Nuclear won't make power bills cheaper, energy analyst says, as Coalition claims scrutinised

The Coalition's claims nuclear power will make energy cheaper don't stack up, according to an energy analyst.

In a long-awaited announcement, the Coalition yesterday unveiled its plans for nuclear energy in Australia as part of efforts to decarbonise the economy by 2050. As a consequence, he said the electricity generated by those plants — in countries from the US to Finland and the UK — was or would be expensive by Australian standards.Ted O'Brien, the opposition's energy spokesman, pointed to the Canadian province of Ontario to argue that nuclear power was delivering relatively cheap electricity to households.

This, he said, meant its costs were likely to be far lower than for any new plant such as Hinkley Point C in England, where the government had agreed to buy power at $237MW/h for decades. "So it's an absolute stretch to say that this will result in lower electricity prices, and certainly not on time frames that anyone will appreciate."Under the Coalition's plan, the first nuclear plant would be a small modular reactor and it would be operational by 2035.

Dr Barr said trying to plug too much variable wind and solar power into the grid would ultimately run into limitations that nuclear power could overcome by being available around the clock. As things stood, Dr Barr argued, there would eventually be so much wind and solar power on the system that huge amounts of electricity would need to be wasted — or curtailed — during periods of abundance to avoid overloading the system."If they do it well, they can drive down the cost of electricity from where we are at the moment.

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