Bite the atomic bullet or face blackouts - National - theage.com.au

VICTORIA will probably need to accept nuclear power within a decade if it wants to avoid blackouts, big electricity price rises and a blow-out in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Monash University power generation expert.
Professor John Price, who has been involved in designing almost every form of power technology from wind and wave to nuclear, said proposals to store carbon dioxide underground could triple or quadruple the cost of power.
He said he believed Prime Minister John Howard and other Government leaders knew this and that was the reason they had reopened the debate on nuclear power.
Underground storage, known as geosequestration, has in the past been touted by Mr Howard, and on Saturday by state Treasurer John Brumby, as a means of reducing greenhouse gas from coal-fired power stations.
Victoria gets more than 80 per cent of its energy from burning greenhouse-intensive lignite (brown coal) and the ageing Hazelwood station in the Latrobe Valley has been nominated as one of the worst polluters in the world.
Mr Brumby has ruled out nuclear power, saying Victoria had vast underground sites where carbon dioxide could be stored, such as the voids left by former oil wells under Bass Strait.
But Professor Price said geosequestration was possibly decades away from being proven as a viable technology, and alternative energy sources, such as wind farms, produced costly power needing government subsidies, were often unreliable and unable to realistically meet more than a small portion of demand.
"No matter what the Government does, we are adding 300 megawatts of demand every year in Victoria, much of it because of the uptake of air-conditioners," he said. "In a decade, that is the equivalent of the Loy Yang A and B power stations in the Latrobe Valley.
"If the Government is serious about reducing carbon dioxide, it will have to stipulate that reduction in any new power stations built. But because all Victorian power generators are private companies, no private operator is likely to be willing to build a station that costs three or four times more to run."
Professor Price said that at present Victorian power was cheap because brown coal was provided to the operators for virtually nothing. But once they started to include the cost of zero-emission technologies, the price was likely to make nuclear the cheapest means of producing large amounts of electricity.
"I don't know why they are talking about unproven technologies like geosequestration when they have a proven technology in nuclear that has been safe for 50 years, and produces virtually no greenhouse gas," he said.
Professor Price said that waste was nothing like the problem nuclear opponents claimed. "Compared with the waste generated by coal, you can store the entire waste from the life cycle of a nuclear power station in a space the size of an average house."
A spokesman for state Energy Minister Theo Theophanous denied Victoria would need nuclear power, saying Professor Price's predictions on future power use were higher than the Government's.
"We are committed to a range of options such as sourcing power from interstate, clean coal technologies, renewable energy and finding more gas deposits."