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Five basic reasons.
One is simply it's by far the most electrified economy in the nation indeed it's right up there globally.
Electricity has a 72% market share for residential space heating, over 90% for commercial, it has a 90% market share for cooktops, 94% for hot water and almost 100% of ovens in Tasmania are electric. Add in the climate and the need for space heating and that leads to high consumption.
Versus just across Bass Strait in Victoria where gas overwhelmingly dominates for heating, cooking and hot water.
The other four reasons are more specific - Bell Bay Aluminium, Nyrstar, TEMCO and Norske Skog collectively "the big 4" between them use about 56% of all electricity in the state.
BBA - runs 3 potlines producing about 185,000 tonnes of aluminium metal each year. Most is exported as metal but some's supplied in molten form to the Ecka plant next door which produces aluminium powder (used to make metallic paint, explosives, rocket fuel etc). The ultimate owner of BBA is Rio Tinto.
Nyrstar - equal third largest zinc refinery on the planet, producing about 260,000 tonnes each year of zinc metal and about 350,000 tonnes a year of sulphuric acid. If you've been to Hobart as a tourist and caught the ferry to MONA then you sailed straight past this place, almost certainly failing to realise just how big a business it actually is:
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As I've said to many, it's certainly not the prettiest thing in Tas in terms of aesthetics but it's outright beautiful in other ways. There's an awful lot of people who've at some point relied on that place for employment either directly or as a contractor or who did a trade apprenticeship there.
TEMCO (an acronym for Tasmanian Electro-Metallurgical Company) runs 4 furnaces producing ~270,000 tonnes per annum split roughly equally between ferromanganese and silicomanganese plus a separate sinter production facility producing ~325,000 tonnes per annum. These products being sold to steel producers as a key ingredient in steel production.
Norske Skog - runs two production lines one each producing newsprint and magazine paper. Long term it's almost certainly doomed for obvious reasons but for now it's still in business, it's outlasted many competitors who are long since gone, and uses about 7% of the state's electricity.
Now all that might seem off the topic of nuclear power and in some ways it is but in other ways it's getting to the heart of the issue.
Those factories are collectively producing $ billions worth of product for export or to replace what would otherwise be imported, the zinc metal alone exceeds $1 billion a year, and between them they're exporting to over a third of all countries in the world. But they're doing so in direct competition with countless others in China, the Middle East, various European countries, Brazil, USA, Canada and so on.
In short there's zero chance that production would be occurring in Australia without cheap energy, that's what it comes down to. Energy is the single largest production cost for BBA and it's a top three cost for the others. If an adequate supply of competitively priced and sufficiently reliable electricity wasn't available then they wouldn't be viable businesses in Tasmania or for that matter in Australia, the production would go offshore.
It's similar with the heating loads. That Tasmanians are using electricity for space heating, water heating and cooking comes down to it being reliable and reasonably cheap. The willingness of Tasmanians to cook, heat and shower with electricity would change real quick if prices were comparable to what we have in SA (roughly double the price in Tas) or if supply were unreliable.
So if the aim is to electrify society, to shift consumption away from gas to electricity, and if we want to have manufacturing and refining type industries in Australia then the key ingredient to making that work is cheap and reliable electricity. If we don't have that, forget the rest because it ain't happening.
Nuclear? It comes down to the above. Can it be done cheaply enough that it's viable for industry and it's viable for electricity to replace gas? Because if it can't then it's pointless - because if we're not going to be able to use it to run heavy industry, if it's too costly to electrify homes and businesses and replace gas, then there's not actually much point in it since the notion that society needs lots of electricity is dependent on it being used for industry and heat. Without that, if we're just running lights, computers and so on, well that's not a huge demand and it won't really matter how it's supplied.
Now contemplate the economic benefits to the nation if WA's minerals were refined through to metal rather than just selling the ore, the scale of that would vastly exceed what's being done in Tasmania given the quantities being mined, the money it'd bring in would be huge. To have any chance of happening though it needs cheap energy, without that it's no go. Same with any other sort of manufacturing.
A debate about energy supply isn't something that exists in isolation. It's really a debate about industry, since if we're going to produce large volumes of cheap electricity then ultimately that's what it'll be used for.
