Good news. Uranium is safe.

Its the message being sent to South Australian teachers.

Here's a kit, helpfully sent out by the South Australian Chamber of Mines and Energy.

uraniumsa_teachers


Why exactly is it that there are health warnings in Japan? What is it that nuclear radiation does to cells and DNA?

These are no hints the publication.

And its science is crap too -- suggesting that nuclear radiation is just a scaled-up version of radio waves, or light.

Heaven help our students.

Heaven help Japan's.

In 1993 the reactor operator gave school students Mr Pluto, a cartoon character who flew around sprouting ‘facts’ and even encouraged a boy to drink a glass of water laced with Plutonium, saying that there’s nothing to be afraid of and Plutonium is safe to eat. The cartoon character wore a bright green hat with a friendly PU sign on the front. The cartoon boy, who drank the water, happily visited the toilet afterwards saying “Feels great! All fresh!”

Okay you South Australians, remember...

“Feels great! All fresh!”





Related Posts

. Forget nuclear power, we should be worried about expanding the Olympic Dam uranium mine

. The 'economics' of nuclear power in Australia

. Could baseload power demand be a myth?

. Australia's nuclear future: Howard shifts ground.

Read more >>

Could baseload power demand be a myth?

In November 1993 I took my radio microphone into the control room at the Sydney utility Pacific Power.

It was Melbourne Cup day. I was there to see and record what happened during the few minutes the race was run.

I learned that providing power is a very difficult (and very wasteful) enterprise.

For the the alternating current to keep coming out of our sockets at 50 cycles per second supply needs to exactly equal demand (as the economists would say).

When power consumption goes down (as it does every year during the Melbourne Cup when factories stop their production lines) the supply has to shrink at the same time, otherwise the readout on the control room wall shows not 50, but 50.1 or 49.9 or even worse, and devices such as televisions that depend on the direction of current switching 50 times per second rate don't work properly.

So as the power demand eased off, the machinery began cutting the supply...

First it shut off the intake to hydro turbines under the water in the Snowy Mountains, then it would stop gas turning turbines in coal-fired plants in the Hunter.

"But how can you do that?" I asked, although probably not in exactly those words.

"If you stop burning coal to boil the water, you won't be able to quickly start again when the Melbourne Cup stops."

The answer - more or less in these words: "We just point the steam away from the turbine until its time to point it back."

Coal-fired power generators (and nuclear-fired ones) can only accommodate quick changes in power demand by wasting power.

Well that's okay, the advocates of coal and nuclear say, they're needed for "baseload".

I began to doubt that then, and to suspect the causality ran the other way - that baseload is created in order to accomodate the way coal (and nuclear) plants work.

We create baseload "demand" by giving people financial incentives to heat their water at night.

A few years later an engineer phoned me at the ABC to explain (and complain) about his suspicion that Victorian power suppliers were creating baseload "demand" by putting a higher voltage through the wires at night so that in order to run household meters more quickly. He said he had the measurements to prove it. He also said they stopped doing it when he complained.

Wind power and hydro have none of these problems - yet we are told they are not good for base load.

A few weeks back I had to write a story for The Age about a related matter - which they didn't publish (sometimes it happens). It's down below.

Then I remembered this piece from John Quiggin which puts a lot of my vague thoughts into ordered words.

I've reproduced it right here (but also read the original for the comments).

What do you think?

(By the way, the Pacific Power people told me that they have to adjust the power supply to fit around the commercial breaks of really popular TV programs. Not so much because everyone gets up and turns on their kitchen lights, but because they go to the toilet, and activate pumps that have to haul more water to the top of Sydney's water towers.)


The myth of baseload power demand

July 22nd, 2009 John Quiggin

Today’s Fin has a leader arguing that we should be laying the ground for a move to nuclear power. It’s commendably realistic about the long time lags involved, and argues we should get started on preparations now. My view is that it would be better to wait and see if the US makes progress on its (currently faltering) attempts to revive the industry there. But the thing that really got me going was the repetition of the claim that alternative energy sources are problematic because they can’t meet “baseload power demand”.

I’ve said before that this claim is wrong, but I think it’s time to sharpen my position, and state two claims:

*There is no relevant sense in which baseload power demand is a meaningful concept in our current electricity supply system.

*Any electricity supply system likely to exist in the next 40 years and capable of meeting peak power demand will have no problems meeting baseload demand.

The first point may seem paradoxical, but the reasoning is quite straightforward. Our current electricity system is based primarily on coal-fired power stations which cannot be turned on and off at short notice. So, generating power during times of peak demand (daytime) entails generating power during off-peak times, even if there is no demand for that power at a price that covers average costs. That is, we have a baseload supply, which easily exceeds the demand for off-peak power at average cost, and sometimes even at fuel cost. The result, as we observe, is that off-peak power must be heavily discounted, and even so, demand is barely enough to keep the turbines turning.

To consider any meaningful notion of baseload demand, we could do a bottom-up analysis, and consider how much of electricity demand corresponds to the notion of a continuous, stable 24/7 demand. In the average household, for example, this would include the fridge and those ‘vampire’ appliances that are left on standby all the time. In addition, of course, lots of households have off-peak hot water, but this is only because of the price incentives designed to get rid of the excess baseload supply. The same points apply to offices and a most industrial uses (including some that operate at night to take advantage of cheap power, even though other costs are higher). There are only a few continuous processes like aluminium smelting that really constitute baseload demand in the strict sense. Of course, there are off-peak demands that don’t constitute baseload in the strict sense, like people watching TV at 3am, but there’s no reason to think that such demands are large.

To get a quantitative handle, we can use the following analysis: currently off peak prices are about half of daytime prices, and offpeak demand is about half of daytime demand (illustrative numbers only, will fix). If we didn’t discount offpeak electricity, it seems likely that offpeak demand would be around a quarter of daytime demand.

So, as long as 25 per cent of supply is generated by baseload suppliers like coal, oil, geothermal and nuclear, our main problem will be one of excess baseload supply, as at present. We’re unlikely to reach that point for some decades. But even then, the offpeak demand could be met by reliable sources that are independent of time of day, most obviously gas and hydro. In that case, standard principles of marginal cost pricing would suggest that there should be no off-peak discount. In such a system, the baseload sources would be used optimally, rather than generating excess low-value electricity as at present.

A baseload demand problem would only emerge in a system reliant almost entirely (more than 75 per cent) on solar electricity. And, even if such a problem emerged, it could be dealt with exactly as we deal with our current problem of excess baseload supply, by changing relative prices.

I haven’t dealt with the separate problem of supply variability from solar and wind (hint: the answer has to do with prices, as before). But, in our current circumstances, and as regards marginal increments to the system, the far bigger problem is that of supply invariability. It is a positive disadvantage for nuclear that it generates power 24 hours a day rather than solely during the daytime. Much of that power, and the fuel used to generate it, is effectively wasted.


You're getting smart meters, whether you want them or not

August 3, 2009 Peter Martin

Expect an extra $53 per annum on your electricity bill from next year for a service you probably haven't asked for.

The Australian Energy Regulator has proposed a range of increases averaging $53 dollars per household to pay for new compulsory "smart meters" to be installed in all Victorian homes over four years from 2010.

The new fees set out in the draft declaration would apply to all homes from next year even though the introduction of the smart meters would be staged.

The annual fee will increase by a further $25 in 2012.

AER Chairman Steve Edwell concedes that the bulk of the benefit from the smart meters will go to the electricity distributors who will no longer need to send meter readers to each house.

But he says the regulator will be making sure that those eventual savings are passed back to customers in tariffs.

"There's a four-year roll out and everybody pays upfront. Once the meters are installed and we starting getting some cost savings, they will be passed back to consumers," he told The Age.

Asked why consumers had to pay the full cost of something designed to benefit the suppliers he said that the distributors had wanted certainty.

"They've effectively got to order all these metes upfront. They are incurring charges on day one that they want to know they'll get compensation for."

The new meters communicate with the distributors by a range of technologies including mobile phone signals and have a short life span, necessitating a continuing impost of electricity bills beyond their installation.

Victoria is alone in mandating the technology without extensive trials.

"Victoria is leading the charge," said Mr Edwell. "All the other states are following the decision of the Ministerial Council on Energy to trial them first to look at the costs and benefits."

Those benefits include allowing the suppliers to charge higher tariffs at times of peak power use, in theory allowing them to alter the price minute by minute.

"You'll see the result on your bill and you'll be able to alter your behaviour to cut your spending, for example by not using your washing machine in peak time or turning off your air conditioner."

"If it succeeds in cutting peak power use there will be less need for investment in the network and less need for power prices to keep rising."

But Professor Stephen King of the Melbourne Business School is unconvinced, describing the compulsory installation of and payment for the meters as "bad economics".

"If the benefits outweigh the costs then the market will sort it out - consumers and suppliers will come to an arrangement.

"There is no suggestion that the government needs to force everyone to have Pay-TV cables connected to our houses, we would view such compulsion as ludicrous," the former ACCC Commissioner writes on his blog.

"Yet smart meters are no more complex than Pay-TV infrastructure."

"But the government might be doing it because they do not think the private benefits outweigh the costs, in which case the roll out is just an expensive political stunt – expensive to every household in Victoria."

Photo: UK's Battersea power station, Guardian

Read more >>

Australia's nuclear future: Howard shifts ground.

As recently as last month the Prime Minister has said he would do nothing to hurt Australia's coal industry. Not any more.

It looks as if we are going to trade carbon and go nuclear.

Story and analysis below:

Prime Minister John Howard, until now a staunch supporter of the coal industry, has spoken of the need for Australia to cut its reliance on the present generation of coal-fired power stations as it moves to a nuclear future.

Claiming that nuclear power stations were safer than coal-fired stations the Prime Minister said yesterday that he would have no objection to having one built next to his own home in Sydney.

Asked whether he was serious, Mr Howard replied: "I am serious, quite serious. I wouldn't have any objection. None whatsoever."

Launching the final report of the Switkowski inquiry into nuclear energy Mr Howard said that Australians "clearly need to recognise that we can't go on using coal with the current level of greenhouse gas emissions and also make a contribution to climate change"...

As recently as last month the Prime Minister spoke of wanting to shield Australia's coal industry from the consequences of action to fight global warming saying it was "in Australia's national interest to play a part in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but in a way that doesn't damage our vital industries such as the coal industry".

The new stance came as the Prime Minister undertook to refer the Switkowski Report's findings on greenhouse gas emissions and the costs of different forms of power to his Emissions Trading Taskforce which is due to report in May 2007.

It heightens the likelihood that the Prime Minister will mid-next year endorse some form of emissions trading regime that imposes a financial penalty on the operators of Australia's existing coal-fired power stations in order to assist the development of new low-emission technologies including nuclear power.

Mr Howard warned that the changes would mean higher power prices. "If there are to be reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, power bills will over time go up. There's not much doubt about that, that's been said before and it ought to be acknowledged," he said.

He has asked his Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane to bring a submission to Cabinet early in the new year on ways in which the Government can quickly remove impediments to the development of nuclear power.

The Switkowski report foresees the development of 25 nuclear reactors along Australia's coast producing about one third of the nation's power when nuclear generation becomes cost competitive.

Mr Howard said that the government itself would not be building any of the reactors and it would not be choosing the sites. "I think they should be where it makes commercial sense, where environmentally it's reasonable and all the other factors that will be taken into account. But we won't be building nuclear power stations and none are going to be built in the immediate future," he said.

The Opposition Leader Mr Rudd said that the Prime Minister's stance would present voters with a clear choice at next year's election. "Either they can vote for Mr. Howard, and get 25 nuclear reactors in the country; or they can vote for us, and we'll not be having one bar of nuclear reactors for this country," he said.

Mr Howard also yesterday called on Australia's Labor state and territory leaders to remove any remaining restrictions on the mining and export of uranium. Those restrictions remain part of Labor's national policy platform.


Analysis

Standby for Australia’s first nuclear power plant. The foundation stone will most likely be laid in about ten years from now.

But the final report of the Switkowski inquiry released yesterday makes clear that for that to happen a number of supports have to be put in place.

First there needs to be a single national regulator for the nuclear industry, of the kind the High Court’s recent WorkChoices decision has made possible. It would help if there was bipartisan agreement about the rules for establishing plants that would give would-be generators the confidence to invest.

Then the cost disadvantage of nuclear power needs to vanish, or a mechanism needs to be put in place where the investors would have confidence that the disadvantage would vanish by the time they are ready to produce power. An emissions-trading scheme that penalised heavy emitters of carbon such as coal-fired power stations would do the trick.

It would not need to be a particularly onerous emissions trading scheme. Switkowski finds that even with Australia’s access to very cheap coal, nuclear power would be just 20 to 50 per cent more expensive.

By contrast a coal-fired station that captured and stored carbon to eliminate emissions would be around 150 per cent more expensive.

If a system of tradable carbon permits is introduced, even at a low price, it is likely to make nuclear power a more attractive option for replacing Australia’s existing carbon-belching power stations than new coal-fired stations with built-in carbon capture.

(It would also make high-capacity wind generation attractive. Its costs are in the same range as those of nuclear power.)

It is possible for the Prime Minister’s Emissions Trading Task Force to design a permit trading system that increases the costs of coal-fired generation slowly and predictably giving would-be nuclear generators (and renewables generators) the kind of certainty that they would need to make the heavy investments necessary to replace Australia’s coal-fired plants when their working lives expire.

That Task Force reports in May. It will lay out the road map to Australia’s nuclear future.

Read more >>

Australia's nuclear future?

Dr Switkowski says there is “no case” for nuclear power without some sort of carbon tax. The Prime Minister says such a tax would mean that “Australians would pay more for electricity while jobs and investment would be exported offshore”.

Or that’s what he said three months ago. Since then his language has subtly shifted.

He is not alone. Dr Switkowski told the Press Club yesterday that opinions are shifting quickly. The former nuclear physicist said that as recently as a year ago he felt intense community opposition to nuclear power. Now he says feelings are more moderate.

And so too is John Howard’s desire to protect the coal industry. Asked in Vietnam yesterday for his view about a carbon tax the Prime Minister said: “Well at the moment dirty coal is cheaper than nuclear power… but I thought everybody was in favour of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and if you’re going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even things like clean coal technology will make the use of coal a bit more expensive.”

Mr Howard may still be against “ a carbon tax” but he appears to no longer be against imposing a cost on Australia’s coal-fired power industry in order to reduce emissions of carbon...

Free-marketeers such as the ANU’s Professor Warwick McKibbin, a member of the Switkowski Nuclear Review would prefer that coal and gas-fuelled power stations be made to pay for the carbon they belch out by buying permits.

(The free-market bit is that they would be allowed to buy and sell the permits so that firms that cut their carbon emissions early and have spare permits can sell them at a profit.)

Dr Switkowski said yesterday that the permits would need to be priced high enough to force up the cost of coal and gas-fired power by 20 to 50 per cent.

John Howard appears to be talking about a requirement for coal-fired power stations to use clean coal technology, which would “make the use of coal a bit more expensive.”

As it happens clean coal technology (which is very difficult to install, but easy to introduce when a power station is replaced) is quite a bit more expensive – it can double the cost of power produced from coal according to CSIRO calculations.

John Howard’s approach may not be as different from Ziggy Switkowski’s as it seems.

Both would push up the price of coal-fired power by imposing big costs on those plants, and both could do it enough to meet Australia’s greenhouse obligations and make nuclear power financially attractive.

Mr Howard would do it by requiring Australia’s existing power stations to install an expensive technology, Dr Switkowski would do it by allowing them to trade expensive permits.

The two aren’t that far apart at all.

Read more >>

Switkowski's Nuclear Future

When the former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski rises at the Press Club on Tuesday to outline the findings of his Nuclear Energy Review most of the interest won’t be in the findings themselves, but in the reasoning he uses to back them up.

The findings have already been leaked. They are that nuclear power could be commercially viable within 15 years and Australia can go ahead and start planning, safe in the knowledge that by the time a nuclear power station is ready the cost differential with coal will have disappeared.

They are findings that, on the basis of the evidence presented to the Switkowski Review, look hard to justify.

The United States, often regarded at the forefront of the push for nuclear power, hasn’t built a new nuclear plant since the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The problem isn’t only community concern about safely and about the ability of plants to withstand a terrorist attack, it’s economics...

BHP Billiton says in its submission to the Switkowski Review that even with the huge reductions in the cost of building plants likely in the years ahead “only few nuclear plants are expected to be built in the United States in the next few years”.

It says those that are built will be constructed “only as a direct result of the US$15 per megawatt hour subsidy and other incentives available under the Energy Policy Act 2005”.

In Australia the economics of nuclear power are even harder to justify.

As Dr Switkowski himself said last month: "Australia is blessed with a couple of things - very low-cost electricity because of access to coal and gas, and has many centuries of coal supply available."

In March this year a British scientist John Gittus examined the economics of nuclear power for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). The plant he recommended was the Westinghouse AP1000, which has yet to be built anywhere in the world. He said that eventually new AP1000’s would come down in price to be as cheap to build, run and decommission as new Australian coal-fired power plants. But he said that until then the AP1000 would produce electricity “at a cost that is
significantly higher than would a new coal fired or CCGT power station”.

He suggested a government subsidy of 14 per cent of the cost of building the plant and 21 per cent of the cost of its electricity for the first twelve years.

BHP puts the problem this way: “The electricity markets in Australia are renowned for their effective market operation and their clear market signals to encourage efficient investment. The Australian market structure helps ensure that only cost-competitive generators are profitable. Under current circumstances, nuclear generation would not be cost-competitive with existing or anticipated new generation assets.”

It says that not only is nuclear power about 13 per cent more expensive than gas for those countries that have access to it, but that “significantly”, it is 6 per cent more expensive than electricity produced by wind “which is also a carbon-free resource in its power production phase”.

BHP acknowledges that if a carbon tax was introduced that roughly doubled the price of coal-fired electricity nuclear power would become attractive. But it says “on these assumptions, many other technologies - wind, solar, clean coal, carbon geosequestration, carbon offsets, energy efficiency, etc. - could also become more competitive”.

BHP Billiton, which operates the Olympic Dam uranium mine in outback South Australia says it has “no intention of entering the nuclear power generation market and its potential investment in the expansion of the Olympic Dam project is not dependent in any sense on the establishment of a domestic nuclear power industry”.

The National Generators Forum, which represents Australia’s existing power generators is equally unconvinced about nuclear power. It has told the Review that even by 2030 nuclear power would still cost twice as much for Australia to make as would power from coal.

It says the reason nuclear power makes commercial sense in Europe and Japan is that coal and gas are hard to get. And because of the dense population in those places coal-fired power stations are dangerous to residents. But in Australia coal-fired power stations are distant from the cities and the coal they burn is cleaner, for example (according to the Forum) producing almost no nuclear radiation as does coal from other countries.

About the only way to make a commercial case for nuclear power or other alternative energy sources is to tax or require a permit for the release of carbon. (A tax is paid to the government; a permit is issued or sold by the government but can then be traded privately.)

And as it happens Australia’s leading proponent of carbon permits and trading is Professor Warwick McKibbin from ANU, who is one of the six members of the Switkowski Review.

Professor McGibbin is an internationally recognised economic modeler. He has calculated that if Australia ratified the Kyoto treaty and introduced carbon trading it would cut the value of our national income over the next 50 years by a mere 0.16 per cent.

John Quiggin from the University of Queensland puts this in perspective. He says 0.16 per cent of GDP is to two weeks' economic growth. “In other words, suppose that we all took it easy for two weeks… and kept producing the same level of output but there was no growth in productivity. Suppose that after the two weeks were finished the economy returned to the previous rate of growth, but that the growth missed in those two weeks was not regained. This would be roughly the impact that McKibbin is modeling,” he says.

It is just possible that on Tuesday the Swikowski Report will provide John Howard with a face-saving way of agreeing to carbon trading, if not signing up to the Kyoto Treaty itself.

The Switkowski Review is examining more than nuclear power. It is also looking at the idea of “adding value” to the uranium Australia exports by turning it into fuel rods; leasing them to overseas power plants and then taking them back for burial in the desert.

As BHP puts it in its submission, some commercial interests have suggested that there is “an opportunity and almost obligation” for Australia to process and rebury its uranium give our stable political political and geological situation.
It is an obligation BHP vehemently rejects saying it “believes that there is neither a commercial nor a non-proliferation case for BHP Billiton to become involved in front-end processing or the development of fuel leasing services in Australia.”

Indeed it says there is an oversupply of fuel reprocessing services worldwide and that most of the end-users of Australian uranium do not want to send it back. It says any attempt to force BHP and Australia’s other uranium exporters into the processing and burial business “would put customer relations and the investments those underpin at risk”.

It notes that traditionally the Australian government has been reluctant to impose “artificial constraints” on Australia’s exports and reluctant to pick winners when it comes to supporting industry.

And that’s what will be so interesting about the Switkowski Report. It will only be able to find that nuclear power industry is viable in Australia with a carbon tax or a system of carbon permits and trading, and those measures would advantage many other forms of power generation as well.

Nuclear power stations are so expensive to build that putting a high efficiency solar panel on every roof in Sydney might be cheaper per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced.

Traditionally trained engineers are uncomfortable with such an idea, because they have become used to a model where electricity is generated centrally and then distributed radially, in the same sort of way as are radio signals. But just as the internet is changing that system for radio, local generation may be changing it for electricity as well.

Many Australian homes now produce power from solar cells or wind and sell it back to the generators, although the generators themselves don’t seem to be encouraging the idea. It is no worse a method of producing power than central distribution, and probably more secure, but it requires a new way of thinking. On the outskirts of Sydney one new apartment development will make its own power from gas, using the waste heat to provide each apartment with hot water. It won’t be connected to the central electricity supply at all.

Nuclear power requires central distribution at its most extreme. Some of its advocates have even suggested that one single nuclear station could supply base load power for entire country, located near the uranium mines in Australia’s center. But the idea that there needs to be a big base load supplier is becoming less fashionable as well. Much of the ‘demand’ for a constant base load is created by power companies that are unable to easily vary their output. They create the demand with variable tariffs and devices such as off-peak water heaters.

A Nuclear Review prepared by an economic rationalist would have behind it no assumptions about the way power should be distributed and would pick no winners when it came to government support. It would recommend a carbon tax in order to cut emissions of carbon, not in order to give a leg-up to a particular technology.

The Treasurer Peter Costello said recently that in his view nuclear power was not presently commercial. “"I don't think it will be in three years; will it be 10 years? Maybe, possibly not. But it will, in my view, become commercial, and when it becomes commercial, someone will build it."

On Tuesday we will find out whether Ziggy Switkowski takes the same approach.

Read more >>

The 'economics' of nuclear power in Australia

If you listen carefully to the new debate over nuclear power you can hear the sound of furnace doors being opened and bundles of the Treasury’s $100 notes being loaded on to shovels.

The Prime Minister says he wants to find out whether nuclear power is economically feasible in Australia. He must know that it is not a commercial proposition. There have already been enough reports prepared for his Government telling him so.

The most recent, prepared by a British scientist sympathetic to the nuclear industry for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) finds that any private operator who attempted to build a nuclear power plant in Australia would produce electricity ‘at a cost that is significantly higher than would a new coal-fired or gas-turbine power station.’

In many places overseas it is a different story. For countries that don’t have ready access to coal, are densely populated and are rapidly industrialising, then nuclear power might well be the ideal (perhaps, the only) commercial solution.

So what will the Australian Government do?

Well, I fear that it’ll do what it’s done before — notwithstanding its proclaimed commitment to the free market.

Back at the start of the 1980s, media moguls including the late Kerry Packer became fascinated with the idea of a national communications satellite. They wouldn’t build it or fund it themselves — as a business proposition, it made no sense. But persuading the Government (Malcolm Fraser Prime Minister, John Howard Treasurer) to part with its own money to ‘position Australia well for the future,’ the moguls played with the new technology for which they could never make a sound business case.

A decade later the government-owned aussat was $400 million in debt and derided as a piece of ‘space junk.’ The Hawke Government couldn’t give it away — literally. In order to persuade the firm that became Optus to take it off its hands, the Government threw in a domestic telephone licence.

AUSSAT was built and launched at a time when Australia was about to be covered by a web of cheaper-to-use optical fibre cable. In order to ensure that AUSSAT had paying customers the Government forced the ABC to use it exclusively to transmit its programs between Australian cities. But the economics of doing so were horrendous. Even after the ABC had paid for all of the transmission costs, the cost of an extra receiving dish was sometimes still more than the cost of using optic fibre cable.

I worked at the ABC during the 1980s and remember one instance when the ABC got around the spirit of the Government’s requirements by installing a cable between Sydney and Wollongong rather than buying yet another satellite receiver.

Smart people knew that AUSSAT made no financial sense. But it suited them for taxpayers to take the plunge and then take the bath.

Smart people are at it again.

The report prepared for ANSTO finds that a privately-owned nuclear power plant could only make money if the Government contributed 14.3 per cent of the cost of building it, and then paid 21.4 per cent of the electricity bills for the first 12 years. It’s a finding based on best-case assumptions. The interest rate used in the calculations is one of the lowest on record (that for 2002-2003), the plant is of a type not yet built, and it is assumed to be far cheaper than have been previous nuclear power plants.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Government bites again.

Some of the arguments for it doing so are incredibly thin. The report for ANSTO says that a nuclear power plant would improve the security of electricity supplies ‘by adding diversity to Australia’s sources of electricity.’ This makes about as much sense for a nation built on top of a near-inexhaustible supply of coal as does the claim that Iran needs nuclear power in order to diversify away from oil.

It is correct that a nuclear plant might become more economic relative to coal-fired plants if the Government imposed a tax on carbon emissions and allowed carbon trading — something it has said it is not yet ready to do.

But if it did do so, all sorts of other actions might become more economic as well — among them the installation of technology to cut or offset the emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The market would decide. And my tax dollars would be safe.

Wouldn’t that be something?

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