Proposed Queensland nuclear power plants risk contaminating water supplies in event of disaster, research finds

The Guardian

24-03-2025

Proposed nuclear power plants in Queensland could strain water supplies, even under normal operations, and risk contaminating them in the event of a nuclear disaster, critics warn.
Analysis by the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) has found that one of the two nuclear reactors proposed for the sunshine state, under the energy plan that the Coalition will take to the upcoming federal election, could require double the water currently used by the existing Callide coal-fired power station. The other, Tarong, could use 55% more water than its existing coal station.
Tarong's primary water source is the Boondooma Dam, from which it is allocated 30,000 megalitres a year, and which also supplies drinking water for the nearby town of Kingaroy and irrigates the rich agricultural land along the Boyne River. But Tarong also has a pipeline to the Wivenhoe Dam, the main supply of water for Brisbane and Ipswich, which – due to substantial premiums – it only uses when Boondooma Dam levels are low.
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The QCC report also raises concerns about additional water that would be required to prevent a meltdown in the event of disaster.
About 1.3m tonnes of seawater was required to cool Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactors and prevent a complete meltdown in 2011 – water which has been stored on site for more than a decade and which began being gradually released into the ocean through an undersea tunnel about one kilometre long in 2023.
The report has been described as 'flawed and highly politicised' by the Coalition.
But the director of QCCC, Dave Copeman, said there 'simply is not enough water' available to run nuclear facilities in the proposed locations and 'no plan for where to store irradiated water required for heat reduction in the case of an emergency'.
Tony Irwin, an Australian National University honorary associate professor said modern nuclear power plants would not need to draw on external water supplies in the event of catastrophe.
Irwin is the technical director at SMR Nuclear Technology Pty Ltd, a consulting company established to advise on the roll out of small modular reactors in Australia.
'Post-Fukushima there was a lot of improvements and design changes, so that a modern reactor would survive even a Fukushima-type of accident,' he said.
'Modern power stations, like a Westinghouse APS 1000, is all passive cooling, it's all with its own containment so it doesn't withdraw water from anywhere else to keep itself cool … in an emergency situation, it's completely self contained'.
The Callide coal-fired power plant has an annual water allocation of 20,000 ML from the Callide Dam, which is fed by the Awoonga Dam. As of Wednesday, Awoonga – which supplies the city of Gladstone's water – was at 46% capacity, and Callide – which supplies drinking water to Biloela – was at 16.5% capacity. Callide Dam is also used to replenish aquifers that irrigate crops in the Callide Valley.
Callide would have to find an additional 27,000 ML of water to power the kind of power plants implied by the Coalition's nuclear plan, the QCC report found – with Copeman saying there was simply 'not enough water available'.
The renewable energy engineer for the QCC, Clare Silcock, who crunched the numbers on the report, said the Coalition's nuclear proposal was scant on details. Instead she drew upon the Frontier Economic's modelling that the opposition has relied upon to argue its nuclear vision for seven reactors across the country would be 44% cheaper than the government's renewables-led plan.
That report models just over 100,000 gigawatt hours of nuclear electricity in the National Electricity Market (NEM) – which covers Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia – by 2050.
Six of the proposed nuclear sites are within the NEM, and so the QCC report assumes the generation would be spread equally across those sites.
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Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University's school of environment and science, said that a rule of thumb was that a nuclear power station needed about 15% more water than a coal-fired power station of the same capacity.
'[But] if we were to build the amount of nuclear power proposed in the Frontier Economics report as part of the Coalition's long-term approach for 2050 electricity, there would not be enough water for Tarong and Callide to provide the proposed share of power,' he said.
That meant that the Frontier report was 'implicitly assuming that the nuclear power program would be expanded' beyond the sites already identified by the Coalition.
'So it would be reasonable to ask the question: if the much larger nuclear program proposed in the Frontier Economics report were to go ahead, where would all the extra power stations be sited?' Lowe said.
Irwin said that the water required to make steam to generate electricity under normal operations of a thermal nuclear power station with indirect cooling towers, such as at Callide and Tarong, would draw on 'slightly more' than a coal-fired plant to generate the same amount of electricity.
'But if you are worried about water consumption, you can go to dry cooling,' he said.
Irwin said that using fans to blow air through a large radiator in a closed circuit, or dry-cooling, was, generally, slightly less efficient, cost more and decreased electrical output – but by requiring a fraction of the amount of water, would enable power stations 'to be built practically anywhere'.
The shadow energy minister, Ted O'Brien, described the QCC report as 'flawed and highly politicised' criticising it for making assumptions about water usage based on a 2006 feasibility study into the possibility of establishing a nuclear power industry in Australia commissioned by then prime minister John Howard.
'The Coalition has embraced a world's best practice 'coal to nuclear' because it allows us to leverage existing infrastructure – including water, transmission and a local workforce,' O'Brien said.
The Coalition minister pointed to the Palo Verde Nuclear power plant in the Sonoran desert, one of the United State's largest power producers and the only one in the world not near a large body of water as it uses treated wastewater from nearby cities.
Associate professor Martin Anda, with Murdoch University's centre for water, energy and waste, said US comparisons were 'not relevant to Australia'.
Anda said he was not '100% against nuclear' – and that it would 'probably be a good solution' in the Arctic regions of the US and Europe, for example, where water abounds, renewable energy opportunities are more limited and the nuclear industry is established.
Australia, though, not only lacked for an abundance of water, but also the kind of regulatory frameworks and safeguards that could take years to establish.
The headline and text of this article were amended on 24 March 2025 after the Guardian was notified of a significant calculation error in the Queensland Conservation Council research. An earlier version said the dams that supply the proposed Callide and Tarong nuclear plants 'could not access enough water' to cool them in the event of a meltdown; our article has been amended in line with the organisation's revised analysis.