The Liberals are partly to blame for the predictable bashing that Peter Dutton’s slowly-evolving nuclear policy has taken from all the usual ideologically-blinkered suspects.
When Labor put Australia on the dangerous path of a renewables-only energy system — which no other country is dumb enough to countenance — the Liberals stuck to a non-nuclear, fossil fuel preference.
Now, with an election over the horizon, they want to convince the nation that nuclear is the solution to the inadequacies of Labor’s strategy. It’s a big ask.
Nuclear power is a big idea, and the right one for Australia, but it will take years to satisfy the doubters in what is an eye-glazingly complex debate.
However, the coming Federal election will not be a referendum on nuclear power, as some are claiming.
The cost-of-living crisis will see to that. The immediate effects of that lingering wound and the Albanese Government’s inability to treat it will dominate voters’ decisions.
Unfortunately, the election contest is likely to be resolutely negative on both sides, riddled with scare campaigns like the one around Medicare rolled out this week by spendthrift Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
It was obvious that Labor would resort to Mediscare again about a month ago when taxpayer-funded Medicare advertising began appearing in the media, for no apparent reason.
Many voters might not have taken much notice of the ads among the plethora of other election material masquerading as necessary government communications, for which the Labor Party flicks you the bill.
It was part of their usual slick practice of creating a narrative on which to base a political strategy. First tell people how wonderful Medicare is — which everyone knew already — and then frighten them that someone will take it away.
Expect lots more of the same up to polling day. Which brings us to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher. How dumb does she think we are?
The day before the delivery of Jim Chalmers’ big-spending MYEFO, she joined in trying to deflect the bad news they knew was coming.
Gallagher began with claims of “an additional $48 billion in unavoidable or legacy spending since we came to government” — which she has obviously been unable to fix over three years — before getting really creative.
“Now, the biggest risk facing the Budget and the biggest risk facing Australians right now is Peter Dutton’s nuclear scheme,” Gallagher said.
“His own costings, the Liberal Party’s own costings show that even though nuclear power plants are decades away, Australians will be paying for it straight away. Higher bills, fewer jobs, a hit to growth and worse for the environment.”
This is from a Government that says it would take too long even to start building a nuclear future for it to be of any value.
So how could it possibly be a threat “right now” to Labor’s Budget?
Even on their over-blown rhetoric about construction timelines, where’s a threat to any Budget within decades, even if their verballing of the Liberal costings were true? Which it isn’t.
None of Gallagher’s misinformation was useful for those Australians trying to make sense of whether Dutton’s plan helps them, their children or their children.
But if the detail in the nuclear arguments is a bit hard for some people, maybe they should just evaluate the language being used.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen persistently refers to “reliable” renewables when he is attacking nuclear. But every sentient being realises that wind and solar energy are anything but reliable.
We all know the sun shines usefully on us for half the day and the wind often isn’t blowing. And that mountains of batteries can run cities for just a few hours, when wind and sunlight droughts can last for many days.
That’s only one part of Bowen’s deception. The other is when he says nuclear is uncommercial because financiers are not queuing up to bankroll plants in Australia.
Once again, highly deceptive. Bowen refuses to lift the national moratorium on nuclear power, thereby ensuring that no banker can take an interest in funding it.
If Labor truly wanted an honest debate on Australia’s energy future it would have agreed to the Coalition’s attempts to have the ban lifted.
The Howard government instituted it in 1998 for reasons that are now largely forgotten. Why it happened is a morality tale about the sad state of our politics.
Back then, the Coalition government wanted to build a new research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney, replacing one in operation since 1958, to support the nation’s vital nuclear medicine needs.
But Labor and the Greens opposed it on ideological grounds. To secure the essential reactor, the government had to agree to a Greens amendment, trading the life-saving facility for a national ban on nuclear power.
If the new reactor had remained blocked by the dog-in-the-manger approach of Labor and the Greens, the future of the critical nuclear medicine industry would have been imperilled.
In 1998, the nation luxuriated in cheap energy courtesy of abundant coal and gas, and there was no interest in future-proofing power supplies with nuclear.
So a deal was done, the Greens amendment was passed with less than half an hour’s debate — and we’re still suffering the consequences of such crappy Senate politics.
Labor doesn’t want to drop the nuclear ban because it ties the nation’s hands on the issue. That simple.
If it agreed, the commercial sector — including those 14 major global banks that have pledged to finance the tripling of nuclear power generation by 2050 — would be able to make rational decisions.
The two deceptions — claims that an all-renewables system could ever be reliable and the blackmailed ban — should be enough for all Australians to question anything that falls from Bowen’s smirking mouth.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable was spot on the money when she demanded the ban be lifted when addressing Labor’s fatuous nuclear energy inquiry on Tuesday.
She pointed to the irrational dichotomy Labor created when it embarked on the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines deal while still retaining policies against the mining of the uranium which fuels them and the use of nuclear power by Australia anywhere but at sea.
Constable rightly pointed to the uncertainty about the Australian Energy Market Operator’s ability to deliver reliable, affordable energy as Australia decarbonises towards 2050.
“Without firm dispatchable power such as that from nuclear or carbon capture and storage, the system is extremely weather-dependent and costly to achieve close to 100 per cent decarbonisation,” the representative of the nation’s biggest miners said.
“The last 20 per cent to completely decarbonise is extremely difficult. Nuclear gets us there at a lower total system cost.”
Frankly, I’d rather trust the corporate hardheads that Constable represents, such as BHP and Rio, to understand the complexities of our energy future than a storied fool like Bowen.
While the two reports by Frontier Economics — on which the Coalition’s nuclear plan is based — were a significant advance in the debate because they shredded Bowen’s credibility on the true cost of the renewables transition, the second one has significant flaws in its application to WA.
Frontier’s use of a Levelised Full System Costs of Electricity approach showed up the flaws in the simplistic analysis of comparative energy costs in the GenCost report advanced by the CSIRO and AEMO, which are blindly relied on by nuclear’s detractors.
“You can’t compare renewable energy and nuclear power generation and costs like apples to apples,” Frontier’s Danny Price says. “Including nuclear power in our energy mix is cheaper — by up to 44 per cent — for Australians in the medium-term future.”
Frontier was able to model the east coast’s National Energy Market because it is a discrete, integrated system covering around 90 per cent of Australia’s electricity consumption.
The titles of both reports clearly say they apply to the NEM and the detail inside extrapolates the findings of that modelling to WA’s fragmented system, which was not modelled.
Frankly, with all the time the Liberals had to formulate their policy and with the importance of WA to its electoral prospects, that’s not good enough.
While there’s nothing in Frontier’s latest report suggesting its assumptions for WA are wrong, more work is needed to complete the case for a nuclear plant at Collie which underpins renewables, decreasingly firmed by gas, in the medium-term.
But its unlikely to be front of mind for most West Australians heading to the ballot box.
A poll this week by the left-leaning Guardian showed that only 31 per cent of Australians think the nation is on the right economic track. Joe Biden became a dead duck when his figures hit 27 per cent.
Labor’s blinkered approach to both the inadequacies of a renewables-only strategy and the crucial role for baseload nuclear power just reinforce the picture of a government struggling with the big issues.