The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, the opposition’s climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, also said a Coalition government would consider supporting Generation III+ large-scale nuclear reactors, and not just the unproven small modular reactors it has strongly touted.
The statement at the global summit confirmed the Coalition was on a markedly different path to Labor. The Albanese government last week joined more than 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030, but did not sign up with 22 countries that supported tripling nuclear power by 2050.
While only 11% of countries at the talks – mostly nations that already have a domestic nuclear energy industry – backed the nuclear pledge, O’Brien declared “Cop28 will be known as the nuclear Cop”
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Weren’t you idiots the ones who brought coal into the parliament office and we’re brandishing it as “clean”?
Fun fact the coal prop used was washed and sealed with a coat of lacquer
“As was pointed out at the time, the coal must have been lacquered – touching raw coal covers you in black dust. Morrison didn’t want to get his hands dirty. “
According to this article, the lump of coal was supplied by the Minerals Council. If I recall correctly, it was one of their exhibits, so it had been sealed for that purpose. They didn’t specifically prep a fresh lump of coal just so he could take it into the chamber.
Here’s one we prepared earlier…
Wonder if they’ll do the same stunt with uranium
Lmao that’s like when one of the awful US senators of the state of Oklahoma (basically like Texas and Florida but worse) brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as ‘proof’ that ‘global warming isn’t a thing.’ How absolutely ridiculous. I’m sorry you guys have to deal with nonsense like that, too.
Liberals have been in power most of the last 2 decades. They only spout this bullshit in opposition.
Nuclear was the way to go 20+yrs ago.
Nuclear power is an amazing technology with enormous potential… in the 70s.
50 years later, solar and wind is the way. We can use it to crack sea water and sell hydrogen.
Counterpoint, wind and especially solar are now so cheap that the average grid scale solar plant turns a profit in 10 years and continues that profit for the next twenty plus. It’s cheaper per watt than gas and especially coal.
Perhaps govement subsidies should instead go to the less profitable 24 hour sources of power needed to fill the gaps, like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, instead of just making already profitable investments a bit sweeter. There is a reason why well managed grids use a diverse set of sources, so unexpected shortages in one tech don’t limit the whole system.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: Due to renewables becoming cheaper and cheaper, private investment is pumping in capital en masse because the economics work out on their own. There is less and less room for government policy to set the direction. The market will decide.
I honestly don’t know how a nuclear power plant could be anywhere near profitable when 30% of the time we have negative power prices due to rooftop solar. Batteries are already edging out gas plants on a LCOE basis, and they’re getting cheaper by the day.
By the time the Liberals get in and try to implement their nuclear fever dream, there will be no cheaper form of energy than distributed solar + batteries and no sane financier will back anything else.
There are limits to battery production, especially on short time frames. If your expecting every nation to try and deal with storing days of electricity production to cover for a rainy week your going to run out of easily accessed raw materials such as lithium.
You need either reliable generation, absurd quantities of undersea cables, or scalable storage. The only practical storage tech we’ve seen is hydro, and there are limited places to flood in order to construct built massive resivors, and it has far worse timelines and costs than nuclear, so that means on demand generation.
In this category we have nuclear, and location dependent options like hydro and geothermal. All of these are about as expensive, but output constant or at will power.
If you let the market decide, it’s going to do what its already decided to do, which is cheap solar plus cheap gas and coal. If you ban gas and coal, then it will be cheap solar and batteries for nations that can afford them and all gas and coal for the poorer nations that can’t afford the batteries.
Leave the batteries for applications like transport and smaller grids that need them instead of brute forcing them into places where they don’t fit like long term grid storage.
Finally, though this is the most minor, nuclear is by far the winner in local environmental impact, as it lacks the land use and habitat distruction requirements of solar, wind, and hydro. It’s also location agnostic, and unlike batteries gets cheaper and faster as it scales.
By which they mean triple the number of nuclear power plants in Australia.
Coalition math: Three times zero equals many more decades of fossil fuel lobby getting what they want.
I am moderately pro nuclear but the coalition is not. They are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (as are some in the ALP) and their fake fascination with nuclear is entirely a delaying tactic to prolong the value of fossil fuel investments. Renewables have been getting all the investment and R&D and that is reflected in the declining costs and ease of deployment. Nuclear has stagnated and the economics and time to market suck. The fossil fuel lobby is not threatened by nuclear which won’t take business away from them in Australia. Send uranium to France where they have a mature nuclear industry and restart reactors shut down by fools in places like Germany. Meanwhile lets ramp up our deployment of renewables and shut down more carbon emitters.
Whatever your political leanings, unless you are a billionaire with huge fossil fuel investments they aren’t looking out for us, our families or our country. They represent people like the Saudi royals and Adani not us. They care about local coal jobs about as much as Thatcher did and our kid’s futures even less.
3x0 is 0
Perhaps Dutton will take a chunk or uranium to parliament.
Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared of this little rock
Has the coalition ever built any major infrastructure in Australia?
Dutton is such a nasty piece of work that it’s written all over his face. Like Voldemort in the flesh.
He is a serious creep. It’s one of those “do not get trapped in a hall alone with this bastard” vibes.
The Coalition want Nuclear to be the next coal and gas. Meaning big, long-running industries that will receive tons of taxpayer money. Everybody knows that big nuclear projects almost always run over budget and over time. If they start building big nuclear reactors in Australia, I’ll take almost any bet that we are going to see ludicrous cost ‘blowouts’, just so they can maximise the amount of money they extract from the taxpayer. And who will run these projects? Coalition donors. Also it’s going to be the Coalition-affiliated mining companies who dig up the nuclear materials.
Nuclear Potato
This is the best summary I could come up with:
O’Brien’s speech was at a side event hosted by the World Nuclear Association and the Australian group Coalition for Conservation, which flew seven Liberal and National MPs to the summit.
New South Wales Coalition MP Matt Kean, a former state treasurer, acknowledged O’Brien’s commitment to reaching net zero emissions but said “obviously nuclear is a long way away” and the country should back renewable energy now.
The convener of the political fundraising body Climate 200, Simon Holmes à Court, said he was not opposed to a global nuclear expansion, but argued O’Brien’s proposal for Australia had “only one conclusion, and that is blackouts”.
The Australian domestic debate over nuclear energy came as the negotiations over a deal to accelerate global action to tackle the climate crisis entered their final days.
The Cop president, Sultan Al Jaber, called on countries to be open to “flexibility, compromise, cooperation and a true understanding of the urgency of the task”.
In a signal of compromise language that Australia could support, Bowen pointed to a statement at last month’s Pacific Islands Forum that the world should “transition away from coal, oil and gas in our energy systems, in line with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pathways for 1.5C, with a peak in fossil fuel consumption in the near term”.
The original article contains 977 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Surely there is a law lizard people can’t be PM
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