AEMO boss says nuclear too slow to replace coal, and confirms that “notion of baseload” will not compete with grid powered by cheaper renewables.

The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.

  • The_Terrible_Humbaba@slrpnk.net
    43·
    2 months ago

    For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.

    I’ll put it another way so you might better understand my point: what would you have said 10 or 15 years ago when someone mentions that solar is a bad idea because it would cost more? Because up until recently it did cost more, and people did use it as an argument against it. And now your (and other people’s) main criticism of nuclear is that it’s not as cheap as an energy source that we’ve been heavily investing into for a decade.

    You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here

    I showed several examples. The ones you mentioned, such as earthquakes, are not likely to affect one source more than another, but events which block out the sun obviously disproportionately affect the production of solar energy.

    it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that

    Neither was solar when we started to invest in it, as I mentioned earlier. That came from improving and investing in the technology - which also bumped solar into the safest energy source, right after nuclear, which used to be the safest.

    • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 months ago

      I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here to be honest. When nuclear was the fastest, cheapest option we should have been deploying that. Now that it’s not, we should still be deploying the fastest cheapest thing. Solar, wind and batteries continue to be on a rapidly declining cost curve, even back in 2010 but it was still too early to roll them out at huge scale. It’s unlikely nuclear will be catching up any time soon barring major breakthroughs like fusion.

      I also strongly disagree with your statement that disasters would impact nuclear and renewables equally. One of these things is certainly much harder to clean up and recover than the other if there is significant damage from an environmental disaster.

      We should be rolling out the best available technology at the current time and continuing to improve our generation technologies, including nuclear, as we always do. I’m not sure why we would do anything else.