The world has limited funds and time to tackle the climate crisis, so perhaps we should set aside a slow and expensive solution | Opinion by Nick O'Malley climatechange AusPol
The conversation always starts the same way. Someone pops up in an opinion piece or during a political interview and asks why Australia can’t have rational discussions about nuclear power.
With the Coalition’s election loss the issue has erupted again. Victorian Liberal greybeard Michael Kroger lamented the lack of visionary policy. Asked by this newspaper what one might be, he proposed a nuclear energy program.Why we lost Kooyong”, conservative commentator Tim Smith also cites the lack of a nuclear energy plan, as though the raft of inner-city voters who abandoned his party for climate candidates might have been won over with nuclear power plants rather than phantom car parks.
In 2020, globally, five reactors started up, which was six fewer than scheduled as of mid-2019. Six units closed over the same period. There are now 414 reactors in operation and 93 that were abandoned during construction. Another 53 are closed for maintenance, 25 of which have had construction suspended and 204 permanently closed.Excluding China, nuclear power generation dropped to the lowest level since 1995.
Despite this good fortune, the disaster prompted the industry to tighten safety measures and, as a result, the construction of new facilities has doubled or tripled in cost, Kan writes.
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