Labor’s marketing campaign spokesperson, frontbencher Jason Clare, claimed on Monday that CSIRO had put a $600bn price ticket on the Coalition’s plans to construct taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors at seven websites.
“Have a look at the work that the CSIRO has done that proves that this will cost $600bn. It won’t turn a light on for 20 years. It’ll only produce about 4% of the energy that Australia is going to need,” Clare advised ABC Radio Nationwide.
The Coalition’s power spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, stated Clare’s assertion was a “lie” and that the CSIRO’s work had put the associated fee at one-fifth of the $600bn.
The place does the $600bn determine come from?
Labor has repeatedly used the $600bn determine in its marketing campaign, however that quantity doesn’t come from the CSIRO, Australia’s nationwide science company, and Clare was incorrect to say that it did.
The quantity comes from the Good Power Council (SEC), a renewable power business group that used the $600bn determine in evaluation put out as a press launch final June.
That evaluation was launched virtually six months earlier than the discharge of modelling utilized by the Coalition, carried out by Frontier Economics, to advertise its nuclear coverage. That modelling assumed there can be 13GW of large-scale nuclear-generating energy by 2050.
The SEC evaluation assumed there would solely be 11GW of nuclear. This included 1GW of capability coming from so-called small modular reactors that aren’t but commercially obtainable.
How had been the prices calculated?
The SEC evaluation set a value to construct reactors at between $116bn and $600bn – the decrease determine matching O’Brien’s declare that CSIRO’s work had estimated the associated fee as one-fifth of the $600bn.
SEC primarily based its decrease determine on the estimated prices of constructing nuclear calculated within the CSIRO’s GenCost report.
However importantly, the CSIRO prices had been primarily based on the idea that reactors can be constructed as a part of a longtime and rolling nuclear program – which isn’t what Australia would have in the beginning.
CSIRO specialists warned that the primary few reactors to be in-built Australia – if the Coalition might raise the nationwide ban – might value double its estimates due to a “first of a kind” premium.
The CSIRO thinks that for every gigawatt, SMRs can be greater than 3 times the price of typical nuclear – these vegetation weren’t a part of the Frontier modelling however had been included within the SEC evaluation.
The SEC assumed the primary 2GW of nuclear capability constructed can be double the CSIRO value, and the remainder can be 25% greater.
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Frontier estimated nuclear vegetation would value $10bn a gigawatt to construct in 2025, but additionally assumed these prices would fall 1% yearly.
What about different prices?
To get to the $600bn determine, SEC additionally stated it had added estimated prices of refurbishing and sustaining coal vegetation to maintain them operating for longer, however didn’t say how a lot it thought these can be.
The Coalition has stated it might be essential to maintain coal vegetation operating longer whereas nuclear reactors are constructed.
The SEC additionally pointed to the UK’s Hinkley C nuclear mission that has confronted ongoing delays and a doubling of the preliminary value estimates as a real-world instance of prices being a lot better than preliminary estimates.
Tristan Edis, an analyst at Inexperienced Power Markets, stated if the complete prices of Hinkley C – together with the price of curiosity funds over the lengthy construct time of nuclear – had been translated to Australia, then the Coalition’s reactors would value about $532bn.
Different specialists have recommended that CSIRO’s costings for large-scale nuclear are too conservative as a result of they had been benchmarked to prices in South Korea – a rustic constructing a few of the least expensive reactors anyplace.
Whereas the modelling utilized by the Coalition assumes a primary nuclear plant could possibly be producing energy in 2035, the CSIRO has stated it should in all probability take till the early 2040s. Others have counsel even longer timeframes.
One evaluation has warned that maintaining coal vegetation operating for longer might result in giant shortfalls in electrical energy technology, with even larger provide gaps to fill if nuclear vegetation confronted delays – as they often do.
