Banana Shire mayor Neville Ferrier warns of mass outages amid rush to renewables

A Queensland country mayor says only atomic energy or coal can provide baseload power and has issued a dire warning.

A Queensland country mayor whose shire has been earmarked for a nuclear power plant says only atomic energy or coal can provide baseload power and has warned of more mass outages like the recent one in Broken Hill in the rush to renewables.

Addressing a federal nuclear energy inquiry in Biloela, Banana Shire mayor Neville Ferrier also slammed “childish” politics about what he said was increasingly safe nuclear power, saying some commentary “lacks credibility”.

Two Biloela graziers who are fighting a huge solar farm bordering their property also backed nuclear over the “reckless rollout” of renewables which they said was destroying Australia’s prime food-producing land.

The Labor-dominated House Select Committee on Nuclear Energy is holding the first public sittings of its inquiry in Queensland.

A nuclear power plant has been mooted to be built near Biloela.

It comes after Opposition leader Peter Dutton announced in June that a Coalition government would build up to seven nuclear power plants on the site of existing coal-fired power stations including Callide, west of Gladstone.

Mr Ferrier told the inquiry that Callide employed 250 people and was the “backbone” of Biloela but would stop generating coal-fired power by 2035, with uncertainty over whether it would transition to another form of energy “or stop generating power for Queensland”.

He said transforming Callide into a nuclear power plant could add 80 years to its lifespan “supplying power to Queensland and other states”.

“A lot of people I talk to would welcome this as guaranteed jobs for the workforce that are already here, however others don’t want it here,” he said.

“As a council, we need the economic benefit but not at any cost. It has to be safe. Council has already talked to nuclear experts around the safety of this, but we all know accidents can happen.”

Mr Ferrier said many countries were building nuclear power plants “and there seems to be new ideas to make them safer”.

Banana Shire Council Mayor Neville Ferrier is warning against rushing renewables. Picture: Steve Vit

He said he had recently met with a delegation from Texas where both wind farms and nuclear power plants were being built.

Mr Ferrier said the rest of Australia had to make sure it “doesn’t fall down the same hole” as Broken Hill which lost power for days last month in a mass outage.

“We’re all talking about electric cars and all this sort of stuff, so you’ve got to have a lot more power, but it’s never going to work without a baseload,” he said.

“It’s got to be something, and the only thing I can work out … it’s got to be nuclear or coal.”

Mr Ferrier urged a slowdown in closing coal-fired power stations, saying the global zero net emissions target was not until 2050 and ensuring base power was critical.

“The world’s moving so fast in some of these things, we can’t keep up with it,” he said.

Graziers Cedric and Therese Creed, who are part of a group of landholders dubbed the “Tenacious 10” fighting an 1800ha solar farm neighbouring their Smoky Creek property, said the “reckless rollout” of renewables was imperilling Australia’s food and energy security.

Ms Creed said a slew of wind and solar farms she claimed were being secretly approved with little government oversight were “polluting our very precious and finite productive land”.

“There is very, very little to rein these people in … it’s very scary,” she said,

Ms Creed said when it came to carbon dioxide emissions, “nuclear wins hands down” compared with the likes of solar panels which were made with “highly toxic” chemicals in Chinese “slave labour” factories.

“If the issue is safety, modern nuclear reactors win again,” she said.

Originally published as Banana Shire mayor Neville Ferrier warns of mass outages amid rush to renewables