Australia Nuclear Update

Here's an interesting news item out of New South Wales:

SCRAMBLING to catch up on years of inadequate infrastructure planning, the NSW Government gave the go-ahead yesterday for the state's biggest privately funded power station.

The 400 megawatt, $350million plant will be one of two gas-fired stations the Government will race to have built before a forecast energy crunch takes hold on the state.

But even as Premier Morris Iemma announced the new electricity plants, he said he could not guarantee there would be no blackouts this summer.

In many ways, Australia is in the same boat the U.S. is when it comes to electrical generation: Decades of paying attention to short-term needs have led us to neglect long-term planning in the electrical sector resulting in a pending shortage of baseload power generation.

What we have here is not an energy crisis per se, but rather an energy investment crisis -- something NEI Chairman and CEO Skip Bowman first pointed out in a speech he gave last April in San Antonio.

Later in the story, I tripped over this paragraph:

While former NSW premier Bob Carr had called for a debate on nuclear power, Mr Iemma has rejected nuclear generation outright, forcing him into more greenhouse-unfriendly options.

But if Australia did allow new nuclear to go forward, it could displace natural gas in electric power generation, and free up supply for the home heating and industrial markets.

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