Australia would need “many decades” to develop the regulations and skills to operate a nuclear power plant, and the experience gained at the existing Lucas Heights facility won’t help much, according to New South Wales’ chief scientist and engineer.
Hugh Durrant-Whyte said he stood by comments made to a 2019 NSW upper house inquiry into uranium mining and nuclear facilities that running a plant and its fuel supply chain would require skills “built up over many decades”.
He told Guardian Australia that 2040 or even 2045 was the “realistic” timeframe.
“We would need people who were trained [on] how to measure radioactivity, how to measure containment vessel strengths, how to [manage] everything we do.”
The federal opposition on Wednesday revealed plans to build seven nuclear power stations in five states at existing coal plant sites, promising the first could be operating by the mid-2030s.
The government would own the plants and compulsorily acquire the sites if the owners – private companies as well as the Queensland and Western Australian governments – declined to sell them.
The shadow energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, has cited France and Canada as examples Australia could follow. He also offered the example of Lucas Heights, located in Sydney’s south, where a small reactor has been used for medical research for decades.
Durrant-Whyte said Canada’s nuclear industry employed about 30,000 people while France’s employed 125,000 – “not a trivial number of people”.
The UK, which operated nuclear plants for many years, has just one nuclear engineering program at an undergraduate level, limiting the supply of talent that could be imported from there.
He was also dismissive of the prospect that small modular reactors – which the opposition proposes to start its nuclear program with – were likely to be commercially viable soon.
“When I was [at Rolls-Royce] in 1979 my colleagues in the couple of desks next to me were designing SMRs,” he said. “It’s always the issue with anything big and complex. Whether it’s an aeroplane or a nuclear reactor, the first one is always the hardest.”
The capabilities learned at the Lucas Heights Ansto (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) facility would make “little contribution” to supporting a nuclear power industry in the country, he wrote in his 2019 report.
“It must be recognized that this is a ‘zero-power’ pool reactor where the complexities of high pressure, high power, high radiation environments do not exist.”
