What Exactly Would We Need Nuclear For?
It’s too late for appeals to headlines
Faced with globally changing attitudes towards nuclear energy both societally and among institutions, anti-nuclear politicians must rely on a diminishing reservoir of claims. A tailor-made appeal-to-authority headline will be impossible to resist.
Did Josh Wilson MP take a moment to check if this is what Fatih Birol, IEA executive director said in the article?
…if there is a country that has a lot of resources from other sources, such as solar and wind, I wouldn’t see nuclear as a priority option. I’m talking about Australia now. For Australia, we have other priorities to push.
The longer interview is fascinating but provides no further perspective.
The key word here is need. Can Josh Wilson MP define what nuclear energy is or isn’t needed for?
To cut emissions, of course… but specifically, to reduce the average emissions intensity of the country’s electricity supply. By one estimation, this intensity was 562 gCO₂/kWh for Australia in 2024. The IEA specifies a global value of around 165 gCO₂/kWh by 2030 to be on track for its 2050 Net Zero Scenario.
For further context, the State of Climate Action report defines an ambition of <0 gCO₂/kWh worldwide by 2050.
The IEA’s sister agency, the OECD NEA, has recently pioneered comprehensive system cost analysis work to study national clean power mixes under strict emissions intensity constraints. In this set of graphs for a hypothetical country from a recent guide for stakeholders and policymakers, take careful note of the range of values on the plane closer to ‘0 gCO₂/kWh’.
With this still fresh in mind, here is a significant day in Texas last year…
…and here is France through to mid-last year.
As Fatih Birol also said,
I hope the discussions [in Australia] can be made more factual, less emotional and political.
The best, most recent attempt at exactly this was released by Danny Price at Frontier Economics, to see what the how including nuclear capacity in the AEMO ISP would impact the total investment costs. The work is far from the kind of comprehensive system analysis promoted by the OECD NEA, and doesn’t simulate wholesale prices.
It also doesn’t “push nuclear as a priority option” — look at all of that solar, wind, and flexible storage capacity! But what it does do is indicate higher than 20% savings on investment over both of the scenarios it analysed, while reaching near-zero average emissions intensity by 2050.
Much like AEMO’s ISP, it’s far from being a real plan, but at least it’s broadly consistent with the OECD NEA’s system cost results. Enough to justify running an Australian set of Low Carbon Scenarios and their System Costs? Enough to prompt Fatih Birol to reconsider his confident position?
No point asking Josh Wilson MP.
Oscar Archer holds a PhD in chemistry and has been analysing energy issues for twenty years, focusing on nuclear technology since 2014, with a background in manufacturing and QA. He helps out at WePlanet Australia. Find him @OskaArcher on Twitter.
