Australia’s almost indistinguishable far right political parties – the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation – are pushing the nuclear barrow once again, not for climate reasons but because of the “anything but wind and solar” ideology demanded by their fossil-fuelled benefactors.
So it came as a timely reminder on Wednesday, when one of the world’s leading green energy analysts, Michael Liebreich, underlined just how useless nuclear energy is for dealing with climate change, and how far the small nuclear reactors championed by many are from competing with surging wind and solar.
Liebreich is the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance and his address to the Energy Efficiency Council’s National Conference also touched on the perils of net zero targets (because it puts the focus on what’s really hard rather than what’s readily achievable), and the overwhelming push for electrification for “just about everything.”
But it was the nuclear hype that he was also keen to puncture, if only to underline the sheer scale and dominance of wind and solar, and its rapidly growing share of “useable” energy, as opposed to “primary energy” that ignores the massive inefficiencies of fossil fuels.
SMR are still not being built but they are championed by some of the world’s richest people, the AI and social media “tech bros” who are looking for ample energy sources to power their massive data centre needs (while contracting tens of gigawatts of wind and solar in the meantime).
