Part 1 of 2 Parts
The Coalition and News Corp has been engaging in a vague, ideological push for nuclear power in Australia. Critics believe that this push is the latest step in a decades-long campaign of delay and denial on the climate crisis.
Nuclear energy probably has a role to play in the global shift to zero-carbon emissions in places where it is already used or that have few other options. As is the case with many other technologies, its role may grow or recede over time as time passes.
However, no good case has been made to support the claims that nuclear power has a place in the rapid transition underway in Australia. The reason for this is fairly obvious. The small modular reactor (SMR) technology that is being promoted does not really exist.
This suggests that the current wave of nuclear promotion is really just an anti-renewable energy campaign. It is based on an arrogant and unsubstantiated rejection of the detailed evidence from the Australian Energy Market Operator and others that solar, wind, hydro, batteries and other support can provide a reliable, affordable, low-emissions electricity supply,
Coincidentally or intentionally, many prominent members of the pro-nuclear and anti-renewable energy campaign dismiss climate science. Some critics do this directly. Some critics do it indirectly by arguing that there is no urgency to act.
The primary sources of this climate change rejection are the federal Coalition, the Australian newspaper and the misinformation channel of Sky News After Dark. The Australian often runs unquestioning news stories claiming multibillion-dollar “black holes” in renewable energy plans which are based on flawed analysis by former mining executives. But then it devotes pages to criticizing an estimate by Chris Bowen’s energy department that says that nuclear energy would be really expensive.
The Australian is a newspaper that gives more space to contrarian campaigns by individual scientists who claim that the Great Barrier Reef is not under threat and the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature records cannot be trusted than it does to the overwhelming consensus of thousands of peer-reviewed science papers.
The Coalition’s position on nuclear power is a little more slippery. To be fair, the last election was only sixteen months ago, and it is reasonable that it has not yet developed an energy policy. However, the language that it employs is not that of a party gently exploring an idea. Peter Dutton has asserted that Australia could build nuclear power plants, which are banned, on the site of existing coal-fired power plants.
The Coalition considered and rejected abolishing the nuclear power ban while it was in power for almost nine years. Then, the party stuck to its status quo on climate. This included promoting a subsidized “gas fired recovery” that never took place. Now, Dutton and Ted O’Brien, the energy and climate spokesperson, talk about nuclear power as the obvious solution and mock those who back the rollout of renewable energy and new transmission lines.
O’Brien said that the cost of introducing nuclear power in Australia “depends on the way that you model it”, which may be true but does not mean much.
Please read Part 2 next