0:02

I'm Dr Karl, coming to you from

0:04

the lands of the Gadigal people of

0:06

the Eora nation. I acknowledge Aboriginal and

0:08

Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first

0:10

Australians and traditional custodians of the lands

0:13

where we live, learn and work. Is

0:16

it Rosie Rosemary, Rosa Mundo?

0:19

You can say Rosie is good, yep. Okay,

0:21

Rosie Barnes? Yep. And what sort

0:24

of engineering? Mechanical is the easiest way to describe

0:26

it. Okay, here we go. G'day, Dr Karl here,

0:28

show us a science university of Sydney, talking with

0:30

the Eora nation. And with my bestie from the

0:32

past, who pointed out some of my mistakes, Rosie

0:34

Barnes. Good morning, Dr Rosie. Thanks for having me

0:36

back. Today we're going to talk

0:38

about nuclear engineering because you are actually a fully

0:40

qualified engineer, is that not correct? Yeah,

0:42

that's correct. My PhD is in mechanical engineering.

0:45

Ah, so you are in fact a PhD

0:47

doctor, whereas I'm only an MBBS doctor. Yeah,

0:49

it's pretty rare for engineering, not too many

0:51

people will bother to go back to uni

0:54

or do more. Before we start off on

0:56

advantages and disadvantages of nuclear, last time you

0:58

helped me with a big

1:00

problem, which is why wind turbines have only

1:02

three blades. Now tell me where I'm wrong.

1:05

If you have just one blade, it's

1:08

very unbalanced as it rotates. If

1:11

you have two blades, it's more

1:13

balanced, but you're not intersecting enough

1:16

with the wind. If you've

1:18

got four blades, the complexity is too much and it's

1:20

too expensive or something I don't know, tell me where

1:22

I'm wrong and three is a compromise. Okay, Dr Rosie,

1:24

tell me where I'm wrong and how much I don't

1:27

mind. I'm humble. Main point you were

1:29

wrong on is two blades. It's not that not enough

1:31

wind is caught. You can design a two bladed wind

1:33

turbine that catches all the wind. Really? I'm

1:35

not possible to catch. Yeah. The

1:37

problem is to do with the stability when it's turning to

1:39

face a different wind direction. And

1:42

the analogy that's really good to visualize it

1:44

is, you know, when a figure skater is

1:46

spinning around and she's got her

1:48

arms straight out in the like three o'clock,

1:51

nine o'clock position, she goes slowly.

1:53

And when they're straight above her head, then

1:55

she goes really fast. So yeah, the two

1:57

bladed turbine is basically like arms out. arms

2:00

up, arms out, arms up. And so it's like

2:02

a jerky turning motion when it's trying to change

2:04

direction. So if it's

2:06

not trying to change direction,

2:09

it doesn't really affect

2:12

anything. But if it is trying to rotate

2:14

on its own vertical axis to align itself

2:16

better with the wind, then you're in trouble.

2:18

Is that correct? Yeah, and I mean, there

2:20

are two-bladed wind turbines out there, it's very

2:22

common design. For small wind turbines, there's been

2:24

some very large, utility scale wind turbines with

2:26

two blades, and there are solutions to it,

2:29

but that's the main reason why three blades

2:31

is the most common. Oh, I

2:33

love talking with engineers. What you see

2:35

is what you get. Look, okay, Rosie, now talk

2:37

to me, if you could, about

2:40

nuclear power and

2:42

my primitive understanding, tell

2:45

me where I'm wrong again, please. You took it so you

2:47

ran them together. If you get them too

2:49

close, they go bang. But you stop them

2:51

from getting too close or you don't have enough mass,

2:53

and then you shove water

2:55

near them, or on them, I don't know.

2:57

And then that water somehow turns into steam

2:59

and you use the steam to turn the

3:01

blades of a turbine, which then makes electricity,

3:04

and instead you can skip the heat from burning

3:06

coal or bank notes or your favorite clothes. How

3:08

wrong was I on that? Oh, I

3:11

don't think very wrong, and I only have the same

3:13

level of understanding. Yeah, the nuclear, you split

3:15

an atom into two and it releases

3:17

energy, and then after that energy's released

3:19

as heat, and it is very similar

3:21

to any other kind of thermal steam

3:23

turbine, a coal power plant. I

3:26

did a little bit of homework, and I asked

3:28

one of my physicist's mates, and they told me that,

3:30

and I was really surprised, that when one atom of

3:33

uranium splits, it

3:35

gives off enough energy to make a

3:38

grain of sand jump a

3:40

whole centimeter. And some

3:43

people would think that's very small, but

3:45

there's a lot of atoms of uranium

3:47

in 100 grams, and

3:50

that turns out to be a very big

3:52

number. And in fact, you've seen that movie

3:54

Oppenheimer? I do say. So

3:57

in that first uranium bomb, they

3:59

had a- 50 or 60 kilograms of

4:01

uranium, some 30, 60, something like

4:04

that. The amount of uranium that

4:06

went bang was equal to

4:08

the weight of you pick up a sheet of

4:10

A4 paper and tear off a

4:12

little corner, 0.7 of a gram.

4:14

And the rest of it was just scattered

4:16

everywhere. Okay, we're ready to dive into the

4:18

pros and cons of nuclear engineering. And you've

4:20

done a YouTube on this, haven't you? Yeah,

4:23

I have. I've provocatively titled it, Four

4:25

Reasons Why Nuclear is a Dumb Idea

4:27

for Australia. This is how

4:29

people can find it, four as

4:32

in F-O-U-R reasons why nuclear power

4:34

is a dumb... Dumb idea

4:36

for Australia. And that's the key point

4:38

is for Australia. I don't think that nuclear

4:40

power is dumb in general. It just doesn't

4:43

suit Australia's energy needs. I'm hoping you've got

4:45

that YouTube video up in front of you

4:47

so you can have it as an aid

4:49

memoir. So take me through reason number one.

4:52

It's too slow. So, you know, Australia

4:55

is really rapidly building out our wind

4:57

and solar power. And by the time that

4:59

we could get a nuclear reactor built,

5:01

then we'll be

5:03

mostly renewable electricity anyway.

5:06

So nuclear would have missed

5:08

the boat, the energy transition will be largely

5:10

completed for the electricity system. I mean, if

5:12

you look at how long does it take

5:14

to build a nuclear reactor, and there's a

5:16

lot of variety in recent projects, the global

5:19

average has been nine years, but that's an

5:21

average that is skewed a lot by some

5:23

really, really slow projects and then by some

5:25

more that are fast. So in countries

5:28

like China, construction has been

5:31

taking five to nine years. But

5:33

other countries like the US and the UK

5:35

are taking much longer. The most

5:37

recent one has just come online in

5:39

the USA that took over 10 years to

5:41

construct Hinkley Point C in the

5:43

UK. They originally promised that it would be

5:46

operating by 2017, but then they didn't

5:48

even start building it till 2018. And the

5:50

latest guess of when it'll be ready is

5:52

2030. So yeah, when you look at the

5:55

whole suite of nuclear projects that have

5:58

been completed, it's a type of project that's really

6:00

prone to schedule overruns, 93% of

6:04

nuclear power plants take longer to

6:06

construct and they were estimated to

6:08

and the average is 65% longer

6:10

than the original estimate. Now

6:14

you mentioned some places doing five to nine years,

6:16

would that be, for example, you say in China,

6:18

I guess they don't have too many regulations

6:21

in place from concerned

6:23

citizens? I don't think that that's

6:25

it. I mean, China hasn't been having a lot of nuclear accidents,

6:27

have they? So I don't think that

6:30

they don't have safety under control. I think

6:32

it's got a lot more to do with

6:34

the fact that they build a lot of

6:36

them, you know, it's a really big country, they

6:38

plan their whole energy system. And so they have

6:40

the ability to say, we're going to build,

6:42

you know, say 100 reactors, and then they

6:44

just roll it out. And what that means

6:46

is that you get a workforce that is

6:48

experienced building the next plant, if you just build

6:50

one plant from a standing start, everybody working on

6:53

it, it's the first time they've ever built

6:55

a nuclear power plant, except for a few

6:57

international experts you've brought in, obviously, that is

6:59

not going to be as efficient as if

7:01

you then took the same team to build

7:03

a second plant and then a third and

7:05

then a fourth. So a country like China

7:08

has enough projects where they can, you know,

7:10

take advantage of all the lessons that are

7:12

learned, whereas other countries that

7:14

are taking a longer time, it's much

7:16

more stop start industry, you can imagine

7:19

in Australia, if we're going to build maybe six

7:21

or seven reactors, and are we going to

7:23

build them one after the other? And then you

7:26

know, it'll be 70 years before the last one

7:28

is built, are we going to build them in

7:30

parallel, in which case you'll have no opportunity to

7:32

improve your workforce from project to project. Yeah, it

7:35

is pretty hard to assume that we would, we

7:37

would be building them as fast as China

7:39

from day one is a pretty optimistic assumption. Even

7:42

if we take that the global

7:44

average of nine years for the most

7:46

recent ones constructed, it still

7:49

puts us very close to 90% variable renewables

7:52

in our electricity grid. What role does

7:54

nuclear have left to play at that point? So

7:57

you're saying to Rosie that the global average is nine

7:59

years. For some reason, I thought it was more like

8:01

15 or 20 years. It

8:04

depends which country you look at. I think that

8:06

that's part of a really common feature with a

8:08

nuclear debate is that both sides are cherry picking

8:10

data. So if you're pro-nuclear, then you're going to

8:12

say, well, China can build a reactor in five

8:14

years. And then if you're

8:16

anti-nuclear, then you're going to say, well, look at the

8:18

UK. They're taking 12 years and they're

8:21

still not finished. To me,

8:23

it's more illustrative to look at the data

8:26

set as a whole, drill down onto

8:28

countries that are more similar to Australia,

8:30

sure. But cherry picking

8:32

the one example that proves your point

8:34

isn't really the way to do it. So

8:36

you're saying nine, maybe 10 years ballpark

8:38

figure. And you mentioned something about we'd be

8:41

most of the way there to renewables. Now,

8:44

tell me where I'm wrong on this one, please, again.

8:46

My understanding was that overall for

8:48

a whole calendar year, Australia got

8:51

about one third of its energy

8:53

from renewables. But South Australia over

8:55

a whole calendar year was 70

8:59

or 80%. Now tell me where I'm wrong. It's

9:01

not quite 80%. But yeah, definitely when

9:03

I made the video, it was 32% for all

9:07

of Australia and in the 70s for

9:09

South Australia in the 70s. And so

9:11

if we go forward 10 years, you're

9:13

saying that we'll have more renewables and

9:15

therefore nuclear would be only to fill

9:17

up the remaining 10% or something? Yeah,

9:21

but it wouldn't do that job very well either.

9:24

Oh, yeah. So the second

9:26

point that I make is it doesn't play very

9:28

nicely with wind and solar. Everybody

9:30

knows about wind power and

9:32

solar power is obviously the sunsets every

9:34

night and not every day is windy.

9:38

So yeah, nuclear power plants, on

9:40

the other hand, they like to turn on and stay

9:42

operating like at a fairly constant level. And

9:44

there's two reasons for that. One is just

9:46

the economics of building something very expensive, you

9:49

want to use it as much as possible.

9:51

And then the second aspect is just in

9:53

the technology similar to a coal power plant,

9:55

they don't like to ramp up and down

9:57

very much. There are new technologies that are

10:00

are making them a little bit more flexible

10:02

and they can vary to a certain extent.

10:05

But yeah, when you use either

10:07

nuclear or variable renewables, you need a

10:09

way to match that output to what

10:11

people actually, the amount of electricity people

10:14

want to use because it varies throughout

10:16

the day and supply needs to precisely

10:18

match demand minute by minute. So

10:21

whether you've got wind and solar or you've got

10:23

nuclear or a coal power plant, you need

10:25

something that you can turn on very flexibly and

10:27

very quickly to match. So that's going to

10:29

be something like a gas picker plant is how

10:32

we do it at the moment mostly, but more

10:34

and more it's batteries. The

10:36

research shows that if you add

10:38

nuclear to a mostly variable renewable electricity

10:40

grid that you don't actually need very

10:43

much less batteries or gas picker plants

10:45

than you would with

10:47

just a purely variable renewable

10:49

system. So it doesn't

10:51

play nicely. Yeah. So I

10:53

mean, there's a lot of countries that combine

10:56

nuclear and renewables, but none of them have

10:58

a lot of nuclear and a lot of

11:00

variable renewables. So like France, for example, has

11:02

a lot of nuclear power gets most of

11:05

its electricity from nuclear power. And

11:07

then the rest of it is hydro, which is a very

11:09

flexible source of electricity. You turn it on and off when

11:11

you want to. That's true

11:13

for Switzerland, Armenia, Slovenia as

11:16

well. The only countries with both a lot of

11:18

nuclear and a lot of variable renewables,

11:20

Sweden with 30% nuclear

11:22

and 20% wind, which is already

11:24

less than the amount of variable renewables

11:27

we have in our grid today. And

11:29

then Finland with 35% nuclear, 16% wind. But

11:33

the crucial thing about those is that they both also

11:36

have a lot of hydro, 40% for Sweden

11:38

and 20% for Finland and

11:41

Australia. We just don't

11:43

have that amount of hydro. So

11:46

it's yeah, it's there isn't

11:48

anybody combining it in that way because

11:50

they just don't together very well. So

11:53

it's a great ability to go with either generation

11:55

type nuclear or variable

11:57

renewables. They can't compliment

11:59

each other very well. Ah,

12:01

that was very nicely put. Now, can I tell you

12:03

my idea? And you tell me how wrong I am.

12:06

And please be brutal. We want the

12:08

truth here. So batteries,

12:11

people say things like what happens if

12:13

everybody turns their electric car battery on

12:15

to suck energy out of the grid

12:17

at 6pm each night? My

12:20

answer to that is, and you might

12:22

remember this, do you remember what's upon

12:24

time that kids at school used

12:27

to go to a computer room to use

12:29

that exotic expensive rare thing called a computer?

12:32

I do remember I also went to public

12:34

school, so that happened a lot, a lot

12:36

later than you might expect at my school.

12:38

Okay, but that was silly, because after all,

12:41

our parents didn't go

12:43

to a pencil room to use the rare and

12:45

expensive thing called a pencil when they wanted to

12:47

write anything clever down on a piece of paper,

12:49

did they? And so what

12:52

I'm saying is that we're heading

12:54

towards a situation where electric charging

12:56

stations to weigh will not

12:58

just be in a certain place you drive to and wait for everybody

13:00

else to get out of the way, but they'll

13:03

be everywhere. A car

13:05

with that sort of range has got a

13:07

hundred kilowatt hour battery. Now,

13:09

a hundred kilowatt hour battery, and please

13:11

let me know where I'm wrong here,

13:13

Dr. Rosie, will run your average American

13:15

house for three or four days. It'll

13:18

run our place here in Sydney, and

13:21

we're very inefficient with a floating population

13:23

of two to five for about nine

13:25

to 11 days, and

13:27

it'll run a small apartment for 24

13:30

days. So if

13:32

you had charging stations everywhere

13:35

in the same way that we have

13:37

computers everywhere, when

13:41

you're not driving your car, on one

13:43

hand, it just plugs into the grid,

13:46

and you are sucking up excess electricity that's

13:48

being generated in the daytime, and you can

13:50

give it back at night. And the other

13:52

side of the coin is that

13:55

if the grid would have fallen down,

13:57

there'd be, and if every car in Australia was an

13:59

electric car, it would car, there'd

14:01

be enough energy in the car batteries

14:03

to run the domestic side of Australia

14:05

for about a week or so. Tell

14:08

me where I'm wrong on that. Well, I

14:10

haven't got the figures to hand, but definitely,

14:12

I mean, I'm a huge fan of

14:14

vehicle to grid potential. And I think that

14:16

it's one of the big things that's going

14:19

to be a bit different to the way

14:21

that when we plan the future Australian electricity

14:23

grid, that it's not really included vehicle to

14:25

grid. We're planning to build a lot of

14:28

batteries, Snowy Hydro, for example. And I do

14:30

recall from one of the first videos that

14:32

I did on vehicle to grid with a

14:35

new researcher, Bjorn Stoenberg. Have you had

14:37

him on the show? Yeah, very clever.

14:39

Yeah, yeah, he's great. Every

14:41

Australian car was electric and you add up

14:43

all of their batteries, then that's the same

14:46

as five Snowy 2.0s. It

14:48

comes for free when you buy all those cars. So I

14:51

definitely think that's going to be a huge factor.

14:54

Tell me where I'm wrong on this. I've been reading

14:56

up a little bit, but I'm not an engineer like

14:58

you. Well, I'm a biomedical engineer, which is not a

15:00

mechanical engineer like you. I don't have a PhD. So

15:03

my understanding is that there's four

15:05

levels of vehicle to something. And

15:08

the first one is vehicle to vehicle,

15:11

where somebody else has got a flat battery and you pull up next

15:13

to them and you just charge them up a little bit. V2V?

15:16

Yep. Okay, the next one

15:18

is V2L, L standing

15:20

for load. So you want to

15:22

use an electric welder or some

15:25

power tools and that's V2L. Then

15:28

there's V2H, where

15:31

it runs your house, and

15:33

then V2G, where it marries

15:35

into the grid. And I don't

15:37

fully understand the difference between running

15:39

your house, which is a handy thing

15:41

when the electricity goes down, and running into the

15:44

grid, which is obviously what we want. Can you

15:46

talk about that? Yeah, it's mostly to

15:48

do with safety. Because I mean, of course,

15:50

basically all of them are the same. Why

15:53

can't you, if you can plug your phone

15:56

in and charge it from your car or

15:58

your laptop or your Arcwelder? whatever,

16:00

why can't you just pretend your house is

16:02

in appliance and plug that into your car

16:04

and run it. Once your house has got

16:06

electricity, you can export power from your solar

16:09

panels or a battery to the grid, why

16:11

not just the battery in

16:13

your car. And my understanding

16:15

is it's mostly related to safety.

16:18

If there is a

16:20

blackout and people are working

16:22

on the electricity grid, they don't want

16:24

random houses supplying electricity into the

16:27

lines that they're working on. They don't want that chance

16:29

that that would happen. So if you've

16:31

got something that's capable of supplying to the grid,

16:33

then it needs to have the safety devices in

16:35

place to make sure that under

16:38

those circumstances that nothing untoward is going

16:40

to happen. So yeah, again, when I

16:42

talked to Bjorn about his program, one

16:44

of the biggest headaches was getting Australian

16:46

standard certification for the V2G charger. And

16:49

at the moment, there isn't one available

16:51

that you can buy in Australia. Really?

16:54

Yeah, it's the standards. The electrical

16:56

standards is actually the biggest holdup when

16:58

it comes to V2G in Australia at the

17:00

moment. Even if we had all

17:02

the cars electric, if we didn't update our standards,

17:04

we'd be able to use that potential electricity in

17:06

the car batteries to run Australia when the grid

17:08

goes down. The standards there, but there

17:10

isn't a device that meets the standard currently.

17:13

Wallbox I think the company was called, or maybe

17:15

that was the product name. They had one, but

17:17

they don't sell it anymore. And now they're working

17:19

on another version. Yeah. So it

17:21

just needs to go through the certification process,

17:24

which is lengthy and expensive, but it's not

17:26

a technical problem. It's getting signed off. OK,

17:29

well, two little issues there. First one is

17:31

that I fully appreciate that you've got some

17:33

poor electrical line person and they're going working

17:35

on the grid and they've switched it off

17:37

because they think it's down. They're replacing wires

17:39

with doing something. And then somebody's

17:42

house comes online and makes circuits

17:45

live from the house. And

17:47

that would be a bad thing. I've

17:49

been looking up fires in lithium

17:52

electric vehicles and going back to

17:54

about 2004, if you've

17:57

got an electric vehicle, I don't

17:59

mean. a push bike or a scooter

18:01

but a proper car, the chances of

18:03

having a fire on a brachial basis, you are

18:06

20 to 50 times less

18:08

likely to have a fire in

18:10

an electric car than in a

18:12

petrol car. Petrol cars on a

18:14

percentage basis catch on fire more

18:16

often than electric cars, but every

18:18

time there's a fire in an electric car, it's

18:20

the front page of the newspapers and

18:23

Sky TV and the world's coming to

18:25

an end. There's much more problems with

18:27

things like scooters and smaller lithium-ion batteries,

18:29

especially ones that are brought in maybe

18:32

not through official channels, maybe they haven't

18:34

passed the Australian standard certification process and

18:36

also things that can get beat up

18:38

because if you've got a lithium-ion battery

18:41

and it gets banged around, that's the

18:43

kind of situation that is much more

18:45

likely to lead to a fire. It's

18:47

much more common in smaller things than cars.

18:50

My understanding was, and tell me if

18:52

I'm wrong, is that the cars have

18:55

got a very sophisticated cooling system and

18:57

other sort of, what do

18:59

you call it, a battery management system, whereas

19:02

if you've got a scooter, you just get this little box, you

19:04

plug it in the main, you shove the socket in and there's

19:06

a bit of like a little work and not catch on fire

19:08

and they haven't gone through the same rigorous

19:10

testing. Fire is a

19:13

possibility and many, many things and you

19:15

do have to take the safety seriously

19:17

and lithium-ion batteries is an exception

19:19

to that. People are reaching

19:22

more inherently safe battery chemistry so you

19:24

don't need all the special battery management

19:26

and all sorts of fireproofing casings. That's

19:29

good that we continue to progress but

19:31

I think you're definitely right that the issue is

19:33

overblown. A lot of times you hear on the

19:35

news, this ship caught fire and

19:37

it was because of electric vehicles and then

19:39

you hear, well, actually no, that was just

19:41

some spectator that thought maybe that's what happened

19:43

and everyone reported it and well after it

19:45

was proven that it was nowhere near the

19:48

electric vehicles on the ship, they're still saying

19:50

that it was an electric vehicle fire. The

19:52

problem seems a lot bigger than it

19:54

is because nearly every fire is attributed

19:56

to EVs at the moment. Wow. They've

19:58

barely touched on that.