Climate key is uranium exports

Michael Angwin
Australian Uranium Association
Australia is ignoring an important way to help manage climate change, writes Michal Angwin.

Australian policy for managing climate change is becoming clearer.

While the details of the emissions trading scheme are still to be finalised, the overall strategy is emerging and key platforms are shared by the political majors, notwithstanding the distraction of the argument over the starting date for emissions trading and the occasional eruptions of the nuclear energy debate.

The framework is a combination of both mainstream and slightly dodgy economics (the MRET) and a political response to strong beliefs held by the electorate. The framework carries risks.

There is political risk. Climate change science seems to demand an ambitious emissions reductions trajectory and at least a moderately high carbon price. Yet that kind of response risks provoking a community reaction (think petrol prices) that could undermine it.

There is a technology risk. Renewables cannot currently provide ‘all the energy we need’ no matter how often the conservation groups say so. Having to mandate a 20% target by 2020 itself tells you the technology jury is still out.

Though Australia has more incentive than most countries to solve the clean coal question, solving it will be a stretch. The higher the carbon price, the greater the prospects that those technology issues will be dealt with. But a carbon price that carries that burden is no certainty.

There is the broader risk of uncertainty. We can probably reduce electricity usage by greater efficiency though, by definition, much of that will be achieved by one off gains.

Managing demand will also help but the size of the contribution is uncertain. None of the tools in the carbon reduction kitbag is a sure winner.

The political orthodoxy rules out nuclear power on the basis that, unlike other countries that do not have our energy endowments and prospects, Australia does not need nuclear power and the necessary broad-based political and community support is absent.

Within the political parties, either privately or publicly, that’s a contested view, as Ian Macfarlane’s position demonstrates. At least it is no longer based on an ideological rejection of nuclear power, an unremarked breakthrough in the Australian political economy.

There is one platform missing from this framework: the need to maximise Australia’s uranium exports.

The use of nuclear power around the world will expand somewhere between 50 per cent and 100 per cent in the next 25 years. Many countries see it as a vital part of their response to climate change.

The University of Sydney reviewed about 40 studies of the lifecycle greenhouse intensity of nuclear power for the 2006 Switkowski inquiry into uranium mining and nuclear power. Those studies examined emissions from uranium mining and milling, transport, all the nuclear fuel making processes, electricity generation itself, decommissioning and dismantling the reactor and disposal of waste.

The review showed that the emissions over the nuclear power lifecycle are about the same as from wind, hydro-electricity, biomass and geothermal power. It is less than from solar power. And all of those are much less than coal and gas using existing technology.

Using coal-fired electricity generation with existing technology as a benchmark, maximising exports of our uranium would globally avoid greenhouse gases that were the equivalent of Australia being carbon-free for 15 to 20 years. Neither the draft Garnaut report nor Senator Penny Wong’s green paper gives this much attention. Yet from a climate change point of view, it does not matter much where in the world greenhouse gases are generated or avoided. The crucial goal is to avoid them.

And the stoush between Wong and McFarlane over nuclear power is exactly why an alternative approach is needed to make the most of our uranium endowment. A polarized debate on nuclear energy potentially blinds us to a smarter approach – treating the development of the Australian uranium export industry explicitly as part of Australia’s overall climate change strategy, integrating it with other strategies and raising it in the forums that emerge to implement those strategies.

Uranium exports can only be maximized with the removal of the bars on mining in Western Australia, Queensland New South Wales and Victoria.

This is the third way, the way that allows Australia’s uranium endowment to make a contribution to the global climate challenge immediately, while what passes for debate about nuclear power in Australia reaches its own conclusion over a longer time.

Michael Angwin is the Executive Director of the Australian Uranium Association