Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Case for Nuclear Power" with Aidan Morrison

Transcript

"The Case for Nuclear Power" with Aidan Morrison · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:09
  The entire renewable energy green revolution is a costly dead end that will lead us into
• 0:16
  nothing but brown outs, black outs and an overly expensive climate chaotic future.
• 0:22
  Here's another alternative dangerous idea for you, perhaps the opposite idea but equally
• 0:26
  dangerous depending on your inclination that in a generation's time we will be living
• 0:31
  in a world festooned by nuclear power plants that will be our main source of base load
• 0:38
  energy.
• 0:39
  Nuclear power is a debate that's coming up more and more in Western democracies as we struggle
• 0:45
  to figure out what to do about climate chaos and the limitations of renewable energy.
• 0:49
  I've spoken a couple of times on this show to opponents of nuclear power.
• 0:54
  I spoke to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Dave Sweeney who's campaigned his whole life
• 0:59
  against not just nuclear weapons but also nuclear energy.
• 1:02
  I spoke to Saul Griffith who is a renewable energy entrepreneur and engineer.
• 1:08
  If you haven't listened to that episode, in fact he's been on this show twice.
• 1:11
  You may want to go back and listen to that because we talk quite a lot about Saul.
• 1:16
  We talk a lot about his worldview as it sort of is representative of the overall worldview
• 1:22
  of people who believe that renewable energy is the solution to the planet's crisis.
• 1:29
  That episode was on the 10th of June with Saul Griffith, if you want to listen to it
• 1:34
  because today we articulate a different vision of an electricity future for Australia and
• 1:39
  the globe, despite the fact that at the last federal election in Australia, the opposition
• 1:44
  conservative liberal party took to the people a platform to build nuclear power plants
• 1:50
  in Australia and go nuclear ended up losing, not just because of that, but it certainly
• 1:54
  didn't help.
• 1:55
  Nonetheless, the director of energy research at the Center for Independent Studies, who
• 1:59
  is today's guest, thinks we need to cling onto that idea.
• 2:02
  We need to popularize that idea because there is no solution.
• 2:06
  That is as effective, as safe, as reliable, and as cheap as nuclear power in the medium
• 2:13
  term at least.
• 2:14
  Hayden Morrison leads the Center for Independent Studies' energy systems research.
• 2:19
  It's a Sydney-based classical liberal think tank, so it unashamedly prefers market-based
• 2:25
  options and is not a left-wing outfit.
• 2:28
  But Hayden is a data scientist who assists the Center for Independent Studies on publishing
• 2:32
  research about rooftop solar, about renewable energies, about the cost and effectiveness of
• 2:37
  solar and wind and geothermal and coal and of course nuclear.
• 2:42
  I found this really stimulating and quite eye-opening.
• 2:45
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one the only Hayden Morrison.
• 2:54
  The argument for nuclear power is, it's the only carbon-free thermal source of energy
• 2:59
  we have, right?
• 3:00
  And thermal is a kind of key technical word, but it means that you can have some sort of
• 3:04
  concentrated heat source and you spin a machine from steam generally.
• 3:10
  That's the only energy system that's really we've ever had that has worked, except for
• 3:15
  maybe hydro.
• 3:16
  Those places that have hydro, I can't be spinning machine, but I'm very much now the
• 3:21
  view.
• 3:22
  The harder I look into it is the problem with the opportunity for nuclear is the problem
• 3:26
  for all the other low-carbon resources that we have.
• 3:29
  If you're happy to burn coal, coal is fine, like we can burn coal forever, it's cheaper
• 3:33
  probably at least in the short term than nuclear ever, will we?
• 3:36
  There's a chance that nuclear might get there to be cost-competitive with coal, but not
• 3:40
  in the short term.
• 3:42
  But the real opportunity is that it's the one that works, that can get to decarbonisation
• 3:47
  that's in, that's all there is, the other one's just don't scale.
• 3:53
  But that contradicts what we hear from so many engineers in the industry space.
• 3:57
  You've probably heard a whole bunch of rubbish then, don't you?
• 3:59
  I mean, this is just abstract and it's like, you know, it's like the fringe COVID vaccine
• 4:06
  tonight who goes on Joe Rogan's show and it's like, everybody's wrong and I'm just like,
• 4:09
  but I mean, everybody else, I'm not an epidemiologist and I'm not an energy expert.
• 4:14
  Sure.
• 4:15
  I'm like, you only have to ask, chat GPT, what the cost per kilowatt hour of competing
• 4:22
  energy sources are or talk to people who work in the energy technology sector and they'll
• 4:27
  say that solar is booming, wind is booming, so you know, you could coat the whole country
• 4:32
  in solar panels and wind turbines and it'll work since cheap and wonderful.
• 4:36
  Of course, you know, then there's a question of base load power and stuff so you did
• 4:39
  batches and you do, you know, pumped hydro and you might have local community batteries
• 4:43
  and you electrify everything and all that, it all sounds complicated, but no more complicated
• 4:49
  than building a whole bunch of nuclear power plants that take decades to build.
• 4:53
  No, I think it's totally different, right?
• 4:56
  So yeah, there's sadly amongst all that kind of, that's exactly the right thing.
• 4:59
  If you do the sort of quick Google search, you go and look at the literature, you see what's
• 5:02
  been said on all the major news channels for a while.
• 5:04
  That's been the news that you hear from what seemed to be authorities for a long time
• 5:07
  is that we can do this, we can scale up renewables, look, we've already got to 30%, this is going
• 5:11
  great, we can go the whole way and it will be in the end cheaper than what we currently
• 5:16
  have and certainly cheaper than nuclear power.
• 5:18
  So that's already cheaper, you know, no, well, what makes you think that it's already
• 5:22
  cheaper?
• 5:23
  Well, hell, I'm glad you are.
• 5:25
  It's tell us, tell us what.
• 5:27
  I mean, the CSIRO for example, Australia's leading science agency, it says that nuclear
• 5:33
  is five to ten times more expensive than wind or solar.
• 5:36
  I think they've even revised that down quite a bit, that was what have been a year or
• 5:39
  so ago.
• 5:40
  Okay, it's the thing that's now only two to three times.
• 5:42
  I think that's it.
• 5:43
  I mean, there's, you know, there's numbers, but I mean, do you want to dispute that's
• 5:46
  cheaper?
• 5:47
  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 5:48
  I think there's now no chance at all that a high renewable energy system, a high variable
• 5:53
  renewable energy system from the wind and the sun is there's absolutely no chance that
• 5:58
  it's lower cost than a thermal generation based on coal and or nuclear, like there's,
• 6:03
  I think it's just, it's just, what do you think the nuclear cost?
• 6:06
  Nuclear costs in Australia, probably $130, $150 a megawatt hour and you could just sub that
• 6:10
  and replace the coal based load with that and that would be, it doesn't require any big
• 6:14
  changes to the system.
• 6:15
  And what about solar?
• 6:17
  I think solar, the first little bit, if you're willing to take, you know, feast and
• 6:20
  famine energy off the solar panel off the roof, it starts very low.
• 6:23
  So they say $40 something like that, but nobody has ever succeeded to scale it up to build
• 6:28
  a kind of a reliable round the clock on demand energy supply.
• 6:32
  Like, you know, it's just, it's just, it's just the fact that nobody has done something
• 6:34
  that's brand new and that we need to convert to in the future.
• 6:37
  It's not a very good argument.
• 6:38
  Is it?
• 6:39
  No, I totally agree with that.
• 6:40
  But then you can look around at everyone as trying and all the progress they're making
• 6:42
  and all the references they've made and, and you find that there's, there's literally
• 6:45
  no hope.
• 6:46
  I think that a few years ago.
• 6:47
  Why is that?
• 6:48
  I'm still not understand.
• 6:49
  Sure.
• 6:50
  There's a thing that produces power.
• 6:51
  Yep.
• 6:52
  Right.
• 6:53
  It is really good at producing a bit of power.
• 6:54
  Yeah.
• 6:55
  You can see that.
• 6:56
  We have a history in which we've had a very cheap alternative and so we've never needed
• 7:00
  to invest in this or innovate in this space.
• 7:01
  Yeah, that's right.
• 7:02
  So, you know, imagine the, where the dawn of flight.
• 7:05
  Yep.
• 7:06
  We've got trains.
• 7:07
  Trains have been great.
• 7:08
  We've got the automobile.
• 7:09
  That's good as well.
• 7:10
  Yeah.
• 7:11
  And now we've got some early planes and I talk to a guy like you and you're like, nobody
• 7:13
  has ever created, you know, a plane that can carry hundreds of people.
• 7:16
  It just doesn't.
• 7:17
  There is no test case in the whole world.
• 7:19
  Exactly.
• 7:20
  So, so let's, let's indulge the first principles and analysis of why this is, it not just
• 7:23
  hasn't worked now, but it's never likely to, right?
• 7:25
  Right.
• 7:26
  There must be some fun and all reasons for that, right?
• 7:28
  So, first one is density, right?
• 7:30
  If you just sort of take a, a path of the history of evolution of power, you'll find that
• 7:35
  we go from things like sort of basically muscle power, so you eat some food and you kind
• 7:39
  of get horses or whatever else to sort of push things around to, to burning things.
• 7:43
  And again, it's biomass to start with, so you burn dung or water or whatever else.
• 7:47
  And then you find slightly denser versions of that, which is sort of a fossilized version
• 7:49
  of fossil fuels.
• 7:51
  And uranium obviously is much, much, much denser.
• 7:53
  And there's a natural progression there.
• 7:54
  So the common argument people say is that, you know, renewals are the new thing that will
• 7:58
  replace all the old things, like all the other new things that time replace the previous
• 8:01
  things.
• 8:02
  There's a trend there that's being ignored.
• 8:04
  Previously we always went from low density to high density and high density has a whole
• 8:08
  bunch of really good advantages.
• 8:10
  In particular, it's just easier to move and it's easier to store.
• 8:13
  And so you can get that power, you can get to higher temperatures much, much more easily.
• 8:17
  But moving these around the fuel, it's easy to move uranium, it's not very easy to
• 8:21
  use to move in your clear power plant.
• 8:24
  That's not really strictly true.
• 8:26
  Like you can still move around in submarines pretty easily.
• 8:29
  But you can move the uranium.
• 8:30
  But that doesn't produce anywhere near the kind of energy that we'll be talking about
• 8:32
  for a land basis.
• 8:33
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's right, that's right.
• 8:35
  What I mean is, in terms of if you're trying to win the point of nimbleness, I think renewals
• 8:40
  have got it because there you're talking about local batteries, you're talking about transmission
• 8:44
  lines, you're trying to move about, you've tried to move a wind farm, or you've tried
• 8:47
  to move a solar farm.
• 8:48
  I think part of the picture of renewables is that you would have a more responsive and
• 8:53
  reactive and smart grid system where, because of course, nuclear advocates will always
• 8:57
  say, what happens when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow and you put that
• 9:01
  to an energy technology expert and they roll their eyes and go, it's so fucking stupid.
• 9:06
  We have transmission lines.
• 9:08
  We are able to move things around.
• 9:09
  So we have local communities that have community batteries.
• 9:13
  We have solar panels.
• 9:14
  We have electrified cars that can pump back into the grid.
• 9:18
  We have smart grids that don't just push energy in and you have a nimble and responsive
• 9:22
  system.
• 9:23
  When populations move is able to be more reactive, you can move it around.
• 9:27
  If the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow and Sydney for a week, the sun's
• 9:31
  shining somewhere in Australia and the wind's blowing somewhere in Australia and you
• 9:34
  can move it around.
• 9:35
  It's big lumbering nuclear power plant that costs $30 billion to build is that can't be
• 9:40
  set up.
• 9:41
  But you're right that uranium is very energy dense.
• 9:42
  So if you're going to go with the old fashioned wave, we just have to heat up some water
• 9:45
  and blast steam at some turbines.
• 9:47
  Uranium is good.
• 9:48
  That's right.
• 9:49
  But you're describing that nimbleness and that kind of distributed nimbleness, something
• 9:53
  will scale up, something will go down, there will be smart grids.
• 9:55
  You're describing that as an asset, right?
• 9:56
  But actually what you're doing there is by brute force of engineering and adding more systems.
• 10:00
  You were trying to overcome a fundamental characteristic of the wind and solar things,
• 10:05
  which is that it's sporadic.
• 10:06
  It's intermittent.
• 10:07
  It's not just that it's intermittent.
• 10:10
  Intermittency I think is probably the common word that is is relied on too much.
• 10:13
  It's not actually precisely what the problem is.
• 10:15
  If you had an intermittent coal-fired power plant that was only working like half the time
• 10:20
  or something like that.
• 10:21
  But you could control which half of the time it was working because it was a real clunker.
• 10:26
  You had to massage and get it all ready to go over.
• 10:28
  It's one week stretch and then I had to go down for some maintenance.
• 10:31
  You could pick that one week and then your other coal plant that might only be half as
• 10:34
  you can try to line them up so that they kind of complement and coverage of those weaknesses.
• 10:40
  Wind and solar power is the opposite of that.
• 10:42
  It's not just that it's intermittent.
• 10:43
  It said you can't control when it emits or when the mittensy is, right?
• 10:49
  Why does that matter?
• 10:50
  It matters massively because when one goes down and it's very worst case when it has its
• 10:53
  greatest vulnerability because it's the cloudy as day.
• 10:57
  You know, in, I don't know, Victoria.
• 11:00
  It also happens to be the most likely day that it's also cloudy in New South Wales, okay?
• 11:04
  You've got to go a very, very long way before your other ones are actually unrelated.
• 11:08
  And then even then people say, oh, once you get to find North Queensland, it's kind of
• 11:12
  independent and it's most likely there's a little bit some somewhere.
• 11:16
  That's still unrelated.
• 11:17
  There's still a chance it's not great there.
• 11:19
  It's what you really want is not just independence and not correlated.
• 11:22
  You want powerful anti-correlation in the energy sources.
• 11:26
  So you switch one on and you can switch another off or when one goes down, you can switch
• 11:30
  another one on.
• 11:31
  And so that's, that's the real asset in these thermal power sources that you've got a dense
• 11:35
  pile of fuel and you can control when you burn it.
• 11:38
  And you can control, you can certainly know in advance where it is going to be and where
• 11:42
  all your different assets are going to be, where the most likely ones to switch on.
• 11:45
  Right.
• 11:46
  Let's say let me just jump in there.
• 11:47
  So yes, it's going to provide you with a really strong base load of power, right?
• 11:51
  This is what we hear about a lot.
• 11:52
  It's going to keep on, I mean, you can't turn it off.
• 11:54
  It's on, it's just on, it keeps producing power.
• 11:57
  You can't ramp it up really, ramp it down, it's just churning out its thing.
• 12:01
  You're frowning a little bit because a little bit, you can turn the volume up and down.
• 12:05
  But it's not something that you're going, is that right?
• 12:07
  No, no, no, correct me.
• 12:08
  No, that's right.
• 12:09
  A lot of these machines you can turn up.
• 12:11
  So for example, gas, the open powered gas turbines, which are the less efficient ones,
• 12:14
  you can ramp them very fully charged up, right?
• 12:16
  Exactly.
• 12:17
  But this is the insanity of some of the, I mean, just as on the side, I've been to places
• 12:21
  in California and Texas, where in order to deal with peak demand, when everyone, in the
• 12:26
  middle of summer, where everyone turns on their air conditioners and gets home from work,
• 12:29
  they've bolted basically jet engines to the concrete slant, which are gas, and they just
• 12:34
  blast them and turn them right up and turn them right down.
• 12:37
  But that's not the way that nuclear works.
• 12:39
  It's not like that.
• 12:40
  Nuclear works.
• 12:41
  Well, but so nuclear can actually ramp relatively, it's much more people than people
• 12:45
  think technically.
• 12:46
  So it can ramp up and down, but I think that your proposition that it's better off to
• 12:49
  run pretty steadily is a strong one.
• 12:50
  Yeah.
• 12:51
  Not because it's engineeringly impossible to make it ramp a bit, but because it's not
• 12:55
  it's purpose.
• 12:56
  It's not.
• 12:57
  It's not economically beneficial to do baseline.
• 12:58
  So what we're really talking about is, at two in the morning, on a weeknight, go on,
• 13:07
  right, lowest possible demand of energy, presumably, maybe go right or pick your time.
• 13:14
  What time of day would be the problem?
• 13:15
  No, it's probably around that.
• 13:16
  It's probably two or three.
• 13:18
  You want there to be a reliable, like base load means at that time, as well as at 5.30
• 13:24
  p.m. on a summer evening, people are going to turn on the dishwasher and it's going to
• 13:29
  work.
• 13:30
  Right.
• 13:31
  And there shouldn't be a difference between our expectations of the availability of electricity
• 13:34
  and either of those.
• 13:35
  Well, that's all that's what we've got used to.
• 13:37
  I mean, we can change that.
• 13:38
  But at the moment, no, no, no, and that's fine.
• 13:39
  That's fine.
• 13:40
  But what I'm going here is, so it's cloudy in New South Wales, it might be cloudy in
• 13:45
  Victoria.
• 13:46
  People listening abroad can be transposed this because a lot of our, the majority of our
• 13:50
  listeners aren't in Australia, but just transposed to your local place.
• 13:54
  And what you're saying is that at the 5.30 p.m. on a weeknight, there has to be enough
• 14:01
  extra capacity to supply over the 2.2 a.m. base load.
• 14:05
  That's right.
• 14:06
  But that's still the case with nuclear.
• 14:08
  Like nuclear is also, nuclear isn't supplying even in the best case scenario at 5.30
• 14:13
  p.m.
• 14:14
  I think we need to find what the base load is, right?
• 14:16
  So when you, when you, let me just add one thing, you, but yes, let's get to base
• 14:19
  load.
• 14:20
  But before I forget about it, because I've been on holiday for a while and my brand's fluffy.
• 14:25
  The, in terms of the transmission of electricity from different places, right, and your claim
• 14:31
  that like if it's cloudy here, it could be cloudy elsewhere, it's likely to be cloudy
• 14:34
  elsewhere.
• 14:35
  Yeah, most likely.
• 14:36
  Yeah.
• 14:38
  In, if I've got like five hot water heaters in my house, one is a solar, like, let's
• 14:45
  just use my house as an analogy for the country.
• 14:48
  Sure.
• 14:49
  Sure.
• 14:50
  And one is a solar powered one, and one has like a bunch of mice in the, in the basement
• 14:56
  on like a spinning wheel, but they're, but that's enough and it can produce it.
• 14:59
  And then there's another one that is a hydrothermal one that comes from steam grates in the, under
• 15:05
  the ground, and then one is a conventional gas burner or one of the conventional electric
• 15:08
  burner.
• 15:09
  That's right.
• 15:10
  And some of them, and all of each one of them alone produces enough for me to have a
• 15:14
  shower.
• 15:15
  Yep.
• 15:16
  And they all randomly go on and off, unpredictably, with the caveat that there's always going to be
• 15:22
  one of them.
• 15:23
  Okay.
• 15:24
  That's all.
• 15:25
  That's a big caveat.
• 15:26
  Yeah.
• 15:27
  Sure.
• 15:28
  Then what do I care whether it's unpredictable, which one is on for any one of them to be
• 15:32
  on?
• 15:33
  So all you have to do when in the transition to a renewable future is make sure that there's
• 15:37
  one thing that's always on, but you've got to make sure that one thing could be a nuclear
• 15:40
  power plant, but it could also be some renewable alternative, you know, it could be, but
• 15:46
  you've, you've just has to be different from the other thing that is, is vulnerable to
• 15:50
  being off at the same time as the other thing.
• 15:52
  It could be something on the west coast of the country.
• 15:53
  It could be something very, very long way.
• 15:56
  I mean, if you're talking about like worst case scenario, you just have to make sure that
• 15:59
  the base load is there.
• 16:00
  It could be anything.
• 16:01
  But you've, you've described the problem exactly perfectly, like, you know, because that's,
• 16:05
  that's the problem.
• 16:06
  If you have five different hot water cylinders, like, you know, to give you warm water,
• 16:10
  and you're sure that one of them will be on.
• 16:12
  Okay.
• 16:13
  Great.
• 16:14
  Add up the cost of that system and sort of figure out, okay, is this a good value system?
• 16:16
  Because ultimately it, as it turns out, I think this is the general proposition I want
• 16:20
  to put to you, which is why nuclear is very good, is that a low cost system in the long
• 16:25
  run is going to be something that gets a lot out of a little bit of machinery, all right?
• 16:30
  And what we're building with the renewable energy system is by definition, very much obviously
• 16:34
  going to be a lot of machinery, all of which produces, on average, relatively little.
• 16:39
  Yeah.
• 16:40
  But when you add them up and they all cover each other's weaknesses, eventually you can
• 16:43
  kind of get them to stack and then to change and sub in and out, and you're able to produce
• 16:46
  something that you say is reliable.
• 16:49
  And I would say that that's, that's the basic proposition is your capital utilization,
• 16:54
  like the feast and famine kind of way in which electricity falls in the landscape from
• 16:57
  the wind blowing and the sun shining whatever else.
• 17:00
  In aggregate, of course, if you kind of just aggregate that up into a big enough amount
• 17:04
  of time and space and say, oh, it's always blowing somewhere, you can sort of make that
• 17:08
  look like it's, it's a lot of energy.
• 17:11
  But for all the different bits that you have to use to actually take it from the places
• 17:14
  where it lands and then sort of pull it and make it more reliable and add the spare backup
• 17:19
  systems and be able to move it further away from when you, you know, some places that's
• 17:23
  too much in other places.
• 17:25
  Anything else in the system gets basically less and less consistently utilized.
• 17:30
  It's not just that the machines themselves that gather the energy, the wind and the solar
• 17:33
  panels have a low capacity factor, but they force that on everything else in the system
• 17:37
  too.
• 17:38
  It forces the transmission lines.
• 17:39
  It forces the batteries.
• 17:40
  It forces the dams.
• 17:41
  It forces everything else to operate, you know, rapidly changing and on average not very
• 17:46
  well utilized fashion and so not very well utilized meaning that you need to have a lot
• 17:52
  of redundancy.
• 17:53
  That's right.
• 17:54
  You gas power plants that could be running flat out, right?
• 17:57
  Like, you know, and the gas, the same, you know, gas jets on commercial air line as they
• 18:00
  fly a lot.
• 18:01
  Like, you know, they've got short downtime and they land and they go up and fly and they
• 18:04
  keep flying.
• 18:05
  They're very reliable.
• 18:06
  They could run them flat out, but they don't.
• 18:07
  They're sitting around for like less than 1% of the time for those really rainy days
• 18:11
  or whatever else.
• 18:12
  You say, okay, let's get them absolutely whacking in now.
• 18:14
  It masks capacity.
• 18:15
  So it's just, I think the proposition basically that the renewable energy guys have is like,
• 18:21
  don't worry.
• 18:22
  There's a system where there's lots and lots of other patches and networks and different
• 18:25
  things and less utilization of all the transmission.
• 18:27
  But don't worry, we've checked.
• 18:28
  We can add all those bits of the system together and it'll be cheaper.
• 18:31
  And when you look at all the different reports from every different one of the studies and
• 18:34
  it's now an absolute lay down mosaic case against gen cost, against the ISP, against the
• 18:39
  net zero Australia, whichever one you want, right?
• 18:41
  Like I'm happy to go through them all.
• 18:42
  But like none of them have got exactly what's right, but let me just inject one more thing
• 18:49
  into this conversation because I think it's the elephant in the room and it's sitting
• 18:52
  here without us talking about it, which is storage, which is batteries and stuff, right?
• 18:56
  Because like part of the problem of renewables that nuclear solves is, you don't have to worry
• 19:02
  about where to put the energy, like because when the sun doesn't shine and when the wind
• 19:08
  doesn't blow, you could have a gigantic transmission line stretching, you know, 2,000 miles
• 19:14
  to the west coast of Australia and you could be bringing a hydrothermal from the Indian
• 19:17
  ocean.
• 19:18
  You could go across to the east and sea, which, whichever hebrain, no, you wouldn't
• 19:22
  say you could do that.
• 19:23
  But as you say, not very efficient, it's right.
• 19:26
  You lose a bit along the way.
• 19:27
  You have to upkeep the transmission lines, you know, it's a headache.
• 19:31
  So the solution is something that we don't really quite yet have affordable technology
• 19:37
  for and which is battery, which is really good, dense, affordable, efficient batteries.
• 19:45
  There are workarounds like pumped hydro, so for people outside of Australia who aren't
• 19:48
  familiar with this idea, basically when you've got lots and lots of energy when the sun
• 19:52
  is shining and the wind is blowing, you use it to pump water up a hill and then the water
• 19:57
  at the top of the hill in the dam becomes the battery and when the sun isn't shining and
• 20:01
  the wind isn't blowing, you open the floodgates and the water pours through and it turns
• 20:05
  the turbines and that's essentially a form of natural battery, which is quite effective,
• 20:10
  which I'm sure you have your problems with.
• 20:13
  We might actually, I mean, a lot of people and you might be a skeptic of this, where do
• 20:17
  you think, you know, they say, just as we've seen with electric vehicles, just as we've
• 20:21
  seen with the iPhone, just we understand, we know how these technologies end up scaling
• 20:25
  and getting cheaper and there's no reason why batteries would be the first technology
• 20:29
  in the history of humankind, not to follow the same trajectory as the personal computer
• 20:33
  or anything.
• 20:34
  When we went to the moon, a computer filled a room, now we have a supercomputer in our
• 20:38
  pocket.
• 20:39
  Everything is happening with batteries in the time it takes you to build your nuclear
• 20:42
  power plants for the tens of billions of dollars and decades it's going to take.
• 20:46
  By the time you get there, you're going to end up with a nuclear power plant, holding
• 20:49
  your dick in your hand and there's going to be batteries that are just as good, which
• 20:53
  could have solved the problem, not worried about it at all.
• 20:56
  So the thing is about, I think about batteries there, just one more system that you have to
• 20:59
  add to this, that you're going to use less efficiently, less, you know, use it a lower
• 21:04
  capacity factor, right?
• 21:05
  So I know that you've had, yeah, saw Griffithson and a lot of people would say, look at this,
• 21:09
  this technology, it does hold energy and the costs are, well, the costs are where they
• 21:13
  are.
• 21:14
  But ultimately, you are only ever going to get the best use out of this technology.
• 21:18
  If you can get a lot out of a little bit of stuff, right?
• 21:20
  And so for a battery, that means discharging and recharging.
• 21:23
  What is that true?
• 21:24
  I mean, yeah, I think it is.
• 21:25
  It's a pretty broad proposition that the only metric is whether or not you can concentrate
• 21:31
  as much efficiency and as dense a physical area as possible.
• 21:35
  No, it's not, isn't that might be true?
• 21:37
  It's Singapore.
• 21:38
  I feel like Australia or America.
• 21:40
  No, it's not the, it's not the, it's not the only metric, but what I'm pointing out though
• 21:44
  is that the proposition that we can scale it to batteries means we're, we're scaling
• 21:47
  against a general proposition that has worked at our, that's been the wind at our back
• 21:51
  for the rest of the time, is that you kind of build more machines, machines work as much
• 21:55
  as you can in fairly steady state.
• 21:57
  There are machines in our society where things don't work in a steady state and they're
• 22:00
  kind of those piggy ramping things.
• 22:02
  But in general, we don't maximize and propose replacing all the steady state stuff with
• 22:05
  that and get a, get a cheaper system.
• 22:07
  That's not, that's not been a common thing to do.
• 22:09
  So this, this push up hill to sort of say, okay, we're going to use batteries, but what
• 22:13
  does a battery do, right?
• 22:14
  The battery, lithium ion battery, like the chemistry in that means that it's really good
• 22:16
  at charging and discharging over the period of about an hour, right?
• 22:20
  You take your iPhone in, it's flat, plug it in, about an hour, it's charged, same with
• 22:24
  the drill.
• 22:25
  Not so your car, only because you can't get a big enough like, you know, power draw from
• 22:29
  your particular house, but you can with fast charges charge it in easily an hour.
• 22:32
  And really fast ones with a few compromises, a little bit of wasted energy, got a fast
• 22:35
  on that.
• 22:36
  That's just nature of the chemistry, right?
• 22:37
  So the best utilization of those things would be to sort of say if you had like an hour
• 22:41
  fluctuating or sort of a two hour sort of cycle where it sort of was really sunny for
• 22:45
  about an hour and then it was really dark for about an hour, that would be the very best
• 22:48
  utilization of battery.
• 22:49
  And you get the sort of, you know, how many thousand cycles, but we only have it on a daily
• 22:53
  cycle.
• 22:54
  So batteries generally, if you had your house battery, would charge once a day and discharge
• 22:58
  the other day.
• 22:59
  And we'd consider that really good utilization.
• 23:01
  Well, guess what?
• 23:02
  The ones in our grid at the moment, we had a really sort of big, dunkelflat last week.
• 23:05
  They charged and discharged twice a day.
• 23:07
  They charged in the night as well when there was no sun and they charged off fossil fuels
• 23:10
  and they discharged them at the morning peak as well, even better utilization than what
• 23:14
  we can expect when we get rid of all that, that the gas and the coal that actually let's
• 23:19
  them charge in the night.
• 23:20
  So so utilization is already not great for the current systems we have.
• 23:25
  And as we propose getting more and more towards a totally whether dependent system, we'll
• 23:31
  use it even less.
• 23:32
  And you can see the evidence of this, right?
• 23:33
  So solar farms at the moment, they typically do often come in business cases that pair with
• 23:38
  batteries.
• 23:39
  And that's because they're fairly confident they'll be able to discharge the battery at
• 23:42
  least once a day.
• 23:43
  Wind farms in the other hand, do not, right?
• 23:45
  Like they, and they often include them in the plans, but they end up not building them
• 23:49
  because when it's windy, it's windy for a day or through or three.
• 23:52
  And so you only get to discharge them, you know, it's not nearly as good a utilization
• 23:57
  of the battery.
• 23:58
  But don't they also not build burnbiggers people say they hit birds.
• 24:00
  And they don't look pretty on the hill.
• 24:02
  No, no, the batteries I'm talking about, the batteries, they're wind turbines, right?
• 24:05
  Okay, right.
• 24:06
  And they also, well, at the moment, like, yeah, they, they do hit birds.
• 24:09
  And that's the, so that's the other big, that's the other big challenge that I think is
• 24:12
  reason why not to go with an all renewable system is that I don't think people appreciate
• 24:17
  what the physical, physical impact on the landscape are trying to scale this stuff up
• 24:22
  actually.
• 24:23
  And it's just phenomenal.
• 24:24
  Like it's, I mean, I always thought that, you know, wind turbines were kind of like
• 24:28
  a pretty kind of novelty.
• 24:29
  I sort of, when the first times I saw them outside of Canberra, I went to uni and I knew,
• 24:32
  like, you know, driving back like, oh, this wind turbine's like, yeah, I was like, oh,
• 24:34
  that's kind of cool.
• 24:36
  But then you, then I think that's, that's a tiny little bit of energy.
• 24:39
  And I know as well, environmentalists that kind of, you know, advocated for kind of,
• 24:42
  you know, the first big wind turbines in their area.
• 24:44
  This is certainly the case of Steven Novakowski.
• 24:47
  And then they realize, okay, are we done yet?
• 24:49
  We've kind of like, you know, we made some compromises.
• 24:51
  This, this, this species here will take a hit.
• 24:54
  You need to sow so much more stuff that you have to build.
• 24:58
  And it just, it has a huge impact on the landscape and the environment too.
• 25:02
  Like you end up, you know, tearing up massive tracks of, um, of, uh, in some cases,
• 25:07
  almost pristine rainforest or kind of, you know, rendered forest.
• 25:10
  So I don't think that we, I don't think the strains understand that the scale required
• 25:15
  for us to actually replace the base load is, I think, very environmentally, uh,
• 25:20
  damaging at the scale that's contemplated to.
• 25:22
  So what's your ideal, like, I give you a magic wand, uh, and make you emperor of the universe,
• 25:27
  uh, for a moment, what's your ideal mix?
• 25:30
  Like is your objection to the, to what you see as the myth of a fully renewable system?
• 25:36
  Uh, in other words, it should be mostly renewable plus a bit of nuclear or is your vision?
• 25:40
  And then I should be all nuclear with a bit of gas or is your vision.
• 25:44
  Like what is, what is, it's right.
• 25:45
  So it makes, ideally, what does the mix, I don't look like?
• 25:48
  So this is a really good question.
• 25:49
  And I've sort of, you know, been spending a lot of time thinking about this, um,
• 25:53
  really carefully.
• 25:53
  And, and the longer you look at it, the harder you stare into this problem, the,
• 25:57
  the share of renewables that you ideally put in the system get smaller and smaller and smaller
• 26:01
  and smaller.
• 26:01
  So the, and that's because you can't control when they come, right?
• 26:04
  So when people say, uh, we need to have some flexible variable stuff as well.
• 26:08
  What they're really talking about is we need to be able to fill the peaks, right?
• 26:11
  Of our demand, right?
• 26:12
  When you, that's not base load, you need some peaking stuff as well.
• 26:15
  But your renewables don't reliably land on those peaks.
• 26:17
  In fact, they're almost the opposite.
• 26:19
  They land on a day, which is not sort of peak times.
• 26:21
  But, but, but it's all Griffith and others like him have changed my thinking on that
• 26:25
  by saying that that's actually back to front.
• 26:27
  It's, it's not actually that the whole concept of base load power is kind of a red
• 26:32
  herring in the sense that what you're really talking about is having excess power.
• 26:37
  What you really want is having redundant power, so that every time you need energy,
• 26:41
  it's there, right?
• 26:42
  The base, the base load just means, I mean, like you just don't need as much energy
• 26:47
  at two in the morning as you do at 5 p.m.
• 26:49
  Therefore, you know, as long as there is always
• 26:53
  10% or 20% more energy than anyone's going to need, no, that base load is a meaningless
• 26:58
  is sort of a, no, that's, that's not what, that's not what base load is.
• 27:01
  So if you look at, if you look at what people's demand is, right?
• 27:04
  Like, you know, and look at our society at the moment.
• 27:06
  And we do have things like, you know, hot water heaters that switch on in the middle of
• 27:10
  night, whatever else.
• 27:10
  But if you look at the actual total electricity demand, final and consumption of Australian
• 27:14
  society, and I think most societies, you'll find that actually we have a peaks
• 27:19
  often around when people are changing spaces.
• 27:21
  So when you have to warm up the new space that you come to is a big one,
• 27:24
  or cool it down.
• 27:24
  So in the morning, or when you're switching on, you're cooking, you're doing activities
• 27:27
  watching TV morning, even this often a peak.
• 27:30
  And in the middle of the day, sometimes, and there's a bit of a trough and night,
• 27:35
  there's often a slightly bigger trough.
• 27:36
  The base load is, is actually not the full kind of total.
• 27:39
  We need to have extra supply sitting around.
• 27:42
  The base load is that ribbon at the bottom that is not cut out by those troughs.
• 27:46
  So the base load is what it's supposed to mean.
• 27:49
  But the argument against that is that, of course, you need the base.
• 27:53
  Yes, you need to have enough power.
• 27:55
  So what you meant when, well, hang on, isn't by definition the block underneath
• 28:00
  that a peaks and troughs by definition, that is the amount of energy that gets used
• 28:05
  at the lowest consumption point of the day.
• 28:07
  That's right.
• 28:07
  Yeah.
• 28:08
  So his point is, as long as you have a way of satisfying the lowest
• 28:11
  consumption, like consumption moment of the day, then base load is taken care of.
• 28:15
  So as long as there's batteries or, like, stored hydro or, like, whatever it is,
• 28:20
  whatever you need to make sure that you can turn on a light at two in the morning.
• 28:24
  Sure.
• 28:24
  That's what people are talking about when they're talking about base load, isn't it?
• 28:26
  Yeah.
• 28:27
  Well, that's what they, that's what they should be talking about.
• 28:29
  But they're actually not because what, what people, such as Saul and others do,
• 28:32
  is they say, we're not going to talk about your final enderman.
• 28:35
  We're going to take your net demand after we've taken all the rooftop solar out
• 28:39
  of the system across your neighborhood and your city and they'll say, okay, if we look
• 28:43
  at the net demand after rooftop solar to the grid, all right, they'll say, okay, now we
• 28:48
  don't need any electricity in the middle of the day.
• 28:50
  And actually, we do need electricity in the middle of the day.
• 28:53
  And so that is a load.
• 28:55
  That base load does exist.
• 28:57
  The question is, is do you have now an efficient base supply, if you like, do we have, do
• 29:01
  we have a supply that is...
• 29:02
  Well, I mean, you don't have to get it from rooftop.
• 29:04
  I mean, a person like Saul would say, you might as well get it from rooftop solar,
• 29:08
  because why bother the grid, why bother with being clunky infrastructure, if you can get
• 29:12
  it from the closest to your house.
• 29:14
  That's right.
• 29:15
  But I don't think it's a fair criticism of his worldview to say, well, if we can't
• 29:18
  hit him the keys to the castle, then he might just forget to put the rooftop solar on
• 29:23
  and then there'd be nothing in the middle of the day.
• 29:24
  No, no, no.
• 29:25
  If there wasn't enough rooftop solar, they would find then energy engineers would find
• 29:29
  another solution.
• 29:30
  I'm not worried about him not putting the rooftop solar on.
• 29:32
  What I'm worried about him is not keeping up the infrastructure that is there for when
• 29:36
  the sun is not shining and the batteries have run out.
• 29:39
  Don't you think you'll think of that?
• 29:40
  No, it's going to think you will.
• 29:41
  I think he's not a silly guy, right?
• 29:43
  But I think when you do the honest analysis about what is required to keep all those
• 29:46
  other bits in place, you'll find that it's a very expensive system.
• 29:50
  The biggest fallacy in my mind in this whole discussion is trying to dish out economic
• 29:54
  rewards for partway solutions to what you want to be a reliable system.
• 29:58
  Right.
• 29:59
  There's really no economic rewards that you can say, oh, look, you know, we're at 30%
• 30:02
  of the way.
• 30:03
  Add a bit of battery.
• 30:04
  I feel like you'll just have a sense that there's some kind of bullshit here, which is
• 30:09
  to do with conflating complexity with unreliability, that you seem to be saying that a system that
• 30:21
  requires a whole lot of bits and bulbs that requires, you know, constantly switching between
• 30:27
  these different films, you know, complicated, I understand that a complicated network that
• 30:33
  is geographically dispersed and that has different demands at different times.
• 30:38
  So that a cloudy, still day has different requirements than a sunny day because the rooftop
• 30:44
  solar doesn't work on that day and therefore solar has to run out and get on a unicycle
• 30:48
  in order to power your house lights or something, that that is more complicated.
• 30:55
  Sure.
• 30:56
  But it doesn't, I'm not, I'm not finding it obvious to me.
• 30:59
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here that that means that it's a more vulnerable
• 31:03
  system because I'm thinking of like the concept of fragile or anti-fragile societies and
• 31:09
  systems, things that are, you know, resilient are often a complicated network of interlocking
• 31:16
  things that cleverly interact with each other.
• 31:18
  Like a fighter jet is a very complicated system and I can imagine a, you know, the world's
• 31:24
  greatest sailboat manufacturer saying, like, you don't want to go with a, with a steamship,
• 31:30
  there's all these moving parts, like there's a beautiful simplicity in a sail and maybe
• 31:34
  the, maybe thermal energy and like nuclear and coal fired and everything, that's just
• 31:38
  a, you're building a really, really world's best sailboat, but the future lies in, I don't
• 31:43
  have a sailboat.
• 31:44
  And you know, just, just incredibly complicated machinery, which yes is, has a lot more
• 31:48
  moving parts, but doesn't necessarily make it worse, you know what I mean?
• 31:53
  So like the rooftop doesn't shine, so great, you have another, for the one in 100 days
• 31:58
  when there's no sun, no wind, no geothermal and you don't have reliable base load, you
• 32:05
  know, maybe you, maybe you do have your nuclear power plant, maybe you do have your one nuclear
• 32:10
  power plant.
• 32:11
  Well, it's gas, people propose gas for that.
• 32:12
  Or gas for something like that.
• 32:13
  So you're the hollow system standing.
• 32:14
  Yeah, and all that fails, then one day out of 100, you have to call in the transmission
• 32:18
  from Queensland.
• 32:19
  Okay.
• 32:20
  But you build whatever it is.
• 32:21
  You build a Queensland.
• 32:22
  Yeah, you build a lot of things for a hundred days, right?
• 32:24
  That's a, yeah.
• 32:25
  Okay.
• 32:26
  But on that day, when if you don't have nuclear as 100% of the maximum amount ever needed,
• 32:33
  then you also need redundancy and nuclear, like whatever you're choosing, it's right.
• 32:37
  You need some redundancy to factor in for the possibility that, you know, like Adele
• 32:44
  is going to come on a tour and everyone is going to need to turn on their lights to
• 32:47
  watch it.
• 32:48
  Okay.
• 32:49
  Okay.
• 32:50
  Well, there's two different propositions we can, we can, we can zoom in on there.
• 32:52
  Like one, one is the idea of the units of redundancy.
• 32:54
  I totally, I totally agree with that.
• 32:56
  Of course, for every, every power source, including nuclear, like you have to have come
• 32:59
  offline for planned things and occasionally you have to be ready for something to go offline
• 33:02
  and unplanned way.
• 33:03
  So that's, there is definitely a requirement for redundancy.
• 33:06
  And just to answer a probably a previous question, I think it's an important one is what
• 33:09
  is my ideal system.
• 33:10
  I think you do have nuclear to a bit above the base load, right?
• 33:14
  And I think this is where nuclear is very good.
• 33:15
  If you have a very high capital cost, but very low carbon, a very reliable thing for
• 33:19
  that base load, and you do use some batteries, I think that every day or every time that,
• 33:24
  you know, you below the trough, you're storing some batteries and that helps to fill up the
• 33:27
  next bit of the peak.
• 33:28
  And you probably still have some gas, peaker plants that are on top of that, but they don't
• 33:32
  have to power the whole grid.
• 33:33
  They only have to power that little peak of the grid.
• 33:35
  Yeah.
• 33:36
  I think that looks like a pretty efficient system to mean.
• 33:37
  And just out of interest, what proportion of the total maximum demand would that base load
• 33:44
  trough be?
• 33:45
  That base load trough would probably be probably a bit over 50%.
• 33:49
  If you say the absolute maximum peak of the very, very highest, highest day, it might be
• 33:53
  around a bit under 50%.
• 33:54
  But in terms of like, above the 90th percentile, so our needs basically double over the
• 33:59
  course of an ordinary 24 hour period, something like the amount of that.
• 34:02
  That's right.
• 34:03
  Yeah.
• 34:04
  About double.
• 34:05
  Right.
• 34:06
  And what?
• 34:07
  Yeah.
• 34:08
  All right.
• 34:09
  But the peak is not that much higher than your average.
• 34:10
  Like, you know, it's not a huge fluctuation.
• 34:11
  The average level of power, which is probably what you build your nuclear to, is probably going
• 34:14
  to be 60, 70% maybe a bit more.
• 34:16
  Okay.
• 34:17
  And why isn't there a role for renewables in the portion of the, I guess because of the
• 34:24
  unpredictability of the.
• 34:25
  That's right.
• 34:26
  I mean, you just ask yourself, okay, like if you've got a very nice base load that is
• 34:28
  totally low carbon, very, very low marginal cost, you keep that running.
• 34:31
  You gain nothing by turning down a nuclear power plant to let the wind blow in that space.
• 34:35
  Right.
• 34:36
  So what else do you want it for?
• 34:37
  Well, you want it for these peaks, which happen at this time and they happen at that
• 34:40
  time.
• 34:41
  And unless you've got some natural alignment that you're pretty sure is going to really
• 34:44
  well align with those times, they don't add a lot of value, right?
• 34:48
  Like if we could be really sure.
• 34:49
  And maybe there are places in the world where there are exceptions, right?
• 34:51
  The free metal doctor, the wind that blows really well in the absolutely right direction.
• 34:55
  You know, it's right.
• 34:56
  I mean, maybe there are places where you do get good alignment.
• 34:58
  But again, this is, this is, this is, we're talking in a universe in which batteries aren't
• 35:02
  cheapened.
• 35:03
  Perfect.
• 35:04
  I think even in the universe where the batteries are cheap and effective, that increases
• 35:07
  the amount of batteries you have to fill the peak and you have less gas on top.
• 35:11
  That's what I think.
• 35:12
  Right.
• 35:13
  So you're always going to need something to mop up the final demand when the hell's jet hits
• 35:18
  the ground.
• 35:19
  And I don't know why I think everyone suddenly starts using it.
• 35:22
  But you know what I mean?
• 35:23
  Like there's some, some black swan event that makes everybody suddenly require a huge heat
• 35:28
  wave.
• 35:29
  For example, everyone turns on the air.
• 35:30
  It's right.
• 35:31
  So you need that around to see extra backup for sure.
• 35:32
  And I think most of it's going to be going to be gas because like, you know, the idea of
• 35:35
  having a battery sitting around fully charged for just when a Dell's jet, so let me just
• 35:40
  talk about the 50% to 80% or 50% to 90% band above the base load, but below the absolute
• 35:47
  top trough.
• 35:48
  I would say hopefully that's filled with batteries, right?
• 35:50
  So hopefully, and if that's going to be batteries, why not just have renewables fill the batteries
• 35:54
  instead of gas?
• 35:55
  Because if you can know that every day or every night, you can charge it because you've
• 35:58
  got your nuclear base load that's there can charge it.
• 36:01
  You get much better utilization than batteries than you would being like, okay, I can charge
• 36:06
  this.
• 36:07
  But you're assuming that battery technology is not going to improve beyond having it only
• 36:12
  providing like an hour or two of discharge.
• 36:14
  Well, you can still scale up those hour two and buys many redone hours as you want.
• 36:18
  So just because they naturally discharge at that kind of rate, you can still have lots
• 36:22
  of them.
• 36:23
  Right.
• 36:24
  And you just keep them lined up and step up.
• 36:25
  They're ready to discharge.
• 36:26
  Or you can have pumped hydro or something like that.
• 36:27
  Yeah, you can.
• 36:28
  Yeah.
• 36:29
  But either of those, they still like, I mean, I think just snowy 2.0.
• 36:31
  Alone, isn't that going to, that will be enough to power the entire state of New South
• 36:36
  Wales for a day or something, except that it can only power like, you know, a quarter
• 36:39
  of our peak demand at fastest outputs.
• 36:42
  So you need to have three quarters of a New South Wales demand.
• 36:44
  I say what you're saying.
• 36:45
  Yes.
• 36:46
  Okay.
• 36:47
  So you need the base load and then you need to add that on top of the, of the base load.
• 36:51
  Maybe.
• 36:52
  Yeah.
• 36:53
  Maybe it helps.
• 36:54
  If that's your cheapest way of supplying that function, it is.
• 36:55
  I don't think snowy hydro is always ever going to be that.
• 36:59
  Right.
• 37:00
  You're all for storage, I think, but your best possible utilization of storage is going
• 37:04
  to be when you're really quite sure that you can charge it as often as possible, which
• 37:08
  is what you get from having a little bit of redundant low cost base load sitting around,
• 37:12
  which is with nuclear.
• 37:13
  So I'm not.
• 37:14
  You can, I don't understand that.
• 37:15
  I mean, Australia is very sunny.
• 37:16
  Lots of places are very sunny.
• 37:17
  Lots of places are very windy.
• 37:18
  So I mean, you could certainly guarantee that you're going to be able to charge at some
• 37:23
  point.
• 37:24
  If you give me a, you know, a month-long period, but we're not going to be able to charge.
• 37:27
  Yeah, but my solemn battery in that month.
• 37:29
  That's right.
• 37:30
  But if you just charge it once a month, that's terrible utilization of your battery.
• 37:33
  You return to the investor that bought that battery is going to be abysmal, right?
• 37:36
  You want to be able to discharge it once or twice a day, right?
• 37:39
  That's when that starts to look okay.
• 37:40
  Well, maybe the needs of investors are not the best way of framing our, you know, zero.
• 37:46
  Well, do you want the taxpayer to do it?
• 37:48
  A future without, you know, without, but whatever it is, if you get, if you get less output
• 37:54
  from more stuff, right, that's going to be economically uphill, that's going to be really
• 37:57
  hard.
• 37:58
  The proposition is that batteries aren't, I'm not against batteries, per se, but they'll
• 38:02
  work better if you have a really low marginal cost thing that you can rely on, whereas if
• 38:06
  you have a, you know, every day that you, you can't recharge your batteries, your batteries
• 38:09
  are sitting around less utilized and you have to pay for that other thing that is going
• 38:13
  to step into that place.
• 38:15
  And you've got to pay for that other thing.
• 38:16
  So it's more systems that are redundant that have got very low utilization.
• 38:20
  In the case of the gas backup, you need to have more or less 100% of that gas backup
• 38:24
  sort of sitting around if you want to go to that extremely high renewable penetration
• 38:28
  system.
• 38:29
  But, I mean, you need that in any scenario, right?
• 38:31
  No, you don't need, you don't need 100% because if you've got that nuclear base load,
• 38:34
  you only need to have that last little kind of from the base load up to your Adele peak,
• 38:38
  right?
• 38:39
  Yeah.
• 38:40
  Which is less than half.
• 38:41
  But that's half.
• 38:42
  Yeah, but that's still a lot.
• 38:43
  And that's half the energy consumption.
• 38:44
  Hopefully you've got your batteries that will stack up a little bit higher than that.
• 38:47
  It's, so you can have much, much less of that, of that redundant system that's sitting
• 38:52
  around waiting for those rear peaks.
• 38:54
  Much, much less.
• 38:55
  Yeah, but the batteries that you've got in that embedded in those peaks are also being
• 39:01
  charged by gas or nuclear.
• 39:03
  I would say you try to charge up the low marginal cost source for short, which is nuclear
• 39:07
  if you can.
• 39:08
  Right.
• 39:09
  Yeah.
• 39:10
  And so do we have any misconceptions about the cost of building nuclear because you keep
• 39:12
  saying low or zero marginal cost.
• 39:15
  That's true.
• 39:16
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  Once you've built this.
• 39:18
  Yeah.
• 39:19
  But it's basically a city or a town, which is a nuclear power plant for tens of thousands
• 39:24
  of millions of dollars, then it free costs nothing to run for a while.
• 39:30
  And then like 40, 50 years later, can you promise when we come back to that complexity
• 39:35
  of fluctuating systems?
• 39:36
  No, no, no, no.
• 39:37
  Stay there.
• 39:38
  Stay there.
• 39:39
  Stay there.
• 39:40
  Stay there.
• 39:41
  Stay there.
• 39:42
  Stay there.
• 39:43
  Stay there.
• 39:44
  Stay there.
• 39:45
  Stay there.
• 39:46
  The complex systems have lots of different parts and they're kind of distributed in this.
• 39:49
  Often sort of, you know, there's as small as beautiful thing like they're going on there
• 39:53
  as well.
• 39:54
  And I just think that in certain circumstances where you have true redundancy between the
• 39:58
  different parts of the system, that is the case.
• 40:01
  But in the case of the renewable energy system, which we're proposing to build, you often don't
• 40:06
  have complete redundancy between any of the systems and you actually need all of them
• 40:10
  to work simultaneously exactly as you thought that they would for any of it to work at all.
• 40:15
  Why is that the case?
• 40:16
  Well, take, for example, the broken hill kind of blackout, which country town is a town
• 40:22
  and an outback town.
• 40:24
  West New South Wales and they had like, they had a couple of weeks with very intimate
• 40:29
  and power, like where they're out multiple hours a day.
• 40:31
  So very, very serious breakdown of the energy there.
• 40:34
  And they had all the different systems for renewable energy, right?
• 40:37
  They had an interconnector line that went out to connect with the rest of the states.
• 40:40
  They can get plenty of power through that.
• 40:41
  They also have a really big wind farm.
• 40:43
  And they, I think they have, I think maybe also a big solar farm.
• 40:46
  And they have lots of rooftop solar on their houses in the town.
• 40:54
  And they also have two gas backup turbines.
• 40:57
  And they have a project in the works for a compressed air storage as well, right?
• 40:59
  So they've got the full gamut of all these different pieces.
• 41:02
  But as it turns out, the power line went down, okay?
• 41:04
  You got a failure in one part of the system.
• 41:06
  And then you had also one of the gas generators was not ready for service.
• 41:12
  It was not in the right kind of situation.
• 41:15
  I think there's also a significant battery.
• 41:17
  But the battery wasn't configured to do grid forming work,
• 41:20
  which was to basically set the frequency of the electricity and create that heartbeat.
• 41:25
  And so it wasn't configured in the right way.
• 41:26
  And they didn't have enough gas.
• 41:27
  And because they didn't have that heartbeat in the system,
• 41:29
  they couldn't even get the solar power to be integrated in the system.
• 41:32
  And they couldn't connect the wind farm, right?
• 41:34
  So all these things had to work exactly the way you want them to work for them to actually operate.
• 41:40
  It's not a robust system.
• 41:42
  It's actually quite a delicate system.
• 41:43
  Now, I'm not saying that you can't engineer that to eventually work.
• 41:47
  I'm not saying there isn't a price where you can pay to have the system become stable.
• 41:52
  But you do need all those bits to be there in the right place, the right time.
• 41:56
  And as we move towards this more, the system of large fluctuations,
• 42:01
  where you've got feast and famines, things rapidly ramping up,
• 42:04
  fully dependent on one thing now, but then switching to be fully dependent on another thing,
• 42:08
  you just have a very, very much bigger, complex menu of different states for your system to be in, right?
• 42:13
  There's more different ways the system can be configured and can be operating.
• 42:18
  And you might not have seen them all before.
• 42:19
  And the risk of something going wrong, and this is sort of what happened in Spain, right?
• 42:22
  Is it, it wasn't necessarily that they couldn't have a verdict that with the right investments,
• 42:26
  but they happened to see the system in a state,
• 42:28
  which they hadn't really encountered as much before.
• 42:31
  And if they made a few better, better preparations, it would have been better.
• 42:33
  And next time it probably will be,
• 42:35
  but they'll have to add a bunch more systems and a few more costs and a few more checks to all that.
• 42:39
  So we're moving uphill, I'm not saying it's impossible.
• 42:43
  There will be a technical solution.
• 42:44
  But once you've added all those technical solutions to be able to phase between your rushes and gushes of wind and solar power,
• 42:51
  and then your high dependence on an interconnector,
• 42:53
  and then your grid forming batteries, and then your gas that peaks up when everything else is not there,
• 42:59
  the system won't be cheap.
• 43:00
  And we can be really confident of that because we're already at the point now,
• 43:04
  which is really just at the end of the honeymoon period,
• 43:06
  where you don't need to build many of those complex backups and interdependent safety checks.
• 43:11
  We're already at the point where the system's got very expensive.
• 43:14
  So I would imagine that a country town in the outback is probably not the,
• 43:21
  the sole purpose of the world ideal model for what they want the whole,
• 43:26
  the whole Shabang to look like.
• 43:28
  Well, then my question is, what is?
• 43:30
  Like, you know, what, I mean,
• 43:31
  well, to people who haven't heard my episode was all or episodes,
• 43:36
  I think, or don't know what we're talking about,
• 43:38
  I'll just paint the picture of what is, as I understand it,
• 43:41
  right? Sure.
• 43:42
  Where I understand it is, you decentralize the network,
• 43:46
  so that instead of relying on gigantic coal fired on nuclear power stations,
• 43:52
  funneling energy, dumbly into every house,
• 43:55
  regardless of how much it needs, with no sense of who's living there,
• 43:58
  or how much, what their demand is.
• 43:59
  Yeah.
• 44:00
  You have either a street or a local suburb or neighborhood
• 44:05
  that where each house is networked together
• 44:08
  and their electricity is connected to either a local,
• 44:11
  could be a local battery,
• 44:13
  or they could have their own household batteries,
• 44:16
  and that could be in the form of their electric vehicle,
• 44:19
  but probably not because that complicates things
• 44:21
  and electric car manufacturers don't really like you to pull electricity out of their car
• 44:26
  or use it for anything other than driving.
• 44:28
  But you could imagine having a battery in each house.
• 44:31
  I mean, I did a story when I worked on a show called Energy Now
• 44:35
  in the States for a while,
• 44:38
  and I was like a correspondent went around and talked about energy things
• 44:41
  because I'm a bit of a science nerd.
• 44:43
  And we went to a place in Austin in Texas,
• 44:46
  which was an experimental project called the Pecan Street
• 44:48
  or Pecan Street as the American State Project.
• 44:51
  And this was 10 years ago now.
• 44:53
  And it was experiment where every, you know,
• 44:55
  you would try to turn on your dishwasher,
• 44:57
  your washing machine, and it would say,
• 44:59
  would you like me to run at two in the morning
• 45:01
  when you're going to save, you know, $3.14?
• 45:04
  Right.
• 45:05
  And everyone had electric car.
• 45:07
  It was all smart grid.
• 45:08
  The homes would talk to the electricity wires
• 45:12
  and like they would be in a constant give and take.
• 45:14
  So in this world, your house knows that your neighbors are away
• 45:19
  and not using any electricity,
• 45:20
  and you buy some from them
• 45:21
  and they get paid on their next electrical bill
• 45:23
  and it goes back and forth.
• 45:24
  And so there's this kind of virtuous,
• 45:26
  it's replacing this bigot of electricity
• 45:30
  that's just coming at us whether we need it or not
• 45:33
  with a more nimble network where each lots of,
• 45:36
  lots of virtuous sounding terms to discover this high fluctuation,
• 45:40
  high class, high unstable system that go on here.
• 45:43
  And so then the idea is, you know,
• 45:45
  you need to get your base load power from, so, you know,
• 45:49
  in a country like Australia,
• 45:51
  your rooftop solar can mostly run your house, right?
• 45:57
  Definitely not every day of the year.
• 45:59
  Not every day of the year, so you need some back up to that.
• 46:02
  But, you know, lots of Australians have,
• 46:04
  we have the highest rooftop solar uptake in the world.
• 46:06
  Yeah.
• 46:07
  It works for a lot of people,
• 46:08
  reduces their electricity bills.
• 46:10
  There are lots of problems with it in terms of regulations,
• 46:12
  like you can't, often can't actually sell your electricity
• 46:16
  back to the grid and make money off it and so on
• 46:18
  because the electricity companies don't like that
• 46:20
  or something, but you're founding at me.
• 46:21
  Yeah, very much so.
• 46:22
  What, what?
• 46:23
  As in, like, no, there are ways you can do that now.
• 46:25
  There's a company which will let you sell it back,
• 46:27
  but it's just not very profitable.
• 46:29
  But it's not the company's fault.
• 46:30
  It's just that the electricity is not very valuable, right?
• 46:32
  At the time when you've got lots of it.
• 46:33
  So it's hard to make a lot of money out of that
• 46:35
  without huge batteries and then the power from those
• 46:37
  is expensive, it's still pretty slow.
• 46:38
  So it's, I think it's fundamental.
• 46:40
  Yeah, you wouldn't let them in.
• 46:41
  There are all kinds of policy levers
• 46:42
  that you would need to pull in this world
• 46:44
  in order to encourage more.
• 46:46
  Now, but you're still assuming that there is some state there
• 46:49
  which is economically desirable that you can get to, right?
• 46:52
  Like, you know, there's only a few policy impediments
• 46:54
  to get there.
• 46:55
  What I'm proposing is there is you're fundamentally
• 46:57
  moving into a higher cost system.
• 46:59
  Once you've, once you've aggregated
• 47:00
  all the kind of necessary storage bits and the smart bits
• 47:04
  to the grid and whatever else and the synchronous condenses,
• 47:06
  do you still have the same poles and wires in the street?
• 47:08
  Like that's, that's the big question, right?
• 47:10
  It's nobody in Australia or anybody really in the world
• 47:13
  would be say, I'm gonna be happy to have like, you know,
• 47:16
  no power for sort of five or 10 days of the year
• 47:17
  but I can't choose and can't get any warning about it.
• 47:20
  I'm going to have to run the car.
• 47:21
  There's none of the cars.
• 47:22
  So, so yet, all the kind of systems where you say,
• 47:24
  oh, this system with all my sort of, you know,
• 47:26
  networked up neighborhood knowing kind of local batteries,
• 47:30
  one on the street, maybe two,
• 47:31
  the sort of some cars and we talked to the grid.
• 47:33
  They all still rely on those last few days,
• 47:35
  like, you know, being totally reliant
• 47:37
  on the same grid infrastructure we currently have.
• 47:40
  And often, in fact, if you want to do
• 47:41
  inter-neighbored or, you know, sharing,
• 47:44
  interested to sharing,
• 47:45
  you have to add more stuff to the grid
• 47:47
  to be able to be share a lot of rooftop solar
• 47:50
  with that suburb over there, which, you know,
• 47:52
  is all part of buildings and haz�, et cetera, right?
• 47:54
  So, I mean, the broad proposition is that it sounds sexy
• 47:58
  but like, once you add up the cost of all the parts
• 48:00
  to a sufficient level to actually give you the same product
• 48:03
  which is electricity on demand every day of the year
• 48:06
  when you want it, it's not cheap at all.
• 48:08
  And I've never seen a convincing sort of, you know,
• 48:10
  explanation to say otherwise.
• 48:12
  It's just an expensive system to do that.
• 48:14
  Okay, but I feel like we've jumped to the economic question
• 48:16
  from the sort of reliability question,
• 48:19
  which I think aren't exactly the same thing, are they?
• 48:21
  I mean, we were on the point about, like,
• 48:23
  does complexity and redundancy, you know,
• 48:26
  necessarily mean unreliability?
• 48:29
  And I was quibbling with that, because I still intuitively
• 48:32
  feel like a 747 has lots of levels,
• 48:35
  layers of redundancy, it's highly complicated.
• 48:38
  And it works beautifully.
• 48:41
  Yep.
• 48:42
  And I would say the same thing about, for example,
• 48:44
  nuclear power plants, right?
• 48:45
  And as I described this question about the plethora
• 48:49
  of different states that you can be in, like, you know,
• 48:51
  that might mean you're in a situation
• 48:52
  that you forgot how to manage right
• 48:54
  or you weren't ready for exactly at that time.
• 48:56
  Nuclear engineers are obviously super fastidious
• 48:59
  about studying and understanding the different states
• 49:01
  your system could end up in if something goes wrong
• 49:04
  or a valve is going wrong or some light
• 49:05
  doesn't go the right way.
• 49:07
  And so being able to understand and manage complex states
• 49:10
  is important, I absolutely grant you.
• 49:12
  And mostly there are technical solutions
• 49:14
  that can be done for some cost.
• 49:16
  And part of that's why things like 747s
• 49:17
  are expensive to buy and maintain
• 49:19
  and say nuclear power plants.
• 49:21
  Yes, finished the thought, finished thought.
• 49:23
  But the thought is that those systems have a single central
• 49:26
  design master, central house that says,
• 49:28
  let's think about all that stuff
• 49:30
  and design to the nth degree and test and practice
• 49:33
  and regulate the hell out of it.
• 49:35
  In the case of the electricity system,
• 49:36
  we've got like the energy minister saying,
• 49:38
  I'm going to pay whatever's required
• 49:40
  for whoever wants to to build a battery wherever you can find
• 49:43
  a site pretty much.
• 49:44
  And you've got like all these different household owners
• 49:46
  and senators jumping up and saying,
• 49:48
  I want my household solar to be able to dispatch
• 49:50
  to the grid at the right price
• 49:52
  that I think gives me the return that I want, right?
• 49:54
  And so, and you can see it's a company.
• 49:56
  Well, just in a price that is comparable
• 49:58
  to the price that the electricity company
• 50:00
  would sell you electricity.
• 50:01
  I think that's what they, they are.
• 50:03
  Well, no, because they sell you electricity.
• 50:05
  They feel like they're being ripped off.
• 50:06
  They feel like that.
• 50:07
  But it's because they're selling electricity
• 50:09
  that has got all the markups to cover
• 50:10
  for in particular the network that you need.
• 50:12
  And this is the problem with rooftop solar, right?
• 50:14
  It's my huge, huge gripe with, I mean,
• 50:16
  pretty much everyone in the energy industries, right?
• 50:18
  They point to rooftop solar.
• 50:19
  Like solar has not ramped up very quickly in Australia
• 50:22
  except the rooftop solar.
• 50:23
  But the rooftop solar is allowed everyone to basically
• 50:26
  freeload on the transmission poles
• 50:28
  and wires being paid proportionately more
• 50:30
  by the guys that don't have the rooftop solar.
• 50:33
  So it's actually been a huge economic bias.
• 50:36
  It kind of crossed subsidies built into our network.
• 50:38
  That's before you get to the mandated feed-in rates
• 50:42
  at the state governments have layered on top.
• 50:44
  So rooftop solar was the rebates that we give people
• 50:47
  in terms of tax inducements to actually get
• 50:49
  rooftop solar in the first place.
• 50:50
  Like you can get interest fee loans and things like that.
• 50:52
  That's right.
• 50:53
  That's right.
• 50:54
  So rooftop solar only ever ramped up as fast as did
• 50:57
  not based on the hard economics.
• 51:00
  It was actually all these sort of government led incentives
• 51:03
  and regulatory cross subsidies from other people.
• 51:06
  Yeah, I mean, I think look at a renewable energy engineer
• 51:08
  or policy maker will say, yeah, of course.
• 51:10
  I mean, and there are all kinds of,
• 51:12
  there are all kinds of subsidies that exist in the coal industry
• 51:15
  and there are all kinds of,
• 51:16
  I'm not sure if that sees that there are all kinds of things
• 51:18
  that, you know, there are all kinds of benefits
• 51:19
  that we get in terms of taxation to fossil fuel industries.
• 51:22
  There are, there's not ways in which.
• 51:24
  That's not true.
• 51:25
  Tell me that, tell me the benefits to fossil fuel.
• 51:27
  I'm not going to go down that,
• 51:28
  I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole
• 51:29
  because it's not my area of expertise.
• 51:31
  But they will say, of course,
• 51:33
  there are policy settings that need to be adjusted
• 51:35
  and that it's fair enough for us to lean
• 51:37
  on favoring renewables when we've spent,
• 51:39
  when there's all of this institutionalized status quo
• 51:41
  by us towards fossil fuels.
• 51:43
  I mean, even just look at how hard it has been
• 51:46
  in places like California to get rooftop solar approved
• 51:50
  on your house because of Nimbiism
• 51:51
  or it looks not pretty different like that.
• 51:53
  You know, you hear horror stories
• 51:54
  of it taking nine months, something like that.
• 51:56
  Then you do away with the regulations and make it easy
• 51:59
  and people say, well, that's the government
• 52:01
  just favoring solar.
• 52:02
  No, no, I'm not sure.
• 52:03
  I just, I just going to have to make the decision
• 52:05
  to make the switch.
• 52:06
  I disagree with that.
• 52:07
  I think that's, I think that the thing is about,
• 52:09
  like fossil fuels and like it, I hate it.
• 52:11
  This is not the same question about whether we should
• 52:12
  be getting rid of them because of the environmental
• 52:14
  consequence or whatever else, but like across the board,
• 52:17
  like the economic tax structure we've laid on top of them
• 52:22
  is that the value that fossil fuels deliver is so high
• 52:25
  that we can comfortably tax them more
• 52:28
  before they land in the petrol in your car
• 52:30
  or get sent across the ship on the sea.
• 52:33
  Like they are not sort of somehow privileged
• 52:36
  in the same way that renewal energy is.
• 52:38
  I totally reject that.
• 52:39
  We've got a very, very high tax structure on this.
• 52:41
  I don't want to waste time out litigating that,
• 52:43
  but I think what they're talking about is not the fact
• 52:45
  that there's an absence of petroleum tax
• 52:47
  at the user end.
• 52:49
  I think they're talking about the cozy relationship
• 52:51
  between companies like Enron and governments
• 52:53
  where I can talk about that, but like if the proposition is
• 52:56
  that no, we need to have this subsidy for renewables
• 52:58
  to equal the playing field.
• 52:59
  I'd say, no, no, no, no, no, we've got to figure out
• 53:01
  what the playing field really is to start there.
• 53:02
  Fair enough, so maybe the 747 analogy
• 53:05
  was just while we're staying on this complexity thing
• 53:07
  because I think it is kind of critical,
• 53:09
  like whether or not we're blundering into with renewables
• 53:15
  a system that is vulnerable because it's too haphazard,
• 53:19
  or whether or not we have the technological capability
• 53:22
  to be able to get the most out of a highly networked
• 53:26
  and complicated and overly redundant system,
• 53:29
  even if I grant you that.
• 53:30
  And so we probably don't want me to even grant you that.
• 53:31
  Sure, sure.
• 53:33
  I wonder if the analogy when I hear you talk about it
• 53:36
  and about the failure points is,
• 53:40
  this might be a stupid analogy,
• 53:41
  but it reminds me a bit in political science
• 53:43
  of planned economies versus free markets,
• 53:48
  where if we're talking about a system
• 53:51
  just going back to energy for a moment,
• 53:52
  where there are like houses that are talking
• 53:54
  on a local level to each other.
• 53:56
  And my main relationship in terms of my household energy
• 54:00
  consumption is between my solar panels,
• 54:03
  my car, the guy on the left to me
• 54:05
  and the guy on the right to me.
• 54:06
  Yeah, yeah.
• 54:07
  Then the network as a whole,
• 54:10
  when you zoom out to the scale of the city,
• 54:13
  feels a bit like a free market system in political economy.
• 54:18
  And I can imagine Stalin saying there's no way
• 54:21
  that that's going to be a more robust system
• 54:24
  than like a centrally planned one.
• 54:26
  No human being is going to be able to understand
• 54:28
  that system well enough for it to make sense
• 54:31
  or for it to outperform a rigid top-down system.
• 54:36
  And there's something about the way
• 54:38
  that you're talking about these networks
• 54:41
  and maybe I'm imposing a political science framework
• 54:44
  onto engineering and it doesn't work there.
• 54:46
  But the way that it smells to me is a bit like
• 54:49
  someone from a centrally planned economy,
• 54:50
  which is basically what our energy network is today,
• 54:53
  gigantic systems with spigots turned on full blast,
• 54:57
  just blasting energy out.
• 54:59
  Right, right.
• 55:00
  And if you need it, great.
• 55:01
  And if you don't need it,
• 55:02
  the matter goes to waste.
• 55:04
  Sure.
• 55:05
  If in the 22nd century we are living in a world
• 55:08
  in which all of this network stuff is working
• 55:11
  and we are renewable, we are on a renewable basis.
• 55:13
  People will look back on conversations like this,
• 55:15
  a bit like I'm a capitalist talking to a communist
• 55:19
  in the 1950s and the communist is like,
• 55:21
  there's no way that you could ever have a market
• 55:24
  that have an economy function.
• 55:26
  If there are too many details and I would say,
• 55:29
  well, yeah, the details will sort themselves out
• 55:31
  because basically the local, the small granular
• 55:34
  local decisions are what powers a free market.
• 55:38
  And similarly, there's no reason
• 55:40
  why a network of nodes in an electrical system
• 55:46
  can't be more resilient through the virtue
• 55:49
  of their disaggregation than a top down,
• 55:54
  let's build three gigantic nuclear power plants.
• 55:57
  Yeah.
• 55:58
  And forget about it.
• 55:59
  I would disagree.
• 56:00
  I think that's, I think, like, thank you
• 56:02
  because I think it's really useful to articulate
• 56:03
  that core proposition that, you know,
• 56:05
  it seems that it seems impossible
• 56:07
  that the more free markete evolving kind of system
• 56:11
  could ever grow to be a more expensive and...
• 56:14
  What does that even seem impossible?
• 56:16
  That it could be more expensive or more vulnerable?
• 56:18
  It just doesn't, I'm just saying it doesn't,
• 56:19
  it isn't obvious to me that it has to be.
• 56:21
  That it has to be, yeah.
• 56:23
  Well, it may have to be more expensive, I don't know.
• 56:25
  But it does, it's not obvious to me
• 56:26
  that it has to be more vulnerable or less resilient.
• 56:30
  Right, right.
• 56:31
  Well, I think that you'd test this argument
• 56:33
  by going to try and test the sort of book
• 56:34
  and extremes of how it could or should work.
• 56:37
  And I think that if you try to say,
• 56:41
  okay, take your house, for example,
• 56:43
  or you take even your street, maybe a house
• 56:46
  or a street or something like that and say,
• 56:47
  let's get that off the grid
• 56:49
  because we want to have a not centrally planned
• 56:52
  controlled by some sort of wire layer regulator that said,
• 56:55
  you shall have this many voltage capacity down your street.
• 56:59
  If you say, let's just build our own street off the grid
• 57:01
  and let the market, like you guys figure it out, shall we?
• 57:03
  Well, I still want the life fest.
• 57:05
  You still want the parachute.
• 57:07
  I still want the parachute.
• 57:09
  So then you get to this trivial question
• 57:10
  because basically I'm happy to say, like,
• 57:12
  I mean, and I respect solar, you know,
• 57:14
  I think it's totally great and all power to you.
• 57:17
  Anyone that wants to get totally off grid, great.
• 57:20
  Solar, whatever else.
• 57:21
  What batteries, I mean, figure it out your own system.
• 57:23
  If you're happy to go without the life fest
• 57:25
  then there's absolutely no problem
• 57:26
  with you figuring out whatever energy system in abundance or,
• 57:30
  or you know, trade-offs you might have a day
• 57:31
  when you're kind of feeling like, you know,
• 57:33
  a bit unpowered underpowered.
• 57:36
  But that's great.
• 57:37
  But the question is at which scale
• 57:39
  does it become remotely cost competitive
• 57:41
  for you to sort of isolate yourself from the safety net
• 57:43
  and throw away the parachutes?
• 57:45
  And the answer is that there is, like there is none.
• 57:49
  Actually, the parachutes are really, really important
• 57:51
  to the system at the moment.
• 57:52
  There's no way that all this good stuff works.
• 57:54
  And at the moment, my frustration is,
• 57:56
  is that there's all this kind of, essentially,
• 57:59
  in what should be the most technically invested
• 58:02
  and quite objective assessment of where we're going
• 58:06
  with energy transition, there's all this hand wave
• 58:08
  you will figure it out later.
• 58:09
  Well, still acknowledging all these contradictions, right?
• 58:11
  Like virtual power plants, nobody's taking them up.
• 58:13
  The incentive structures are all what is a virtual power plant.
• 58:15
  Oh, it's basically the generators saying,
• 58:17
  give me control of your battery
• 58:18
  and I'll dispatch it when I want to.
• 58:20
  But the instance is where that makes sense
• 58:22
  for everyone involved and doesn't completely rip off
• 58:24
  the people having the power that when they need it
• 58:27
  or can is not there.
• 58:28
  And it's really not clear that it's going to get there.
• 58:31
  So, yeah, so push comes show of like,
• 58:34
  if you let the free market decide,
• 58:35
  they would wholeheartedly reject all of, you know,
• 58:39
  this all Griffiths electrify everything we do
• 58:41
  with our street, we'll do the neighbor
• 58:42
  because they would still be stuck with the bill.
• 58:44
  And so they should be for the parachute.
• 58:46
  And the parachute costs them off a lot.
• 58:47
  And so as I said, there should not be any economic rewards
• 58:51
  for part time or part way contributions
• 58:54
  to what you need to be a reliable system.
• 58:56
  You got to name your whole team up front
• 58:57
  and say, does this whole thing work?
• 58:59
  And once you've got that backbone,
• 59:01
  once you've got wires down the street,
• 59:02
  once you've got interconnectors out
• 59:04
  to sort of some centralized point
• 59:05
  where you can build a big at scale generator
• 59:08
  that can generate power at a place
• 59:10
  in a time of your choosing.
• 59:11
  It always turns out to be that you would have
• 59:13
  a lower cost system with these thermal generators.
• 59:16
  And it should happen, right?
• 59:18
  Like a big, a big aluminum smelter
• 59:19
  or a big like, a big like, you know, China's got lots of them.
• 59:22
  Why didn't you have sort of big industrial precincts
• 59:24
  with smelter after, smelter after, silicon refinery?
• 59:27
  Why don't you just figure out like, you know, your tendrils
• 59:29
  like build out like, you know, your wind farms
• 59:31
  and you figure out how many different places
• 59:33
  for what sort of weather diversity you need
• 59:34
  and where you put your batteries.
• 59:36
  And the market will never go near it.
• 59:38
  No way.
• 59:39
  It's never going near.
• 59:40
  Sorry, that was it.
• 59:41
  The market at the moment, good segue way.
• 59:43
  The market at the moment in the West
• 59:45
  does not go near nuclear.
• 59:47
  That's, that's right.
• 59:48
  And that's because I think the benefits of nuclear
• 59:50
  are too long and slow and broadly dispersed
• 59:53
  for people to have a single company
• 59:55
  that he's going to be able to capture them.
• 59:56
  So you need to do things like value, you know,
• 59:59
  stability for the grid at the moment.
• 1:00:01
  We got this problem.
• 1:00:02
  It sounds like you're talking about government policy.
• 1:00:04
  Oh, well, I was trying to, like you're talking about
• 1:00:06
  the kind of government policy
• 1:00:08
  that you were dismissing about
• 1:00:09
  when it came to rooftop solar.
• 1:00:10
  No, it's, you know, I think that like governments
• 1:00:12
  are going to encourage people to do things, right?
• 1:00:14
  You're saying they should encourage companies
• 1:00:15
  to build in nuclear.
• 1:00:16
  In the case, in the case of households
• 1:00:18
  to put solar panels on their roof.
• 1:00:20
  Yeah, it makes sense for the government, I think,
• 1:00:22
  to plan this.
• 1:00:23
  And so probably actually to lead to a more logical point.
• 1:00:26
  Once you've got those natural monopolies in place, right?
• 1:00:29
  Where you sort of say, okay, the backbone,
• 1:00:31
  the parachute, if you will,
• 1:00:33
  requires these things that are poles and wires.
• 1:00:35
  And it wasn't always the case.
• 1:00:36
  Like when the electricity networks first evolved
• 1:00:38
  in the United States and you had Edison and then,
• 1:00:41
  and he was the DC guy and then the,
• 1:00:42
  I think it was Westinghouse, someone that did the AC.
• 1:00:45
  They had competing electricity lines up and down the streets,
• 1:00:47
  right?
• 1:00:48
  They had different generators connected
• 1:00:49
  to the transmission lines.
• 1:00:50
  And we all realized that was inefficient
• 1:00:51
  and it would be better off for everyone
• 1:00:53
  if the government had to do something.
• 1:00:54
  So I agree.
• 1:00:55
  Perfectly las a fair does not build the optimal system
• 1:00:58
  in the United States.
• 1:00:59
  Should we re-enationalize the poles and wires?
• 1:01:01
  Potentially, yes.
• 1:01:02
  So here's my kind of conclusion to your economic question.
• 1:01:05
  So I think you're absolutely right to sort of say,
• 1:01:06
  you know, which way are you going here?
• 1:01:08
  And I think that there is at the moment,
• 1:01:10
  if we want to entertain the idea that we need
• 1:01:12
  to keep large amounts of weather dependent, renewable,
• 1:01:15
  which means highly dispersed energy
• 1:01:18
  as part of where we're going, there's two ways you can go.
• 1:01:21
  You can either say, let's go back towards
• 1:01:23
  a much more small government pure capitalist system
• 1:01:27
  where you say, build your own everything.
• 1:01:30
  You know, if you want to build a generator out there, okay,
• 1:01:32
  well, build your own poles and wires out there too, right?
• 1:01:34
  You know, you can cover that cost.
• 1:01:36
  Because at the moment, that's a huge problem
• 1:01:37
  we have in our electricity system.
• 1:01:38
  Is that the value of a wind turbine
• 1:01:41
  is very much how proximity it is
• 1:01:43
  to a big, long electricity transmission line
• 1:01:46
  and what capacity you can get through that.
• 1:01:48
  So the business case between the transmission
• 1:01:51
  and the generators are now fundamentally intertwined,
• 1:01:53
  right, which I think creates a hotbed
• 1:01:55
  for potential corruption, conflicts of interest, right?
• 1:01:57
  So if you said, build your own everything,
• 1:01:59
  like you turn up here with a reliable, you know,
• 1:02:02
  firm electricity you can plug into the grid,
• 1:02:04
  that would be a good way to go.
• 1:02:06
  Or you can say the other direction to go,
• 1:02:08
  which I think is logical as well,
• 1:02:09
  as the government says, you know what?
• 1:02:12
  This energy generation precinct
• 1:02:14
  is really just a function of the centrally planned
• 1:02:16
  natural monopoly transmission line
• 1:02:18
  we build out to it anyway.
• 1:02:20
  You could have the government say,
• 1:02:21
  you know what, we are going to buy all the land
• 1:02:23
  around that point where we put these things
• 1:02:25
  and build all the generators too.
• 1:02:26
  Because that's actually, it's not something
• 1:02:28
  that once we've built the electricity line out there,
• 1:02:31
  which is the dominant thing, like, you know,
• 1:02:32
  you know, a lot of competing
• 1:02:32
  for interesting different places.
• 1:02:34
  The right places somewhere near this electricity
• 1:02:36
  line get the government to do that whole lot as well.
• 1:02:38
  And I think that either of those could work quite well.
• 1:02:41
  Right.
• 1:02:42
  And we have landed right between two stalls at the moment,
• 1:02:44
  where we're sort of somehow saying
• 1:02:46
  that these natural monopolies are still okay.
• 1:02:48
  But then we're building these
• 1:02:50
  inefficiently used transmission lines
• 1:02:52
  that we are now adding the bills back
• 1:02:54
  to the whole rate base.
• 1:02:56
  And then saying, oh, but we'll let all the people
• 1:02:58
  that are building the generators be private market
• 1:03:00
  participants, which get to sort of, you know,
• 1:03:02
  jump in and see which wind farm
• 1:03:03
  and which land packets they can buy out.
• 1:03:05
  And sort of the worst of all worlds.
• 1:03:07
  It reminds me a little bit of the telecommunications industry
• 1:03:09
  in the United States, which also, you know,
• 1:03:11
  you've got former government owned monopolies
• 1:03:14
  that are then privatized and corporatized,
• 1:03:17
  but they still own such monopoly.
• 1:03:18
  They still behave like them and their government owned monopolies
• 1:03:22
  and there's an enormous amount of rent seeking.
• 1:03:23
  That's right.
• 1:03:24
  But it's also not a free market.
• 1:03:26
  So you sort of want, I mean, I suppose the lefty
• 1:03:30
  would agree with you to some degree by saying
• 1:03:34
  re-nationalize polls and wires,
• 1:03:36
  treat them like the sewage system, for example.
• 1:03:38
  They're just part of civilization.
• 1:03:40
  And maybe high speed internet is the,
• 1:03:42
  you can have a drink, it's all right.
• 1:03:44
  And maybe high speed internet is the same
• 1:03:48
  and take it out of the hands of corporations.
• 1:03:52
  Just on the, on the question of like,
• 1:03:54
  you have to look at the entire team before you make,
• 1:03:58
  I think that's a really interesting point, right?
• 1:03:59
  That a lot of the talk about renewables
• 1:04:03
  doesn't take into account the fact that,
• 1:04:06
  even if it's only one day out of 1,000,
• 1:04:09
  you still need to account for a winner Dell's jet lands.
• 1:04:12
  She suddenly needs to turn on her 1,000 hairdryers.
• 1:04:17
  That, I can't tell whether or not that's valid
• 1:04:20
  or whether or not it's the same chess move
• 1:04:23
  as people who say we shouldn't do good stuff
• 1:04:26
  because at the end of the day,
• 1:04:27
  the good stuff isn't going to be absolutely perfect.
• 1:04:29
  Therefore, we should sort of do nothing.
• 1:04:31
  Like, I think that a renewable energy engineer
• 1:04:36
  would say, there is so much we could be doing
• 1:04:40
  to reduce carbon emissions and to save money
• 1:04:44
  that is in that first 99%,
• 1:04:48
  that has to do with contributing to the base load,
• 1:04:50
  that has to do with our ordinary everyday lives.
• 1:04:53
  We are enormously wasteful and inefficient
• 1:04:56
  and we're generating way too much carbon
• 1:04:59
  and it's simplistic to go,
• 1:05:01
  well, let's just swap out the coal-fired plant
• 1:05:03
  for a nuclear plant when there are much more interesting ways
• 1:05:05
  that we could deal with this
• 1:05:07
  and that it's a bit of a dodge to say,
• 1:05:10
  yeah, but you're always gonna,
• 1:05:12
  yeah, what about once we've done everything that you want to
• 1:05:14
  then at the end of the day, that one day out of 1,000,
• 1:05:17
  you don't have a solution for,
• 1:05:19
  I think they're a renewable energy person would say,
• 1:05:22
  yeah, okay, but there's still so much,
• 1:05:24
  we could be doing so much better than we are.
• 1:05:26
  It reminds me a little bit of like when there are
• 1:05:29
  like climate change conferences
• 1:05:31
  and you hear anti-climate change conservatives,
• 1:05:35
  you know, fossil fuel people saying like,
• 1:05:38
  even if we reduced our carbon emissions by half,
• 1:05:42
  there would still be three degrees of warming
• 1:05:44
  in the next 50 years and you're like,
• 1:05:47
  well, okay, it was better than the alternative.
• 1:05:50
  Like, I mean, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
• 1:05:53
  I think you can't really answer that question
• 1:05:55
  until you've got a sense of the cost and the progress
• 1:05:59
  of cost as you move through that solution space, right?
• 1:06:01
  Because you've kind of, you've kind of described this once
• 1:06:04
  in a hundred day thing and you get the idea that,
• 1:06:05
  oh, if you only use something once in a hundred days,
• 1:06:07
  that sounds like poor capacity utilization.
• 1:06:10
  I see there's no, there's no.
• 1:06:11
  Or maybe I'm just thinking maybe you just have to think
• 1:06:13
  of that as being an insurance policy.
• 1:06:15
  And like, the cost of that insurance policy
• 1:06:18
  is that is an insurance policy.
• 1:06:19
  It's a little bit like, you know, investing in a,
• 1:06:22
  I don't know, something that protects you against a bushfire,
• 1:06:24
  which might never happens, but you have to make that investment.
• 1:06:28
  It's not really critical to what you,
• 1:06:30
  to how you arrange the rest of the energy production.
• 1:06:33
  It is if the cost of the insurance policy is something
• 1:06:36
  like the same as the cost of the rest of the energy production, right?
• 1:06:38
  So, I mean, it's still rests on this principle that kind of like,
• 1:06:40
  let's treat it as this little insurance policy.
• 1:06:42
  That costs you a hundred, 20 billion dollars on the insurance policy.
• 1:06:47
  It's exactly right.
• 1:06:48
  And there's literally where we're at at the moment,
• 1:06:49
  where we're sort of saying, okay, like, you know,
• 1:06:51
  why can't we close down these qualified power plants, right?
• 1:06:54
  We wrote all these plans like integrated system plan that said,
• 1:06:56
  you know, here's this trajectory and it still works.
• 1:06:59
  But even the ISP, right, is based on this perfect foresight weather plan,
• 1:07:03
  where they just took, you know, 10 or 14 years of previous weather.
• 1:07:06
  What's the ISP?
• 1:07:07
  The integrated system plan.
• 1:07:08
  So, yeah, sorry, it's a, so the Australian Energy Market Operator
• 1:07:11
  produces this blueprint once every two years that has become our kind of Bible.
• 1:07:14
  Boring!
• 1:07:16
  Superboring, yeah.
• 1:07:17
  But, I mean, that's our blueprint master plan,
• 1:07:19
  but it incorporates perfect foresight, right?
• 1:07:22
  Like, you know, which means that the whole system gets to know exactly
• 1:07:25
  when the wind blows and shines everywhere.
• 1:07:27
  So, it can build all the right stuff in the right places to have every battery charged
• 1:07:30
  and every transmission line at just right, you know,
• 1:07:32
  to the nearest thermal limits and be okay.
• 1:07:35
  But we, as we progress, right, we realize that,
• 1:07:38
  oh, that level of backup wasn't quite right.
• 1:07:40
  And then, you know, the polygons say,
• 1:07:41
  I'm not sure whether we're kind of really ready to cut.
• 1:07:43
  And of course, you're basically in your paper workup,
• 1:07:46
  just incorporated these rosy assumptions about,
• 1:07:48
  oh, yeah, a complex system, we can make that work.
• 1:07:50
  I'm sure there'll be a switch, and hopefully,
• 1:07:52
  that we can, we can juggle it all together with.
• 1:07:54
  But actually, the cost of that insurance policy, right?
• 1:07:57
  The cost of the parachute might be as much of the plane, right?
• 1:07:59
  So, when you've got that, you've got to figure out,
• 1:08:02
  okay, what kind of aircraft do I want to have here?
• 1:08:04
  And it brings you back to this kind of like,
• 1:08:07
  actually, no, you don't walk yourself down this dead end.
• 1:08:10
  We are on a dead ended path where, from here onwards,
• 1:08:14
  we don't get to retire the transmission system.
• 1:08:16
  We actually need to build up up three times as much as we ever had it before, right?
• 1:08:19
  We don't get to do without the distribution network,
• 1:08:21
  actually moving that huge 5X rooftop sole that we currently have,
• 1:08:26
  which is already on the brink of creating problems,
• 1:08:28
  like, you know, that has to go somewhere.
• 1:08:29
  Sorry, what's the even sort of distribution and transmission?
• 1:08:32
  So, distribution is the small scale poles and wires.
• 1:08:34
  They're lower voltage to the ones you see in your street.
• 1:08:36
  So, up and down your street,
• 1:08:37
  so the nearest transmission is huge wires connecting
• 1:08:40
  different parts of the, exactly right, across the countryside, right?
• 1:08:43
  So, they're two different things.
• 1:08:44
  And at the moment, the transmission network actually costs
• 1:08:47
  the average end user electricity much less,
• 1:08:50
  like a third or a quarter of what the distribution network
• 1:08:52
  in your street makes sense,
• 1:08:55
  because the gigantic power,
• 1:08:56
  yeah, pole is probably more resilient
• 1:08:58
  than a little one in your street that a tree could follow.
• 1:09:01
  No, I just think that it's probably got to do with the utilisation as well.
• 1:09:05
  Like, you know, there's big ones to consistently utilised
• 1:09:11
  generation stations where a relatively simple cost to make.
• 1:09:15
  But now we're building out transmission lines
• 1:09:17
  to what we call renewable energy zones.
• 1:09:19
  And we've just had, like, the evidence is mounting up, right?
• 1:09:21
  The first renewable energy zone that has got a bill
• 1:09:24
  basically sent to the consumer is the New South Wales one,
• 1:09:28
  the central West Irrana,
• 1:09:30
  and New South Wales had the highest increase in electricity prices
• 1:09:33
  in the country last year,
• 1:09:34
  partly because $500 million of the bill was sent for this zone.
• 1:09:38
  And that made it, and that was,
• 1:09:40
  and that's put it this way, that's about double
• 1:09:42
  what our currently biggest transmission project will do when it's finished.
• 1:09:46
  And we haven't finished building this one.
• 1:09:47
  We've barely even started it.
• 1:09:48
  And we're already sending bills of $500 million
• 1:09:50
  to build this renewable energy zone.
• 1:09:52
  And it looks like the capital cost,
• 1:09:54
  yeah, is going to be sort of, you know,
• 1:09:56
  five and a half billion before they've started building it.
• 1:09:58
  And we've found every transmission line recently of this scale
• 1:10:01
  we've built has doubled well after we've started building it as well.
• 1:10:04
  So it's just, it's a question of cost.
• 1:10:06
  Okay, talking about costs then.
• 1:10:08
  Let's talk about cost of the nuclear.
• 1:10:09
  Because this is what the, you know,
• 1:10:11
  the anti-nuclear naysayers talk about as well.
• 1:10:15
  Hinckley point C in the UK.
• 1:10:16
  Yeah.
• 1:10:17
  Massive cost to blow out disaster.
• 1:10:19
  Plant, is it vote in the US?
• 1:10:21
  Vote, vote, sorry.
• 1:10:22
  I'm not wearing my glasses.
• 1:10:24
  Yeah.
• 1:10:25
  Flamelville in France.
• 1:10:26
  That's right.
• 1:10:27
  These are all huge cost overruns.
• 1:10:31
  What's going on with, why is nuclear not coming in at the price
• 1:10:34
  that people like you tell us it well?
• 1:10:35
  No, no, the West is stuffing up nuclear.
• 1:10:37
  I don't want to, I don't want to kind of kill the lily.
• 1:10:39
  Like it's, it's just, we have never had a situation
• 1:10:42
  where we've built basically a mature design a couple of times
• 1:10:45
  in a row, like in the West at all period, right?
• 1:10:48
  So, so people are kind of like,
• 1:10:49
  ah, Australia, the Western democracies,
• 1:10:51
  we have some beautiful thing about democracy and planning
• 1:10:54
  that makes it harder in the Western world.
• 1:10:55
  I'm kind of like, not really.
• 1:10:57
  We've just like, you know, for the first time ever
• 1:10:59
  and it's the same in the UK or the United States,
• 1:11:01
  we sort of like, let's get a brand new design.
• 1:11:03
  We've maybe been a built before.
• 1:11:04
  Or if we have maybe built one, get a new consortium
• 1:11:06
  that's never built that and put it on a, put it on a new site
• 1:11:08
  and like, and, and, and by the way, in this country,
• 1:11:11
  we've never built anything nuclear for at least 20 or 30 years.
• 1:11:13
  Let's see how it goes.
• 1:11:14
  And, and the first one, lo and behold,
• 1:11:16
  is always consistently expensive.
• 1:11:18
  But all the ones you listed there,
• 1:11:19
  like the UK and the UK is stuffed it up in other ways.
• 1:11:21
  Like, you know, how not to do nuclear
• 1:11:23
  is the UK in so many different ways.
• 1:11:25
  But, but in the, in the US, yeah, totally new design,
• 1:11:29
  the consortia they put together,
• 1:11:30
  I mean, that was sort of a big part of the story.
• 1:11:32
  They did also change a few rules and regs on the way,
• 1:11:34
  but the consortia fell over and collapsed
• 1:11:36
  and didn't have experienced people
• 1:11:38
  building the design at all.
• 1:11:39
  And it was the first time they'd sort of built that design
• 1:11:42
  in the, in the US at all.
• 1:11:43
  So it blew out.
• 1:11:44
  But, nuclear only will get cheap if you build the same design
• 1:11:47
  multiple times over from a, a serious company
• 1:11:50
  that knows how to build it.
• 1:11:51
  Who are they?
• 1:11:52
  And what's the same standard if you were able to pick?
• 1:11:54
  At the moment, it's the Koreans.
• 1:11:56
  Like the Koreans have done that in the UAE.
• 1:11:58
  And again, like the typical thing on the left is to say,
• 1:12:00
  oh, but the UAE are basically like dictators
• 1:12:02
  and like they hate human rights
• 1:12:04
  and we could never match that.
• 1:12:06
  And I think it's not really true.
• 1:12:07
  Like the late, you're also not going to hear that from me.
• 1:12:09
  I mean, there are ways of doing things,
• 1:12:10
  but also the Koreans.
• 1:12:11
  So do the Koreans have nuclear power?
• 1:12:12
  Absolutely, yeah.
• 1:12:13
  And they have low cost electricity
• 1:12:15
  and they've been building relatively steadily
• 1:12:16
  across their own fleet.
• 1:12:18
  Relatively, they had a couple of hiccups.
• 1:12:20
  And they've got big power stations
• 1:12:22
  where there's sort of, you know,
• 1:12:23
  two, three, four nuclear reactors on a single site
• 1:12:26
  and they can, there's make economic sense.
• 1:12:27
  Absolutely, they do.
• 1:12:28
  So the ones in the UAE, you're saying that people will poo poo
• 1:12:31
  whether or not they're economically viable
• 1:12:32
  because there's such low labor cost in the,
• 1:12:34
  in the, the labor rates.
• 1:12:35
  But the labor cost is only a small fraction
• 1:12:37
  of the total cost of building a project.
• 1:12:38
  So it's, I think it's still a weak argument.
• 1:12:39
  Even if you assume we have to pay a bit of a premium
• 1:12:41
  for the labor here.
• 1:12:42
  Why do the Emirates have nuclear power plants?
• 1:12:44
  So they have shit loads of oil?
• 1:12:45
  Yeah, they sort of basically don't get high on your own supply
• 1:12:47
  and what I want to say that.
• 1:12:49
  And yeah, so actually they've got shit loads.
• 1:12:52
  Is it gas or oil?
• 1:12:54
  Qatar has more gas.
• 1:12:56
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:57
  But basically they have a lot of fossil fuels.
• 1:12:59
  They figure it makes sense
• 1:13:00
  in terms of energy security as well
• 1:13:01
  and the long term that better off selling the stuff
• 1:13:03
  for the rest of the world definitely needs
• 1:13:04
  in having low cost power for base load of their own
• 1:13:07
  from, from nuclear.
• 1:13:08
  So your solution would be just higher
• 1:13:10
  a Korean company that knows how to do it to build it for us.
• 1:13:14
  It's pretty close to that.
• 1:13:14
  Yeah, right.
• 1:13:15
  And so I think that you already recommended a cost.
• 1:13:18
  I reckon in Australia,
• 1:13:20
  I think the CSI rose latest estimates for into the kind
• 1:13:24
  a ballpark right, right?
• 1:13:25
  Which is something like something like $10,000 per kilowatt.
• 1:13:31
  But what is the whole thing cost on it?
• 1:13:32
  It'll cost about $10 billion a reactor.
• 1:13:35
  That's cheap.
• 1:13:36
  That's on the very cheap side of the estimates.
• 1:13:38
  Yeah, that is assuming you blow out to $30, $40,000.
• 1:13:42
  That's right.
• 1:13:43
  Well, they're for often two reactors at a site, right?
• 1:13:45
  So like the Vogel was two of those.
• 1:13:47
  Right, right.
• 1:13:48
  It is cheaper than what we've had recently.
• 1:13:49
  But again, I think it's not cheaper than what the UA did.
• 1:13:52
  It's about that kind of thing.
• 1:13:53
  And that's come from CSI's scaling up basically.
• 1:13:57
  They took a comparison for how cheap Korean coal plants were.
• 1:14:00
  And Koreans are just the geniuses
• 1:14:01
  of heavy industrial everything, right?
• 1:14:03
  They're ships and stuff like that.
• 1:14:04
  And said, well, what did our coal plant cost to their?
• 1:14:06
  Will it be their coal plant?
• 1:14:07
  Or scale up the nuclear plant from their prices,
• 1:14:10
  which are way cheaper again.
• 1:14:11
  And so we're going to pay roughly three times the price here
• 1:14:14
  for what they can build it in Korea.
• 1:14:16
  And it still turns out to be $10,000.
• 1:14:19
  Oh, so yeah, about $10 billion for a gigawatt, which is a lot.
• 1:14:24
  But they last a long time.
• 1:14:25
  How long have they last?
• 1:14:27
  We don't know is the short answer, right?
• 1:14:29
  So all the ones that were built in the 70s and 80s in the States
• 1:14:32
  are now getting licensed extensions out to 80 years.
• 1:14:34
  And may get extended to $100.
• 1:14:35
  Really?
• 1:14:36
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:14:37
  So I thought it was like a 40 or 50 year thing.
• 1:14:39
  No.
• 1:14:40
  60 would be pretty standard for most reactor plans.
• 1:14:43
  Of course, the licensing is different, right?
• 1:14:45
  So when you build something that you expect to last maybe 100 years,
• 1:14:48
  you don't license it to say it's definitely good to go for $100.
• 1:14:50
  Yeah, sure.
• 1:14:51
  You're going to have a little good at it again, exactly 40 years time.
• 1:14:53
  Generally that's what you do.
• 1:14:55
  But seriously, long assets life, which means
• 1:14:58
  that there is the possibility if those things last as long as we think they do
• 1:15:01
  and don't need too deeper refurb when they get refurbished,
• 1:15:05
  they can become extremely good value in the long term.
• 1:15:07
  So the prospect for nuclear power being cheaper than coal
• 1:15:09
  is when you get to 30, 40 years, most of your capital is retired
• 1:15:12
  and you look at the capital and say,
• 1:15:14
  doesn't need too much to put that back in ship shape for another 20, 30 years.
• 1:15:17
  Should governments be borrowing money using their triple A credit ratings
• 1:15:20
  to fund it themselves or would you have private industry to it?
• 1:15:23
  I think that governments have to back that in.
• 1:15:27
  Whether it's they borrow all the money completely off the back
• 1:15:29
  or they write some sort of base guarantee for it,
• 1:15:32
  I don't have, I'm not trying to engine the finances in too much detail.
• 1:15:35
  But yes, I don't think there's any cases really outside the United States
• 1:15:38
  where purely private companies have started a nuclear industry.
• 1:15:43
  It's just doesn't that indicate that they are seeing something
• 1:15:46
  that you're not about the possible viability of renewables that could be threatening
• 1:15:50
  because there are companies that invest tens of billions of dollars in things
• 1:15:52
  that aren't going to have a payoff for a very long time all the time.
• 1:15:55
  Pharmaceutical companies, for example.
• 1:15:57
  Yeah, well, no, not necessarily.
• 1:15:59
  So how much do you need to invest in a, I mean, in the case of nuclear, right?
• 1:16:03
  So like I said, the West has stuffed it up because they've only ever built one
• 1:16:06
  or two at a time.
• 1:16:07
  It's a new design, new place, new consortia of people building it.
• 1:16:11
  If you want to, if you want to get nuclear to work well,
• 1:16:13
  you need to build commit to multiple reactors, right?
• 1:16:16
  So on a single site.
• 1:16:17
  And at that point, it's really hard for anyone other than the government
• 1:16:20
  to start making that decision.
• 1:16:21
  And as well, can you pull together not $10 or $20 billion,
• 1:16:25
  but we're talking 50, 60, $80 billion.
• 1:16:28
  Tell me which companies are going to be kind of like that.
• 1:16:30
  But when I asked how much it would cost,
• 1:16:32
  we said like $10 billion.
• 1:16:33
  I thought that was the, that was the bill.
• 1:16:35
  And that's for a reactor and saying,
• 1:16:36
  you need five of them to make it work.
• 1:16:38
  No, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, you have the economy to scale, right?
• 1:16:40
  So for a single reactor for that, it's right.
• 1:16:42
  That would, that's your unit cost.
• 1:16:43
  But I'm saying, you build more like that's a, that's a,
• 1:16:45
  that's a first bit of advice.
• 1:16:46
  If you want to build in Australia, don't build one and be like,
• 1:16:48
  oh, how do we go?
• 1:16:50
  Because it'll be freaking expensive, right?
• 1:16:51
  Like, you know, you make sure you commit to a batch, right?
• 1:16:53
  And, and that's what all the good plans do.
• 1:16:55
  But if you do that, they can have decent unit costs, right?
• 1:16:58
  Like, you know, if you, if you start up the first one, right?
• 1:17:01
  And you stop right there, you guarantee the most expensive
• 1:17:04
  nuclear power ever, right?
• 1:17:05
  But if you've planned for, you can start off the first one.
• 1:17:09
  Right. And so long as you learn from the mistakes,
• 1:17:12
  it's very hard for the whole project not to look okay.
• 1:17:14
  I mean, I think you're giving us, it sounds like you're giving
• 1:17:16
  a certain level of generosity to, and, and benefit of the doubt,
• 1:17:20
  to nuclear, that you're not giving to renewables.
• 1:17:22
  Like, so 50, the thing of the opportunity cost of $50 billion.
• 1:17:25
  Yeah.
• 1:17:26
  And what, if you, if sitting in front of me right now
• 1:17:28
  was a renewable NG engineer, and I said,
• 1:17:30
  what can you do over the next 30 years?
• 1:17:34
  Well, that'd be a great conversation of $1 billion.
• 1:17:36
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:37
  You know, and how close do you think you could get
• 1:17:39
  to addressing the concerns that we've been talking about?
• 1:17:42
  Yeah, except that I'd probably look back at what we've already spent,
• 1:17:45
  which might be surprisingly close to that.
• 1:17:47
  And also what we're about to spend.
• 1:17:49
  And like, again, just these, these projects
• 1:17:51
  that have just massive, massive costs
• 1:17:53
  way above what the spreadsheet models at CSRO,
• 1:17:56
  whatever else did, like that we are just starting to discover.
• 1:17:58
  And I think you spend $50 billion really fast.
• 1:18:01
  Like what, what sort of thing is that?
• 1:18:03
  I mean, like, you know, say one renewable energy zone
• 1:18:04
  is estimated at about $5 billion now.
• 1:18:07
  All right, how many renewable energy zones do you want to have?
• 1:18:09
  Like, you know, so offshore wind,
• 1:18:11
  that's doubled to triple the cost of onshore wind, right?
• 1:18:13
  And if you build it in a deep water zone, like that's,
• 1:18:16
  there's going to be $50 billion you could spend on offshore wind
• 1:18:18
  in the yellow war, for one zone.
• 1:18:21
  You have your argument.
• 1:18:22
  You're either going to get nickel and dime
• 1:18:23
  with a billion little projects,
• 1:18:25
  or you just dump it all into one thing that you know is going to work.
• 1:18:28
  But one that really does.
• 1:18:29
  But also, you're just fundamentally going uphill again.
• 1:18:32
  Like at the moment, the cannibalization, right?
• 1:18:35
  So this is one of the endemic problems
• 1:18:36
  that we have with energy that is highly correlated, right?
• 1:18:39
  Like, when it's sunny, it's really sunny.
• 1:18:41
  And we don't need the energy then.
• 1:18:42
  So the market prices say that you've got to have your powers worthless,
• 1:18:46
  right? The spot price for power collapses in the middle of the day.
• 1:18:49
  And often when it's very windy too,
• 1:18:50
  it's now starting to depress the market prices for that power.
• 1:18:52
  Which is the markets way of saying we had enough of this stuff.
• 1:18:54
  Like, you know, can we build something else
• 1:18:56
  that can supply power the other times, please?
• 1:18:59
  And the government has now created a subsidy scheme
• 1:19:01
  in Australia called the Capacity Investment Scheme, all right?
• 1:19:05
  It was initially meant to provide the reliable capacity
• 1:19:07
  that could power the grid at the other times of day
• 1:19:09
  when the sun wasn't flying, when it wasn't shining.
• 1:19:11
  And it's been co-opted by the current government
• 1:19:14
  to basically become an underwriting scheme
• 1:19:16
  just also for the generators as well.
• 1:19:19
  And we have no idea what the cap on this cost of the scheme is.
• 1:19:23
  It's uncapped. It's so far as I know.
• 1:19:25
  There's been some statements to the effect of,
• 1:19:27
  oh, no, no, it's got a cap, but they have deliberately not said anything
• 1:19:30
  about how much they expect to spend.
• 1:19:32
  And because the market price for the power is going down,
• 1:19:37
  they've got to basically cover the entire gap
• 1:19:39
  between whatever the market could fund of these wind farms
• 1:19:42
  and what they need to build.
• 1:19:44
  And what they need to build in Australia,
• 1:19:45
  like one of the recent ones, the hills of Goldwind Farm in Australia,
• 1:19:49
  they basically said that their cost before they've added any batteries
• 1:19:51
  or any other kind of things to firm their supply
• 1:19:53
  is going to be about $126 or 112
• 1:19:57
  if they build the other offensive wind turbines
• 1:19:59
  that were recommended to be removed
• 1:20:00
  because they were too high a visual
• 1:20:02
  and biodiversity impact, right?
• 1:20:04
  So we're talking about $100 plus dollars
• 1:20:07
  is the marginal cost of building wind
• 1:20:08
  before you build the transmission lines
• 1:20:10
  before you build the batteries.
• 1:20:12
  It was just no chance at all.
• 1:20:14
  This, any of this ever gets back down to low cost electricity,
• 1:20:17
  you know, and all the guys parling on these systems,
• 1:20:19
  like, so Parth A is expensive and Parth B is expensive.
• 1:20:23
  So we might as well take the expensive
• 1:20:25
  that is tested as your argument.
• 1:20:28
  That's, I think that the Parth B has a chance
• 1:20:31
  to be not much more expensive than we currently have.
• 1:20:34
  I think coal is probably the cheapest.
• 1:20:35
  We want to have really low cost electricity.
• 1:20:37
  We've built more coal.
• 1:20:38
  There's no doubt about that.
• 1:20:39
  Do you think if the government gave private companies?
• 1:20:42
  Because, yeah, $50 billion is a lot of money.
• 1:20:45
  $10 billion is not beyond the can of big companies.
• 1:20:48
  I mean, I'd like to know how much money has gone
• 1:20:50
  into Alzheimer's research.
• 1:20:51
  For example, over the past 20 years, I don't know.
• 1:20:54
  I don't know, but it would be a lot of money.
• 1:20:56
  And, you know, so the idea of,
• 1:21:00
  if I could give a company a guarantee,
• 1:21:02
  essentially a guarantee?
• 1:21:03
  Like, let's say, let's suppose it's not a guarantee.
• 1:21:05
  Let's suppose it's an interest-free loan.
• 1:21:07
  Right.
• 1:21:07
  Suppose I go, I'm not going to charge any money.
• 1:21:10
  You can have $50 billion.
• 1:21:12
  Yeah.
• 1:21:12
  And pay it back in 30 years time
• 1:21:16
  after you've built your half-dozen nuclear power plants.
• 1:21:20
  Do you reckon there are companies that take that bet?
• 1:21:21
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:21:22
  If the regulatory hurdles were cleared,
• 1:21:25
  I think it's an easy bet to take.
• 1:21:26
  Absolutely.
• 1:21:27
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:21:28
  Yeah, okay.
• 1:21:30
  And I wouldn't say the same bad renewables.
• 1:21:31
  I think that's still like, I mean, it would be a...
• 1:21:35
  Oh, it's totally interest-free, I suppose.
• 1:21:37
  It's a big, big leg up.
• 1:21:38
  But they're fighting uphill.
• 1:21:39
  Like every renewable energy at the start is easy
• 1:21:42
  because you've got some other power source
• 1:21:44
  that you can just tone down, right?
• 1:21:45
  Like, so there's a paper that we're about to publish very soon
• 1:21:48
  about what we call the renewable energy honeymoon, right?
• 1:21:50
  The very, very first bit is, is trivially simple
• 1:21:53
  because you can just turn down
• 1:21:54
  whatever other marginal power source that you had in the system.
• 1:21:57
  But at some point, you've got so much energy
• 1:21:59
  at one place in one time
• 1:22:01
  that it's too much for your requirements there.
• 1:22:03
  And you have to move energy around
• 1:22:05
  to a different place or a different time that needs it
• 1:22:08
  or start wasting some in order to keep decarbonizing.
• 1:22:11
  And we're already at that point already
• 1:22:12
  where we have to start basically spilling and wasting energy.
• 1:22:15
  Or...
• 1:22:16
  Isn't that point essentially the base load power point?
• 1:22:19
  I mean, the point at which you've got enough energy
• 1:22:22
  and you're going to either have to move some around
• 1:22:24
  or waste it, isn't that by definition the bottom of the trough?
• 1:22:27
  No, but you've just carved out a single trough
• 1:22:29
  but then you've got nothing again for another day or two.
• 1:22:31
  No, I understand.
• 1:22:32
  But so why not just, but are we there already?
• 1:22:34
  And we're producing so much renewables
• 1:22:36
  that if they were only stable, we'd have base load power.
• 1:22:40
  No, because it's not base load.
• 1:22:41
  There'd be days when...
• 1:22:42
  No, I understand, but it reaches the same point on the graph
• 1:22:45
  as the top of the base load block.
• 1:22:48
  The short, in South Australia happens all the time.
• 1:22:50
  It can do it on wind alone.
• 1:22:51
  It can do it on solar alone in South Australia.
• 1:22:54
  But in New South Wales, sorry, in Victoria
• 1:22:56
  in South Australia sort of together, it's a fair share, right?
• 1:22:59
  You know, I can get quite a bit.
• 1:23:01
  And certainly, but rooftop solar is now at the point.
• 1:23:03
  Our regulator has, not a regulator.
• 1:23:05
  The market operator has stated
• 1:23:07
  they need to be able to basically take emergency control
• 1:23:11
  to switch off people's rooftop solar
• 1:23:12
  for the good of grid stability by the end of this year,
• 1:23:15
  like by third quarter this year, right?
• 1:23:17
  So there was a huge scare campaign run
• 1:23:19
  in the last election saying that nuclear would do that, right?
• 1:23:21
  Nuclear would cause us to have to switch off your solar.
• 1:23:25
  More solar does that more so and faster.
• 1:23:27
  And it is right in front of us right now.
• 1:23:29
  We have to switch off rooftop solar because we got too much of it.
• 1:23:32
  And yeah, so I mean, so from here on,
• 1:23:36
  all the systems for renewable energy will just get harder,
• 1:23:40
  far, far harder and more expensive.
• 1:23:41
  You'll have even lower utilization of your equipment
• 1:23:43
  or you'll have to add more systems.
• 1:23:44
  So we've only got about 10 minutes left.
• 1:23:46
  But the main thing that people who oppose nuclear
• 1:23:50
  will, I think, where their heads will be at this point
• 1:23:52
  in the conversation is to say, okay, it might all be more expensive.
• 1:23:57
  Let's grant you that it'll be more expensive
• 1:23:58
  and more complicated and more vulnerable
• 1:24:00
  to have a non-nuclear future.
• 1:24:02
  But the problems of safety and the problems
• 1:24:06
  of long-term storage of nuclear waste
• 1:24:08
  make nuclear and non-stata.
• 1:24:10
  So those are prices that we're willing to pay
• 1:24:12
  and maybe we need to use gas or whatever
• 1:24:15
  to supplement renewables.
• 1:24:16
  Can you speak to where we are with safety
• 1:24:18
  and what you do with the waste?
• 1:24:19
  Yeah, I think the safety is really,
• 1:24:22
  I think it's no longer a serious issue.
• 1:24:24
  Like I agree with you, there's a few people,
• 1:24:26
  a few campaigners who are deeply opposed,
• 1:24:27
  but I actually don't think that's where
• 1:24:29
  the rest of Australia's head is at.
• 1:24:31
  I think that if you look at the safety record of nuclear,
• 1:24:33
  even winding in Chernobyl, which that type of accident
• 1:24:36
  where there's literally a kind of a moment
• 1:24:39
  where it's so fissile,
• 1:24:41
  like it becomes like a little mini-nuclear bombing
• 1:24:43
  the reactor core for a moment,
• 1:24:46
  that can't happen with the current reactors
• 1:24:47
  the way they design.
• 1:24:48
  And also that was totally unshielded.
• 1:24:49
  So either the Chernobyl wound in,
• 1:24:51
  the nuclear safety record is extremely good.
• 1:24:54
  It was also caused by a failing dysfunctional state
• 1:24:56
  that was paranoid about it.
• 1:24:57
  It's exactly right.
• 1:24:58
  And so, and, and yeah,
• 1:25:00
  internally, that's exactly right.
• 1:25:01
  And they would not have done that experiment
• 1:25:03
  if they weren't in that sort of system
• 1:25:05
  where they had to tell the guy above,
• 1:25:06
  yes, we can do it.
• 1:25:07
  Like they knew that the state they were putting the reactor
• 1:25:09
  into was not a safe one,
• 1:25:10
  and they did the experiment,
• 1:25:11
  the low power experiment anyway.
• 1:25:12
  So, but like, but even like if you look
• 1:25:14
  at the recent ones, three mile islands,
• 1:25:16
  like no one hurt, no adverse health effects
• 1:25:19
  to anyone working at the plant or anyone else.
• 1:25:22
  Like it was just, it was just, that's incredible.
• 1:25:24
  Like if you think about what people think of in their head,
• 1:25:26
  you say melt down through my island,
• 1:25:27
  like that actually no one was hurt by that.
• 1:25:31
  And also in Japan,
• 1:25:34
  gee, what's the name now?
• 1:25:35
  Fukushima.
• 1:25:36
  Fukushima, right?
• 1:25:37
  Again, like massive meltdown.
• 1:25:39
  Three reactors, you know,
• 1:25:41
  quite seriously melt, meltdown.
• 1:25:43
  And again, like it's not clear
• 1:25:45
  that anyone was actually hurt from that either.
• 1:25:47
  Like there's one potential death
• 1:25:49
  and he was smoking two packs a day
• 1:25:51
  and he did have a cancer several years later
• 1:25:53
  that could be related, right?
• 1:25:54
  But if you want to ask me,
• 1:25:56
  like what's the kind of worst case
• 1:25:58
  industrial disaster we have
• 1:25:59
  when there's a once-in-a-half millennia
• 1:26:01
  sort of natural disaster, like floods and tsunami?
• 1:26:05
  Having a whole bunch of capital wiped off
• 1:26:07
  but no one actually died
• 1:26:08
  is a pretty good version
• 1:26:10
  of what industrial safety should be.
• 1:26:11
  So I just think the safety argument is,
• 1:26:13
  and I've got the question about whether or not
• 1:26:15
  there could be contamination in the Chinese,
• 1:26:16
  say that the Fukushima contaminated the water,
• 1:26:19
  but that mean who knows whether or not the Chinese,
• 1:26:22
  legit when they're complaining about pollution and so on.
• 1:26:24
  Also, the reason I left this until the end
• 1:26:26
  and I think it's a non-issue
• 1:26:28
  is just that people are very good at being scared
• 1:26:31
  by big one-off events
• 1:26:33
  and not noticing the slow downsides of the alternatives.
• 1:26:38
  And if you believe that climate chaos
• 1:26:41
  is real and is happening,
• 1:26:44
  then the sort of every few weeks
• 1:26:47
  cost and cost to life and in money
• 1:26:50
  of more extreme weather events
• 1:26:52
  and of hurricanes and wildfires and tornadoes
• 1:26:55
  and rising sea levels.
• 1:26:57
  All of that is just a backdrop to our lives
• 1:27:00
  whereas you have to stack all of that up
• 1:27:02
  on one side of the ledger
• 1:27:04
  and then look at the vanishingly small risk of
• 1:27:07
  some of nuclear, which is incredibly, incredibly unlikely.
• 1:27:12
  And the waste question again,
• 1:27:14
  I think it's not an issue.
• 1:27:16
  I think that it's just such a small volume of waste.
• 1:27:18
  You can engineer the heck out
• 1:27:19
  of whatever containment solution you want
• 1:27:20
  and it's just perfectly safe.
• 1:27:22
  It's never hurt anyone.
• 1:27:24
  I mean, I'm a little bit more leery about that
• 1:27:25
  just because I feel like
• 1:27:27
  we have so little idea of
• 1:27:28
  how human civilization is going to go
• 1:27:30
  over the next few thousand years.
• 1:27:32
  You're talking about things that are still going to be toxic
• 1:27:34
  in 10,000 years?
• 1:27:34
  No, it's not much to me.
• 1:27:36
  After a thousand years,
• 1:27:37
  you've got to crush this stuff up
• 1:27:38
  and eat it to get a lethal dose.
• 1:27:39
  Is that right?
• 1:27:40
  Yeah, so the case exponentially, right?
• 1:27:42
  So when it's fresh out of the reactor,
• 1:27:44
  it's extremely dangerous, right?
• 1:27:46
  Keep it under water for that reason.
• 1:27:47
  And then you've got to wrap in this concrete casks.
• 1:27:50
  But again, like after a few hundred years,
• 1:27:52
  after one or two hundred years,
• 1:27:53
  you can sort of have it on the other side
• 1:27:54
  of this room probably for a while and be okay,
• 1:27:56
  like not anymore.
• 1:27:57
  So this idea that it's sort of, you know,
• 1:27:59
  forever, absolutely infinitely radioactive,
• 1:28:01
  wouldn't have handled it's not true, right?
• 1:28:03
  You know, after a few hundred years,
• 1:28:04
  it is not very hard for us to handle,
• 1:28:07
  move about, recask, whatever else.
• 1:28:09
  And after a thousand years or so,
• 1:28:11
  like you literally have to crush it
• 1:28:12
  and eat it to get a dose.
• 1:28:13
  So it's not, it's not hard to handle radioactive.
• 1:28:16
  It's technically still radioactive, right?
• 1:28:18
  Like you have a guide counter, you'll get something.
• 1:28:20
  But yeah, it's just, you're not going to,
• 1:28:21
  if human civilization collapses and the planet of the apes
• 1:28:26
  takes us out and they don't know what a warning sign is,
• 1:28:29
  then they're going to be okay in 5,000 years.
• 1:28:30
  Absolutely.
• 1:28:31
  This whole idea we need to kind of invent new languages
• 1:28:33
  to communicate with future civilizations.
• 1:28:34
  I love this.
• 1:28:35
  I love this idea.
• 1:28:36
  It's just, it's just an absolute perfect skill.
• 1:28:38
  Just to clarify, just to clarify for people
• 1:28:39
  what you're talking about, there was a program
• 1:28:42
  such an interesting article,
• 1:28:44
  and I think the Atlantic about this program in Europe,
• 1:28:46
  where they were where semi-attitions, I suppose,
• 1:28:49
  language experts, right, who study symbols,
• 1:28:52
  meanings of symbols were put together in a crack squad,
• 1:28:57
  which was to say, how are we going to label nuclear waste sites
• 1:29:02
  in the event that human civilization extinguishes itself
• 1:29:06
  completely, and then future civilizations evolve,
• 1:29:10
  maybe some homo sapiens are still around,
• 1:29:12
  but they get bombed back to the Stone Age and cavemen
• 1:29:16
  who don't understand what the nuclear technology ever existed.
• 1:29:21
  Coming to curious.
• 1:29:22
  They become curious.
• 1:29:23
  And they come across a nuclear waste dump.
• 1:29:25
  How do we, we can't put a skull in crossbones,
• 1:29:28
  and we certainly can't write something about nuclear,
• 1:29:30
  because they're just going to think it's fantastical.
• 1:29:32
  That's right.
• 1:29:33
  They're going to be curious.
• 1:29:35
  They're going to probably pay as little heed
• 1:29:37
  to our warnings as we do to the warnings of the pharaohs
• 1:29:40
  on the outside of the pyramids that say, don't come in here.
• 1:29:42
  Otherwise, you'll disturb our demons,
• 1:29:44
  and there'll be a hex on you.
• 1:29:46
  Exactly.
• 1:29:46
  And they'll go in, and they'll meddle around,
• 1:29:48
  and then they'll die of radiation poisoning in 10,000 years.
• 1:29:52
  Just not worth worrying.
• 1:29:52
  You're not super worried about this.
• 1:29:54
  Not at all, no, it's literally all that stuff
• 1:29:56
  is like a kind of nonsense kind of fear campaign,
• 1:29:58
  to kind of create this impression
• 1:30:00
  that we're really, really hard to use.
• 1:30:01
  Even the idea of deep geological repositories,
• 1:30:03
  I don't think like that we need deep geological repositories.
• 1:30:06
  You can reprocess this fuel.
• 1:30:08
  At the moment, it's cheaper not to,
• 1:30:09
  but you can reprocess this fuel
• 1:30:10
  and get a whole bunch more power out of it.
• 1:30:12
  So what's the chance of that being a good thing to do
• 1:30:14
  in the next couple of hundred years?
• 1:30:16
  You don't end up with nothing, though.
• 1:30:18
  You don't reprocess it out of existence.
• 1:30:20
  You reprocess it down to smaller levels.
• 1:30:21
  It's much, much smaller.
• 1:30:22
  It's surprisingly close to.
• 1:30:25
  But still, it's a trivial volume at the moment.
• 1:30:27
  All of the nuclear waste from America
• 1:30:30
  could stack in basically a Walmart,
• 1:30:32
  like a single storage facility.
• 1:30:35
  If you look at what we have for an ash pit
• 1:30:37
  at a single one of our coal-fired power stations,
• 1:30:39
  it's that big or bigger, right?
• 1:30:40
  There's just this idea that we're running out of space
• 1:30:43
  or we'll ever come close to,
• 1:30:44
  ever running out of space.
• 1:30:45
  It's just so, so nonsense.
• 1:30:47
  You can put whatever fences around you want.
• 1:30:51
  There's just no issue with waste.
• 1:30:53
  I've flown over Australia enough times to know
• 1:30:56
  that there's plenty of room.
• 1:30:57
  There's plenty of room.
• 1:31:00
  All right, let's wrap up with
• 1:31:01
  I want your sort of best case and worst case
• 1:31:03
  prognostication here.
• 1:31:04
  Because all of the stuff we're talking about,
• 1:31:06
  it would be great if every person in the world
• 1:31:08
  listened to this and like took heed of what you're saying.
• 1:31:11
  And we could have a big mature debate
• 1:31:13
  doing you and Saul Griffiths
• 1:31:15
  and then figure out the best way to proceed.
• 1:31:18
  We live in a real world,
• 1:31:20
  which is driven by partisan differences,
• 1:31:22
  fueled by democratic misinformation
• 1:31:25
  and ultimately voters who have to vote on things.
• 1:31:28
  And politicians who have to be courageous enough
• 1:31:30
  to propose things that might be unpopular.
• 1:31:32
  Are you optimistic about your message cutting through?
• 1:31:37
  I guess what is the best case and worst case scenario
• 1:31:39
  for how we manage the energy?
• 1:31:41
  And we haven't even talked about artificial intelligence
• 1:31:42
  and the kind of demands that data centers are going to place
• 1:31:45
  on energy,
• 1:31:47
  but assuming that we need two or three times as much energy
• 1:31:50
  as we currently have in a few years' time,
• 1:31:52
  what are the best and worst case scenarios of how we get it?
• 1:31:58
  Yeah, really, really good question.
• 1:32:00
  I think that we will...
• 1:32:01
  I think we're going to stagger along
• 1:32:03
  in the same direction for at least a few more years.
• 1:32:07
  But there are cracks emerging.
• 1:32:08
  There are changes that are taking place.
• 1:32:11
  I think that slowly,
• 1:32:15
  in a long fight, the truth is a powerful ally.
• 1:32:18
  And this is a long discussion.
• 1:32:20
  And people are slowly starting to change their behaviors.
• 1:32:25
  And I think the writing is in the wall,
• 1:32:27
  for the renewable-only fantasy,
• 1:32:30
  the 99% or 98% or whatever you want it to be.
• 1:32:33
  But Germany is proving that.
• 1:32:35
  California is proving that.
• 1:32:36
  Germany has just had this incredible letter
• 1:32:38
  from their biggest industrial giants,
• 1:32:40
  the biggest chemical companies,
• 1:32:42
  and a union say,
• 1:32:43
  this is the worst economic crisis,
• 1:32:45
  industrial crisis since World War II,
• 1:32:48
  and lay the blame pretty squarely
• 1:32:49
  at the foot of energy policy.
• 1:32:50
  So I think that people will slowly walk themselves back
• 1:32:54
  from this path,
• 1:32:55
  which I'm convinced it's just down at dead ends
• 1:32:57
  towards trying to get total dependence
• 1:33:00
  on diffuse intermittent,
• 1:33:02
  weather dependent energy resources.
• 1:33:04
  But in the time being,
• 1:33:05
  Australia will probably stick out
• 1:33:06
  for another few years, at least, I think.
• 1:33:10
  And it looks like us just not turning off
• 1:33:12
  the other parachutes we have.
• 1:33:13
  Like that's the problem.
• 1:33:15
  We'll just keep coal burning.
• 1:33:17
  Coal will remain in the system.
• 1:33:18
  It's going to be very hard to push out on any economic basis
• 1:33:20
  because it's cheap.
• 1:33:21
  It's fundamentally cheap.
• 1:33:22
  Yeah.
• 1:33:23
  And so,
• 1:33:24
  so coal will remain for a long time.
• 1:33:26
  But we won't maintain it or reinvest in it.
• 1:33:29
  So it's as reliable as it could be.
• 1:33:31
  So we'll stagger along
• 1:33:33
  and probably won't get blackouts
• 1:33:34
  for pure lack of energy needs for any time soon.
• 1:33:37
  But there could be an accident or two
• 1:33:39
  and coal will be blamed for that occurring.
• 1:33:42
  Well, it would be an accident.
• 1:33:43
  What do you mean?
• 1:33:44
  As in,
• 1:33:45
  oh, we've had them in coal plants before,
• 1:33:47
  but like, I mean,
• 1:33:48
  the common ones are just a pipe in the boiler bursts,
• 1:33:50
  which happens in the future.
• 1:33:51
  You mean just an accident, literally,
• 1:33:53
  in the power plant because it's getting up.
• 1:33:54
  But that'll take it off line for a couple of days
• 1:33:56
  and if that's as a couple of days,
• 1:33:56
  we really need it down and we can have exactly right.
• 1:33:59
  So that can still be...
• 1:34:00
  I'm not predicting there's going to be some,
• 1:34:01
  I hope there is not some sort of catastrophic, you know,
• 1:34:04
  things in safety accident or whatever else
• 1:34:06
  that we've had serious safety accidents before.
• 1:34:08
  But I think we'll just limp along for quite a while.
• 1:34:12
  But my mission is to basically sort of, you know,
• 1:34:15
  try to dispel this idea
• 1:34:17
  that there is a low cost
• 1:34:20
  a vision at the end of this renewable sort of rainbow.
• 1:34:24
  Like it is, it might be made to work.
• 1:34:26
  I'm a technological optimist.
• 1:34:27
  If you had all the systems,
• 1:34:28
  but there is just no chance now,
• 1:34:30
  not at all, but at a slow cost.
• 1:34:31
  And I think that the narrative that's been sold to us
• 1:34:34
  was not just that we can do this to the carbon ice,
• 1:34:37
  but also that it wouldn't cost you anything else.
• 1:34:39
  In fact, it'd be a cost of living relief.
• 1:34:42
  And I think that we'll have to,
• 1:34:44
  I think that that will have to unwind slowly and gradually.
• 1:34:48
  My disappointment is that we'll wind up in a place
• 1:34:50
  in 10 years time where we still haven't made a move on nuclear at all.
• 1:34:54
  And we could have it just about here
• 1:34:56
  and be able to start scaling it quite quickly.
• 1:34:58
  Like once you build the first couple
• 1:35:00
  and you've figured out your design
• 1:35:02
  and your site and you can sort them,
• 1:35:03
  got some maturity, you could ramp up
• 1:35:05
  and we could get out,
• 1:35:07
  we could get our electricity system net zero
• 1:35:09
  or very close to with nuclear if we started today.
• 1:35:13
  Just the electricity system.
• 1:35:15
  The rest is bonkers, basically.
• 1:35:18
  But we won't, I think that this good chance
• 1:35:21
  which won't have and will,
• 1:35:22
  there'll be a coal renaissance in about 10 years time
• 1:35:27
  where we're sort of left having lurched long
• 1:35:30
  current where we are.
• 1:35:32
  That's sort of what I think.
• 1:35:32
  And we'll have to start building more coal-fired power plants
• 1:35:34
  or just rehabilitating the ones in the water.
• 1:35:37
  Perhaps so, yeah.
• 1:35:38
  Because I think there will be an end to the subsidies.
• 1:35:40
  We'll keep pouring.
• 1:35:40
  Like at the moment we are pouring unlimited subsidies
• 1:35:42
  into the wind and the solar
• 1:35:44
  and all the other stuff that goes along to support them.
• 1:35:45
  It's like, you know, wind solar plus, plus, plus, plus,
• 1:35:48
  battery generation, synchronous condensers,
• 1:35:50
  gas-fired firming, et cetera.
• 1:35:53
  I think at some point that's going to lose political license.
• 1:35:56
  You can see the cracks starting to appear already.
• 1:35:58
  Like even the green magazines,
• 1:36:00
  like Renew Economy Online here,
• 1:36:02
  I started to talk about like some mistake
• 1:36:06
  in the integrated system plan,
• 1:36:07
  that blueprint that's kind of taking us to 100 cent renewables
• 1:36:09
  because they didn't assess.
• 1:36:10
  Good old ISP.
• 1:36:11
  That's right, there's an ISP that I have.
• 1:36:13
  There have known all about the past 23 minutes.
• 1:36:16
  Oh, really? Okay.
• 1:36:17
  So, well, you're a lot more.
• 1:36:19
  It dominates my day, but the greenies
• 1:36:21
  are clearing those mistakes.
• 1:36:23
  And they're basically saying that they have underestimated
• 1:36:26
  certain areas, their potential.
• 1:36:28
  Because I think they're seeing the right in the wall
• 1:36:30
  in terms of the cost of transmission.
• 1:36:31
  They know they won't be able to build up
• 1:36:32
  the sequence of renewal.
• 1:36:34
  Also, I just have to say before we end,
• 1:36:36
  I'm so bored of people talking about how the downside
• 1:36:39
  to new clear is that it's going to take a long time.
• 1:36:41
  Because the reality is that you find yourself
• 1:36:43
  at whatever point in time you find yourself out.
• 1:36:45
  Like, we only have the options on the table now.
• 1:36:47
  That's exactly right.
• 1:36:48
  It's like the old that's outage about like the best time
• 1:36:50
  to do something as yesterday
• 1:36:51
  and the second best time is today.
• 1:36:52
  It's like, it's exactly right.
• 1:36:54
  We haven't, it's not so long,
• 1:36:56
  like to those of us of a certain age,
• 1:36:57
  if you're listening to this in 2017
• 1:36:59
  then it will feel different.
• 1:37:00
  But to those of us of a certain age,
• 1:37:02
  Barack Obama being elected president
• 1:37:03
  is not ancient history.
• 1:37:05
  Not at all.
• 1:37:05
  And that's the duration of time we're talking about
• 1:37:07
  to have a nuclear power plant.
• 1:37:10
  That's right.
• 1:37:11
  That's 17 years.
• 1:37:12
  Right.
• 1:37:12
  Oh, maybe make a couple.
• 1:37:13
  So maybe quicker.
• 1:37:14
  Yeah.
• 1:37:15
  So sure, things take time.
• 1:37:18
  That's what are you going to do?
• 1:37:19
  All right.
• 1:37:20
  And the other things take time too, right?
• 1:37:22
  Yeah, everything takes time.
• 1:37:23
  Everything takes time and costs money.
• 1:37:26
  And it's lovely to talk to you.
• 1:37:27
  Thank you for dispelling a few of the misconceptions
• 1:37:29
  that I had from those nasty communist greenies.
• 1:37:32
  I still don't know what to make of it all,
• 1:37:33
  but it's great to hear your point of view.
• 1:37:34
  Thanks very much for having us.
• 1:37:40
  you