Coalition delivers the same old tired nuclear talking points at COP28

“Today I am happy to announce that a reelected Coalition government will, at its first COP after being returned to office, sign the nuclear pledge and return Australia to where it belongs, standing alongside its friends and allies,” opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien told world climate summit/increasingly dark joke at humanity’s expense COP28 on Saturday.

He pledged that a reelected Coalition government would triple nuclear energy output and overturn Australia’s nuclear energy moratorium, insisting “no nuclear, no net zero”.

And so, with a heavy sigh, Crikey once again delves into what our politics editor Bernard Keane has described as “the single most boring and ossified ritual in Australian public policy”.

A ‘sensible’ debate

It always starts with a demand for a “sensible” debate around the topic. Going back to John Howard’s years as prime minister (he called for this not once but twice) and to pick a handful of examples since: Then-foreign minister Julie Bishop in 2014, the then-assistant science minister Karen Andrews in 2015 and then-candidate Warren Mundine in 2019. Just last week, troublemaking former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon called on the Albanese government to end the ban on nuclear energy. This is not to mention a swathe of conservative media figures adding their voices to the choir over the years.

With dreary inevitability, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton reached for the old hymn book in his budget reply this year, arguing (all together now): “Any sensible government must consider small ­modular nuclear as part of the ­energy mix.”

Time is money and also money is money

As we’ve long reported — long, long reported — there are several barriers to nuclear power in Australia, primarily that the whole thing is incredibly expensive because Australia doesn’t have any nuclear infrastructure. As clean energy investor and man with a zeal for the teal Simon Holmes à Court, who was at O’Brien’s address, puts it, “it is a pretty easy pledge to sign because three times zero is zero”.

Nuclear power plants take a very long time to build — as Australia’s former chief scientist Alan Finkel told the Nine papers in August, it’s highly unlikely Australia could open a nuclear power plant before the early 2040s, a delay the country can ill afford if it is to dramatically reduce emissions as quickly as it needs to.

On top of this is the eye-watering price. According to research from the Department of Climate Change and Energy released in September this year, the cost of replacing coalmine sites with small nuclear reactors would be $387 billion.

Even former chair of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Dr Ziggy Switkowski, who undertook a review on the viability of nuclear power for the Howard government in 2007 and is a very big fan of nuclear energy, conceded in 2018 “the window for gigawatt-scale nuclear has closed”:

With requirements for baseload capacity reducing, adding nuclear capacity one gigawatt at a time is hard to justify, especially as costs are now very high (in the range of $5 billion to $10 billion), development timelines are 15+ years, and solar with battery storage are winning the race.

The tax that is not to be named

There is and always has been only one way, in the eyes of Australia’s most credible nuclear spruikers, for nuclear energy to compete with existing energy sources: impose a carbon price.

Switkowski’s 2007 review probably didn’t greatly please Howard, given it found that nuclear became viable compared with coal and gas only if there was a carbon price. Economist and Crikey contributor John Quiggin has also previously argued in favour of nuclear energy in Australia only if it is backed by a carbon price.

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