Latrobe Valley Express, 3 December 2024

Nuclear power generation in the Latrobe Valley is now essential because of the need for base load power in a balanced system as over-investment in renewables is destabilising electricity supply and increasing costs, according to a retired Morwell scientist.

Dr Ron Camier, in a submission to the House of Representatives inquiry into nuclear power, said these increasing costs due to renewables were a primary driver for increasing unemployment and the cost-of-living.

“The full cost of new renewables including storage, transmission and distribution is being underestimated,” he said.

Dr Camier, a long-time Latrobe Valley resident and retired chemical engineer, has a background in brown coal research and development, and has worked at the CSIRO Division of Mineral Engineering, SECV Herman Research Laboratory, Brown Coal Liquefaction Victoria and HRL Ltd.

“I must acknowledge that global warming must be addressed, and exponential growth in population, resource consumption, fossil fuel combustion, energy prices (and dare I say extravagant lifestyles) are unsustainable,” he said.

However, “it is possible to find a balance without ideological polarisation”, he said.

In a series of recommendations, Dr Camier emphasised the need for nuclear power:

Filling in electricity supply gaps with premium-value natural gas (used in low-efficiency gas turbines) and hydro come from limited resources and are expensive;

Base load power generation from new nuclear and HELE (high efficiency low emissions) coal plant is necessary for base load supply. Adequate safety and waste disposal technologies are available for both;

The Latrobe Valley has suitable industrial services, workforce and infrastructure for nuclear power, and;

The midday surges of solar feed/demand drop are damaging to all other forms of power generation. They must be curtailed concurrently to permit investment in nuclear power.

Dr Camier said well-intentioned ‘renewable’ electricity generation promised to save the climate.

“Unfortunately, these solar and wind power technologies provide erratic outputs, mostly in the middle of the day, rather than during the morning and evening peaks when most needed,” he said.

This was promoted by cross-subsidies ranging from home insulation, light bulbs, solar panels and tree-planting, to carbon taxes and mine rehabilitation imposts. The resulting over-investment produced wild fluctuations in electricity markets, often driving midday demand to near zero.

“The resulting instability in wholesale electricity prices is a toxic environment for big, steady baseload power generators. This shrinking baseload means that coal-fired power stations are being displaced (leaving a gap) rather than replaced by renewables,” he said.

“By no longer operating at near 100 per cent capacity, Latrobe Valley power stations are damaged economically, affecting maintenance budgets as well as profits. Worse still, is the physical damage from trying to cycle them up and down, with expansion and contraction stresses on their massive steel structures causing cracking and other failures.”

Dr Camier said more investment in renewables, with additional battery storage, was not the answer, despite reduced carbon dioxide output.

“This is because a fundamental problem with all renewables, again not well understood, is a basic law of nature known as the ‘second law of thermodynamics’,” he said.

“Essentially it means that collecting low intensity energy from the sun or wind (albeit apparently ‘free’) requires vast areas of collectors (solar panels or wind turbines) and concentration to produce useful (transmissible) high voltage electricity.

“No matter how cheaply these components might be manufactured, the laws of nature cannot be changed, so this form of energy production will always be inherently expensive.

“To this must be added the costs of expanded transmission networks and environmental impacts of massively increased rare earth mining and refining necessary to support such expansion.”

Dr Camier said by dropping all subsidies and taxes, the basic cost of ‘deliverable’ electricity from renewables was about five times that of baseload electricity (despite some claims that it is now cheaper).

The default solution was now gas turbine generation, which is quick to turn on and off, “being like jet engines”.

“However, they are thermally inefficient (about 80 per cent of their energy is lost in flue gases), still produce some carbon dioxide, and consume a relatively scarce and increasingly expensive premium fuel,” he said.

“Conventional wisdom and government policy previously used brown coal for electricity while conserving oil and gas for premium purposes like transport and home heating. The 1990s privatisation destroyed that.

“There is a place for renewables (with batteries) especially in more remote locations, but there is now too much ‘before the meter’ rooftop solar to achieve system stability,” he said.

“Pumped hydro (Snowy 2.0), enlarged BassLink and more transmission interconnections across time zones are probably an expensive way of ‘softening’ the problem.

“Perhaps over the next 10-15 years many cheap, rooftop systems will be reaching the end of their lives and without ongoing subsidies will not be replaced (but their disposal with toxic heavy metals may become another ‘headache’),” Dr Camier said.

“None of this is an adequate solution, because the real problem is lack of baseload generation.”