High-profile entrepreneur Dick Smith entered the ongoing radioactive debate on nuclear energy this week, accusing government agencies of misleading ministers over the costs of reactors and the practicalities of renewables.
But Smith’s complaints about what the Australian Energy Market Operator’s plan for the future of the grid says, or how CSIRO calculated the costs of nuclear, are themselves misleading.
Smith placed an advert in the Australian and gave an interview to the newspaper, saying: “What you would have to do if you wanted to try and use wind and solar, you’d need the most incredible expenditure in batteries.
“But if you have a wind drought or unusual cloud cover, the batteries go flat. You have no power.”
Except, Aemo’s plan for the future development of the electricity grid does not rely only on wind, solar and batteries, but also includes major pumped hydro storage projects, (think Snowy 2.0 or Queensland’s Borumba project) and an increase in the amount of electricity available from gas for times when solar and wind output is low.
This increase in the capacity of gas (up to 15GW in the future, compared with 11.5GW now, according to AEMO) does not actually mean more electricity being generated by gas.
Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems analyst at the University of NSW, says the future scenario that Aemo thinks is most likely sees the amount of gas generation electricity roughly at today’s levels by the late 2040s.
Aemo’s latest blueprint for the electricity system says: “This gas generation is a strategic reserve for power system reliability and security, so is not forecast to run frequently.”
Exaggerated costs?
Smith claimed CSIRO had exaggerated the costs of nuclear “by looking at the worst-case scenarios everywhere” – but did it?
CSIRO produces an annual report on the costs of different generation technologies, called GenCost, and for the first time this year included both large-scale nuclear reactors and small modular reactors, which are not yet commercially available.
For smaller reactors, CSIRO based its numbers on one of the only detailed set of costings available anywhere – a project in Utah that published detailed figures before it folded in November due to the high price of the electricity it would produce.
For larger reactors, GenCost benchmarked potential costs in Australia to one of the most successful and lowest cost nuclear builders anywhere – South Korea. This is, arguably, the opposite of choosing a “worst-case scenario”.
Tennant Reed, the climate and energy director at Ai Group and an energy systems expert, said the GenCost report was “very clearly not taking a worst case approach.”
Rather than look at South Korean nuclear costs, Reed said it would have been defensible for CSIRO to consider much higher nuclear costs in the US, UK, France or Finland – countries that had restarted nuclear building after a long pause, and therefore more similar to Australia’s situation.
He said: “A fair reading of GenCost makes clear that CSIRO have been pretty careful, if not generous, to avoid any overestimation of nuclear capital costs.”
Resilient reef?
The Great Barrier Reef has just been through what many scientists fear will be its most widespread and severe mass coral bleaching event – and a fifth in just eight years – driven by the inevitable rise in ocean temperatures from burning fossil fuels.
After being hit by two cyclones and then plumes of sediment flowing out over near-shore corals after major floods in north Queensland, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science (Aims), extreme levels of heat-driven bleaching covered for the first time all three regions of the reef this summer.
With all that, you would need to work pretty hard to find a way to suggest that there’s actually very little to worry about.
But the Australian newspaper managed that task at the weekend with an article claiming new government data showed the reef remained resilient, with near-record levels of coral cover.
It had been a good week for the reef, the story said, with Unesco deciding against recommending the natural wonder should be placed on a list of world heritage sites in danger, and then Aims publishing “final survey results” showing “hard coral cover has held steady at the record-breaking levels of the past two years across the entire reef system.”
The reef, wrote the paper’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, “appears to be largely going about its business as usual”.
The story included five graphs, each marked with a 2024 end data point, appearing to show high levels of coral cover from five of 11 sectors of the reef covered by Aims.
But three of those five sectors were actually surveyed well before this summer’s bleaching event began.
The Capricorn sector in the southern region of the reef was surveyed between September and October 2023, the Lizard island sector in the north was surveyed between November 2023 and early February 2024, and Cairns, in the central region, was also surveyed in 2023, between August and September.
Reports of bleaching did not start to emerge until late February and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority did not officially declare a mass bleaching was taking place until 8 March.
Prof Tracy Ainsworth, a coral scientist at UNSW, said it can be weeks or months, depending on the species and the severity of heat stress, before the fate of corals after bleaching can be known.
“To determine mortality of corals associated with bleaching, surveys conducted in the weeks to months after the peak of heat stress are necessary to assess mortality from bleaching,” she said.
Just swap
Lloyd interviewed Dr Peter Ridd, a marine physicist who has long-claimed the reef is not facing a crisis and who has also signed a declaration that “CO2 is plant food” and that there is no climate emergency.
Ridd claimed research had shown that corals could deal with rising temperatures by swapping their symbiont algae for more tolerant versions. When corals bleach, they seperate from the algae that lives in their tissues and provides much of their nutrients and colour.
“It is the reason that, even if there is to be a large rise in temperature due to CO2, corals are one of the best able to adapt and survive – all they need to do is swap the symbionts,” Ridd claimed.
But Dr Kate Quigley, who was also interviewed by Lloyd and who has researched the switching phenomena, says only some corals studied had this ability.
She said: “So some corals can withstand a bit of heat now, but this will likely be swamped given increased warming. Those species without these mechanisms will suffer the most first.”
She said rather than corals being “one of the best able to adapt and survive”, she said the opposite was true.
Quigley, a molecular ecologist specialising in corals at James Cook University, said: “That is why we are seeing reefs suffer globally. They are the canaries in the coalmine because they already sit very close to their thermal limits naturally. Small increases in warming have already pushed reefs to the limit.”
Research of previous bleaching events on the reef had shown that large drops in coral cover occurred once the amount of corals bleached on individual reefs went beyond 30%.
When government scientists carried out aerial surveys of this summer’s bleaching, they found 792 of 1,080 reefs had bleached. Half of those affected reefs saw bleaching of at least 30% and some 39% had 60% or more of corals bleaching.
Quigley said: “Although the official reports of the extent of impact are not yet complete, this can not be described as the ingredients for business as usual.”
