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Having pushed for nuclear power as a signature energy policy, National MPs are now divided over where to build reactors – which will be disproportionately located in their seats. By Mike Seccombe.
Dutton’s nuclear policy backfires
This much can be said for Colin Boyce: he is not one of the federal Coalition’s nuclear nimbys. He would, if necessary, agree to have a nuclear power station in his electorate.
Mind you, it takes 20 minutes of questioning before the Queensland member of parliament says so. Even then, his comment is somewhat qualified.
“If the moratorium was lifted and we had the conversations and we got to a stage in the argument where you had to decide where to have them, yes, I would,” he finally tells The Saturday Paper.
Prior to that, he sounds like so many of his colleagues – enthusiastic for nuclear power in principle but resistant to the idea one should be put in their electoral backyard. “Both the federal Liberal Party and the federal National Party have pointed out that we should explore this nuclear option,” he says initially. “We’re not making any commitments by any means at this point in time, but what we need to do is have an intelligent conversation around it and put it out there and get all the facts and figures on the table so that it can be debated properly.”
Until recently, such a dodge would have been entirely in line with the federal Coalition’s longstanding position that nuclear power should be considered as “part of Australia’s future energy mix”, subject to technological developments.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s announcement on March 12 that the Coalition would “shortly” announce about six sites across the country where nuclear reactors could be built forced the issue. Dutton’s plan would put them in places where coal-fired power stations were closing down.
The promised announcement of potential nuclear sites has been pushed progressively further into the future. Initially it was expected within a couple of weeks, then before the federal budget on May 14. Last Sunday, on the ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton would not commit to a pre-budget announcement, improbably blaming the recent stabbing incidents in Sydney for the delay.
On Tuesday this week, Nationals leader David Littleproud told Sky News the Coalition parties were “not going to be bullied into putting this at any time line, but you will see it before the election”.
Whenever the announcement does eventually come, Boyce’s central Queensland electorate, Flynn, is likely to be on the list.
Boyce’s acceptance of nuclear power in his electorate is not so much an endorsement of the policy being pushed by his leaders as an acceptance that he has no other choice.
Flynn, twice the size of Tasmania and dotted with coalmines and gas wells, produces vast amounts of energy, most of which is shipped overseas.
Huge amounts of energy also are used in Flynn to power the industrial city of Gladstone, site of Australia’s largest cement kiln, second-largest aluminium smelter, and three enormous gas liquefaction plants among other power-hungry heavy industries. Providing most of that power are three big coal-fired power stations within the electorate.
Not for much longer.
Back in 2019 the operators of one of them, Callide B, announced it would close in 2028. Last week, the Queensland Labor government legislated for a 75 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. Boyce says, probably correctly, “that means that there will be no coal-fired
power stations in Queensland operational after 2035”.
He is not happy about that and is even less happy that the state opposition supported the government’s legislated target, for he has never accepted the need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Before his election to federal parliament, Boyce served five years in the Queensland parliament, representing the coal seat of Callide. There, he argued for the construction of more coal-fired power stations. He denied the reality of human-induced climate change.
Opposition to fossil fuels, he told state parliament on June 17, 2021, was “driven by the mind-numbing, eco-Marxist Millennials and upper middle-class ‘wokes’ who have been indoctrinated with some quasi-religious belief that coal is bad and carbon dioxide is poisoning the planet”.
Boyce dialled the rhetoric back somewhat for his run at federal politics but still managed to damage the Coalition’s environmental credentials during the 2022 campaign by suggesting its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 was not firm but rather a flexible, non-binding plan that left plenty of “wiggle room”.
Dutton’s bold move on nuclear power is widely seen as an attempt to find that wiggle room. He is wedged between public opinion that accepts the need to address climate change and is broadly supportive of the phasing out of coal-fired electricity generation, and a substantial rump of MPs and senators who either do not accept the reality of climate change at all or who oppose the use of wind and solar power to address it.
Even within the Coalition’s ranks there are some who see the move as being at least as much an attempt to address a political problem as to address the climate crisis, although most will not say so publicly.
Bridget Archer will, however. The Tasmanian MP – one among a much-depleted cohort of moderate Liberals after the 2022 election – issued a warning to her colleagues via the pages of the Nine newspapers last month that nuclear energy should not be put forward as an alternative to wind and solar.
“There is no point even having a nuclear discussion if you don’t accept a need to decarbonise, to transition away from coal and gas,” she said. “There only is a case for nuclear if there is a fairly rapid transition to large-scale renewables, otherwise why are you doing it?”
She then answered her own question: “I think part of the reason for having the discussion is to keep people in the tent on net zero.”
Others privately assess the motivations of the federal Coalition leadership more harshly. They suggest it’s not primarily about getting nuclear up but about slowing the transition to wind and solar and thereby extending the life of fossil fuels in power generation.
Certainly, the chances of getting the federal parliament to greenlight a domestic nuclear industry are remote. For about 25 years, nuclear power has been prohibited by law in Australia, and it was the Howard Coalition government that banned it, under a 1998 deal with the Greens to get other legislation through the Senate.
Given the ever-growing proclivity of Australian electors to give their votes to progressive independent candidates and Greens, there is a good chance neither major party will win majority government at the next election. Even if the Coalition did win the House of Representatives, it almost certainly would not gain a majority in the Senate. Unless Labor recanted on its vehement opposition to nuclear power, Dutton’s plan would fall at the first hurdle.
David Crisafulli, the leader of the Liberal National Party in Queensland – and likely next premier of the state – has repeatedly pointed out this reality.
“Until both sides of federal parliament agree that is the course of action, it is not going to happen,” Crisafulli told The Australian Financial Review, way back in July last year.
“I’m not spending any energy on it – pardon the pun – because no one will invest in it unless both sides agree to it,” he said.
The Victorian opposition leader, John Pesutto, has made the same point, in almost exactly the same words. In New South Wales, Opposition Leader Mark Speakman also is uninterested in the idea, stressing his party’s commitment to “energy sources that are clean, cheap and reliable”.
Furthermore, the available evidence suggests even those members of the federal Coalition parties who publicly spruik the Dutton policy lack the courage of their convictions.
Last month, shortly after Dutton made his big announcement, reporters for the Nine papers contacted a dozen of them.
“Twelve opposition MPs have publicly backed lifting the moratorium on nuclear power in Australia but will not commit to hosting a nuclear power plant in their own electorate,” their story began.
When he announced the policy on March 14, Dutton referred to polling that showed 55 per cent support for the building of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), a new breed of nukes that has yet to be commercialised and that is essentially experimental at this point.
He emphasised support was even stronger – 65 per cent – among respondents aged 18 to 34. Dutton attributed this to the fact they were “well-read, they understand what’s happening in Europe, and in Asia and in North America.”
In his appearance on Sky News this week, Littleproud also cited opinion polling to bolster his assertion that nuclear energy was cheaper than renewables.
Two points. First, the Coalition plan no longer involves small modular nuclear reactors, but instead would rely on building traditional large plants. Second, the polling to which Littleproud referred actually showed a lot of people were woefully misinformed about the cost of nuclear power.
When asked to rank sources of energy “in terms of total cost including infrastructure and household price”, 40 per cent of respondents thought solar and wind power were the most expensive, compared with 36 per cent who thought nuclear was, and 24 who picked coal and gas. Fully one third of respondents thought nuclear was the cheapest option.
They are spectacularly wrong. According to the most recent GenCost report – the annual collaboration between the Australian science agency CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) – SMRs are by far the most expensive way of generating electricity. The “levelised cost” of power from an SMR would be $382 to $636 per megawatt hour, while solar and wind would cost between $91 and $130 per MWh.
The Dutton response was to attack the experts. He claimed GenCost underestimated the cost of renewables because it did not include expenditure on the transmission infrastructure required to integrate them into the grid.
This was untrue, as the report’s authors promptly made clear. Dutton was undeterred, however, which in turn saw the chief executive of the CSIRO, Douglas Hilton, release an open letter defending the importance of independent scientific endeavour.
“For science to be useful and for challenges to be overcome, it requires the trust of the community. Maintaining trust requires scientists to act with integrity. Maintaining trust also requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science,” he wrote.
They haven’t stopped.
Last Tuesday, the same day as Littleproud went on Sky News and maintained the falsehood that nuclear power was cheaper than wind and solar, another report was released, further confirming more wind and solar energy was simultaneously lowering both prices and emissions from the electricity sector.
The quarterly Energy Dynamics report from the energy market operator showed that in the first three months of this year, renewables provided 39 per cent of power in the east coast power grid, almost 2 per cent more than in the corresponding period last year.
Over the same period, wholesale electricity prices were down 8 per cent, to an average of $76 per MWh.
“We are increasingly seeing renewable energy records being set which is a good thing for Australian consumers as it is key in driving prices down and NEM [National Electricity Market] emissions intensity to new record lows,” AEMO’s executive general manager of reform delivery, Violette Mouchaileh, said in a media release accompanying the report.
There were big differences between states, however.
Queensland, the most coal-dependent state and home to Dutton, Littleproud, Boyce and most of the other outspoken opponents of renewables expansion, had by far the highest prices: $118 per MWh. It was the only state where prices went up, year on year.
This, said Mouchaileh, continued “the trend observed in recent quarters, [of] a notable wholesale price separation between the NEM’s northern and southern regions”.
She put the Queensland result down to “record demands and weather events”. She did not elaborate further, but really she didn’t have to. Abundant evidence tells us climate change is bringing more frequent and dramatic weather events.
The good news for consumers is that lower wholesale prices eventually feed through to retail prices. The maximum price retailers can charge east coast customers
will go down by about 7 per cent on average from July 1.
Meanwhile, details of the Dutton nuclear plan are still pending. The continued delays suggest difficulties in getting MPs willing to be among the half-dozen or so whose seats will be earmarked for nuclear reactors.
A senior Liberal Party source confirms this: “Basically, it’s the Nats that have pushed this nuclear thing. But now they’re running away from it at a thousand miles an hour, because they don’t want it in their seats. And the poor old regional Libs aren’t going to cop it.”
There is, of course, an alternative available to Dutton. There are Labor seats with old coal plants in them, too. One such seat is Hunter in NSW, held by Dan Repacholi.
He professes to be untroubled by the prospect Hunter might turn up on Dutton’s list – and he has his lines well researched and rehearsed.
“It’s now been 22 months since the May 22 election, and the Coalition still has not announced any physical energy policies: no details, no costings, no locations or plans. This comes seven months after they said they were doing their modelling on this policy,” he says.
“Between the 5th of March and the 16th of April, 2024, Dutton said that nuclear details, including sites, will be released either shortly, in due course, or over the next couple of weeks, on nine occasions.”
“They’re in disarray on this. It’s a joke.”
At least, though, Dutton now has one MP prepared to publicly offer up his electorate for a nuclear power station.
Whatever one might think of Colin Boyce’s climate change denialism, that marks him as braver than the rest of his colleagues.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 27, 2024 as "Attack on the nuclear family".
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