Can the Voices model help communities fight off nuclear reactors?
By Bianca Hall and Mike Foley
Coal communities across the country – facing the loss of industry, jobs and the social fabric that binds them together – are poised to transition from the fossil fuel that built their histories.
But what the future will look like in towns like Lithgow in NSW and Traralgon in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley is far less certain. Will they pivot to privately owned renewables, or have government-owned and funded nuclear reactor sites imposed on them by a future Coalition government?
Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, where Opposition Leader Peter Dutton wants to build a nuclear reactor.Credit: Joe Armao
Community groups in every site nominated by Peter Dutton as a potential future nuclear site have joined forces to offer their answer to his proposal: no.
Wendy Farmer is president of Voices of the Valley, a community group that formed in the Latrobe Valley after the Hazelwood coal mine fire in 2014, which burned for 45 days and caused health concerns for those living there amid the smoke.
Farmer united community groups from each area nominated for a nuclear plant to campaign together against the plans. Together, they’ve formed an alliance representing seven communities to fight against the proposal, reminiscent of the independent Voices movement that sent Cathy McGowan to federal parliament in 2013 and has since been replicated across the country.
Already, two people are preparing to nominate as independent candidates to take the fight to the next election.
Wendy Farmer protesting outside Darren Chester’s electorate office in Traralgon last month.Credit: Eamon Gallagher
“I’m really hoping that it will show communities that united, we can really make a change,” she says. “We can actually demand what we want as community. To me, it’s really important that we just aren’t dumped on and told ‘this is what’s good for you, and this is what’s going to happen’.”
Kate Hook, who ran as an independent candidate in Calare in central western NSW in 2022, says she’s considering putting her hand up again at the next election against Nationals MP-turned-independent Andrew Gee.
Key to her candidacy, which she would run as a Voices-style campaign, is renewable energy and nuclear. “Is it a bunch of politicians who have just got together and said, ‘Here’s a talking point that will distract from renewable energy’?” she says.
“Because there is already something under way [the switch to renewables], which is an amazing opportunity for this region that we haven’t had in decades, and there’s a risk that that is squandered.”
Kate Hook says renewable energy offers exciting opportunities for regional Australia.
AGL has announced its ambition to transform the sites of its coal-fired power stations in Victoria and NSW – the last of which is due to close in 2035 – into low-carbon energy “hubs” spanning renewable energy generation, big batteries and green tech manufacturing.
Meanwhile, Dutton in June nominated seven regional communities that he said would be home to nuclear reactors under a future Coalition government, at the sites of current or closing coal power plants.
They would be hosted at Lithgow and the Hunter Valley in NSW, Loy Yang in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, Tarong and Callide in Queensland, Collie in Western Australia and Port Augusta in South Australia.
The announcement was made without consultation with the owners of the privately owned coal stations they would replace, according to several well-placed sources.
Unease about Dutton’s nuclear ambition isn’t limited to communities: local MPs are also wary of Dutton’s bid to build reactors on the sites of former coal-fired power plants.
AGL is planning to turn the site of its shuttered Liddell coal-fired power station into a low-carbon industrial energy hub.Credit: Janie Barrett
Bathurst MP Paul Toole, who represents Lithgow in the NSW parliament for the Nationals, has criticised the lack of consultation by the federal opposition over the proposed takeover of the Mount Piper plant, about 20 kilometres north-west of Lithgow.
Rather than commit to the party line, he said he would back the community’s position. “I think the community feels as though they’ve been left in the dark,” Toole said last month. “The announcement lacks detail and raises more questions than answers. I’ll be backing the views of my community 100 per cent.”
Calare MP Andrew Gee, an independent who represents Lithgow in federal parliament, is also a sceptic of the opposition’s nuclear plans who has criticised lack of community consultation.
Nationals-turned-independent MP Andrew Gee has criticised the opposition’s lack of detail about its nuclear plan.Credit: Getty
Gee has a rocky relationship with the opposition. He was elected as a Nationals member to represent Calare in 2016, but quit the party in December 2022 when Nationals leader David Littleproud announced the party would campaign against the Indigenous Voice to parliament in the referendum.
“We need specific information so that we can all fully understand what is proposed for our communities and have certainty about what the impacts will be,” Gee said last month.
Nationals MP Darren Chester, whose Gippsland electorate would be home to a plant at Loy Yang, said the community was more open-minded than the parliament.
“They want a fact-based campaign, based on science not emotion.” Party polling in his electorate found 55 per cent of people supported the proposal, 26 per cent were opposed and the rest undecided.
But locals do have many questions. For one, Mount Piper’s owner EnergyAustralia does not plan to shut the plant, which began supplying power in 1992, until 2040. But the opposition has said its first reactor could be built by 2035, creating uncertainty over the future of Mt Piper and its 300 jobs.
Gippsland MP Darren Chester says people want a fact-based campaign on nuclear.
Jo Lynch, co-ordinator of the Hunter Community Environment Centre, argues the Coalition’s announcement won’t create jobs in the short or even medium term. “Depending on the rate of structural decline in coal, people are going to be needing jobs a lot sooner than 2050,” she said.
Across NSW, about 200 million tonnes of coal ash is stored in unlined dams, with more than half stored in the Hunter and Central Coast. Lynch said given the haphazard storage of coal waste in the state, she had “no confidence at all” in the ability of authorities to safely manage nuclear.
A 1000-megawatt coal plant, the same size as a large-scale nuclear reactor, burns more than 3 million tonnes of coal a year and generates around 300,000 tonnes of ash. Most of this is also stored on site.
Large nuclear reactors have a typical capacity of 1000 megawatts and generate about 30 tonnes of used fuel a year. This includes high-level radioactive waste that is toxic to humans for tens of thousands of years, as well as weapons-grade plutonium.
Nuclear waste is also set to become an issue during the federal election, due by May next year.
The underground nuclear waste storage facility in Finland, which will store spent fuel rods 450 metres beneath the surface.Credit: Posiva
There are no permanent repositories anywhere in the world capable of storing high-level radioactive waste, although Finland and Sweden are preparing to open deep underground storage sites. That means nuclear waste from most plants is sealed off and stored on-site.
The same would happen under the opposition’s plan – until and unless Australia develops a permanent depository that could house waste from reactors and the nuclear submarines that it will build under the AUKUS deal.
“Our argument is that should be where the government decides for the waste from the submarines to be stored,” Dutton said last month. “Australia’s a very safe country in that regard, as you know, and that would be the most sensible way.”
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says nuclear waster could safely be stored in Australia.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Jaimie Yallup Farrant, from Western Australia’s Climate Justice Union, has joined the campaign against nuclear plants after working for years on a transition from coal. The Collie coal plant (identified by the Coalition as a potential nuclear site) is due to close by 2027.
“People in the community have been doing this work for years now,” she said. “This is a distraction to the real work that needs to be done. This is designed to distract and create false debate.”
The community had already identified what transition needs to deliver, she said: affordable housing, affordable and accessible childcare and healthcare, public transport and renewable energy.
“The community has said what it wants … the last thing they want is outsiders coming into Collie and telling them what they want.”
Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the opposition’s plan puts Australia’s renewables future at risk.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the Coalition’s “frolic” was placing investments into renewables at risk.
Renewables are flooding the grid with bursts of cheap power, driving coal plants out of business at a rapid rate. The energy market operator expects 90 per cent of the grid’s coal plants shut by 2035 and all of them gone by 2040.
The renewables building boom promises thousands of regional construction jobs, but investors and big business are increasingly nervous about what path a future federal government will map out for the energy grid.
Major renewables backers have said the opposition’s refusal to endorse Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target, coupled with its warnings that the grid is overly reliant on wind and solar power, is forcing them to reconsider their Australian investment plans.
Bowen told the National Press Club this week that a Coalition government would cause private investment to dry up.
“All these investments and many more like them are at risk because of the policy uncertainty caused by an ill-informed nuclear frolic,” he said.
Nationals leader David Littleproud, acting senior Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie, Gee and Toole were contacted for comment.
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