Peter Dutton’s nuclear push makes sense, but it’s politically risky

Chris Bowen and Andrew Forrest ‘spruik green hydrogen but viable technology to produce it profitably does not yet exist’. Picture: Squadron Energy

Many politicians trip up on the uncritical support of media backers.

Think Prime Minister Anthony’s Albanese’s voice referendum, Scott Morrison’s national cabinet that gave Labor premiers equal footing with the then PM, and Bill Shorten’s decision to take money from self-funded retirees during his ultimately unsuccessful 2019 election campaign. The Nine newspapers, ABC and The Guardian thought all were great ideas. Voters decided otherwise.

Earlier, many here and at the then Fairfax papers and ABC loved former prime minister Paul Keating’s big picture: the republic, reconciliation, and engagement with Asia. But voters in 1996 preferred the simpler ambitions of John Howard.

Yet it was Howard who risked all on a new tax – the GST – at his first re-election bid in 1998. Now a Coalition leader wants to risk all from opposition as Peter Dutton campaigns for nuclear power.

Howard also looked at the nuclear issue in 2006-07 but eventually ditched the idea as too expensive and politically risky. Nuclear supporters should go back and read the 294-page formal report presented in 2007, titled Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia. Much of it holds true today.

This newspaper’s columnists Nick Cater and Chris Kenny are supporters of nuclear, as are Sky News Australia’s night time hosts Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt. The Daily Telegraph’s James Morrow is on board.

Little has been published in support of the nuclear option at the Nine papers, The Guardian, the ABC or commercial television news.

Herald Sun national weekend political editor James Campbell highlighted the diversity of opinion available at News Corp last Sunday when he described Dutton’s advocacy of nuclear – revealed on page one of The Australian the previous Monday, March 4 – as “madness on steroids”.

“You’d have thought that a mob that so easily unpicked the lead of the Yes case at the voice referendum would understand that support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition,” Campbell wrote.

He asked how making itself the issue with an expensive plan to build nuclear reactors would sit with a likely campaign on Labor’s cost-of-living failures.

Jennifer Hewett in The Australian Financial Review chimed in on March 12. She wondered whether the main political dividend of Dutton’s strategy might by helping to keep the Coalition’s junior partner, the Nationals, in the tent on net zero by 2050, as rural communities rebel against building tens of thousands of kilometres of poles and wires across regional Australia.

This column supports the logic of Australia, with the world’s largest reserves of uranium, eventually overturning its ban on nuclear power. The nation’s attitude to mining, exporting and using uranium has long been illogical.

As former editor David Armstrong used to say in this newspaper, the ALP’s former position essentially believed in good and bad uranium. Good uranium came from Labor’s three approved mines – Ranger, Nabarlek and Olympic Dam – and was apparently used only for good when exported. All other uranium was dangerous, at least politically.

The Coalition in office eventually approved the Beverley mine in South Australia but Labor still opposes opening any more new mines.

People who really believe Australia needs to reduce its CO2 emissions but understand the reliability problems of renewables can hardly oppose the only existing technology (other than hydro) to produce baseload power without emissions.

The problem is not the policy Dutton has chosen but the politics. This column doubts the Coalition will actually go to an election fighting for nuclear power and expects it to change course, as Howard did in 2007.

Sky News Australia’s pro-nuclear hosts reacted as one on Wednesday night at the first hint of media hostility to nuclear. Kenny at 5pm, Credlin an hour later and then Bolt all raged against ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson’s hectoring interview on Tuesday night with opposition climate and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien. It was just a hint of what will come if Dutton pushes on.

The Australian’s Paul Kelly picked the politics correctly and early in a November 2021 piece headlined “Why nuclear power for Australia is just a grand fantasy”.

Discussing the commitment of many countries to expand nuclear power to meet net zero, he wrote: “Civil nuclear power in Australia would be an intergenerational, whole of government project that would require long-run political bipartisanship. It would never be established amid an energy policy war between the Coalition and Labor.”

Labor would invoke Chernobyl and Fukushima in the biggest scare campaign since Work Choices. Kelly rejected the idea the AUKUS submarine deal could assist in developing a nuclear industry.

He quoted Morrison saying he only decided on AUKUS because the technical advice showed the project could be delivered without a domestic nuclear industry.

Yet Dutton, O’Brien and their media backers are correct in their assessment of Energy Minster Chris Bowen’s total reliance on renewables. The International Energy Agency – no global warming sceptic – has specifically said a full renewable grid is not deliverable with existing technologies.

Bowen and billionaire mate Twiggy Forest spruik green hydrogen but viable technology to produce it profitably does not yet exist. That’s why Twiggy, who bags nuclear, is travelling the world looking for government subsidies.

Bowen also fails to discuss how the cost of a single nuclear reactor and the time needed to build it compare with Snowy 2.0. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s “battery for the nation” is likely to cost $20bn rather than the original forecast of $2bn and take 10 years to build rather than the original estimate of four years.

This column reported in February 2022 former Energy Security Board chief Kerry Schott saying Australia needed another 20 such pumped hydro projects to firm up the grid. That could build a lot of nuclear capacity given the four newly commissioned reactors at the United Arab Emirates Barakah project were built in 10 years for $US20bn by its Korean contractor.

The original plan for grid firming in Australia was to establish gas peaking plants that are less carbon intensive than coal, and can be turned on and off quickly. Having signed up to such plans under the Gillard Labor government, the Greens quickly backflipped against gas.

The Coalition should fight the politics of renewables on gas firming and drive a wedge through the green movement on the damage large wind projects, city-sized solar array plans and the network build are doing to the natural environment. Former Greens leader Bob Brown has already criticised Tasmanian wind projects for the environmental damage they cause.

Media supporters of nuclear point to a Newspoll on February 26 showing 55 per cent overall support for small modular nuclear reactors. Support was highest among 18-to-34 year-olds at 65 per cent. Critics point out this technology does not exist yet and O’Brien is now talking about full-size reactors.

As more voters realise shutting coal, rejecting gas and trying to build storage will cost a bomb and shut manufacturing, nuclear power may become more palatable. But moving to nuclear would require bipartisan consensus and probably nationalisation of the entire electricity system.