Vikki Campion: Nuclear energy could solve cost of living crisis

In Australia, the basics you can’t live without – shelter, power and food – are becoming dearer. But we are choosing poverty rather than to use one of our greatest mineral gifts, writes Vikki Campion.

We don’t have an energy crisis – and we don’t have a coal, natural gas or uranium shortage.

We are choosing to give poverty a shot instead of embracing nuclear, making this experience a leadership crisis, not a cost-of-living crunch.

We are refusing to use one of our greatest mineral gifts – uranium – to instead embrace the absurd narration of the Labor Party to make us a “renewable superpower”, spending $20bn of taxpayers’ money on transmission towers ($78bn in total), as activist shareholders shut down power plants earlier than planned, with no new base-load power coming on to the grid.

Today a morbid window opens on our future. From today, the UK, which stopped drilling for gas or mining coal, and Germany, which shut down nuclear to become reliant on a madman for gas, bring in onerous new restrictions as the power crunch spreads from industry to the home.

Germany will be rationing hot water – to one hour a day in some municipalities – public buildings and offices cannot be heated above 19C, and street lights will be dimmed.

During the energy crisis European families are having to use candles to warm themselves writes Vikki Campion.

Each load of washing in the UK will cost $AU4.10 to wash and dry. A hot shower will be $3.60. An electric heater will be $2.68 per hour.

The poorest people suffer the most. The social media sensation sweeping through students in these countries is how to build a “room heater” with a few terracotta pots and four tea lights.

As they have discovered, the alternative to coal and gas is not renewables – it’s candles.

For a family with toilet-training children who need linens, clothes, and themselves to be frequently washed, just staying hygienic will leave less for groceries.

Any mother with a winter newborn will be unable to heat her home or change her baby in comfort.

I doubt any politicians wash their own towels, but drying them on an indoor rack in the New England winter takes 36 hours.

Washing lines in winter may be the option option if its too exepnsive to run the dryer.

Where we feel pain at a household level is at the checkout. Once the bills are paid, food comes from what little is left over. This will inevitably change diets to lentils and rice, not because we are inspired by a Kardashian cleanse, but because that is all people can afford.

In Australia, the basics you can’t live without – shelter, power and food – are becoming dearer.

This week Labor told us we would have historically high gas prices for years, cast doubt over the future of any new gas developments in Australia, and refused to acknowledge that early closure of coal-fired power plants puts our grid at risk.

The answer, they say, is more wind and solar.

They tell us it is much cheaper, yet our electricity bills go up yearly.

You are pilloried when you mitigate the madness by proposing nuclear, even when high-efficiency, low-emissions (HELE) coal is the obvious alternative.

Senator Penny Wong could not name one country in Question Time in the Senate that installed solar and wind power and got cheaper electricity.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong. Picture: Keely Barnes

“I’m happy to ask the minister if there are examples worldwide of what we also see in Australia,” she said, apparently unaware that even in our renewables centre of the ACT, parents in the playground struggle to keep their winter energy bills below $1000.

When Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen asks who would want nuclear in their electorate, he forgets no one asked us if we wished for giant wind factories and expensive transmission lines stamping out our biodiversity and productive agricultural land.

In Bowen’s tone-deaf attack on former resources minister Keith Pitt this week for criticising the Paris agreement, he cited North Korea as an example to be followed.

Look at nuclear. America has it, Canada has it, and Asia has it.

We join only the great economy of Antarctica as a continent without a nuclear power station.

Overseas, nuclear is the safest form of power with the least deaths – more people have fallen off roofs and died installing solar panels.

Between 1965 and 2018, the world spent $2 trillion on nuclear compared to $2.3 trillion on solar and wind. By the end of it, nuclear produced twice as much energy than solar and wind.

I would rather have a small modular nuclear reactor in my backyard, than the hundreds of wind towers proposed.

Turkey Point, one of three nuclear power plants in Florida . Picture: Tim Chapman

Between soaring interest rates and electricity, petrol and food prices, there is enough political ammunition for this to be a one-term Labor government. The one thing that will deliver them a second term is if the Coalition gives nuance to the government’s position, which is causing all this pain.

Leadership is taking a researched stand and offering an educated solution.

Queensland Senator Matt Canavan put up a Private Member’s Bill this week to remove the commercial ban on nuclear – and at least nine Coalition senators had the epiphany to lead and fight for the solution.

It took only 10 mainly Green and Democrat senators to ban commercial nuclear technology in 1998. Maybe just nine today can inspire the change we need.