Unlike coal and gas, no greenhouse gas pollution is created in the operation of the nuclear reactor. The steam drives a turbine that powers a generator. The heat produced from this process is used to create steam from water. When the nucleus of a uranium molecule is split inside a reactor, heat is produced. Photo by Flickr user Brewbooks licensed under (CC BY-SA 2.0) What is a nuclear power station? Nuclear Power Plant Isar II, Bavaria, Germany. So let’s stop wasting time, and get on with building more renewables. The bottom line is – nuclear power is the slowest, most expensive, most dangerous and least flexible form of new power generation for Australia. It is also low risk, renewable and non-polluting. Building large-scale wind and solar projects is the cheapest way of producing electricity here, even when paired with storage. It needs to be mined which can have widespread effects – contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation.Īustralia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries on earth, with enough renewable energy to power resources to power our country 500 times over. Uranium is a finite resource just like coal, oil and gas. They are also water hungry – requiring massive quantities of water for ongoing operations. Even when a nuclear power station operates as intended it creates a long-term and prohibitively expensive legacy of site remediation, fuel processing and radioactive waste storage. Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, have impacted hundreds of thousands of people and contaminated vast areas that take decades to clean up. Nuclear power poses significant community, environmental, health and economic risks.As shown in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan, by far the cheapest and quickest way to do this is to r amp up renewable energy paired with storage like pumped hydro, and batteries. Australia needs to replace its ageing coal-fired power stations as quickly as possible, and should be slashing its emissions by 75% this decade. Further, analysis conducted by the nuclear industry itself shows nuclear power stations take an average of 9.4 years to build – compared to 1–3 years for a major wind or solar project. In contrast, the costs of building and operating nuclear in Australia remain prohibitively high. CSIRO says by far the lowest cost way of producing electricity is with solar and wind even when factoring in storage. Nuclear power stations are expensive and take too long to build.Many parliamentary inquiries at a federal and state level – see this Victorian Inquiry, this Federal Inquiry, and this South Australian Inquiry for instance – have been held into nuclear, and all have concluded that nuclear power makes no sense in Australia. Such bans were introduced because of community concerns about the health and environmental risks. They are banned in every state, and in every territory. Nuclear power stations can’t be built anywhere in Australia.Why doesn’t nuclear power make sense for Australia? In fact, nuclear power in Australia makes no sense and wasting time and energy debating it is a distraction from genuine climate action. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, various individuals appear in the media singing the virtues of nuclear energy onshore – claiming it is the only option for clean and reliable electricity in Australia. While we have never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s.
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