Dutton’s nuclear plan wouldn’t even meet net zero by 2050 target, report finds

The federal Coalition’s nuclear energy proposal would not just result in the tearing up of Australia’s commitment to the Paris climate treaty, it wouldn’t even be able to deliver net zero emissions on Australia’s main electricity grid by 2050, according to a new report.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s admission on the weekend that the Coalition’s energy plan – to stop the roll out of renewables, keep coal fired power stations online, and build more gas while waiting for nuclear – would render Australia’s interim emissions target for 2030 impossible to meet.

Dutton suggested that the Coalition would be willing to tear up that agreement, but would still seek to honour the later 2050 net zero target once nuclear power generators could be rolled out in the country in the 2040s.

A report prepared by Solutions for Climate Australia, led by Barry Traill, says Dutton’s proposal would result in some 2.3 billion tonnes of additional carbon emissions over the Australian Energy Market Operator’s step change scenario.

That is bad enough, because it would mean Australia walking away from its international commitments – the Paris treaty that Australia signed up to requires no backtracking because of the urgency of emissions reduction – and becoming a pariah once again on the international stage.

Worse than that, SCA says that even rolling out nuclear as early as 2040/41 – which it does not believe is feasible, but is using that date for the sake of modelling – and rolling it out as quickly as France (also questionable), would still leave Australia well short of reaching net zero by 2050.

The Coalition energy plan remains vague, but to fill the gap created by the lack of renewables and the shutting down of ageing coal fired power stations would require a 10-fold increase in gas generation, which with its newly understood methane leaks and ambitions is barely cleaner than coal.

“The calculations in this paper use a series of assumptions based on what the federal Coalition has said their nuclear reactors plan would achieve,” the report says.

“Many of these assumptions are not considered feasible by energy experts: it is near impossible that nuclear reactors could come online in 2040, nor that Australia could build nuclear reactors at one of the fastest rates in
history.

“The build rate used in this analysis generously matches the relatively fast rate achieved by France from 1978, which had a population of 53 million, and had already been building nuclear power reactors for 23 years.

“It is extremely unlikely that Australia could match this build rate, but this has been used as a proxy for the purposes of the analysis. Even with this scenario’s very ambitious build rate of nuclear reactors, the National Electricity Market would
not reach net zero by 2050.”

“Drastically reducing carbon emissions this decade is essential to avoiding more extreme fires, heatwaves, floods and droughts as the impacts of climate intensify.

“The proposal by the federal Coalition would not significantly reduce emissions until the late 2040s, by which time
catastrophic impacts would be almost certain.

“The proposal would break Australia’s existing international commitments to both the current 2030 target and its obligations under the Paris Agreements.

“Any proposal to introduce nuclear reactors to Australia is therefore not a climate policy, but rather a policy to increase emissions, acting to distract from urgent climate action over the coming decades.”