Nuclear energy fan Dick Smith slams ‘biased’ CSIRO and AEMO

Renowned Australian businessman Dick Smith has backed the Coalition’s nuclear energy push and called on the Albanese government to scrap the ‘absolutely ridiculous’ nuclear moratorium.

Australian businessman Dick Smith in his Terrey Hills, Sydney home office. Picture: Jane Dempster

Renowned Australian businessman Dick Smith has backed the Coalition’s nuclear energy push and called on the Albanese government to scrap the “absolutely ridiculous” nuclear moratorium.

Mr Smith said the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator “misled” the government and were “completely biased” against nuclear energy because they were afraid of “offending the party in power”.

Mr Smith ran a newspaper advertisement spruiking nuclear energy and warning of blackouts in a future of entirely wind and solar power generation.

“Our Prime Minister, (Anthony) Albanese, and our Minister for Energy, (Chris) Bowen, have been misled by the CSIRO and AEMO,” the ad read. “Wind, solar and adequate storage are far more expensive than coal and even more expensive than nuclear.”

The intervention by the former Australian of the Year came as the Albanese government and Coalition locked horns over nuclear energy. The Coalition made it a key plank of its energy policy for the next election while the government said it would take too long and cost too much.

“Nuclear is the Rolls-Royce of power generation,” Mr Smith told The Australian. “It’s the best baseload power you could ever get. To think you could ever run a modern, industrial country – which Australia is – on wind and solar is delusional. It’s simply not possible.

“What you would have to do if you wanted to try and use wind and solar, you’d need the most incredible expenditure in batteries. But if you have a wind drought or unusual cloud cover, the batteries go flat. You have no power.”

Mr Smith said he was confident Labor would eventually reverse its opposition to nuclear energy but urged the party to do so soon.

“Climate change is happening and it’s going to have some dire consequences,” he said. “It’s not going to affect someone my age or even someone of the Prime Minister’s age or Mr Bowen’s age, but it’s going to affect their grandchildren.

“What Labor, at the minimum, should be doing is saying, ‘we’re going to take away the legislation banning it and we’re going to consider it objectively’.

“What they’re doing to our young people at the moment is outrageous, it’s irresponsible.”

Mr Smith dismissed assertions nuclear energy would be too expensive. “It’s quite ridiculous to say we can’t afford nuclear – this is what Mr Bowen says,” he said.

“If Pakistan and Bangladesh can afford nuclear – now those are really poor countries – we can afford nuclear.”

Mr Smith said the CSIRO had exaggerated the cost of nuclear energy and downplayed the cost of large batteries.

“I’m very critical of the CSIRO,” he said. “It used to be a respected organisation.

“What they’ve done with their studies is they exaggerate all the costs of nuclear by looking at the worst-case scenarios everywhere and then they minimised the costs of renewables, and that’s just completely dishonest. They know that Labor has an ideological bent against nuclear and so they don’t want to even consider it.”

He also criticised the AEMO for similar assessments. “The CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator … work together in producing these reports, they are just completely biased.”

A CSIRO spokesman said: “We stand by the data and analyses in the GenCost report … a technology-neutral and policy-agnostic report that provides the cost of building future electricity generation, storage and hydrogen production technologies in Australia.”

An AEMO spokesman said: “AEMO’s ISP outlines what Australia needs to build to keep the lights on as coal-fired generation retires. It is developed by AEMO as part of its role as national transmission planner. The details of what must be included in the plan are set out in the National Electricity Rules.

“Nuclear is not considered in the ISP because it is required to take account of government law and policy, and nuclear generation is currently banned under Australian law.”