News

Previously staunch opponents of nuclear energy in the Coalition are now backing it as an alternative to renewables, despite largely unproven technology, long delays for approvals and the unsolved problem of waste. By Mike Seccombe.

Why the Coalition backs nuclear

Ted O’Brien, the shadow minister for climate change and energy, and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in parliament.

Credit: AAP Image / Mick Tsikas

In his younger days, Ted O’Brien, the federal shadow minister for climate change and energy, was strongly anti-nuclear. But these days, he marches with a different crowd. Indeed, he leads it.

Tony Abbott is among them. As is Gina Rinehart, the richest person in the country. And Warren Mundine, a leader of the campaign against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. And Andrew Liveris, an architect of former energy minister Angus Taylor’s abortive “gas-fired recovery” plan. And the climate change sceptics at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). And a raft of right-wing commentators, particularly in the Murdoch media, which also dutifully records each new salvo fired by Rinehart, Mundine, Liveris and others on the latest front in the climate wars.

The front is the battle for acceptance of nuclear power as an alternative energy source to renewables.

It is perhaps unsurprising things have come to this. Despite the efforts of the last federal government to slow-walk the shift to renewables and to extend the life of fossil fuels – particularly the dirtiest of them, coal – it has long been increasingly obvious they are on the way out. There will never be another coal-fired power station built in this country. Gas is an expensive alternative of very limited and declining utility.

Having spent years fomenting resistance to wind and solar, battery storage and new transmission infrastructure, the political right could hardly be expected to reverse course. Nuclear, though, presented an opportunity for differentiation. And so, last month, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton grasped it firmly. In a speech to the IPA, he accused the Albanese government of “renewable zealotry … putting our nation at risk”.

“The Albanese government is recklessly rushing to renewables and switching off the old system before the new one is ready,” he said.

Having set out in detail the magnitude of the task of achieving the government’s goal of getting the national electricity grid to 83 per cent renewables by 2030 – and it is huge – Dutton offered a new variation on an old, radioactive theme.

“Now, if the government wants to stop coal-fired power and phase out gas-fired power, the only feasible and proven technology which can firm up renewables and help us achieve the goals of clean, cost-effective and consistent power is next-generation nuclear technologies which are safe and emit zero emissions. Namely, small modular reactors, or SMRs. And microreactors or micro modular reactors – MMRs – which are also known as nuclear batteries.”

A single SMR, Dutton said, could power 300,000 homes. An MMR could power a hospital, a factory, a mining site or a military base.

Because these new nuclear plants were “factory-built, portable and scalable”, he said, “we could convert or repurpose coal-fired plants and use the transmission connections which already exist on those sites”.

Dutton was singing from the songsheet Ted O’Brien has been assiduously composing for years.

O’Brien was elected to the south-east Queensland seat of Fairfax in 2016 and quickly established himself as the parliament’s most enthusiastic booster, and student, of nuclear technology.

“I’ve been to, personally, on the ground talking to nuclear people everywhere from China to Taiwan, Japan, Canada, US, Switzerland, France, India,” he says.

In 2019, the House Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy, chaired by O’Brien, conducted an inquiry into nuclear power.

Interestingly, it did not give a blanket endorsement. It found Australia should definitely reject old nuclear technology, but conditionally approve new and emerging technologies of the sort Dutton spoke about. There were dissenting reports from Labor members on the committee and the independent Zali Steggall.

The report’s title was “Not without your approval”, a recognition that nukes faced a big problem in gaining social licence. It stressed that nuclear plants and waste facilities should not be imposed on local communities.

The response – or rather lack of response – from O’Brien’s superiors suggest they also worried about its public acceptability. The government made no move towards addressing the threshold problem with having nuclear power in Australia: that it is illegal under two separate pieces of legislation, passed under the Howard government.

They preferred to dodge the issue. In one 2019 interview on Sky News, then energy minister Angus Taylor said nuclear was “not going to help” reduce energy prices in the short to medium term.

He was right. The most optimistic forecasts, including by O’Brien himself, suggest that even if new legislation were passed to remove the existing bans, it would take at least five years to get a reactor approved, up and running. A significant weight of expert opinion suggests far longer – probably 10 to 15 years.

Way back in 2006, the Howard government appointed the nuclear physicist Ziggy Switkowski from the board of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation to conduct a review of Australia’s possible nuclear future.

The review concluded nuclear power would likely be between 20 and 50 per cent more costly to produce than power from a new coal-fired plant. It would take 10 to 15 years, and government subsidies, to get any nukes into the grid. Switkowski also foresaw cost reductions in renewable generation that would make them even more competitive.

That was before SMRs were contemplated, of course, but in the years since, the calculus hasn’t changed much, except that renewables and storage have become cheaper and faster. Big questions remain about the cost of power from SMRs and the timeframes for deploying them.

Even Dutton’s assertion that modular reactors are a “feasible and proven technology” is questionable. They certainly look feasible, but they are hardly proven.

Mark Ho, newly elected president of the Australian Nuclear Association, an independent professional body of nuclear advocates, says there are currently just two operational SMRs in the world – one in Russia and one in China. Many more are in prospect. According to Dutton – and there is no reason to doubt him – 50 or more countries “are exploring or investing in new SMRs and nuclear batteries”.

But they are a way off being operational, Ho says. “In the US, there’s two leading designs, the NuScale reactor and BWRX, slated for completion by 2029.” In the UK, Rolls-Royce plans to have a first SMR up and running by 2029. Others are under development in Canada and elsewhere, Ho says, all looking to be operational around the end of the decade.

These timeframes mean SMRs would do nothing to help Australia meet its 2030 emissions reduction target, which leads some to suspect that Dutton’s recent volubility on the subject is more about addressing a political problem than an environmental one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87YitrIlK_w

It’s noteworthy that none of the talk reflects an actual policy commitment, says Dave Sweeney, nuclear-free campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation. “Our sense of this is that nuclear is a debating issue that gives the Coalition cover for its quite diverse and often quite split positions,” he says.

The debate gives the impression that the conservative parties are sincere about finding the best way forward, he suggests, when in reality a significant portion of its ranks “just don’t want renewables” and remain committed to fossil fuels.

“It enables them to not have to announce what their actual policy position is. When asked what is their response to energy and climate issues, what they say is ‘we need to consider everything’,” says Sweeney

“They talk about the need for discussion, conversation, all that sort of stuff – as if we haven’t talked about it and had royal commissions about it and federal/state inquiries about it ad nauseam.”

Which is essentially what O’Brien tells The Saturday Paper when asked what the opposition’s actual policy is.

“I really just feel as though we need a really honest conversation in this country. And I think getting to net-zero and decarbonising the country is going to be so difficult. And we need an all-of-the-above approach to, to finding a pathway that will reduce emissions, while ensuring our way of life is protected,” he says.

To be fair, O’Brien is undoubtedly genuine in his view that nuclear power is vital to balancing an electricity grid heavily dependent on the variable source of wind and solar. He also is quite possibly right and likely constrained in what he can say, in the absence of a formal, agreed policy position.

The opposition is constrained, too, by its internal divisions. Sweeney cites a recent example, from last month’s Liberal National Party Queensland convention, “where there was a motion to support nuclear and [state party leader David] Crisafulli just slapped it down”.

The minister for climate change and energy, Chris Bowen – who O’Brien shadows – was not at all constrained in his articulation of Labor policy in a speech to business economists on Tuesday this week.

“I’ll say it simply: nuclear power for Australia doesn’t stack up,” he told them.

“We hear a lot about small modular reactors. In some ways SMRs are small. Their output is low: 300MW compared to around 2GW for many power stations. In other ways they are not small. Conservative estimates put their cost at $5 billion. Likely much more.

“Five billion dollars for 300MW is a lot of dollars, for not many megawatts,” said Bowen.

The fact is, however, it is difficult to establish the cost for SMR power because, as Mark Ho says, with only two exceptions in China and Russia, “they actually haven’t finished building them yet”.

Still, he says, if the numbers provided by the major developers are to be believed, SMRs could produce electricity at very low cost.

“NuScale has said that they could provide a 900 megawatt plant … for about $US4 billion.”

That is, about 40 per cent of the cost claimed by Bowen.

In any case, says Ho, “I don’t really understand why a speculator price is a justification to keep the ban on nuclear power. It really should be market decides, rather than politics decides.”

The same argument was made by Coalition senators in a report from yet another parliamentary inquiry, which came down last week.

The impetus for this one was a private member’s bill introduced last year by a Nationals senator and implacable foe of renewable energy, Matt Canavan, and co-sponsored by eight other conservatives. Its purpose, Canavan told the Senate, was to remove the bans on nuclear power “because that would be the best way to take advantage of future technological developments that could see nuclear energy as the most competitive carbon free option to produce electricity”.

Two pieces of Commonwealth legislation prohibit nuclear power in Australia. They are the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act, and they prevent the construction or operation of nuclear facilities for power generation, as well as facilities for the fabrication of nuclear fuel, uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of nuclear waste.

A further complication is that the three large east coast states, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, also have legislation prohibiting the construction of nuclear plants, while Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory have legislation that prohibits the transport or disposal of nuclear waste.

Canavan’s bill was duly shunted to a committee, and when it reported back, it was, to no one’s surprise, split.

The majority recommended the bans remain, citing eight reasons: that “next generation” nuclear technology was unproven; that expert evidence held it would take 10 or 15 years to come online, by which time it would be unnecessary because Australia would have hit its 83 per cent emissions reduction target; that it was inflexible in its output; that it posed risks to human health and the environment; that it required vast quantities of water for cooling; that it created national security risks because neighbouring nations might suspect we would make nuclear weapons, and might in response target us; that it lacked a social licence and that renewables were cheaper.

Coalition members produced a dissenting report arguing, among other things, that countries with more nuclear power tended to have lower electricity costs; that many other nations were moving ahead with SMRs; that international data showed vastly more people died from accidents or pollution related to coal, gas and even wind generation than from nuclear and that, as a result of the AUKUS agreement, Australia already was buying into SMRs, albeit on submarines rather than on land.

As to the issues of cost and the amount of time it might take to build nuclear power stations the Coalition members argued: “Even if the critics are right, they do not make for a sufficient reason to ban nuclear energy. Politicians or regulators are not in the best place to judge the efficiency of different investments. That should be something left to businesses,” they wrote.

Regardless of the relative merits of the competing arguments, what mattered was what always matters in politics: the numbers. And the government had the numbers on the committee, just as it has the numbers in the parliament. So the ban on nukes stays, so long as Labor and the anti-nukes who dominate the cross benches hold power.

And they hold power so long as public opinion is with them.

On that front, much has been made in conservative media of an opinion poll taken in May, which found 45 per cent of voters either strongly or somewhat supported nuclear power as a domestic energy source, with 23 per cent opposed and the rest undecided. It also found 51 per cent support for removing the bans on nuclear energy.

The poll was commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia, a body that has long supported the nuclear industry, but the questions asked were pretty straightforward.

It would be interesting to see the results of a poll that asked voters if they would like to see a nuclear plant or waste facility in their electorate. Because you can bet that’s the scare campaign nuclear opponents would mount if the opposition formally adopted the position Dutton, O’Brien, and the conservative members of that committee have intimated.

And in that case, you really have to wonder whether the endorsement of such prominent supporters as Gina Rinehart, Tony Abbott, Warren Mundine and Andrew Liveris and the power of the IPA or even the Murdoch media would sway many votes.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 19, 2023 as "Nuclear confusion".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING