Proposed nuclear power plants in Queensland would not have access to enough water to stop a nuclear meltdown and could strain capacity on drinking water and irrigation supplies even under normal operations, research has found.
Analysis by the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) has found that one of the two nuclear reactors proposed for the sunshine state under the energy plan that the Coalition will take to the upcoming federal election would require double the water currently used by the existing Callide coal-fired power station. The other, Tarong, would use 55% more water than its existing coal station.
Tarong’s primary water source is the Boondooma Dam, from which it is allocated 30,000 megalitres a year, and which also supplies drinking water for the nearby town of Kingaroy and irrigates the rich agricultural country along the Boyne River. But Tarong also has a pipeline to the Wivenhoe Dam, the main supply of water for Brisbane and Ipswich, which – due to substantial premiums – it only uses when Boondooma Dam levels are low.
More than 1.3m cubic metres of seawater were required to cool Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors and prevent a complete meltdown in 2011 – about 1,000 times the combined capacity of Wivenhoe and Boondooma dams.
The report has been described as “flawed and highly politicised” by the Coalition.
The QCC director, Dave Copeman, said the fact there was “nowhere near enough water capacity in our dams to stop a nuclear meltdown if things go wrong” exposed the Coalition’s energy plan as a “nuclear fantasy”.
“If there was an emergency, you could run the whole [Wivenhoe] Dam dry and still not have enough water to stop a meltdown,” Copeman said.
“The Coalition is not being honest with farmers and the community about the realities of their nuclear scheme. At best it’s impractical, at worst it’s grossly irresponsible and could result in a major incident.”
The Callide coal-fired power plant has an annual water allocation of 20,000 ML from the Callide Dam, which is fed by the Awoonga Dam. As of Wednesday, Awoonga – which supplies the city of Gladstone’s water – was at 46% capacity, and Callide – which supplies drinking water to Biloela – was at 16.5% capacity. Callide Dam is also used to replenish aquifers that irrigate crops in the Callide Valley.
Callide would have to find an additional 27,000 ML of water to power the kind of power plants implied by the Coalition’s nuclear plan, the QCC report found – with Copeman saying there was simply “not enough water available”.
Clare Silcock, the renewable energy engineer for the QCC who crunched the numbers on the report, said the Coalition’s nuclear proposal was scant on details. Instead she drew upon the Frontier Economic’s modelling that the opposition has relied upon to argue its nuclear vision for seven reactors across the country would be 44% cheaper than the government’s renewables-led plan.
That report models just over 100,000 gigawatt hours of nuclear electricity in the National Electricity Market (NEM) – which covers Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia – by 2050.
Six of the proposed nuclear sites are within the NEM, and so the QCC report assumes the generation would be spread equally across those sites.
But Silcock said none of the other four proposed plants were “going to be particularly better in terms of water availability”.
“This is going to be a problem for anywhere in Australia,” she said. “Particularly in South Australia, they’re in a brutal drought at the moment. We’ve just done the analysis for Queensland – but the question is valid around all those six sites”.
Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University’s school of environment and science, said the QCC research was “sound”.
Lowe said that a rule of thumb was that a nuclear power station needed about 15% more water than a coal-fired power station of the same capacity. So whether the proposed Tarong and Callide nuclear plants would require more or less water than the current coal stations would depend on the capacity for which they were built.
“[But] if we were to build the amount of nuclear power proposed in the Frontier Economics report as part of the Coalition’s long-term approach for 2050 electricity, there would not be enough water for Tarong and Callide to provide the proposed share of power,” he said.
That meant that the Frontier report was “implicitly assuming that the nuclear power program would be expanded” beyond the sites already identified by the Coalition.
“So it would be reasonable to ask the question: if the much larger nuclear program proposed in the Frontier Economics report were to go ahead, where would all the extra power stations be sited?” Lowe said.
“Given that we are the driest inhabited continent and rainfall patterns are being significantly disrupted by climate change, they would have to be on coastal sites and using sea water for cooling, which would add further costs due to the design complication of resisting corrosion”.
The shadow energy minister, Ted O’Brien, described the QCC report as “flawed and highly politicised” criticising it for making assumptions about water usage based on a 2006 feasibility study into the possibility of establishing a nuclear power industry in Australia commissioned by then prime minister John Howard.
“The fact is, the latest nuclear power plant designs are incredibly efficient and their water usage is comparable to coal fired power stations which they will eventually replace,” O’Brien said.
“The Coalition has embraced a world’s best practice ‘coal to nuclear’ because it allows us to leverage existing infrastructure – including water, transmission and a local workforce.”
The Coalition minister pointed to the Palo Verde Nuclear power plant in the Sonoran Desert, one of the United State’s largest power producers and the only one in the world not near a large body of water as it uses treated wastewater from nearby cities.
