<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/affordable-nuclear-duttons-plan-would-add-nearly-1000-a-year-to-the-power-bill-of-a-family-of-four/>
"A family of four in living on the east coast of Australia would pay nearly
$1000 more a year for electricity under the federal Coalition’s nuclear power
plan, a new report has found, while the average Australian household would see
bills rise by $665 a year.
In a major new report, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial
Analysis, IEEFA, has undertaken to calculate the cost to consumers of Peter
Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants across Australia, including
both large-scale reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs).
This has already been done, to a fashion, by Australia’s main scientific body,
the CSIRO, whose GenCost report in May of this year found large-scale nuclear
to be at least double the cost of integrated renewables, and impossible to
deliver before 2040.
IEEFA has taken a different tack, seeking to measure the cost of nuclear to
“mums and dads,” by calculating the electricity bill impact of a range of
scenarios, based on the actual costs of six recent projects in countries
comparable to Australia.
For large-scale reactors the first four scenarios are based on actual, recent
nuclear power plant construction costs and timeframes for countries in liberal
democracies where costs are transparent, IEEFA says.
This includes the real-life projects – Finland’s Olkiluoto Unit 3, France’s
Flamanville Unit 3, the US’s Vogtle Units 3 and 4 and the UK’s Hinkley Point C.
For SMRs – where, as IEEFA notes, “no plants have been successfully completed
in a democratic country” – costs are based on the one example of a binding
contract offer to build such a plant in the US, the now-cancelled NuScale
project.
It also used this approach to assess the costs to build South Korean APR
technology (a design that the Coalition has cited for potential implementation
in Australia) in a democratic country with laws protecting labour rights: the
Czech Republic’s Dukovany proposed plant.
“In the international examples examined, the capital cost of nuclear power
plants was very high – up to $90 billion,” says Johanna Bowyer, report coauthor
and lead analyst for Australian electricity at IEEFA.
“Recent international large-scale nuclear projects have experienced
construction challenges, delays and cost-blowouts. Capital costs, excluding
financing costs, of recent nuclear power station builds we analysed had blown
out by a factor of 1.7 to 3.4 times.”
When extrapolated to the Australian market, results vary – the more than
50-page report provides precise details on the differences in bill increases
depending upon which nuclear power project cost experience you consider, which
state (South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales or south-east Queensland) and
the size of the household.
But the bottom line is that, in every scenario, bills increase by hundreds of
dollars and in some cases by more than $1000."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
