Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) is a traditional greenish leftish advocacy organisation. Every year it does dozens of submissions to Government on environmental issues with health consequences. It considers itself a reliable source of information for other medical professionals interested in environmental issues. It's an advocate for strong action on climate change.
Does DEA understand climate science?
DEA is a vocal advocate for viewing climate change as an emergency. But does that imply they understand the science? No. Sabine Hossenfelder isn't just a YouTube science guru/journalist/commentator with 1.57m subscribers, she also has a solid publication record in physics. In early 2023 she put up a clip about how she had totally misunderstood climate science. I'd be pretty certain that most or all of the DEA board would have similarly misunderstood it.
Does it matter if you don't understand the science behind a position for which you are an advocate?
It does when you are wrong.
Back in November I sent DEA a critique of their anti-nuclear policy. I didn’t attack them publicly; I didn't post on social media or this blog. I wanted to have a rational private conversation about the factual and logical problems in their policy.
The DEA opted against defending their position. Their email to me simply reiterated it; ignoring the evidence against it.
My critique was based on the DEA nuclear position paper (marked June 2024).
Most of the critique related to health and environmental claims and issues in their policy. But in reiterating their anti-nuclear position, the only claims DEA bothered to repeat was that nuclear power was too costly and would take too long; both claims relate to areas where DEA can’t claim any expert knowledge by virtue of medical training.
With regard to costs, an editorial in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) on December 19th was headlined “Nuclear costings put heat on uncosted renewables plan”. This editorial, in a specialist financial newspaper, clearly considered the claims of the recent Frontier Economics (FE) report on adding nuclear power to our electricity mix as worthy of consideration. That report presented modeling based very tightly on data and assumptions from the AEMO Integrated System Plan and CSIRO's GenCost report. The modelling showed that for either the Step Change Scenario, favoured by the Government, or the Progressive Scenario, favoured by the Coalition, adding nuclear made it cheaper; by $150 billion for the former and $106 billion for the latter.
Having strong opinions about things you know little about is both risky and arrogant. The FE report and its assessment in the AFR editorial show that DEA is on weak ground regarding nuclear costs.
But what about their contention that it will take too long to build nuclear? That depends strongly on an assumption that the current renewable plan will not just succeed but also succeed on time. This current renewables plan doesn't just rely on building a large amount of generation and transmission infrastructure, but also on implementing a new kind of grid that nobody has implemented anywhere on the planet. This is a First-of-a-kind project.
As with costs, DEA has strong opinions about something they have little knowledge about. I’ll return to the build time issue in due course, but first I need a little preamble.
Preamble on integrity and dishonesty
DEA make so many egregious errors in their anti-nuclear policy that you might think I regard them as dishonest. But while their mistakes are sloppy in the extreme, there is a simpler hypothesis than dishonesty which explains them.
Consider again the case of climate science. I'd be astonished if there is a single Greens MP who understands the theory. But I expect there'll be plenty who think they get it; see my previous reference to Sabine Hossenfelder. Advocates often use bad arguments to enlist support because they trust that somebody has the requisite solid evidence. Most of us, most of the time, have faith in many of our beliefs based on whoever "sold" them to us.
How does this manifest in the DEA’s anti-nuclear position?
Consider nuclear waste. The DEA position, in common with every anti-nuclear position I’ve read during the past 16 years, doesn’t say anything at all about how waste could be harmful in the hundreds of thousands of years DEA claims it is dangerous. Is this dishonestly? I doubt it. DEA simply believes, like many people, that somebody knows the details, so it confidently makes unjustified claims without bothering to spell out the details; which it couldn't do, even if it wanted to.
The mistake is in believing that somebody knows the details.
They don’t.
When you do dig your way to the details you will find that nuclear waste, after about 500 years, is less dangerous than many things you can buy at Bunnings. When you first remove nuclear fuel from a reactor, it's one of the most dangerous things on the planet. This turns out to be an advantage and the major reason it has never hurt anybody. Similarly, a polysilicon furnace (used in the making of solar cells) operates at about 3,000 degrees C. That's about 3 times hotter than a volcano. As far as I know, those furnaces don't hurt people either; precisely because they are so dangerous.
In contrast, less dangerous waste is treated without care and causes serious injury and death as a consequence. Button battery waste, for example, puts about 20 children in hospital every week. And that's just in Australia.
High level nuclear waste from a power plant has never put anybody in hospital. But radioactive waste from a hospital has killed people. But discussions like this are simply braindead. Deadly gas explosions are a regular feature of news broadcasts and the Ufa explosion in the Soviet Union a few years after Chernobyl killed close to 600 people. But you won't see DEA mention Ufa in a gas policy. It's amazing that a bunch of doctors have such an irrational approach to risk. Of all the people on the planet who should understand the difference between fear mongering and sensible policies to protect the public from things that might actually hurt them, you'd expect it to be doctors. But it isn't the DEA.
Okay, so much for nuclear waste fresh out of a reactor. What about after it is buried? Does it really stay dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years? It does not. If you buried a cask of of high level nuclear waste under the foundations of Notre Dame, you could have dug it up and been safely mixing it in concrete for subsequent building projects for the past 500 years. You'd need one warning label: "Do not grind up this waste and put it in a smoothie".
I spell out the details in the critique, but the entire mythology of nuclear waste posing some special kind of risk is just that, a myth. It is perpetuated not because of dishonesty, but because of trust that somebody knows the details; but they don’t. DEA is simply guilty of misguided trust. I was anti-nuclear until 2008, when I started to fact-check my beliefs. So I understand what it is to believe the myths. I used to believe in Santa Claus once upon a time.
I should point out that the nuclear industry itself has been leading with its chin on the issue of nuclear waste. Burying anything 800 metres underground, as many in the industry propose, is a perfect plan if you want somebody to think that nuclear waste is really dangerous. An alternative motivation is access to billions of dollars for just such a project!
That said, organisations like DEA should not be forgiven for not fact checking their slogans. They must be held to account.
It's a terrible thing when YouTube or TikTok influencers spread misinformation, but it's many times worse when people with solid scientific qualifications and reputations are spreading it.
Attributes of the DEA Position paper
Let’s start by being very clear about what kind of anti-nuclear position the DEA has.
They have an innumerate and irrational approach to safety.
A rational person discussing safety would compare alternatives. All technologies carry risks. With energy technologies, it seems obvious to compare them on a per terawatt-hour basis. That’s how we compare plane safety with automobile safety. We look at the death and injury toll per passenger kilometre. Planes win. Express the toll of button batteries in death or serious injuries per terawatt-hour and you will be looking at the most dangerous energy source on the planet.
The statistical website Our World In Data (OWID) has a page on the safety of various electricity generation technologies. Check the chart and you'll find nuclear power is safer than everything except solar PV. Or is it? Nuclear accidents are few and any deaths and injuries are recorded in extraordinary detail. But what about when my mate's father in law fell off his roof while cleaning his PV panels and spent 3 months in hospital? Is anybody keeping count? The OWID chart bases its solar power safety figure on a single study. How did the study work? It did a web search for news articles or other reports involving at least one death or property damage above $50k. They found 7 fatalities associated with the PV industry. I'm pretty sure nobody published a story about my mate's uncle.
Back in 2014 I contacted Safework Australia and asked if they kept a record of such accidents. The answer was no. This is like the Donald Trump method of reducing deaths from Covid-19 ... don't count them. I have rewritten to Safework just before Christmas and I'll add a note about their response when I receive it. Hopefully the considerable fire and toxic chemical risks of solar PV systems has prompted a change.
To his credit, the Safework Officer back in 2014 did a search of the free-text descriptions of accidents and found one involving a solar system: a death in 2010 when an electrician fell off a roof while working on a solar system. [Note: An email (7/Jan) from Safework today details 2 additional deaths of people falling from a height; an apprentice electrictian and a worker cleaning panels. These were gleaned from the narratives, there has been no change in the way accidents are recorded; there is no solar industry category.]
Roofing is always high on any list of most dangerous jobs. You'd expect solar to be a little safer, but still in the dangerous category. You'd expect medical people to know this.
In any event, the salient point is that harm has to be measured and compared in proportion to the energy delivered and electricity sources compared.
Everybody understands this; except DEA.
They are obsessed with the profile of individual accidents in isolation and seem allergic to any kind of rational comparison. This is a common feature of the anti-nuclear movement. Australia burns (and exports) plenty of coal and has done so for decades. The ban on nuclear power has allowed coal to dominate our energy landscape without competition. As a result we will be getting about 4,000-5,000 premature deaths annually. That estimate is based on general rates of disease due to coal combustion from international studies. See that same Our World in Data chart for details. For decades DEA, like all our anti-nuclear organisations, has preferred coal to nuclear. The consequences have been deadly for individuals as well as damaging to the environment.
DEA doesn’t follow the normal sensible protocols for the presentation of scientific evidence.
When scientists write, all claims are supported either directly with relevant data or by reference to other published science. DEA simply don’t get it. Their position has a long list of references which makes it appear scientific, but when you try to match the content of a reference with the claim it is supposed to support, you all too frequently find that the referenced paper doesn’t support the claim; or is irrelevant. Try that in a scientific journal and your work will be rejected. My critique provides details, but here are a few examples:
a. DEA claim that nuclear plants are vulnerable to climate extremes.
“Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to extreme weather – cyclones and storms, floods, droughts and fires, as well as sea level rise. Nuclear power outages have occurred due to these factors already(3) and are likely to increase”
Note that, typically and irrationally, there is no comparison of technologies. Solar farms aren’t just vulnerable to extreme weather, they have outages every night. Their power drops with cloud cover … even dust will cause problems. Wind farm outages are similarly frequent and unavoidable.
DEA provide a reference for this claim (number 3). Does it support their implied claim that nuclear is somehow more fragile in the face of extreme weather? No. See the critique for precise details, but the reference is to a table of nuclear outages in France due to “climate-induced” unavailability. The peak level of outages in any year in the table affected 1/3 of 1 percent of French nuclear output. The table shows, in fact, how astonishingly reliable French nuclear plants are with regard to potential climate induced impacts.
This isn’t just an example of innumeracy, but of buttressing a claim with a data source that contradicts the claim.
Cloud cover in South Australia can slash solar output and cause the price of electricity to spike; reaching thousands of dollars a megawatt hour. Consider this article describing one of many price spikes in South Australia as a result of massive changes in renewable output.
The DEA can’t be expected to know anything about electricity; and it’s abundantly clear that they don’t. But if you know nothing at all about a topic, it’s generally a good idea not to comment.
b. Nuclear worker safety
DEA made claims about workers in nuclear power plants and used an irrelevant study of workers at research labs; a very different environment. Even then, they also failed to understand the study they cited; see my critique for details.
c. DEA made false claims about the lifecycle carbon emissions of nuclear power
They also referenced a paper that contradicted those claims; again, see my critique for details.
d. DEA don’t consider the implications of their policy.
Because of their general inability to think rationally and compare technologies, they don’t think through the implications if people actually adopted their policies and closed all nuclear plants globally. This would be a climate and biodiversity catastrophe.
Using publically available data its pretty simple to spell out the broad implications of shutting down the nuclear industry. I’ll assume nuclear was replaced by solar for this comparison. You could assume a mix of technologies, but that would be more complex to calculate.
It needs about 6 gigawatt (GW) of solar power to generate the same amount of electricity annually as a 1 GW nuclear plant. So closing 371 GW of nuclear plants would require 2,386 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels; weighing about 167 million tonnes. The mining required to get those 167 million tonnes would be many times larger.
That’s a breathtaking amount of additional mining and manufacturing. Put those panels on roofs and you have millions of people on ladders working at dangerous heights.
I could estimate the cost and weight of batteries required to store the energy and the critical minerals required. I could then go on to estimate the number of fires caused by those batteries. People who measure the lifecycle emissions and environmental impacts of various technology rate nuclear as the best; see the Critique for details. Certainly wind and solar are low carbon, but their mining and general environmental impacts are far worse. It is bizarre that an organisation should claim environmental concern while being utterly ignorant of such research.
Moving on. I want to return to the issue of nuclear plant construction time.
Nuclear plant construction time
Japan built 60 reactors with a median build time of less than 4 years per reactor. Here’s a chart.
I won’t take up space with more charts, but Canada built 25 reactors with a median build time of 6.8 years, South Korea built 27 reactors with a median build time of 4.9 years. The US built 133 reactors with a similar median build time to the Canadians. France built 70 reactors with a median build time of 5.7 years.
Many countries have built nuclear plants at scale. It takes a decade or so to get the workforce and supply chains tuned and then away it goes. No one is suggesting it is easy; but many countries have succeeded; despite efforts to gum up the works by the likes of DEA. The US has had more failures than most. There’s a quip that France has hundreds of different cheeses and one type of reactor while the US has one type of cheese and a hundred types of reactor. If the US was building 3 reactors on a single site, they still managed to screw up chances of improving their build rates by building 3 types of reactor.
But as I keep stressing, sound judgement is based on careful comparisons. So has any country ever built a grid with 90 percent wind and solar power or more? Germany tried and failed and Australia is trying; will it succeed? Germany recently ordered another 10 GW of gas capacity. Despite Australia exporting about 80 million tonnes of LNG annually, we are also just finishing our first LNG import terminal. If not for the likes of DEA we could have spent the last 20 years exporting about 9,000 tonnes of uranium annually rather than 80 million tonnes of LNG (not to mention all our coal exports). 9,000 tonnes of uranium will match the energy output of 80 million tonnes of LNG and all our major trading partners have reactors anyway. What a mess the anti-nuclear movement has created for the world in general and Australia in particular. You'd have to be suspecting they are a mob of secret climate change denialists!
DEA thinks nuclear is too slow. But again, they fail to compare. They assume implicitly that our current renewable plan will succeed.
Do they have any idea of the current mess we are in or the challenges that a renewable grid faces? Let me try to explain.
First a little image from Prof. Stephen Wilson. Each dot on the chart is an electricity price in South Australia. The left hand shows the prices before our renewable rollout and the right hand side shows the 2021 state of the market. The issue (for me) isn't so much the price as the volatility; the sheer chaos of a broken system. But few non-specialists follow the intricacies of our grid. And why would medical people be expected to know anything about such matters?
A little background on the grid
Every non-trivial (gigawatt scale) electricity grid on the planet is secured with synchronous generators. Not understanding what this means is the medical equivalent of not understanding the role of vaccination in public health.
Synchronous generators contain massive lumps of metal spinning in synch with the frequency of the alternating current (AC) of the grid. They stabilise the frequency. Without them the frequency would drop as demand on the grid increased and it would increase as demand decreased. The spinning lumps of metal act like a flywheel and decrease the rate of frequency change just long enough to allow generators to be added or removed to keep things balanced.
Every grid works like this. By “every” grid, I don’t mean most, or 90% of even 99%; I mean every single grid.
There are no gigawatt scale grids anywhere in the world like we are trying to build in Australia, secured with wind, solar, batteries and a little gas.
Not one.
In South Australia, the gigawatt scale grid with the highest penetration of wind and solar in the world, we have decreased the number of synchronous generators over the past decade or so. The big decrease was in 2016. Shortly after retiring the last coal generator, we had a statewide blackout. Ooops.
A storm knocked over some transmission lines and caused a loss of generation. So what?
We’d had worse generation losses before that, but our level of synchronous generators had always kept the grid up. In 2016, we didn’t have enough inertia to slow the rate of frequency change and the entire grid collapsed. Renewable advocates claimed innocence, but the proof of responsibility soon followed.
Over the next 4 to 5 years, following extensive planning and at a cost of almost $200 million, we installed 4 synchronous condensers. A synchronous condenser is a large lump of metal spinning in synch with the grid and acting just like a coal plant generator; but without any actual generation.
The availability of solutions to the problems of building grids without synchronous generators cannot be taken for granted. But this lack of “inertia” (the technical term for one of the features of synchronous generators) is just the start of the problems. Back in 2023, I wrote an article about this “It’s the grid stupid” which tries to spell out the problems in lay language. At that time Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) had identified that they needed 23 new software tools to manage a 100% renewable grid; with another 10 existing tools needing enhancements. This kind of software is excruciatingly complex. Consider the US air traffic control system; a very complex piece of software that’s been under construction for decades. Will the new grid software be as complex? The AEMO engineers described it as being “akin to rebuilding a plane while flying it.”.
Before a significant piece of generation equipment is connected to the grid, computer models are run to determine the impact. These models are traditionally physics based, because the electricity grid is traditionally just that; a big network where all the components obey the laws of physics.
But that’s no longer the case.
Wind and solar connections to the grid are very different. They aren’t defined by the physics, but by the software that controls the connection interface (called an “inverter”).
To test the impacts of new hardware now, you need to model not just the physics, but the software. So if you have 10 wind farms and 5 solar farms in an area, you will need to include all of the software from those 15 devices in your grid model to estimate the transient voltages that will occur in response to normal events like trees falling on power lines and transmission line tower collapses. Because these plants are built over time, they’ll most likely all have either different software, or different versions of the same software.
But wait, there’s more. In the case of consumer level equipment, like rooftop solar, there is no guarantee that the devices will operate in accordance with the technical specifications of the manufacture. That won’t matter for small fleets of rooftop devices; but can be important for large fleets. The nightmare scenario is cascading disconnections; as one inverter fails, others in the region detect changes in voltage/current and drop out. This can turn a small problem into a big one. Over the past decade AEMO has changed the standards a number of times as they fight to maintain a stable system.
But wait, it gets worse. During the past few years, people have been appreciating the potential vulnerabilities of having a grid dependent on software written by people with whom we have a somewhat strained relationship. It’s tragic that we need to be concerned about such things; but we do.
Building nuclear plants isn’t easy; but you don’t have to redesign the grid. A nuclear plant is just another synchronous generator.
Once again, the DEA is breathtakingly naive and incompetent in assuming that the current system will be completed on time. Anybody paying attention has been seeing warning signs for a decade.
Blood on their hands
DEA, like the anti-nuclear movement generally, has a substantial amount of blood on it’s hands.
Nuclear power has prevented about 1.8 million deaths and about 64 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (see Critique). It could have done even more if not for the anti-nuclear movement who, for decades, have preferred energy sources which kill people and damage the climate; coal and gas. DEA like the others in the anti-nuclear movement, have been delaying effective climate and safety action for decades.
They have been incredibly successful in making people frightened of nuclear power. When three reactors in Japan had meltdowns in 2011, the evacuation killed 50 or so people directly and more than 2,000 indirectly. That evacuation was against the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) emergency guidelines; it was, in the words of one radiation expert, "stark staring mad".
In Germany, we have an example of just how irrational anti-nuclear movements can become. After the Fukushima meltdowns of 2011, Germany (using the DEA method of non-comparison of risks) closed down its remaining nuclear plants; causing about 9,000 premature deaths. In medical-speak, this is like prescribing a drug with a high rate of deadly side effects to cure a “condition” which enhances strength and cardiovascular fitness but may, very rarely, result in a panic attack.
Conclusion
The DEA’s nuclear Position is sloppy in the extreme. DEA’s lack of any kind of detailed defence indicates an arrogance and hubris that is disturbing. Many Australian organisations are locked in a self-reinforcing information bubble where the same anti-nuclear slogans have been circulating for decades. The public deserve better; they deserve evidence based policies.
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