The Coalition is gambling on nuclear. Towns such as Lithgow are ground zero

Main Street, Lithgow, is a waning shrine to its former self. This town of coal and iron ore, pottery and armaments was once so big that by the end of the 19th century, it had a brewery. By the beginning of the 20th, it had built a picture palace, such was the demand from the steel mills and mines surrounding it.

Now it has dozens of vacant shopfronts and a smattering of residents on its high street who describe it as neglected, depressed and struggling to varying degrees.

Coal-fired Mount Piper Power Station, west of Lithgow, is now a proposed site for a nuclear plant.Credit: James Brickwood

If the Coalition gets its way, it will also have a nuclear power plant.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to bring nuclear to the centre of the Blue Mountains is either foolhardy or worth the risk, depending on who you talk to in this divided town that straddles water catchments 150 kilometres west of Sydney.

Dutton’s plan for seven nuclear power plants, mostly in Coalition or marginal electorates including Lithgow and the Hunter in NSW, will require not only a Coalition election victory but a majority in both chambers of parliament, billions of dollars in investment and a decade of planning.

The proposal is as optimistic as it is ambitious. However, the Liberal leader is gambling that it will pay off in electorates that are older, economically vulnerable and increasingly anxious about the sight of wind farms and solar panels across their landscapes, regardless of the environmental benefits.

“The last time I walked down the street I counted 28 empty shops,” said Lithgow resident Merridy Cairn-Duff, who is preparing to leave the town she has called home for the past six years after struggling to find work.

“Anything that can bring in jobs is going to be good, but I think you are still going to find a lot of opposition.”

The opposition landed swiftly on Wednesday, not just from Dutton’s rivals in Labor, who ruled out lifting a nuclear prohibition on energy production in NSW, but from within his own political alliance, including state Nationals MP Paul Toole, who said the proposal raised “more questions than answers”.

“This could take 20 years, there will be several elections in between, so you have to ask the question: is it reality or is it fiction?” Toole said.

Lithgow resident Merridy Cairn-Duff.Credit: James Brickwood

Andrew Gee is the federal member for Calare, which covers Lithgow. The former Nationals representative turned independent released a dozen questions of his own on Wednesday afternoon.

“Why weren’t the Lithgow area communities consulted before this announcement was made?” he said.

Dutton has been invited to Lithgow by Gee and the town’s Mayor Maree Statham, who has made clear she thinks the town should be “a nuclear-free zone”.

Some residents are not convinced it should stay that way.

Victor Smith and Mark Hawkins at High Street Music shop in Lithgow, which is run by Hawkins.Credit: James Brickwood

“Part of me says, well, it does make some sense. There is certainly information around the place that says nuclear is a reasonable form of power production – it is environmentally no worse than coal,” said Mark Hawkins, who manages High Street Music on Main Street.

“The other part of me says: not in my backyard. Even though it’s a reliable energy, we are all faced with the issues of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and places like that.”

The nuclear disasters that decimated parts of Pennsylvania in 1979 and Ukraine in 1986, as well as the more recent meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, are all raised as a threat by half a dozen residents of Lithgow, not least because the plant at Mount Piper would sit near the edge of a water catchment that flows through to the 6 million residents of Sydney.

But so is the prospect of wind farms and solar panels dotting the landscape – fuelled by an increasingly aggressive social media campaign against renewable energy sources – and a preference for preserving the aesthetics of particular farming communities over broader environmental benefits for the rest of the country.

“I’d rather see the ugly building being reused for nuclear than have acres of pine trees knocked down for wind turbines,” said Hawkins.

The divide is about both optics and generations. As in many regional areas, the dwindling youth population is more concerned about the risk to their future than their parents and grandparents’ visual amenities.

“If there’s a fallout in the balance with nature – that’s quite scary,” said TAFE student Sienna Mansfield.

In the 1920s, Lithgow was described as “a transplanted pocket of Britain’s industrial Black Country” for its smattering of coal mines, steel mills and six pubs that were filled daily with weary miners, many of them from England’s north.

Sienna Mansfield and Jamie Beifus on Main Street in Lithgow.Credit: James Brickwood

But a century earlier, it had different British visitors, including a young Charles Darwin, who first saw platypuses near Wallerawang, just outside Lithgow – an animal that helped the naturalist define his theory of evolution.

“Certainly, it is a most extraordinary animal,” Darwin wrote in 1836. “What would the disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple and yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought, so the one hand has surely worked over the whole world.”

Today, Wallerawang is less known for its platypuses and more for its power station, a decommissioned thermal coal plant that drew its cooling water from Lake Wallace and Thompsons Creek dam.

But many Lithgow residents are pragmatic about the cycle of boom and bust, and long-term environmental concerns sometimes come second to the next paycheck.

“It’s a bit of a one-horse town as far as employment opportunities,” said Hawkins.

The Coalition is betting on the next horse being nuclear.

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