Nuclear option would mean shutting off shedloads of cheap solar to use expensive power

Read the report: Delayed Reaction: Why Queensland Will Never Need Nuclear Energy (PDF 7mb)

Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) has today released a new analysis showing that the equivalent of 45,000 Queensland household solar systems would need to be shut off every day to allow just one nuclear power station to operate in 2040. With the renewable energy rollout well underway, by the time we have built a nuclear power station in Queensland, we won't have the need for it.

Clare Silcock, Energy Strategist at QCC, said:

Nuclear power stations can’t easily turn off, which means by 2040, we’d have to turn off a staggering 3,700 GWh of cheap renewable energy every year just to run one nuclear power station. We would be shutting off cheap energy to allow expensive nuclear power to run.

This report shows that nuclear power simply doesn’t fit into a modern grid and isn’t what we need to meet our future energy demands at the least cost.

Our energy system is changing rapidly. We’ve nearly doubled renewable energy in Queensland in five years. A large part of this has been from rooftop solar systems which have fundamentally changed when we need energy to support the grid.

Baseload generation is what our power system was built on, but it’s not what we need in the future. Saying that we need baseload generation is like saying that we need floppy disks to transfer files between computers.

What we need is flexible generation and storage which can move energy from when we have lots of it, in the middle of the day, to when we need it overnight. That is not how nuclear power stations work.

The earliest we could possibly build a nuclear power plant in Australia is 2040 – by then we will have abundant renewable energy and technology like batteries and pumped hydro will be providing the flexible storage we need to support that renewable energy.

Nuclear is also much more expensive than renewable energy backed by storage. CSIRO estimates nuclear could be up to four times more expensive to build. It’s as clear as day that the Federal Coalition’s nuclear plan is a fantasy to delay the closure of Australia’s polluting coal-fired power stations.

We would like to see the Federal Opposition focus on a real plan for bringing down emissions and power prices and that would mean backing renewable energy and storage.

Read the full report

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