The Incidental Tourist by Peter Doherty

Author:Peter Doherty [Doherty, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522871739
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

CHAPTER 16

Steely resolve

PROMINENT IN THE PLANE window as, still low, we turned and tilted after take-off, I guessed that the piles of coal and iron ore portside at Pohang in November 2007 were likely from Australia. I’d heard a story that Western Australia’s Hamersley Iron had been a big help in getting the Korean steel industry going, and Queensland was a big supplier of the high-quality anthracite required for steel production. That’s the steely component of our gift to South Korea.

We still produce some steel in Australia, of course, though the need to renew old plant and the inexorable reach of the twin and unforgiving gods of free trade agreements and globalisation has greatly diminished our local industry. No sense crying over spilled milk, but it’s more than a bit of a worry that Australia relies so much on a resource-depletion, dig-it-up and sell-it-off economy. South Korea has a mining industry but, like other nations (Japan, Israel) that place technical innovation and manufacturing at the forefront, the economy is not based on the massive extraction of non-renewable resources.

Though it will be centuries before the planet’s coal reserves run out, any sane person understands that we have to get off the fossil fuel-burning kick as soon as possible, while realising at the same time that this is very hard to achieve. Among the most technologically difficult challenges are to replace the energy concentrated in coking (not thermal) coal for steel production and the jet fuel needed to power the Korean Airlines plane that, after a stay-over in Seoul, would take me non-stop from Inchon airport back home to Melbourne. Otherwise, though some of the technology has a way to go, Australia enjoys enormous potential for tapping renewable energy from solar, wind, ground heat (geothermal), tides and biomass. Maybe in the longer term we’ll be exporting hydrogen or electricity in fully charged battery ships or via cable to nearby nations like Indonesia. After all, we live on the planet’s biggest solar collector.

Even with an Australian focus on mining that progressively withdraws from fossil fuel extraction, the two countries are natural economic partners. South Korea needs a spectrum of metals, including uranium and (hopefully) as new reactor technologies develop, the less risky thorium. The Republic of Korea currently operates twenty-five U-235 fission plants and, by 2029, the aim is to supply 70 per cent of its electricity from that source. And, in collaboration with the United States’s Argonne National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute, the South Koreans are planning an advanced, liquid sodium-cooled fast-breeder reactor that uses metal pins composed of low-enriched uranium and zirconium. Such new-generation reactors are designed to be safe and to shut down without operator intervention, avoiding the type of disaster we saw at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant when the tsunami hit in March 2011.

In addition, the South Koreans are constructing four new nuclear plants in the United Arab Emirates and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute is looking at the possibility of supplying two (or more) SMART reactors to Saudi Arabia.

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