Peter Dutton’s pre-budget nuclear policy announcement is now expected in June or July

The Coalition will have less than a year to sell its nuclear energy policy after plans for a pre-budget announcement were scrapped.

Labor and the Coalition will fight over the viability of future nuclear power plants at the next election. Picture: Getty Images

The Coalition’s contentious energy policy to transition coal-fired power stations to nuclear reactors could be unveiled in June or July, with a pre-budget announcement now abandon­ed, despite the leadership said to be close to selecting specific sites.

The Australian has been told Peter Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud, who have been developing the plan with opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien, will inform voters of the coal-fired power stations they’ve selected to be replaced by nuclear and the proximity to those power stations of where a nuclear reactor would be located.

The amount of gigawatts the nuclear plants would feed into the energy grid could also be announced as soon as June or July, according to sources familiar with the policy.

Mr Littleproud on Monday said the Coalition wouldn’t be “bullied” into outlining the landmark policy before the May 14 budget, a day after the Opposition Leader refused to commit to the pre-budget timeline.

“We’re not going to be bullied into putting this at any timeline, but you will see it before the election,” Mr Littleproud told Sky News, before pledging to release the detail by year’s end.

“This is a big shift in policy, one that we need to bring the Australian people with us. And we need to be able to demonstrate about making sure that an all renew­ables approach is going to be detrimental to this country, it makes us more vulnerable.

“But we have the sovereignty of our resources to have an energy mix of transitioning coal into nuclear with gas. We’re going to need gas, it is going to be the energy that transitions and helps not only how nuclear works, but help renewables work.”

With the federal election due by May next year, Anthony Albanese called on Mr Dutton to detail where the nuclear power plants would be, who would fund them, when they would be operational and how the Coalition would “fill in the gap” between the closure of a coal-fired power station and the start of nuclear.

Visiting Mackay to spruik Queensland jobs under the government’s Future Made in Australia policy, the Prime Minister said the Sunshine State represented a “massive opportunity” to increase Labor’s representation at the next poll while attacking the Coalition’s nuclear plans.

Labor has just eight Queensland senators and members.

“They (the former Coalition government) pretended that there was going to be a new coal-fired power plant near here in this region. It was never stacked up,” the Prime Minister said.

“The market was never going to back it, it was never going to be financed … just like nuclear reactors don’t have any financing.”

Nationals MP Colin Boyce, who has three coal-fired power stations in his electorate of Flynn, said there had been overwhelming support at community town halls for the government to explore the possibility of nuclear energy in Australia.

He said he had participated in some discussions with the ­Coalition leadership and Mr O’Brien to develop the nuclear policy, but “I want to go out and see what my electorate thinks before they start making decisions.

“The first hurdle you have to get over before you can start allocating locations is getting over the prohibition in Australia of ­nuclear and then talk about the economics, the practicalities, pull the whole thing apart and examine it properly. Let’s have the experts do that and not the politicians.”

Some Coalition MPs are keen to overturn Australia’s nuclear energy ban in this term of parliament but Labor has made clear it won’t be revisited.