Proposed nuclear energy crops in Queensland wouldn’t have entry to sufficient water to cease a nuclear meltdown and will pressure capability on ingesting water and irrigation provides even beneath regular operations, analysis has discovered.
Evaluation by the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) has discovered that one in every of the 2 nuclear reactors proposed for the sunshine state beneath the power plan that the Coalition will take to the upcoming federal election would require double the water at the moment utilized by the present Callide coal-fired energy station. The opposite, Tarong, would use 55% extra water than its current coal station.
Tarong’s main water supply is the Boondooma Dam, from which it’s allotted 30,000 megalitres per 12 months, and which additionally provides ingesting water for the close by city of Kingaroy and irrigates the wealthy agricultural nation alongside the Boyne River. However Tarong additionally has a pipeline to the Wivenhoe Dam, the primary provide of water for Brisbane and Ipswich, which – as a consequence of substantial premiums – it solely makes use of when Boondooma Dam ranges are low.
Greater than 1.3 million cubic metres of seawater had been required to chill Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors and stop a whole meltdown in 2011 – about 1,000 instances the mixed capability of Wivenhoe and Boondooma dams.
The report has been described as “flawed and highly politicised” by the coalition.
The QCC director, Dave Copeman, mentioned the actual fact there was “nowhere near enough water capacity in our dams to stop a nuclear meltdown if things go wrong” uncovered the Coalition’s power plan as a “nuclear fantasy”.
“If there was an emergency, you could run the whole [Wivenhoe] Dam dry and still not have enough water to stop a meltdown,” Copeman mentioned.
“The Coalition is not being honest with farmers and the community about the realities of their nuclear scheme. At best it’s impractical, at worst it’s grossly irresponsible and could result in a major incident.”
The Callide coal-fired energy plant has a 20,000 ML of annual water allocation from the Callide Dam, which is fed by the Awoonga Dam. As of Wednesday, Awoonga – which provides town of Gladstone’s water – was at 46% capability, and Callide – which provides ingesting water to Biloela – was at 16.5% capability. Callide Dam can be used to replenish aquifers that irrigate crops within the Callide Valley.
Callide must discover a further 27,000 ML of water to energy the form of energy crops implied by the Coalition’s nuclear plan, the QCC report discovered – with Copeman saying there was merely “not enough water available”.
Clare Silcock, the renewable power engineer for the QCC who crunched the numbers on the report, mentioned the Coalition’s nuclear proposal was scant on particulars. As an alternative she drew upon the Frontier Financial’s modelling that the opposition has relied upon to argue its nuclear imaginative and prescient for seven reactors throughout the nation could be 44% cheaper than the federal government’s renewables-led plan.
That report fashions simply over 100,000 gigawatt hours of nuclear electrical energy within the Nationwide Electrical energy Market (NEM) – which covers Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia – by 2050.
Six of the proposed nuclear websites are throughout the NEM, and so the QCC report assumes the technology could be unfold equally throughout these websites.
However Silcock mentioned not one of the different 4 proposed crops had been “going to be particularly better in terms of water availability”.
“This is going to be a problem for anywhere in Australia,” she mentioned. “Particularly in South Australia, they’re in a brutal drought at the moment. We’ve just done the analysis for Queensland – but the question is valid around all those six sites”.
Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith College’s faculty of atmosphere and science, mentioned the QCC analysis was “sound”.
Lowe mentioned {that a} rule of thumb was {that a} nuclear energy station wanted about 15% extra water than a coal-fired energy station of the identical capability. So whether or not the proposed Tarong and Callide nuclear crops would require kind of water than the present coal stations would rely on the capability for which they had been constructed.
“[But] if we were to build the amount of nuclear power proposed in the Frontier Economics report as part of the Coalition’s long-term approach for 2050 electricity, there would not be enough water for Tarong and Callide to provide the proposed share of power,” he mentioned.
That meant that the Frontier report was “implicitly assuming that the nuclear power program would be expanded” past the websites already recognized by the Coalition.
“So it would be reasonable to ask the question: if the much larger nuclear program proposed in the Frontier Economics report were to go ahead, where would all the extra power stations be sited?” Lowe mentioned.
“Given that we are the driest inhabited continent and rainfall patterns are being significantly disrupted by climate change, they would have to be on coastal sites and using sea water for cooling, which would add further costs due to the design complication of resisting corrosion”.
Shadow power minister Ted O’Brien MP described the QCC report as “flawed and highly politicised” criticising it for making assumptions about water utilization primarily based on a 2006 feasibility examine into the potential of establishing a nuclear energy business in Australia commissioned by then prime minister John Howard.
“The fact is, the latest nuclear power plant designs are incredibly efficient and their water usage is comparable to coal fired power stations which they will eventually replace,” O’Brien mentioned.
“The Coalition has embraced a world’s best practice ‘coal to nuclear’ because it allows us to leverage existing infrastructure – including water, transmission and a local workforce.”
The Coalition minister pointed to the Palo Verde Nuclear energy plant within the Sonoran Desert, one of many United State’s largest energy producers and the one one on this planet not close to a big physique of water because it makes use of handled wastewater from close by cities.
