Peter Dutton’s expensive nuclear folly another deplorable outcome after ditching carbon pricing scheme

The Coalition has pledged to build seven nuclear power plants across Australia, including at Loy Yang in Victoria. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

If voters decide they want to have nuclear power to achieve net zero by 2050, it won’t come cheap: higher debt and taxes and the heavy hand of government ownership that has bequeathed money pits like the NBN and Snowy 2.0.

There is no other way because private capital won’t go anywhere near this risky energy play, with huge upfront costs, very long lead times and the madness that has pervaded our energy transition to meet international obligations.

Peter Dutton is all the way with enriched uranium, with details to follow, presumably on costs, benefits and how we’ll cover the period before the first power plants are online in 2035 and 2037.

A new government business enterprise may be “off budget”, as many of today’s green industry and decarbonisation measures are, but their funding and finan­cing won’t be a free lunch.

This is pure folly with taxpayers’ money at this time, in this way.

The Albanese government’s hyperbolic responses have to be taken in light of the coming electoral contest and its own interventionists boondoggles. But they’re not off the mark in raising the fiscal dangers and multiple risks of creating an industry from scratch.

We’re in a new phase of the carbon wars, when what the nation needs is bipartisanship on emissions reduction targets, fewer regulatory barriers to launching new generation projects and getting the poles and wires in place.

The Opposition Leader is proposing public ownership of the seven new power plants.

Doesn’t he lead the party of free enterprise and small government?

Rather than trusting investment decisions by the private sector, Dutton is a late-to-the-party true believer, in this instance, of ministers and government officials deciding which energy projects will proceed and where.

Voters, apparently, keep telling pollsters they want governments to do big things, like the OG Snowy Hydro. The problem is governments keep starting small and end up spending big, while taking a very long time to deliver.

You had the NBN sketched on a napkin during the Rudd era that became a $50bn build; Malcolm Turnbull’s cheeky pumped-hydro redux was going to cost $2bn, with first power in 2021; it’s now priced at $12bn, without transmission costs, and isn’t expected to deliver power to the grid until late 2027.

Think of any defence hardware project or even the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a very different edifice to be sure.

Canberra and cost control are only related through consonant alliteration.

Let’s not stifle the debate because nuclear power deserves its day in the … spotlight.

The bans are outdated, but we should get cost-benefit analysis on the nuclear option, as well as system-wide appraisal of renewables.

In a report in May, the Inter­national Atomic Energy Agency said nuclear power generation matched three of the main objectives of modern energy policy: reduction of carbon emissions, increase in security of supply and predictable generation costs

But it warned of political risks and regulatory hurdles, although public ownership limits the latter.

“New build nuclear power plants are large, complex and capital intensive investments with extended economic lives, and are often preceded by long design, development and construction periods,” the IAEA says.

Be warned and do your homework: “These lengthy phases typically lead to large funding requirements and, ultimately, to extended financing costs.”

Echoing global experts, Origin Energy chief executive Frank Cal­abria told this newspaper’s Energy Nation forum on Wednesday that while nuclear delivers baseload power suitable for a decarbonising market, it is expensive, and the technologies that are scalable at lowest cost today are wind and solar power generation.

Innes Willox sort of welcomed the Coalition’s policy missile, but called for more detail on cost, ­viability and timelines, especially given the delays and cost blowouts in delivering nuclear power in other Western economies.

“With no delivery projected until the middle of the next decade, the proposal does not immediately help with short-term emissions reduction or the cost and reliability of energy in the short term,” Ai Group’s chief said.

Willox argues public ownership of electricity generation in Australia raises some red flags.

“If it effectively renationalises electricity in Australia, there is a risk that private sector investment gets killed off,” he said.

“Using public funds for assets that may be uncommercial means more debt, more taxes or more cuts to other spending priorities.”

It’s hasty and another deplorable product of not having an economy-wide carbon price when we are trying to make the biggest economy-wide energy adjustment we’re ever likely to make.