Bowen says asking Australia to go nuclear is like asking the Swiss to take up surfing

Federal energy minister Chris Bowen has again attacked the federal Coalition’s nuclear power policy, saying it is not compatible with renewables in Australia’s grid and comparing it to asking the Swiss to take up surfing.

“I have no ideological objection to nuclear energy,” Bowen said at a dinner function at the Australian Clean Energy Summit in Sydney on Tuesday.

“Some have a moral objection (to nuclear), I don’t. I have an economic and engineering objection. Climate and energy policy can be built around economic and engineering. Nuclear in Australia fails on both tests – economics, because it is so expensive, and engineering because it takes so long to build.

“If I was the energy minister of a country without renewable resources, maybe I would have to think about that. But saying this country is going nuclear so we should use it, is like going to Switzerland and saying, ‘look I know you have got lots of snow, but we really think you should try surfing’.”

Bowen said Australia has the best wind and solar resources in the world and combining the two made no sense.

“Let’s not pretend for a second that nuclear can be some sort of benign addition to renewables … it’s baseload and we don’t need new baseload, we need new energy which compliments renewables.”

Bowen says the federal Coalition’s push for nuclear is already having an impact on investment sentiment for renewables in Australia.

He will take up the issue again at an appearance at the National Press Club in Canberra, where he will once again focus on the incompatibility of nuclear and renewables in a wind and solar rich country such as Australia.

“Their ideological pursuit of nuclear reactors in two decades’ time would wreck the renewables rollout now,” he says according to speech notes released ahead of time.

Base load nuclear power plants would need to keep generating even when there were ample renewables, “losing money for every watt of energy produced” and challenging the economics of the technology.”

“Is the coalition’s plan to curtail zero cost renewable energy to make room for expensive nuclear energy when renewables drive wholesale prices to very low levels, or is their plan to bankroll these baseload plants to bid into the system at prices where they’ll bleed money?”

“For those reasons, Australians can choose reliable renewables or risky reactors – but not both.”

He also underlined the points made on Tuesday by the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, and the head of the biggest coal company AGL, that nuclear cannot be built fast enough anyway to replace the ageing and increasingly unreliable coal fired generators that are due to retire in the next decade.

“Over the last year, not a single day has passed without an unplanned outage at a coal power generator in eastern Australia,” Bowen says.