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The typical rule in Australian politics is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. The most successful oppositions tend to employ a small target strategy - not putting out any big promises or agendas for the government to attack, and simply taking pot shots at the government for anything that goes wrong. The current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was an exemplar of this sort of strategy and he succeeded in dethroning a three-term Liberal government with it.
The current Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has decided to hell with that. Very unusually, he has proposed a big change in policy direction that is going to be one of the main issues that defines next year's election. He wants to go nuclear.
Australia does not have a nuclear industry (despite having more than a quarter of the world's uranium). In fact, nuclear power is explicitly illegal, at both the federal level and in multiple states. Victoria and Queensland (both ruled by Labor governments) have already ruled out any change in their laws or allowing nuclear plants to be built in their jurisdictions. Dutton is undeterred. He argues they will change their tune if he wins a mandate from the electorate for his policy.
The Albanese government meanwhile has made a big deal of the transition to renewable energy and acting on climate change. It has challenged Dutton to name the locations of his proposed nuclear plants (which he has now done) with the obvious intention of trying to stir up local resistance. It's running the argument that nuclear won't be built quickly enough to meet our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, and that nuclear will be more expensive than renewables. Most of the media has joined in the chorus of insisting that nuclear just doesn't make sense and that relying on wind and solar is much more sensible.
Much remains to be seen about how this debate develops. But Dutton in my estimation is an very pragmatic politician with a good sense of the public mood. He's certainly a conservative, but not someone who's about to let ideology get in the way of political advantage. It seems that he's judged that this is a good fight to have, and I suspect he's right.
I don't know what the politics of nuclear were like back in the 70s but today most people simply don't have a strong opinion on it. What they do have a strong opinion about is energy prices, and those have been going up and up. And while there's an endless stream of commenters ready and willing to assert that the path to cheaper prices is more renewables, I think Dutton is correct that he can win this argument.
Firstly, the actual experience of Australians has been that prices have gotten more and more expensive as more and more wind and solar has been deployed. It's easy to write a headline saying "Power prices went negative today" during a sunny period, but most people are very aware that they are paying more overall.
Secondly, the uptake of rooftop solar has been very high. Something like a third of houses have solar panels already, and this has led to widespread understanding of the intermittency of renewable energy. People understand that it's great when it works... but when it doesn't and they have to buy power from the grid, it's extremely expensive.
And there's a third underrated and underreported aspect to this debate. Dutton's plan is for these nuclear power stations to be government built and owned, while the Albanese government is relying on private investment for its renewable energy buildout. This is kind of an inversion of the traditional stance of the two parties involved, with the Liberals having led the charge in privatising our existing energy system. But I've encountered a not-insubstantial number of people who think that privatisation was a big mistake and really wish we had a nationalised energy system again. I've even heard doctrinaire libertarians say it.
I think Dutton expertly read the public mood on the Voice referendum, correctly judging where people would end up as the issue became more salient. And my feeling is he's done the same here, and is guiding the debate in a direction that will be rewarding for him. It's rare for first term governments to lose, we'll see if this play is able to create an exception.
Do they believe this? What’s going through their heads? Is it just vibes?
There are two(2) ways to run a power grid without particularly fortuitous geography a la Iceland, Switzerland, Norway. Nuclear and fossil fuels. That’s it. Renewables just aren’t reliable enough.
There is build 2x capacity and use fossil fuels when you are getting insufficient solar and wind power.
Which is why the vast majority of new US power infrastructure consists of natural gas turbines, because the only time the sun shines (and to a point, the only time the wind blows) is when you don't actually need the power and no other workable storage solutions exist.
Since the only output from the turbines is... CO2 and water [and methane is arguably the cleanest gas in terms of CO2 to burn, given its outsized amount of C-H bonds anyway], there's no visible plume coming out of the stack and very few other contaminants to visibly wreck the surrounding area (SO4), so most environmentalist complaints about them ring hollow to the general public. Much like cars themselves, come to think of it, especially when everything's already a hybrid anyway.
My memory that opposition to methane burning is more about leakage than anything about the plant or process itself. Of course, it is much better than coal, which is pretty bad. Methane, as you may know, is ~28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas then CO2, so small leaks can add up. However, I haven't looked at analyses on whether natural gas alone is or isn't sufficient for meeting Paris goals. My suspicion is no, but I could be wrong.
Hybrids still don't have full market penetration even among new cars. I'd be much more amenable to making hybrids required, rather than this electric-or-bust current policy. Unfortunately, they are still more expensive than traditional gas powered cars.
Still I quite like nuclear. Makes me wish the gen-4 reactor research funding wasn't so spotty and late.
I suspect that methane leaks are basically not real, and the meme probably driven by some research paper with either shoddy methods or a narrow application.
I happen to have two gas meters on my property. One connects to appliances in our house, the other to a heater for my pool. I use the heater maybe twice a year. During the months it is not used, there is zero movement on the meter.
I don't have any particular knowledge of methane infrastructure, but I am an engineer with some relevant general knowledge.
You are incorrect.
Leakage is an unavoidable part of any fluid system, and the larger the system, the more leakage you can expect. Shit leaks, especially on an industrial scale. Your domestic gas lines are very small and minimally manipulated, gas systems in industrial systems are very large, involve lots of things that can break, and are manipulated regularly.
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