Ziggy Switkowski and another big nuclear back-flip

Dr Ziggy Switkowski, best known as a former Telstra CEO, less well known as a former oil and gas company director, is a nuclear physicist by training. Wearing his nuclear hat, he was appointed by then prime minister John Howard to lead the 2006 Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Power Review (UMPNER) inquiry.

The UMPNER inquiry didn’t inquire. The panel was comprised entirely of “people who want nuclear power by Tuesday” according to the late comedian John Clarke. Its report was predictably biased and misleading. 

Howard evidently decided that he was pushing too hard and too fast. The UMPNER panel was required to finish its report in great haste in late 2006 and the Coalition tried to run dead on the nuclear issue in the lead up to the November 2007 federal election.

However, the Coalition’s political opponents – including Anthony Albanese – were more than happy to draw voters’ attention to the Coalition’s unpopular nuclear power plans. During the election campaign at least 22 Coalition candidates publicly distanced themselves from the government’s policy. Howard lost his seat and the Coalition was defeated. The nuclear power policy was ditched immediately after the election. Past as prologue, perhaps.

Ziggy 2.0

In recent years we’ve had Ziggy 2.0. To his credit, he reassessed his views in light of the cost blowouts with reactor projects and the large reductions in the cost of renewable energy sources.

He said in 2018 that “the window for gigawatt-scale nuclear has closed” and he noted that nuclear power is no longer cheaper than renewables, with costs rapidly shifting in favour of renewables.

Ziggy 2.0 noted in his evidence to the 2019 federal nuclear inquiry that “nuclear power has got more expensive, rather than less expensive,” and that there is “no coherent business case to finance an Australian nuclear industry.”

He added that no-one knows how a network of small modular reactors (SMRs) might work in Australia because no such network exists “anywhere in the world at the moment.”

Ziggy 2.0 noted the “non-negligible” risk of a “catastrophic failing within a nuclear system”. He acknowledged the difficulty of managing high-level nuclear waste from nuclear power plants, particularly in light of the failure of successive Australian governments to resolve the long-term management of low- and intermediate-level waste.

Ziggy 3.0

Now we have Ziggy 3.0, who sounds a lot like Ziggy 1.0. Peter Dutton and shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien “are as well informed on things nuclear as any group I’ve talked to in the last 20 years in Australia,” Ziggy 3.0 says.

Just about everything Dutton and O’Brien say about nuclear power is demonstrably false. Only the ill-informed could possibly claim they are well informed.

Ziggy 3.0 is spruiking the next generation of nuclear plants. Perhaps he’s talking about non-existent SMRs, or failed fast breeder technology, or a variety of other failed technologies now being dressed up as ‘advanced’ or ‘Generation IV’ concepts.

Who knows what he has in mind, and there’s no reason anyone should care expect that he has, once again, assumed the role of a prominent nuclear cheerleader.

“I think it’s unreasonable for anybody to expect the opposition leader to come out with a fully documented and costed plan at this stage,” Switkowski says.

But why is that so hard? O’Brien chaired a 2019 parliamentary inquiry into nuclear power. Coalition MPs initiated and participated in a 2022/23 parliamentary inquiry. And they have a mountain of other research to draw from.

Baseload

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Switkowski now says “the cost curve for solar and wind has moved aggressively down” and he praises CSIRO for its work on the higher relative cost of nuclear power compared to renewables.

But Ziggy 3.0 goes on to say that “you need to have nuclear as well for baseload power”. Seriously? Nuclear power as a complement to renewables as we head to, or towards, 82 per cent renewable supply to the National Electricity Market by 2030? That’s nuts.

Perhaps he thinks non-existent SMRs can integrate well with renewables? Does he support the Coalition’s plan to expand and prolong reliance on fossil fuels until such time as SMRs i) exist anywhere in the world and ii) are operating in Australia?

Apart from the practical constraints (not least the fact that they don’t exist), the economics of SMRs would go from bad to worse if using them to complement renewables. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, power from an SMR with a utilisation factor of 25% would cost around A$600 per megawatt-hour (MWh).

Likewise, a recent article co-authored by Steven Hamilton – assistant professor of economics at George Washington University and visiting fellow at the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the ANU – states:

“Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said: “Labor sees nuclear power as a competitor to renewables. The Coalition sees nuclear power as a companion to renewables”.

“The trouble is that nuclear is a terrible companion to renewables. The defining characteristic of being “compatible” with renewables is the ability to scale up and down as needed to “firm” renewables.

“Even if we don’t build a single new wind farm, in order to replace coal in firming renewables, nuclear would need to operate at around 60 per cent average utilisation (like coal today) to keep capacity in reserve for peak demand. This alone would push the cost of nuclear beyond $225/MWh. To replace gas as well, the cost skyrockets beyond $340/MWh.”

Making sense of Ziggy 3.0

Ziggy 1.0 said in 2009 that the construction cost of a one gigawatt (GW) power reactor in Australia would be A$4-6 billion. Compare that to the real-world experience in the US (A$23.4 billion / GW), the UK (A$27.2 billion / GW) or France (A$19.4 billion / GW).

Ziggy 1.0 wasn’t wrong by 4-5 percent, or 40-50 percent. He was out by 400-500 percent. And yet he still gets trotted out in the mainstream media as a credible commentator on nuclear issues. Go figure.

Dr. Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and co-author of the ACF’s new report, ‘Power Games: Assessing coal to nuclear proposals in Australia’.