Nuclear refuseniks have turned us into a global pariah
When Donald Trump speaks of an energy renaissance for the US he’s referring to nuclear power generation. Likewise his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, who is equally enthusiastic, calls it a “golden age”. But apparently Canberra knows something no one else does. It’s all economic fantasy, Albanese claims.
“See if you can find someone who’s investing in it,” he said last week when asked about it in Britain, which recently announced plans to build more than a dozen new reactors. “No one’s been able to do that, which is why the Coalition went to an election saying that taxpayers would have to do it, because the private sector, it just doesn’t add up for what is necessary for the immediate needs.”
While it may be empirically true to state that investors aren’t knocking down the doors in Australia to build nuclear reactors, it is so for only one reason: it is illegal to build them. This is the fig leaf of obscurity that the government hides behind when it comes to sensible debate about nuclear energy.
The primary blockage to a civil nuclear industry isn’t necessarily an economic one. At least one nuclear power company – Rolls-Royce – believes small modular reactors will be more than viable in Australia, and provided Peter Dutton a private briefing to prove it. It is contracted to construct the reactors for the AUKUS nuclear-powered subs and says the British government would support development of a civil nuclear industry in Australia.
This isn’t even about community antagonism any more. Polling shows significant support for small-scale nuclear as a clean energy source, particularly among younger voters. The obstruction has always been an issue of political determination. Why Dutton suddenly ditched SMRs for large-scale plants is still a mystery to many of his colleagues and is one of the key reasons the broader policy failed. Any new Coalition nuclear policy will be confined to the emerging technology of SMRs.
Labor’s position is self-reinforcing, based on an assumption that the longer Labor remains in power, the more remote the possibility of a nuclear power industry becomes.
This is also not quite right. If it took another decade for the Coalition to be in a position to change policy – assuming it may be that long before it returns to office – nuclear still could be realised as a post 2040 proposition.
By then the financial case presumably would be more attractive as development of small-scale reactors reaches a greater level of market maturity just about the same time an entire fleet of comparatively short-life wind turbines needed replacing.
It is ironic that while the Prime Minister was in New York talking about Australia’s 2035 emissions reduction target and the renewables-only path to get there, Trump and Starmer were inking a new deal to rapidly expand nuclear power technology sharing.
The level of global investment going into development of next-generation small-scale reactors is expected to command a large slice of the estimated $1 trillion forecast to be pumped into all nuclear energy under a net-zero scenario by mid-century. The technology focus for SMRs already has shifted to the next-generation advanced modular reactors. AMR plants are a subset of SMRs. The difference is they don’t require water to cool them. This is already being framed as a game changer for nuclear technology.
But in the pursuit of more nuclear power, fuel becomes an issue. And the one thing that causes US energy officials to lose sleep at night is where it’s going to get its hands on all the uranium it will require for its nuclear renaissance.
Surprisingly, the US doesn’t enrich enough uranium domestically to meet its demand and relies on imports for enriched product. Some of it even comes from Russia.
It’s less surprising, then, that US officials have been making overtures to Australia about supply chains of uranium considering Australia holds a third of the world’s deposits. At the moment we export about 8 per cent of it.
It even has been suggested Australia develop an enriching facility of its own to supply the US with fuel-grade uranium rather than just yellowcake that requires enriching elsewhere. But of course that too is illegal in Australia.
Could Albanese be convinced to go down this path? Unlikely.
But adding uranium to the critical minerals list, and the possibility of processing before export, certainly would add a sweetener to any deal he hopes to secure with Trump on tariffs or defence spending when the two leaders meet in a couple of weeks. The reality is that demand for Australian uranium is only going to increase if the global trend continues as forecast. The question for the government is: How does it respond?
Not only is the rest of the developed world redoubling on nuclear, some of Australia’s closest neighbours are moving in the same direction. This has obvious regional strategic and security implications.
The Lowy Institute flagged non-proliferation concerns in Southeast Asia almost 20 years ago when it was evident that Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries in the region were expressing an interest in nuclear power generation. China is in a competition with Canada for a foothold into Indonesia on the development of a civil nuclear energy program.
Singapore-based company Thorcon already has applied for approval to build Indonesia’s first nuclear power plant north of Jakarta. The Philippines isn’t far behind, having signed a nuclear energy technology-sharing agreement with the US two years ago.
Ironically, it has been an Australian nuclear engineer from the University of Sydney, Helen Cook, who has been helping Manila draft its new nuclear energy security act.
Singapore also is studying whether to deploy SMR plants for its own energy use. The consequence of Australia’s obduracy may become gradually apparent over time considering the demand for electricity globally is expected to double by 2025 as power needs for data storage, artificial intelligence and electric vehicles increase exponentially.
The question Australia may well be left asking itself in 2050 is whether it dealt itself out of the knowledge game long ago. If the global trend towards nuclear expansion continues and is realised in our own regional backyard, Australia’s position becomes increasingly difficult to justify and, frankly, starts to look just odd.
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Anthony Albanese continues to lampoon that which much of the rest of the developed world is re-embracing and many developing economies are pursuing: nuclear power. Having withdrawn red-faced from Labor’s juvenile three-headed fish campaign, the Prime Minister and his Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, continue to engage in a counterfactual hoax.