Donald Trump praises nuclear power and slams wind energy

The favourite to be re-elected US president has explicitly backed nuclear power, suggesting a future Trump administration might welcome a domestic nuclear push.

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump arrives for a rally in Wisconsin this week. Picture: Getty Images

Donald Trump has explicitly backed nuclear energy but warned on cost overruns, suggesting prospective US government support for the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear power stations should the former president be re-elected.

The presumptive Republican nominee for president also praised France’s history of nuclear power generation, embracing smaller replicable nuclear reactors to avoid the sorts of cost blowouts recently seen in the US and UK.

“I’m OK with nuclear, but you have to in a way that makes sense,” Mr Trump told the host Silicon Valley hosts of the popular All In Podcast, days after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton launched a nuclear energy policy.

“In France and in other places where they do have a lot of nuclear, they build small plants all the same, and if they need double up, they’ll build two of them, as opposed to the nonsense that we’ve done where we build these massive plants and they never get built and they have cost overruns of three, four hundred per cent.”

The Coalition has promised to build seven nuclear reactors should it be returned to government in the federal election scheduled next year, prompting a ferocious political debate about the nation’s energy future amid mounting power bills.

The government, which is hoping to buy eight US made nuclear-powered submarines at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, says nuclear power is expensive and dangerous.

Mr Trump, who as president slashed regulation on fossil fuel discovery and promotion, slammed wind power, which Labor is seeking to rely on for a greater share of Australia’s power, for being economically uncompetitive and dangerous, “with its blades knocking out the birds and everything else”.

“They have nuclear applications today that can be built, and can be built reasonably inexpensively, [and] nuclear certainly is very strong power,” he added, suggesting further renewable energy expansion was unfair.

“What do you do when China is burning all the coal and they’re sending the ashes over the United States?” he asked in a one-hour podcast that ranged over US foreign and domestic policy. The former president said the US contributed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by insisting on NATO expansion to the former Soviet bloc country.

“For 20 years I heard that NATO, if Ukraine goes into NATO, it’s a real problem for Russia. I’ve heard that for a long time, and I think that’s really why this war started,” he said.

Mr Trump, who is leading President Joe Biden in most national US polls ahead of the presidential election in November, has a better than even chance of being re-elected, when the two political warhorses will face off for a second time.

As president Joe Biden has championed wind, solar and also nuclear power as critical ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, his administration signing the United Nations “Declaration to Triple Global Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050” at a recent global climate conference.

The Labor government’s attack on the coalition’s plan has revolved around the high cost of nuclear power stations compared to wind and solar power, sources that the coalition argues are far more expensive than their promoters contend given their intermittency and transmission costs.

Mr Trump alluded to in the All In Podcast the infamous cost blowout of the new Vogtle massive nuclear power station in Georgia, competed last year after a cost blowout from $14bn to $35bn.

“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it … they came out at numbers that I think the most expensive things ever built in our country,” he said.