Nick McBride speaks to the Nuclear Energy motion in Parliament

Nick McBride speaks to the Nuclear Energy motion in Parliament

19 June 2024

It gives me great pleasure, first of all, to see this member's motion and then to obviously support it in every shape, aspect and fashion. One of the things that I think is quite fascinating about this area, and the reason I wanted to speak to it, is that there is a gaping hole in what I think is the argument.

This whole philosophy of carbon and climate change is not actually being driven by the business world. You might say, 'Who cares?' The fact is that the actual business world is following and the business world is acting upon it, but it is being driven by science, and the science is being led and pushed and coerced by governments worldwide, and that is fine, it may all stack up really well.

But one of the things I will pose is that governments and bureaucracies picking golden eggs are probably one of the worst sectors in the world to do so because they fail more times than they actually win, and the private investing world, the share markets of the world, the share markets of Australia, the big businesses of Australia, have a really strong emphasis to be on the right side of the equation rather than the wrong.

One of the things about this proposal with nuclear is that it actually fills in a great, gaping hole in renewable energy where we do not have good answers. The good answers are in trying to fill the gaps between sun energy, wind energy, and when there is no energy. We have seen some beautiful, big million-dollar batteries that have thorium and every other rare earth in the world in them. They cannot find enough of it, and they want to dig up the Limestone Coast to try to find some rare earths that came from a volcanic eruption millions of years ago that may be really good for this process, but what is missing in this is that that technology of battery, and potentially no technology existing around recycling as yet, does not really fill in the gaps that the wind and the sun energy does not cater for when either of those two are missing.

What then happens is that we see government saying, 'But we will have a gas turbine that sits there in the wings waiting for there to be no wind and no sun. We will have this big battery that cost millions of dollars that will give us a couple of hours of relief, at this stage'—maybe it is more than that, but we know it is not days. We know that if there is no sun on days and there is no wind on days, we have no alternative but to use gas turbines and then, in today's technology, we are using diesel generators as well.

What gets lost is that we know what the government has done, and South Australia has led the way in solar, and we know that solar energy, as those on the other side and those who are really in favour of this process say, is a cheap form of electricity. In fact, it is even an expensive form of electricity when they oversupply and kill the grid, and the grid collapses because of oversupply. Then we have home batteries and some other storage means, and then we are looking at other options like hydrogen, but the fact is that this hydrogen idea—that hydrogen is the answer—has not actually been done.

We cannot copy anyone else. We want to be frontrunners in this. We want to be world leaders. I welcome that, but who is to say that we will be a world leader. Who says we are a world leader in this space? But if we get it wrong it hurts. It actually comes back and hurts us in the hip pocket. It means that we will have a system and a grid that is not only not reliable but one of the most expensive in the world. That is a fact too. Go and tell me how many other countries in the world have electricity prices like South Australia or Australia, in the perspective of being more expensive. There are a few maybe, but they are few and far between because we are hell-bent on recognising that we are at the forefront, a leader in solar development and solar rollout.

Just so everyone knows how we got there: when our lifestyle in the 1980s went through the roof and we wanted air conditioning and transpirators in our houses, the grid could not cope with all this air conditioning during a heatwave. The answer was solar. Then they advocated lots of solar units and paying these people 40ȼ, I think it was, to attract them into the solar space. It worked really well because it was a bargain, a great initiative. But, it actually overworked, and it is still overworking because we can cook the grid.

I say thank you to the oppositions of not only the state government but also the federal government for their serious consideration in this area, recognising that despite the battery, the gap fillers and the sources of energy that we require when there is no wind and there is no sun, nuclear energy is tried, proven and tested. You cannot walk away from that.

When the other side of the government says that you cannot put nuclear into this space because it is perhaps not even renewable or it is dangerous, how can they even talk about submarines? How can submarines even come on to their radar? They say, 'We'll have nuclear submarines in this state.' Not only will we have them, we are going to build them. Yet, we may even be able to get away with modular nuclear radiation rather than just big ones—I am not even sure. Maybe that could be a retrospective backdown by the opposition governments in that we might not need these big plants. Maybe we need what they call small micronuclear plants that we see in submarines and aircraft carriers, and the like, producing electricity in the grid, filling in the gaps, like we see diesel generators and the gas turbines filling in the gaps in our grid.

I do not think I have to ask the Liberal opposition, but certainly other side of the house and those opposed to nuclear are saying that it is expensive. It is almost a mischievous 'expensive'. Why is it mischievous? What they will do is compare a megawatt of power from a wind turbine, they will compare a megawatt of power from solar and say that nuclear is three, four, five, ten times, maybe even more expensive. But these renewables are only wonderful when there is wind and sun.

Turn it around and say, 'Well, there is no wind and sun', and you will find that nuclear does stack up, because your battery certainly does not do it and hydrogen has not been proven. You do not even know how you are going to produce the hydrogen and at what expense. How much hydrogen do you have to store if you are going to use hydrogen as a back-up network for one, two or three days of no wind and perhaps no sun?

These are the sorts of elements that I hope the governments of today, the bureaucrats who sit behind and are governing and working through climate change, carbon and carbon being the enemy, can see in the light of day and say, yes, we can get there, but we have to do it with what is proven, tried and tested. The arguments have to be balanced.

It is not solar against nuclear. It is a battery against nuclear, it is a two-hour battery against nuclear. It is a hydrogen plant of stored hydrogen against nuclear. It is not the same. You cannot measure the two. In the dark hours of night, when there is no wind, guess what? There is no solar and no wind in the system, but you can turn on a nuclear switch and you can produce power reliably. The rest of the world is doing it, and we should follow suit.

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