Not such a clever country without nuclear

An artist's impression of a NuScale small modular reactor.

All over the world, countries are investing in nuclear energy technologies in what has been described as a nuclear power renaissance.

Countries from Britain and Japan to Saudi Arabia are pouring money into the clean baseload energy source in their mission to go carbon neutral without sacrificing energy security.

While this renaissance is happening, however, Australia remains paralysed and impotent thanks to our moratorium on nuclear power – Luddite legislation that was passed more than two decades ago.

While the British government has pledged £385m ($657.7m) to its Advanced Nuclear Fund to help build small modular reactors, advanced modular reactors and high-temperature gas reactors, it is unclear whether our own Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, is even aware that such technologies exist.

Of course, our leaders are happy for Australia to provide the world with uranium to power their clean-energy future. But develop such technology ourselves? Perish the thought.

“It’s too slow and expensive,” Bowen said of nuclear energy in June, not realising, perhaps, that SMRs have more than double the longevity of wind and solar farms while needing less land, less concrete and fewer transmission lines, and they incur less overnight capital costs and far less storage costs. It’s a joke, according to Bowen, perhaps not realising that the first fleet of SMRs could be up and running in Australia in seven years according to estimates by NuScale, a leading international SMR company.

The barrier is not technological, it’s political and, perhaps more deeply, intellectual. And it is part and parcel of a provincial attitude towards innovation in general. While leaders in the rest of the world get on with preparing their nations for the challenges of this century – namely geopolitical instability and climate change – Australia is trapped in restrictions we created ourselves.

This is not simply a matter of armchair theorising and does not apply only to nuclear energy.

According to ongoing analysis conducted by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of International Development, Australia performs abysmally in terms of economic complexity, ranking 91st out of 133 countries analysed, just above Namibia and below Laos and Pakistan.

During the past 10 years we’ve slid eight places down the ladder, with our economic complexity being so substandard (when compared with our income, which on a per capita basis ranks as the ninth richest out of 133) that Harvard recommends Australia take the “strategic bets approach” on diversifying exports – the same advice given to countries that are rife with poverty and political instability.

Countries that have high economic complexity all spend vast amounts of money on research and development, understanding that the development of new technologies is the key to unlocking future prosperity. Countries with the largest expenditure on R&D include Israel (5.14 per cent of gross domestic product), South Korea (4.63 per cent) and Japan (3.28 per cent). The so-called “innovation nation”, Australia, spends a measly 0.56 per cent.

Not surprisingly, eight out of the 10 countries that rank highest on the Economic Complexity Index all have domestic nuclear power industries.

“I believe that nuclear power is important as we work towards carbon neutrality while ensuring energy security,” Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura said in a recent television interview. “We are in the direction of planning to increase the overall dependency level in nuclear energy.” (Japan ranks first on the Economic Complexity Index).

At the heart of the Australian economy lies a paradox: we are rich because of our natural resources, but all of this wealth has masked our underdevelopment in other industries. And this lack of development will deliver sluggish economic growth while making us vulnerable to economic coercion from our biggest trading partners.

Australians ought to remember that the world’s most dynamic economies all became that way because they successfully turned ideas into exports. Long-term wealth does not simply arise from digging stuff out of the ground. The US has Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Germany has luxury cars. Switzerland has banking, and Taiwan has computer chips.

In the 1970s, when France adopted nuclear power en masse, a popular slogan was, “In France, we have no oil but we have ideas.” Australia’s national motto could be the reverse. Take away our iron ore, coal, beef, wine and tourism, and our economy is almost entirely self-servicing (Atlassian and CSL notwithstanding). Among the G20 nations, Australia is the dumb rich cousin with a nice backyard.

While Australians may laugh at Borat, the satirical Kazakh character created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the joke is on us. Kazakhstan not only ranks higher in economic complexity than we do; in June this year, while Bowen was dismissing nuclear energy in front of a press gallery in Canberra, a Kazakh delegation was touring South Korean nuclear plants and proceeded to sign up Korean engineers to help build a Kazakh nuclear power industry.

Thoughtful people might disagree on how to reduce carbon emissions, and while some will have more faith in wind and solar to do the job than others, there is no excuse for our moratorium on nuclear energy to continue. Legislation that was passed in 1998 for reasons that make no sense today should be discarded as a matter of urgency.

And regardless of whether Bowen understands the potential of new-generation nuclear technologies, or their feasibility for Australia, no reasonable person in Australia’s parliament should continue to support the moratorium if they genuinely believe climate change is an existential crisis. Nuclear energy is an extraordinarily powerful clean energy source that only the most complacent and anti-intellectual country would cut itself off from.

Nations that are joining the nuclear renaissance include Bangladesh and Turkey, which are building their first nuclear power plants. Contracts have been signed in Poland and Egypt. Legal infrastructure is in place in Jordan and Uzbekistan. Well-developed plans exist in Thailand and Indonesia, and developing plans are under way in Nigeria, Kenya, Laos, Morocco, Algeria, The Philippines and Ghana. Countries that have no plans for a nuclear power industry include Myanmar, Rwanda and Australia.

That the moratorium on nuclear power was passed in this country should be considered an embarrassment. That it persists to this day is a national disgrace.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.