Too slow and too risky, and waste won’t fit in a coke can – engineers debunk Coalition nuclear plan

The Australian Academy for Technological Sciences and Engineering has joined other scientific, engineering and energy experts in describing the federal Coalition’s preferred nuclear technology as too slow and too risky.

ATSE has released a detailed assessment on the status of small modular reactors, the nuclear technology embraced by the federal Coalition as a key part of its nuclear power plan, and a technology it claims could produce electricity in Australia by 2035.

The ATSE report says the more likely timeline is “beyond 2040”, and most likely in the late 2040s, and too slow to be of use in joining the urgent efforts of addressing dangerous climate change. If Australia rushed to embrace an unproven technology, ATSE warns, it will be both risky and potentially very costly.

“The urgency to decarbonise our energy sector has never been greater,” ATSE chair Dr Katherine Woodthorpe told a media briefing ahead of the report’s formal release on Wednesday.

“It (nuclear SMRs) will not come in time to assist in that. To combat the climate change that we’ve already seeing around us … we will need to be putting in more renewables because they’re the only thing that can provide energy in the timescale that we need to transition our grid.”

The ATSE view is entirely consistent with those expressed by the CSIRO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, the Australian Energy Regulator and leading figures in the energy industry, all of whom point out that nuclear is too slow, too costly and unsuited to Australia’s grid, and that it would be unlikely to be able to make any meaningful contribution before 2050.

All of these institutions have been attacked relentlessly by the Coalition and its conservative echo-chamber in the mainstream media as “outliers” or biased.

The Coalition has indicated it wants to keep coal fired power plants open until it can start up nuclear reactors, and The Nationals have demanded a moratorium on all new wind, solar and battery projects, and threatened to tear up Commonwealth contracts if it is returned to government.

The ATSE report differs from others because it does not come to any conclusions about costs, waste issues, or the ability to be incorporated with renewables in the grid. Its focus, Woodthorpe says, is a “facts base assessment” on the status of its technology and its likely deployment.

The report notes that to all intents and purposes, commercial SMRs do not exist. There are no licensed designs, or constructed or operating SMRs in any OECD country, and costs and performance could only be accurately demonstrated once full-scale prototype SMRs are built.

“Based on developer announcements and regulatory processes, it is possible that several prototype SMRs may be licenced, commissioned and built in OECD countries by the mid-2030s,” it notes.

“Commercial releases could commence by the late 2030s to mid-2040s, with a mature market likely emerging during the mid to late 2040s, depending on regulatory approvals and investment and resource allocation.”

The report says to meet the Coalition’s current timetable – it aims to build SMRs at Port Augusta in South Australia and Collie in Western Australia – with the first of them up and running by 2035, would be risky.

“That looks unrealistic,” said Professor Ian Lowe from Griffith University in Queensland. “It would be would be a high risk strategy to say we want to have a small modular reactor operating by 2035 because we have no idea at this stage what that would cost or what the operating parameters would be.”

The report says that a mature, well-functioning SMR market would require commercial SMRs that delivered using well-established manufacturing facilities and robust supply chains, a choice of vendors, transparent and proven capital and operating costs, demonstrable operational safety and a suitably scale nuclear-powered skills base.

“Currently, none of these conditions exists in Australia,” the report says.

It did not go into waste issues, because of the lack of information about what a commercial SMR technology would look like, but Woodthorpe said it was clear that the Coalition’s contention that the waste could be contained in a coke can, as Peter Dutton has claimed, is wrong.

“I think the one thing you can say no, it’s not going to be an annual amount in a coke can. We know that that was a misunderstanding,” Woodthorpe said.