“It’s time to talk nuclear,” Ted O’Brien declared in a video message filmed on an isolated beach last February.
Appointed shadow energy spokesperson a few months earlier, Mr O’Brien’s enthusiasm for nuclear power was already well known, but not yet fully formed as Coalition policy. By many in Canberra, it had been regarded with idle curiosity.
But it was the choice of beach that raised eyebrows on this occasion: Mr O’Brien was in Fukushima.
The small Japanese city was the site of an infamous nuclear accident in 2011, when the Daiichi power plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.
Mr O’Brien had travelled to visit the plant at his own expense as a myth-busting exercise.
“I’ve heard many stories about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, including some unfounded horror stories and wildly untrue claims. I therefore decided to travel to Fukushima to find out for myself,” he said.
“I discovered a beautiful place and wonderful people, and I returned home with enormous optimism for their future.”
A year on, nuclear energy for Australia has firmed as Coalition policy, and Mr O’Brien’s “enormous optimism” has earned derision from Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
“Tell him he’s dreaming,” Mr Bowen said last Sunday when asked about the Coalition’s plans. His concern was not safety, where there have been significant improvements since Fukushima, but cost and practicality.
“I don’t know what expert he’s talking to … The average build time of a nuclear power plant in the United States has been 19 years. Ted O’Brien thinks he can do it in Australia from 10 [years] with a standing start,” he said.
“Throw in the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and you might sell him something.”
The politics of the nuclear debate are febrile. But what do the facts tell us?
Room for nuclear?
The Coalition claim is that nuclear energy should join “the mix” of power sources generating energy in the National Electricity Market.
The workings of that market are fiendishly complicated, but the broad strokes are simple.
For a long time, most of our electricity has come from coal, with gas as a backup.
But now we are transitioning away from coal. The main reason for that is the obvious one: to reduce emissions and meet our climate targets.
But it’s also because our fleet of coal plants is falling apart and forcing our hand.
It poses an urgent question for both climate reasons and energy security reasons: what will fill that gap?
The main answer has been renewables: specifically, solar and wind.
Renewable power has twin benefits: it’s green, and it’s also cheap.
At least, it’s cheap once you have the capacity to store and transmit renewably generated power, which requires upgrades to our grid.
That’s where the story becomes a bit complicated. Those upgrades are expensive. They also take time to build – time we’re running out of.
And in some communities, they encounter stiff resistance. Nationals leader David Littleproud recently denounced large-scale solar and wind projects in the regions, declaring “the bush is full”.
The CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) tell us that even with the cost of transmission and storage, renewables are still the cheapest form of power, with the temporary exception of gas, which the government says will play a role in the transition.
But there remain some who are sceptical that renewables can be the whole answer, whether for political, ideological, or scientific reasons.
Enter nuclear, says the Coalition.
Nice work if nuke can get it
Nuclear power is already used to generate about 10 per cent of the world’s power, and it generates almost no emissions.
And while noteworthy historic disasters have given nuclear power something of a PR problem, the government’s nuclear expert agency says the latest technology is much safer than Chernobyl or Fukushima might suggest.
Nuclear power plants generate cheap, reliable energy in several developed countries, especially in Europe.
But setting up in the Australian context would be a different proposition, and would present several hurdles.
First, large-scale nuclear power plants are expensive. The cheap power produced by plants in Europe comes only after decades of operation, enough time for the operators to have recouped their significant upfront capital costs.
It would take a long time – the Coalition hopes for a decade, but Labor says it would be at least twice that – to get them up and running, and an even longer time to bring costs down.
Second, the CSIRO and the AEMO doubt that large-scale nuclear plants are the right fit for Australia’s energy needs.
The east coast electricity market is relatively small by global standards, owing to Australia’s small population.
A single large plant of the sort used in Europe, according to CSIRO and AEMO, would account for such a huge chunk of our power needs that it would be inadvisable, since the whole grid would falter if the plant went offline for maintenance, or due to some fault.
Instead, the agencies say we would need more than one plant working together, like the coal plants currently do. But that would be even more expensive.
Some have called instead for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) – mini nuclear plants, assembled in a factory, which can be set up quickly. Unlike large plants, they can also be switched on and off quickly, which means they could “pinch hit” to provide power alongside renewables or other power sources.
If this sounds appealing, cool your jets – the technology to do this on any notable scale doesn’t exist. Attempts to build them elsewhere, such as in the US, have so far run into fatal cost barriers.
None of that has dimmed the enthusiasm of SMR optimists, including Bill Gates, Rolls Royce and for a time the Coalition.
But the latter’s embrace of nuclear has shifted away from its early focus on SMRs and it now appears set to land on advocating larger-scale nuclear plants on decommissioned coal sites.
A radioactive political issue
This points to a political challenge on top of the practical one.
The Liberal Party has tried, and failed, to start a conversation on nuclear power on more than a few occasions.
John Howard took a nuclear policy to the 2007 federal election, hoping public perception of the industry had shifted. It hadn’t.
Nearly two decades on, the Coalition is hoping it is right this time.
Coalition backbenchers have been agitating on the issue for years, urging the former Morrison government to take up the idea.
Those pleas weren’t heeded, beyond a very low-key parliamentary inquiry, as the party feared a scare campaign on nuclear reactors in the suburbs.
But the change in leadership after the 2022 election saw a surprisingly rapid shift — with new Nationals leader David Littleproud openly calling for nuclear power to be on the table just weeks after polling day.
Peter Dutton also flagged early enthusiasm, although at first only in principle. Then, shortly after the Dunkley by-election loss a fortnight ago, he confirmed this would become official Coalition policy.
An announcement is expected before the budget, which Mr Dutton has hinted will include a list of possible sites for nuclear, likely large-scale nuclear.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can scarcely contain his glee at the prospect of a nuclear fight.
“I’ll give you this tip, when they release their policy, you’ll hear a very clear response … [from] the communities where these giant nuclear reactors are going to go,” he said this week.
“[Peter Dutton] is a guy who’s scared of a solar panel but thinks that a nuclear reactor will be well received. I’ll wait and see.”
But Coalition MPs are confident they can sell the idea to voters, insisting the issue plays well with younger voters in particular.
They point to published opinion polls, which suggest more than half of Australians are now either supportive of nuclear or at least open to the idea.
The most prominent such poll was The Australian’s Newspoll, which suggested approval from 65 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds.
That poll question asked about SMRs and described them as “zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired”.
Nuclear in my backyard
But if this has created some optimism in the Coalition, the announcement of locations looms as an early political hurdle.
Just a handful of regions have coal-fired power stations that could fit the bill. This includes the Hunter, Gippsland and Central Queensland.
MPs in those areas would have the difficult task of selling a nuclear reactor to their electorate. So far, they seem cautiously enthusiastic, though some want assurances the technology is safe. Gippsland MP Darren Chester warned community concerns would need to be “ameliorated”.
There’s also the question of where to put the waste. Mr Dutton has sought to “put things in perspective” by pointing out the waste generated in the US since the 1950s “would fit in the area the size of a football field, to a depth of about nine metres”.
But if selling locals a nuclear plant is challenging, selling them a nuclear dump would be even more so – although as Mr Dutton points out, the same challenge awaits on waste from nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement.
Bonanza or boondoggle?
Even if the Coalition can convince enough voters to back nuclear power and put them in government, that won’t be the last of the political hurdles.
Next comes the question of money.
Labor’s Chris Bowen has suggested “eye-watering” amounts of taxpayer money would be needed to make nuclear viable.
“Every country in the world with nuclear has required massive transfers of taxpayer wealth to the nuclear constructors,” he said.
The Coalition has been coy on whether its policy will include a taxpayer subsidy, but has hinted at details to come in its forthcoming announcement.
And energy experts say that realistically, any private sector contribution would only come if investors had enough confidence the project would make it through to completion. That would require bipartisan support.
Bipartisan support may also be needed to overturn the federal ban on nuclear power. State-level bans in NSW, Victoria and Queensland would need to be overturned too.
Labor’s national platform currently includes an explicit ban on nuclear power, and some key unions are resolutely opposed to the industry.
‘Niche’ at best
All of that points to a difficult road ahead. And it’s one many energy experts say it would lead to a small benefit at best.
Alison Reeve from the Grattan Institute does not see nuclear as part of the mix, but says that if anything SMRs could play a “last resort” role, supplementing renewables during winter troughs.
“That would be the only possible niche I could see for nuclear … but you’re having to build generation that’s only used for a couple of weeks every year,” she said.
“At the moment it looks like the most economic opportunity for that role is gas, with offsets to cover the emissions.”
Ms Reeve said large-scale plants would not be suitable for this “last resort” role because they take weeks to switch on and off. If Australia built a large-scale plant, it would be as a replacement for renewables rather than the icing on the cake. And it would almost certainly be more expensive.
“Everyone in the world finds these plants expensive and time-consuming to build, even countries that have a lot of experience building them,” she said.
Globally, nuclear power projects are the third most likely to overshoot their initial cost estimates, behind only nuclear storage and Olympic Games.
“Given Australia has never built one, and we have a poor record in infrastructure already, I see no reason to believe we would buck the global trend,” Ms Reeve said.
“The question then is why would you do it?”
Tennant Reed from the Australian Industry Group said Australia’s energy future almost certainly lies in large-scale solar and wind because it is cheap, abundant and opens doors to developing green export industries.
But he said overturning the ban would be wise, so the option is there if the nuclear revolution eventually arrives.
“It’s a sensible thing to do to add to the tools in the chest,” he said.
“It’s maybe not a great idea to pin all of your hopes on one technology, and go have a sit on the couch while waiting for that technology to show up.
“I don’t know that anybody’s suggesting that. But they shouldn’t.”