Mike's Minute: Should NZ no longer be nuclear free?

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

We have to ask some simple questions around our attitude to nuclear and whether we are capable of becoming slightly more mature about it.

This country got semi-famous for its anti-nuke stance. We are still anti-nuke, but we got famous a lifetime ago and the world has changed.

Amazon and Google and Oracle are building their own nuclear reactors and, if not building, they are buying nuclear deals with places like Three Mile Island, which also a lifetime ago made headlines around the world.

They need nuclear to run data centres. Data centres need astonishing amounts of power.

New Zealand wants to host data centres.

Can New Zealand be a data centre hub, given the power system we now run? No.

Ironically, just yesterday Genesis announced they will be buying more coal for next winter to cover the gap. The ongoing gap.

That’s not for data centres. That's to turn the lights on, on a cold morning.

This country, as we found out this winter, can't handle cold far less data centres, and nothing is changing between now and next winter.

Factor in EV's if you want and we return to the ongoing but unanswered question - just what is it we are going to run the country on?

Hydro is good, but not reliable.

And neither is any of the other options we may or may not ever get around to producing at scale, like wind or solar or batteries.

Nuclear is not only reliable, it's good for the environment.

So we want to run data centres, but we don’t have enough power, we are still burning more coal, and the thing we hate is a viable option and being picked up and run with around the rest of the world.

Are we to be left behind? Or are we to grow up and move forward?

I would have thought it answers itself.

But let's see.

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