Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan may well have minimal carbon emissions, but the distant time of arrival, and ignoring the well known drawbacks makes it a dud.

On the face of it, it is all whizzbang white heat of technology (albeit of 60 years ago) and no carbon emissions (never mind the other ones). The problem lies with the nature of the beast.

The energy produced is heat, resulting from nuclear fission (the splitting of atoms, from a critical mass of highly radioactive material, e.g., uranium 235). The process needs to be controlled or it goes off like Hiroshima, so it is a technical fear of some delicacy, given the cost of failure, as can be seen from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The fuel is usually in the form of rods containing the fissile material, and, over time, it is transmuted into “waste” which contains residual fuel and what are quaintly called the “daughter products of fission”. The spent fuel is reprocessed to extract further and remaining fissionable material and the “daughters’, which are extremely radioactive and dangerous with radioactive half-lives of some thousands of years and which, up to now, have not been found a final resting place that can guarantee their safety for future generations for those thousands of years.

The most celebrated aggregation of these products is at Sellafield in the UK where they have sat awaiting adequate disposal for decades. Dutton blithely says the spent fuel rods will be stored on the power station site, which is mostly not the case elsewhere. For how long, how many and where they might be sent, once processed, for future generations to be safe, is ignored.

The nations he says happily depend on nuclear power, such as France or Japan, either fuel their stations with fissile material from their nuclear weapons programs, as in the case of France, (the cost is, thus, a defence secret), or they are trying to reduce their dependence, to reduce the cost of ensuring safe operation (Japan and Germany).

The cost overruns of nuclear power stations under construction in the UK and elsewhere are notorious. The light-bulb idea of small modular stations has yet to be demonstrated in practice, though the concept has been around for decades. They too have the problems of what to do with the waste as described above which remain unsolved .

The elephant in the room is the fantasy that we will somehow graduate to having a self-sustaining nuclear industry. Firstly, this would be in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, AUKUS notwithstanding, would bring down on our heads the disapproval of the civilised world. The difficulties I have described above, with the fuel rods presumably purchased from a weapons state, most likely the US, would be compounded by the need for the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that any processing of the fuel in Australia meets non-proliferation standards.

The idea that we could produce the fuel rods from our own supply of uranium would entail our establishing a uranium enrichment facility. All that we now know about the cost of doing this, in the face of international obloquy, is that it is a defence secret, which has never been undertaken commercially. Indeed President Richard Nixon famously offered GE and Westinghouse free access to the technology and they both declined to take it on as a business.

Consider then, what is involved in uranium enrichment. Uranium comes in two isotopes. U235 (the fissile one) and U238. To achieve fission, the concentration of U235 needs to be higher than is found in nature, so increasing the proportion of U235 is what needs to be done. That is, increasing the amount of the lighter isotope, and this can only be done by physical means, separating on the basis of three parts by weight out of 238. The only medium for achieving this separation is, in the case of uranium, uranium hexafluoride, an extremely corrosive gas, making the process entirely contained and corrosion resistant the only way to go ahead.

What is the mechanism working in this severely constrained process? A long series of gas centrifuges of the highest quality stainless steel requiring a constant supply of energy to keep the spinning process going. A task at the very edges of technical feasibility. Desperate stuff, or as Dr Johnson said of women preaching, surprising that it is done at all. Cost estimate? A deep dark secret.

Lastly, Dutton’s pro-AUKUS stance goes along with his wilful blindness to the nuclear safety issue. Way back, Billy McMahon denied entry of nuclear-powered submarines to all Australian harbours, because of the mere possibility of an escape of waste or other nuclear materials into populated environments. In the UK and US, berthing of nuclear powered vessels takes place largely at purpose-designed port facilities away from population centres. AUKUS plans to berth near Adelaide, and port cities in NSW. Imagine the effect of a minor “excursion” on real estate prices near Adelaide or even Port Kembla. “It’s clean, it’s green,” Peter cries, with no evidence whatsoever of the cost of keeping it all safe.

Balmy, or dishonest ?

https://johnmenadue.com/duttons-nuclear-vision-is-distorted-by-ignorance-or-worse/

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