Whatever else, Peter Dutton’s uncosted plan to build government-owned nuclear reactors on the sites of seven coal-fired power plants scattered across every mainland state is a huge political gamble. Get set for the mother of all NIMBY scare campaigns about house prices, waste storage and China Syndrome accidents.

There is a case for considering zero emissions nuclear power to help with the decades-long challenge of decarbonising Australia’s fossil-fuel-intensive economy as part of a technology-neutral energy approach to generating reliable baseload power and firmed wind and solar generation. But the Coalition’s nuclear option is driven more by a return to the climate wars with an atomic twist.