Just over a year ago, in the January 2006 issue, I wrote in the Publisher’s Letter that Australia should build nuclear power stations. Furthermore, I advocated that it be used to power the proposed desalination plant in Sydney.

Well, the political climate has certainly changed since then! The New South Wales Government has back-tracked on the desalination plant, in the forlorn hope that it would rain enough to fill the dams. Didn’t happen, did it? But on a more positive note, the Federal Government commissioned a report from Ziggy Switkowski, on "Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy". This 294-page report has just been released and the omens are generally favourable to nuclear power.

Having read the report, I can summarise it in the following way: Uranium mining is generally safe and worthwhile for Australia and we should produce more of it; Uranium processing is very expensive and we shouldn’t touch it with a barge pole and finally, Nuclear Power is safe but much more expensive than Australia’s existing coal-fired power stations. It will never be competitive with coal-fired power stations unless a substantial carbon tax is levied on them.

There seems to be little doubt about the first part: we should export more uranium to other countries. The second part also seems indubitable – so don’t process in Australia. The third part is more questionable – should we bother with nuclear power if we have to artificially make coal power more expensive to make nuclear power viable? I suggest that is the wrong question. The Federal Government is unlikely to bring in a carbon tax on all coal-fired power stations just to make nuclear power stations viable and nor should it. Rather, if nuclear power stations are to be built, to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Government should make a policy decision that nuclear power stations will be part of the national grid and will be able to sell their higher-cost electricity to it – just as higher-cost wind power already is. Consumers will pay more but they are likely to pay more in the future, whether we have nuclear power stations or not.

Having said that, some of the assumptions in the Report seem questionable. For example, Australia’s electricity demand is estimated to double by 2050, even though energy consumption per unit of GDP is declining. Furthermore, as stated in the Report, "consumption is expected to grow at around 2 per cent per year to 2030. The bulk of the electricity will continue to used in industry and commerce but domestic consumption is also expected to increase".

In effect, the Report says that electricity consumption will continue to grow inexorably and there will be no real drive for businesses and households to reduce their power use. So will we continue to waste ever more power? I suggest that if water consumption in all Australian cities can be drastically curtailed by stringent restrictions but little in the way of economic sanctions (ie, price rises), then there must be enormous scope for reductions in electricity consumption over the next 40-odd years, with no reduction in economic output or living comfort.

Think about it: the majority of households could undoubtedly be re-designed to provide just as much, if not more, living comfort while using substantially less energy. This has been done on a very large scale in Europe and the USA. And undoubtedly, most businesses could affect major savings in electricity consumption if they really had to, because of higher prices or restrictions.

So by all means let’s build some nuclear power stations to provide base load power while reducing our overall greenhouse gas emissions. But let’s not just continue to use electricity wastefully. Surely, we are more clever than that.

Leo Simpson