Peter Garrett, the Australian Labor Opposition's new environment spokesman, (The Age 2/1/07) purports to put the Prime Minister's nuclear power claims into proper perspective, but instead peddles a major misrepresentation.
But his point about needing "a fair system in which clean[er] energy alternatives are allowed to compete within an international market for carbon emissions" is spot on. Australian uranium will be a major fuel for such energy sources in the carbon-constrained world of the future. It already avoids te emission of over 300 million tonnes of CO2 per year, relative to coal, and if some stae Labor governments came to their senses, it could do much more.
His misrepresentation is in respect to subsidies. Nowhere in the world to our knowledge is nuclear power currently subsidized, and nowhere in the world is his preferred alternative of wind power not subsidized.
Certainly nuclear power has benefited from major R&D funding through to the 1990s - more than twice the level for renewables, but only in Japan has this continued at a high level. The payoff has been 16% of world electricity from nuclear, with only around 1% from non-hydro renewables, so a much beter return on investment than for renewables R&D.
As to subsidies, some are on offer in USA for the first few new-generation nuclear power stations (6000 MWe), the 1.8 cents/kWh level being the same as that for wind on unlimited basis. Conversely, nuclear power is taxed in Sweden because it is so cheap.
Renewables are indeed a fast-growing industry sector as Mr Garrett says, but how much growth would there be without generous and ubiquitous subsidies? Ask its industry advocates, who have made the answer plain in submissions to government. The answer is none.
We support Mr Garrett's call for people to "read the Switowski report" - they won't find too many "rubbery figures and superhuman assumptions", just a well-researched connection to what is well known in the rest of the world..
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