Let’s not waste time with niceties: the Coalition’s nuclear plan is a fantasy. The vision laid out on Friday by a quartet of opposition frontbenchers is not going to eventuate, regardless of the result of the next election.
That’s not because nuclear energy is necessarily a terrible idea, in a global sense. While waste is an issue, nuclear plants offer zero-emissions power and will be needed in places with fewer energy options. But the claims put forward by the opposition – that Australia needs nuclear, or could have it in the way the Coalition describes – do not stand up to scrutiny.
Peter Dutton and his climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, claim a grid with nuclear energy would cost 44% less by 2050 than the mostly renewable energy system being built under Labor. Remarkably, they argue that Australia will go from no nuclear energy industry today – no expertise, no workers, no regulatory system, no infrastructure – to a national network of generators that can provide 38% of the country’s electricity in just 25 years.
To say everything would have to go right to get there is a gold medal-winning understatement. No similar country has had a nuclear expansion on that scale in recent memory. The Coalition is arguing Australia can somehow buck this trend from a standing start.
The opposition’s claims bring to mind the modelling adage that if you torture numbers long enough they’ll tell you anything. In this case, that includes that Australia could develop a regulatory system and build a large-scale nuclear plant by 2036. The CSIRO’s conservative estimate is that it would be at least 15 years before Australia could develop a nuclear plant. Others say about 20 years is more realistic.
The most obvious criticism of the Coalition’s proposal is that the overwhelming majority of agencies and experts in the field do not believe it is credible. They have found, repeatedly, that nuclear energy would be more expensive than what Australia is building now – a system that will run overwhelmingly on renewable energy, with “firming” support from energy storage and transmission links and further back-up from “peaking” gas plants.
They have found, repeatedly, that a nuclear industry could not be developed by the time it would be needed, and choosing to slow the rollout of large-scale renewable energy and batteries while waiting for nuclear to develop would be a significant risk to supply, risking blackouts as old coal plants become increasingly unreliable.
And they have found, obviously enough, that burning more coal and gas in the medium term would increase Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, push national climate commitments out of reach and accelerate global heating. The modelling confirms the Coalition is planning for a power grid that is significantly more polluting over the next two decades and a transport system in which a lot more people are still driving fossil fuel cars in 2050 than expert advice has suggested is possible.
This isn’t a surprise, but we should call it what it is.
The Coalition has said it would ditch the country’s legislated 2030 emissions reduction target, dismissing scientific and economic evidence the country should and could be cutting pollution faster, not slower. It has opposed all Labor’s climate policies and has none of its own that could make a difference in the next 15 years. It claims it accepts climate science and would aim to get the country to net zero emissions by 2050, but its actions clearly say something else.
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As recently as Monday, the CSIRO released an updated analysis directly addressing claims by nuclear advocates and found energy from these plants would be at least 50% more expensive than the alternative. A number of analysts thought the CSIRO had actually been conservative in its estimates. They said international experience suggested construction costs of nuclear plants would probably be at least double what the national science agency estimated.
Let’s look at that international experience in comparable countries in North America and western Europe. Only five large-scale nuclear plants have reached construction stage across these regions in the past 25 years. Four have suffered substantial setbacks, but will all take at least 18 and up to 24 years to complete, with construction costs between two and six times what was originally estimated. The fifth was abandoned as too expensive after A$13bn had already been spent.
The list of issues raised about the Coalition’s position over the past 24 hours is lengthy. On it: that its policy is consistent with 2.6C of global heating by 2100, a disastrous level we should clearly be trying to avoid, and that it could deter private investment in new energy generation even in areas and technologies where the Coalition would like it to continue.
Perhaps most pertinently on the list, from a short-term electoral point of view, is that the Coalition’s policy explicitly does not claim that it would do anything to reduce household power bills.
Renewable energy is blamed for all sorts of ills, and its expansion is not without challenges. But the evidence is that recent big power bill rises were mostly due to fossil fuel prices going up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to fossil fuel outages, not solar and wind. Experts say the Coalition’s plan to limit new solar and wind generation coming into the grid and in the short-term boost fossil fuel power – particularly gas, the most expensive form of electricity in the system – could lead to bills going up.
The big question for political and media debate over the next six months: whether it will grapple with this reality, or if the nuclear fantasy will be too much to resist.
