Nuclear energy is an emissions detour Australia doesn’t need

With our busy lives, it can be tough to look beyond next week, let alone focus on seemingly distant dates like 2050.

And so, when CSIRO, the Climate Change Authority and other organisations urge governments to stay the net-zero emissions course, it’s easy to dismiss a mid-century goal as something we can defer to another day.

But it really does matter how Australia and other nations get to that goal. 

The impact of greenhouse gases stems from their accumulation in the atmosphere. They build up over time because of the amount we produce in any given year. We can’t just pollute away as usual until 2049 then (miraculously) eliminate those emissions the following year and declare success.

Just as many families are battling to manage their own budgets, there’s also a carbon budget in the background that’s ticking up. Scientists have a good handle on how much we have emitted and how much more we can pump out before our goal of keeping global temperature increases well below 2°C recedes beyond reach. 

The remaining budget isn’t big, and that’s why we need to start reducing emissions as far as possible, as soon as possible.

This is what drives the Climate Change Authority in our work: guiding Australia towards emissions reductions that are ambitious, achievable and in our national interest. 

Just as importantly, we need to sound the alarm when Australia risks going off track with policies or plans that would add to national emissions. That’s what we’ve done by publishing a report examining the impact on Australia’s emissions of incorporating nuclear power into our energy mix. 

Where other analyses have probed the challenges - from nuclear’s high costs to the regulatory, legal and scientific hurdles to clear – our analysis examined how Australia’s emissions trajectory would change.

And change it would: the nuclear pathway could blow out national emissions by more than 2 billion tonnes in the next 25 years.

Uranium-powered plants couldn’t come online until sometime in late 2030, meaning our ageing and increasingly unreliable coal generators would have to chug along much longer. 

Investment in renewable energy would also likely diminish, as the rhetoric around so-called “always-on” nuclear plants and policy uncertainty undermine confidence and the business cases for wind and solar farms.

Renewables are already the cheapest new-build replacement for fossil fuels, an advantage that improves every year as the price of solar panels and wind turbines tumble. Concerns about the reliance on weather-dependent energy sources are also being alleviated by the rapidly declining cost of big batteries. 

If we don’t take advantage of these options and wait for nuclear instead, emissions in the electricity sector alone would swell by more than 1 billion tonnes. Given Australia’s annual carbon pollution is now about 440 million tonnes, that would be like adding a couple of years of extra pollution to our national tally.

But the power sector is just one part of the emissions equation, even if it does account for the largest chunk at about one-third of national carbon pollution.

Our future economy will be driven by zero-emissions electricity – literally, in the case of electric vehicles. Industry and homes will also increasingly move away from gas as cheaper, cleaner options become available. That’s the pathway the Australian Energy Market Operator deems best for cutting emissions, reducing energy bills and delivering a reliable energy system out to 2050. 

The nuclear proposal assumes those necessary and beneficial changes outside the power sector also happen far more slowly. That’s the only way it avoids huge gaps in energy supply during the long wait for reactors to be built. It’s a good modelling trick, but absolutely not a plan for a thriving clean economy. 

Taking this path could add at least another billion tonnes to national emissions on top of the additional emissions in the electricity system. All while leaving Australian families and businesses reliant on more expensive and polluting types of energy, for longer.   

If we care about cutting emissions while continuing to build Australia’s prosperity, we simply cannot afford a nuclear energy detour.