By PHILIP HOPKINS

 

WASTE heat from a nuclear power station in the Latrobe Valley could be a source of town heating and attract commercial and industrial investment to the region, according to a retired Traralgon scientist.

David Packham said a nuclear power station at Loy Yang was an excellent location for an operational trial of domestic town heating for the nearby village of Traralgon South.

“A successful trial could then be extended to the Latrobe Valley, an area in need of commercial and industrial activity,” he said.

“Very low cost heating (and cooling) would attract both human and financial investment in an already attractive regional city.”

Mr Packham’s comments were made in a submission to the House of Representatives inquiry into nuclear power. He has been an applied scientist for 64 years, having worked at the Victorian Gas and Fuel Corporation, as a chemist and a principal research scientist at the CSIRO, a chemistry lecturer at the Department of Defence and a supervising Meteorologist Rural Fires in the Bureau of Meteorology.

Mr Packham, who lives 10 kilometres from Loy Yang, said Traralgon South was an ideal trial town.

“It is about eight kilometres south of Loy Yang, well planned and a community close to Victoria’s largest power producer,” he said.

A nuclear facility would create a national industry “developing domestic heat pump technology to provide both low cost heat and cooling at domestic, commercial and industrial scales”.

“This is a project well suited to the Snowy Mountains Authority, which is already established in the Loy Yang power complex,” he said.

Mr Packham said there was an abundance of waste heat available from nuclear generation.

“Nuclear power generation has a thermo-dynamic efficiency around 40 per cent, similar to thermal electricity generation from coal, gas and biofuels (wood chips). The remaining 60 per cent is available as rejected or waste heat in the form of non-radioactive cooling water,” he said.

“Using this waste heat can raise the thermodynamic efficiency to around 80 per cent if the cooling water is in a cyclic system with some storage to allow for fluctuations in demand and short-term outages.”

Mr Packham said nuclear reactors and upgraded turbines to complement the Loy Yang power complex would increase the reliability and decrease the cost of electricity in Victoria.

Loy Yang was a sensible site for nuclear power, with infrastructure in place, a connection between Victoria and Tasmania with Bass Link and a highly skilled power workforce available.

“Nuclear power is safe, globally important and growing almost day by day. I would be content to live next door to a nuclear power station,” he said.

Mr Packham said the facts about nuclear were easily found. In contrast, many ‘facts’ in the media and social networks were misinformation or even lies, such as the world is abandoning nuclear power when in fact it is adding more.

“There are 440 operational nuclear power stations across 32 countries – 94 in the USA, 56 in China, 56 in France, and so on,” he said, with three in Argentina, and two in each of Mexico, Brazil, Romania, Belarus and Taiwan, and one each in Slovenia, Netherlands, Armenia and Iran.

“In addition, there are 57 nuclear power stations under construction, 21 in China, eight in India, four in Turkey, two in UK, and one each in Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Slovakia and United Arab Emirates.”

Mr Packham said a particular lie was that nuclear is too expensive.

“Power costs are difficult to accurately track down as the truth is hard to find. Deception by political spin and green extreme and ideological fanaticism ensures the difficulties of defining cost,” he said.

“I settled on the comparative data of levelized cost of electricity (LCOE).”

This was from the 2020 report, ‘Projected Costs of Generating Electricity’ by the International Energy Agency, which seemed in step with the ‘Lazard Report’. All could be found on the internet.

“The conclusion… shows the lowest cost LCOE is nuclear and only onshore wind and solar can compete with nuclear,” he said.

Mr Packham said the secrecy around total government expenditure on the energy transition and net zero had prompted his speculation on the economic consequences of current power transition policy.

“There is no compensating gain from outlawing nuclear power in Australia and it has already caused considerable economic pain. There has been no official disclosure of the total expenditure on transition cost for the nation’s energy needs including supply, network transmission and distribution,” he said.

Unofficial and estimates expenditure had ranged from a few hundred million dollars to nine trillion dollars over unspecified periods from annual, or until achievement of net zero, over possibly 50 years.

“The wasted spending with no gain may be responsible for half our damaging mortgage pain, including inflation and interest rates. Expenditure on nuclear power would give us cheap, reliable power and allow us to rebuild our productive manufacturing economy,” Mr Packham said.

“Increasing nuclear capability is also essential to our national capacity to achieve security in the foreseeable future strategic threats.”