Trouble with going nuclear is the true costs are unclear

The election battlelines have been drawn for Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese ahead of the next federal election.

Some might say a debate on nuclear energy in Australia should have happened 20 years ago.

The reality is we did have the conversation more than 20 years ago and it led to the – ahem – Howard government’s Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act (1998), which expressly prohibits “the granting of a licence for the construction or operation of a nuclear fuel fabrication plant, a nuclear power plant, an enrichment plant; or a reprocessing facilit­y”.

The Coalition’s dreams of carbon-friendly nuclear energy are now upon us. The question is will Peter Dutton, as Monty Burns once said of Homer Simpson’s fat-guy heroics, “turn a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island” or will it be the greatest act of political self-harm since US president William Henry Harrison decided not to wear a coat to his inauguration, caught a cold and died 30 days later.

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act would need to be overturned and it would be reasonable to conclude that the amendment or revocation of that legislation will not occur in the life of this parliament.

So that takes us to 2025 and an assumption the Coalition returns to government with a majority in the lower house or in a minority with a handful of crossbenchers it can rely on to pass legislation.

Let’s say, and I am being kind, a further three years for contracts to be issued. Do we go with the French? There could be an integrity issue there that the more excitable among us might call sovereign risk with the French still fairly upset the Morrison government dudded them on the submarine contracts. Perhaps Australian taxpayers should be more miffed than the French with the $830m coming from Australian government coffers in compensation to French company Naval Group for precisely zero.

It could be the South Koreans. It won’t be the Chinese or the Russians. It could be a private company such as GE, the US-based energy and electrical giant.

The first large-scale nuclear reactor commissioned in the US since the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown in 1979 is Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle, 50km from, Augusta. It is a GE build.

Plant Vogtle’s fourth and final unit came online in April. It is the largest nuclear power plant in the US and the largest supplier of low-carbon electricity. The first two units were commissioned in 1976 and came online a decade later. Preliminary construction of units three and four started in 2009.

The initial budget for stages three and four was $35bn. Costs blew out with a seven-year delay in construction to $53bn. In December last year, the Georgia Public Service Commission announced that the state’s consumers would pay 80 per cent of the cost overruns, effectively a 10 per cent increase on electricity bills across the board for the foreseeable future.

In Somerset, England, Hinkley Point C Power Station remains under construction. The project was announced in 2010 and contracts were signed between the British government and French nationalised energy company EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group in 2012. Soil was turned in 2017.

Hinkley Point C was to come online and contribute 11 per cent to Britain’s electricity grid this year. The date is now projected to be 2029 to 2031. The original construction budget was $25bn. Accord­ing to the latest update from EDF, the total cost will be closer to $80bn.

These extraordinary budget blowouts have occurred in countries where nuclear energy already exists, no legislative impediments are present and where there is a degree of expertise already to be found.

On the available evidence, the lead time between concept, legislation, sites being allocated and passed on federal and state government environmental protections, to construction and commissioning, even under the most optimistic projections., is 25 years. That will take us, more or less, to 2050 before we even begin to decarbonise the economy.

In England, the Hinkley Point C's nuclear power station near Bridgwater remains under contruction.

Of course, Dutton’s nuclear policy relies on a rollout of small modular reactors. As of 2022, there were only three in existence, one on a ship in Arctic Russia that supplies power to 40,000 homes. The others are in China and India. A further 60 are planned around the world but most are at conceptual stage. Six were planned in Utah and heavily subsidised by the US Department of Energy.

Design company NuScale had planned to develop a six-SMR 462-megawatt project with the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and launch it in 2030, but several municipalities pulled out of the project as costs hit the stratosphere.

The project was finally abandoned earlier this year, not for reasons of budget blowouts or construction delays but because the cost of generation by SMR per megawatt hour had ballooned into the unaffordable column.

What we can safely predict as the Coalition rolls out its nuclear energy policy is there will be shrieks of outrage from residents where the big steam stacks are due to be placed. There’ll be scare tactics aplenty and Chernobyl and Fukushima on high rotation in government talking points. The national interest should, but often doesn’t, override the not-in-my-backyard crowd. NIMBY-ism is why we can’t have nice things.

So let’s have the conversation again. We should not act out of fear but examine Australia’s future energy needs with a rational eye.

If Australia is to effectively nationalise nuclear energy as with the NBN and the Snowy project – an idea normally anathema to conservatives – the Opposition Leader needs to explain who is on the hook for cost overruns and budget blowouts. What’s the fallback position if SMRs can’t deliver affordable energy or large-scale reactors are stuck in the mud of construction for decades?

Ultimately, there are only three issues Australians need to consider: will nuclear power provide cheap energy? Will it be reliable? Is it carbon friendly?

As it stands, one out of three is all Dutton’s got.