracks Government's appointment of an activist sympathiser as head of the Civil and Administrative Tribunal, this has created an explosive brew, adding needless costs from delays and threatening future power supplies.
Reliable low-cost energy is crucial to Australia's competitiveness. Cheap coal has allowed us electricity prices 50 to 100 per cent below those in most developed countries.
This not only benefits the household consumer but is the bedrock of our industry's international competitiveness.
It forms the basis of aluminium and other smelting industries as well as providing handy support for a range of other industries.
Outside Australia, nuclear is a highly competitive source of electricity generation.
This is notwithstanding the fact nuclear has seen its costs elevated by the clamour of the anti-economic growth crowd.
BUT for Australia, even the cheapest nuclear plant is more costly; for Victoria it would be 35 per cent dearer than a brown coal plant.
Nuclear power's costs cannot be reduced to a level that would make it competitive with billions of dollars worth of brown coal deposits lying just below the Latrobe Valley surface.
Because of coal costs, NSW is disadvantaged as an energy producer compared to Victoria and Queensland.
But in raising nuclear power Mr Carr is surely preparing the ground for a U-turn on future coal-fired generation.
Marcus Godhino is fighting a rearguard action. Part of his claim is that Victoria's brown coal is warming the planet.
As evidence he cites the past couple of months of Melbourne weather. He conveniently left out the fact that the past couple of months was cooler than average in half the places in the world.
Such facts would reveal the climate as being too complex for the simplistic solutions espoused by green zealots.
If Australia were to back off from supplying coal-based electricity, it would make not a jot of difference to global emissions of carbon dioxide.
Australia's output would be replaced by that of China and the only outcome would be a loss of our competitiveness and economic health.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment