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Nuclear energy start-up says CSIRO is wrong about costs

John Davidson
John DavidsonColumnist

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Australia’s only nuclear fusion start-up says the technology could still be a vital part of Australia’s long-term energy solution, despite nuclear power being dismissed as too expensive by the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator last week.

Sydney-based HB11 called on the federal government to help fund the ultra-high-powered laser needed for its nuclear fusion technology, which it says could supply almost limitless amounts of radiation-free baseload power vastly cheaper and more reliably than renewables, should the fusion technology ever become as efficient as it could be.

Dr Warren McKenzie and Professor Heinrich Hora

HB11 CEO Dr Warren McKenzie, with co-founder Professor Heinrich Hora. Louie Douvis

In their GenCost 2022 report looking at which technologies could replace fossil fuels by 2050, the CSIRO and AEMO found nuclear energy wasn’t viable because it was already much more expensive per watt of capacity than renewables such as solar and wind, and its price of $16,000 per kilowatt-hour wasn’t going to get much cheaper over the coming 28 years.

By contrast, rooftop solar could cost less than $600 per kilowatt-hour by 2050, down from around $1500 today, the report found.

The report focused on nuclear fission, which creates energy by splitting atoms such as uranium, and did not analyse nuclear fusion, the process used by the sun, where energy is created by forcing smaller atoms to combine into one larger atom.

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HB11’s process involves using petawatt-class lasers to smash Hydrogen atoms into Boron-11 atoms, giving off heat and electricity as well as helium atoms that could help make up for the shortfall of helium production when it’s no longer being produced as a fossil-fuel byproduct, HB11 officials said.

The GenCost report described nuclear fusion as an “emerging technology that (has) yet to receive any commercial interest” and didn’t analyse its per-watt price.

But price-per-watt is only part of the equation, said Dr Adrian (Adi) Paterson, the former boss of Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), who’s now a non-executive director of HB11.

The “carbon cost” of each technology – how much greenhouse gas is emitted in the lifecycle of the power source – also needs to be considered, and “fission is twice as good as any other energy source” when it comes to carbon cost, and “fusion is even better”, Dr Paterson claimed.

In any case, the CSIRO and AEMO had made a “category error” by comparing the per watt cost of nuclear energy to the cost of renewables such as solar and wind because one generates power 24x7, and the other generates power only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, he said told The Australian Financial Review.

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HB11 co-founder and managing director Dr Warren McKenzie said that the company’s fusion technology was capable of generating at least 400 times more electricity than was required to kick-start the fusion reaction in the first place, and if that level of efficiency could be achieved it would generate power for “cents per megawatt hour”.

Currently, though, the Hydrogen/Boron-11 fusion reaction uses roughly 10,000 times more power to ignite and maintain than it produces, and years of research are needed to make the technology economically viable, Dr McKenzie said.

HB11 has embarked on a $20 million fundraising, but with the lasers required for that research costing hundreds of millions of dollars or possibly even “several billion dollars”, the company needs the Australian government to invest heavily in laser technology, not just for fusion but for other industries developing laser technology, Dr McKenzie said.

But in the long term it would be a good investment, Dr Paterson said.

“Cleaning up the planet is not the ten-year thing that everyone says it must be. It’s actually going to take us the rest of the century to rebalance the ecosystems and to get this thing right,” he said.

“Fusion energy is the anchor tenant of that journey.”

John Davidson is an award-winning columnist, reviewer, and senior writer based in Sydney and in the Digital Life Laboratories, from where he writes about personal technology. Connect with John on Twitter. Email John at jdavidson@afr.com

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