CSIRO nobbles nuclear (again) to support Labor’s ‘cheap renewables’ fantasy

28 May—The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation was once a world leader in inventing and developing technologies and industrial processes to improve the lives of Australians, and indeed all mankind. Now, under the direction of the Albanese Labor government, it is actively suppressing them, by producing junk research to support self-destructive policy prescriptions driven by ideology and fealty to vested interests.

The technology in question is nuclear power. The junk research is the annual “GenCost” report, produced in collaboration with federal gas and electricity market manager the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which purports to show that “firmed renewables” (wind and solar power backed by batteries, pumped hydro and/ or “peaking” gas turbines) are the cheapest pathway for Australia to achieve “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions, and nuclear the most expensive at nearly twice the price. Meanwhile the government refuses to countenance lifting the federal legislative ban on nuclear power, and thereby allow AEMO to do a proper costing in its biennial Integrated System Plan (ISP), despite having effectively admitted the ban is pointless—since if nuclear were really so uneconomical, the “free market” (of which Labor is no less enamoured than the Liberals) would never deign to invest in it anyway. Thus while almost all the world has by now come to see nuclear as absolutely necessary to achieving “net zero” without collapsing civilisation in the process, Australia—despite being by far the most uranium-rich nation on Earth—seems determined to remain both figuratively and, if coal plants continue to be shut down with nothing to replace them, soon literally in the dark. ...

Excerpt of article by Richard Bardon, Australian Alert Service, 29 May 2024. Download the PDF here to keep reading.