The fear of a scare campaign against nuclear energy has prompted one Coalition MP to debunk some myths about nuclear reactors – and warn even coal plants can be potentially dangerous.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is considering a plan to turn five retired coal-fired power stations into nuclear reactors and use existing powerlines to distribute electricity at lower cost.
They include large coal-fired power plants in the NSW Hunter Valley, like Eraring, due to close in 2025, and Liddell, which shut in 2023.
The Yallourn power station in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley, due to close in 2028, is another possibility, along with the Loy Yang-B plant near Traralgon, slated for closure in the early 2030s.
Callide B power station in central Queensland is also due to close in 2028.
With Labor and the Greens opposed to nuclear energy, the Coalition is gearing up for them to mount a scare campaign as opponents try to dismiss the plan.
Both sides of politics are committed to a target of net zero by 2050, but Liberals and Nationals are skeptical about relying only on renewable energy to achieve it.
Now Daily Mail has debunked some of the myths about nuclear energy, from Labor suggesting that renewable energy can supply 100 per cent of ‘s energy, to fears of the technology’s cost – and concerns about waste and radiation.
The prospect of a nuclear energy scare campaign has prompted a Coalition MP to debunk some myths about nuclear reactors and point out coal plants are also potentially dangerous (pictured is a nuclear reactor at Tihange in Belgium)
An MP who champions nuclear energy has debunked the myth that uranium from nuclear reactors can be used to make atomic bombs – and argued coal plants were potentially dangerous too (pictured is a display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park remembering the 1945 atom bomb dropped on the Japanese city)
MYTH 1: Nuclear reactor uranium can be used to make atom bombs
Nationals backbencher David Gillespie, who chairs Parliamentary Friends of Nuclear Industries, is preparing for a scare campaign from the other side of politics.
‘There’s a lot of misinformation that’s been baked into n consciousness and most of it is hogwash,’ he told Daily Mail .
He says a typical reactor contains less than four per cent enriched uranium among its fuel load.
‘The average variety nuclear reactor that is generating steam to produce electricity only has three-and-a-half to four per cent enriched uranium,’ Dr Gillespie said.
‘Three-and-a-half to four per cent will not, ever, ever become bomb grade.’
A nuclear reactor is considered to be highly enriched if it contained more than 20 per cent enriched uranium.
An atomic or nuclear bomb, by comparison, has a much higher content of enriched uranium, of 85-95 per cent.
Some of the worst nuclear reactor disasters in living memory, in Ukraine and Japan in 1986 and 2011, were not classified as atomic explosions like the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II.
‘You need 95 per cent-plus enriched uranium and plutonium to get an atomic bomb,’ Dr Gillespie said.
‘Neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima were atomic explosions.’
Dr Gillespie argued the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan was the result of the tsunami cutting off the diesel pumps rather than a design fault – noting the location of reactors was the problem.
Nationals backbencher David Gillespie, who chairs Parliamentary Friends of Nuclear Industries, noted the typical reactor contained less than four per cent enriched uranium among its fuel load – well below what’s need to make an atomic bomb (he is pictured with party leader David Littleproud)
‘Fukushima formed a whole lot of hydrogen gas because of the meltdown, the meltdown happened because the diesel pumps that pump all the cooling water around to keep the reactor at about 300 to 400 degrees, it stopped because of the tsunami,’ he said.
‘The electricity that was doing the pumps got wiped away by the tsunami but also the actual diesel tank and the diesel engine were wiped out.’
MYTH 2: We can rely solely on renewable energy
The Labor Party has a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, and the likes of Treasurer Jim Chalmers have suggested renewable energy will meet all of ‘s energy needs by 2050.
‘Increasingly the future will be powered by cleaner and cheaper, more reliable and increasingly renewable sources of energy and we want to play a role in that,’ Dr Chalmers told Sky News on Tuesday.
‘Now, the whole world is moving in the direction of renewables. This is a very big and important opportunity for .’
But entrepreneur Dick Smith has warned of wind droughts that can last for years, and argued it was unrealistic to rely on renewable energy for 100 per cent of ‘s energy needs as coal and natural gas were phased out.
‘There’s no way that a whole country can run on wind and solar,’ he told Daily Mail .
The Labor Party has a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 43 per cent come 2030, and the likes of Treasurer Jim Chalmers have suggested renewable energy will meet all of ‘s energy needs by 2050 (pictured is a wind farm in the Netherlands)
Entrepreneur Dick Smith has warned of wind droughts that can last for years, and argued it was unrealistic to rely on renewable energy for 100 per cent of ‘s energy needs as coal and natural gas were phased out.
‘It’s never been done: not even a city has been able to be run continuously on wind and solar because wind and solar is so intermittent and the cost of storage is stupendous.
‘You don’t need storage for a few hours, you can need storage for days or weeks and that’s horrendously expensive, it would make the cost so high that no one could afford the power.’
Mr Smith pointed out South ‘s giant battery storage facility at Hornsdale was yet to reliably provide power sufficient for Adelaide not to fall back on coal-fired power from Victoria.
‘The batteries would have to come down a staggering amount in cost to be competitive and there’s no hint that that’s happening,’ he said.
Even with solar subsidies, renewable energy made up just 32 per cent of ‘s total electricity generation, data from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water showed.
Breaking that down, solar generated 14 per cent of ‘s electricity compared with wind’s 11 per cent and hydro’s 6 per cent.
Labor is planning to have renewable energy make up 82 per cent of the National Electricity Market by 2030 as part of its net zero by 2050 goal.
MYTH 3: Coal plants are much safer
Dr Gillespie said the Callide C power plant explosion in central Queensland in 2021 showed coal-fired power wasn’t entirely safe either.
‘Coal plants blow up too – Callide in Queensland, the hydrogen which cools the generators in coal plants, they had an accident where the hydrogen exploded two years ago,’ he said. ‘It took out a whole coal plant.’
In May 2021, Callide C caught fire and blew up, causing 477,000 customers to lose power as the nearby Callide B station was subsequently tripped.
CS Energy released a video in February revealing an electrical failure at unit C4, shortly after 2pm, caused turbine blades to catch on the casing, leading to a shaft tearing apart in nine spots.
The Opposition is considering converting discontinued coal-fired power stations like Liddell in the NSW Hunter Valley (pictured) into nuclear reactors
In May 2021, the Callide C plant caught fire and blew up, causing 477,000 customers to lose power as the nearby Callide B station was then tripped (pictured is a CS Energy animation)
This ejected chunks of shaft from the generator unit, firing a two-tonne projectile to five metres across the ground ‘like a spinning top’ as chunks of metal were launched 20 metres into the air, punching holes through the turbine hall roof.
CS Energy chief executive Darren Busine said the Queensland government-owned generator had learned from the explosion.
‘This was one of the most significant and complex process safety incidents in and it has taken time to work through and understand the contributing factors to the event,’ he said.
‘The Callide Unit C4 incident was the result of the simultaneous failure of key electrical equipment and system back-ups in a complex series of events that could not have been anticipated, with some of the contributing factors being traced back to the original design of the power station.’
Nuclear reactors use uranium instead of coal to produce electricity, with both approaches relying on spinning turbines.
‘Instead of boiling water by burning coal, you use the element of the enriched uranium which glows red hot and boils the water,’ Dr Gillespie said.
‘The mystery inside a nuclear plant isn’t that mysterious – it’s like the element of a kettle except the kettle is steam tight so it gets to really high temperatures and really high pressure and the high-pressure steam spins a turbine which then spins the big magnets over copper wires and electrons come out the end.’
MYTH 4: Nuclear energy is more expensive
The International Energy Agency and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency released a joint report in 2020 arguing that nuclear energy was the cheapest form of low-carbon power.
‘Electricity produced from nuclear long-term operation (LTO) by lifetime extension is highly competitive and remains not only the least cost option for low-carbon generation – when compared to building new power plants – but for all power generation across the board,’ it said.
Sydney radio 2GB broadcaster Ben Fordham cited this report to refute Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s claim nuclear is the most expensive form of energy.
‘That may be so according to his mates at the CSIRO but according to the international energy authority, nuclear is among the cheapest,’ he said.
Labor pledged at the last election in 2022 to reduce average power bills by $275 by 2025 but they have to deliver on the promise.
Despite welching on that vow so far, Treasurer Jim Chalmers suggested starting a nuclear energy industry would be expensive, slamming Mr Dutton’s plan.
‘His proposal will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, take decades to build, it’s more expensive, takes longer, and it’s the divisive option,’ Dr Chalmers said.
But Mr Smith said France, which generates 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, had the cheapest electricity in Europe.
‘It doesn’t seem to be logical because in Europe the cheapest power available is in France and France is 70 per cent nuclear-powered,’ he said.
‘They have more nuclear than anyone else and nuclear is just using uranium to boil water rather than coal and you need a far smaller amount of uranium to ship around and so it doesn’t sound logical to me that nuclear would be the most expensive.’
Small modular reactors that can produce 300 megawatts, or 300million watts, of power are being developed by the likes of Rolls Royce.
Small modular reactors that can produce 300 megawatts, or 300million watts, of power are being developed by the likes of Rolls Royce
But conventional, large-scale reactors have been commercially proven, with the United Arab Emirates setting up a new reactor at Barakah in 2020 with South Korean technology
Units the size of shipping containers would be manufactured in a factory and transported to a site.
‘I don’t believe there is one of these units actually working but it’s a way of bringing down the cost,’ Mr Smith said.
But conventional, large-scale reactors have been commercially proven, with the United Arab Emirates setting up a new reactor at Barakah in 2020 with South Korean technology.
‘It’s a large-scale reactor but it was built in six years from start until it was producing power,’ he said.
‘That would be my suggestion: we should simply replace our coal power stations, get the South Koreans to build what they have done in the UAE because it’s so proven and it wasn’t that expensive.’
MYTH 5: Nuclear plants emit dangerous amounts of radiation
Radiation is energy given off in the form of rays and high-speed particles, fuelling fears nuclear reactors would cause radiation poisoning within a close proximity.
But has had a nuclear reactor for medical purposes since 1958.
Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor manufactures medical radio-isotopes that are used for chemotherapy cancer treatment and X-rays.
has had a nuclear reactor for medical purposes since 1958. Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor manufactures medical radioisotopes that are used for chemotherapy cancer treatment and X-rays
After being reprocessed in France, the n Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) stores them in the suburban facility.
Mr Smith said this debunked radiation fears and demonstrated ‘it’s perfectly safe’.
‘It’s reprocessed in France, it’s shipped all the way back to the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights where lots of people live and it’s stored there in a Sydney suburb,’ he said.
‘They store it in a shed right where all the population density is to show that there’s just no risk involved at all.
‘We are actually world leaders in those medical isotopes. We are very capable as a nuclear nation – this idea that we wouldn’t know what to do is absolute hogwash.’
MYTH 6: Nuclear energy generates too much waste
has plenty of room to store nuclear waste, debunking the myth we would have insufficient space.
The late Labor prime minister Bob Hawke in his later years advocated the unfashionable view that could make money as the world’s repository for nuclear waste.
Mr Smith, who credits Mr Hawke with converting him to the nuclear cause in the early 1990s, has suggested Olympic Dam in South , the site of a uranium mine, be used to store waste.
has plenty of room to store nuclear waste, debunking the myth we would have insufficient space, with Dick Smith suggesting waste could be stored at Olympic Dam, the site of a uranium mine
‘Where we’ve taken the uranium out, I’ve been down into the mine with these huge, dry cavernous spaces where you could put fracking in and store the uranium waste in total safety,’ he said.
Dr Gillespie said there were well-established protocols for storing spent nuclear fuel and argued the French were getting value from reprocessing spent isotopes shipped from Lucas Heights.
‘I don’t like calling it waste because it’s only waste if you waste it,’ he said.
‘They use it again: we pay them a lot of money to do that and then the stuff that isn’t immediately usable gets put in a big storage container which is then brought back and also stored at ANSTO.’
Uranium has an incredibly long half-life of 4.5billion years.
But Dr Gillespie argued the long half-life of radioactive atoms – or the time they took to decay – did not make them dangerous if they were buried deep underground in the middle of .
‘Like granite, it’s got an incredibly long half life – but it’s not emitting stuff around the atmosphere or the earth, it’s just sitting in a rock underground,’ Dr Gillespie said.
‘Who gives a stuff if you buried it 800 metres underground?’