https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/i-ve-spent-my-life-fighting-nuclear-here-s-what-dutton-isn-t-telling-you-about-his-reactors-20250327-p5ln3e.html

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Today’s voter has it tough, especially younger Australians who get much of their information from apps. It’s daunting to sort fact from fiction in the Wild West world of online media, where hidden agendas and speculative opinion are rife. All the more so when a party’s policy only truly makes sense if viewed through a wider lens.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s promise to build seven small-scale nuclear reactors, ostensibly to help meet future energy needs while keeping carbon emissions at bay, therefore needs to be seen for what it really is: a staggeringly bad idea, a stunt and a con. It is a backdoor attempt to pander to the fossil-fuel lobby – and under the electoral spotlight, more people will figure that out.

Younger voters understandably won’t know that a generation their age once packed the Sidney Myer Music Bowl with Midnight Oil, INXS and other friends to “Stop the Drop”. They won’t remember our Nuclear Disarmament Party campaign, which won Senate seats in Western Australia and NSW in the ’80s. They can’t know what it was like to grow up during the Cold War era or live through horrific meltdowns at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants, which were also “completely safe” until the day that they weren’t. But generations Y and Z can still smell a rotten idea when they give it a good sniff.

At first blush, nuclear energy is causing less concern to younger voters, who haven’t yet taken a closer look. When they do, they will find that most experts and qualified observers view the proposal as expensive, difficult to implement, prone to significant uncertainty and full of rubbery figures.

One example is the fanciful assumption that nuclear plants could be built in 12 years. Twenty years would be more likely – if they are built at all. Cost overruns and safety issues are equally certain. And the carbon consequences of prolonging our old coal-fired power generators are dire.

This deceptive proposal has all the Trumpian hallmarks: a quasi policy announcement intended to serve sectional interests – in this case, fossil-fuel conglomerates – while simultaneously serving up a cartoon enemy as ideological whipping boy, namely renewable energy.

Australia has abundant sunlight, plenty of wind, plus lots of pumped hydro resources that can all be converted by increasingly efficient technologies. Stored batteries are ramping up, too. The butterfly has emerged from the chrysalis and taken to the skies – the renewable energy transition is well under way. Construction costs will keep coming down. Supply will keep going up. The future is already here.

By wrenching the country off this course, Dutton’s plan would leave old, dirty, coal-fired power stations staggering on at increasing risk of breakdown, putting off the day of reckoning when we finally stop polluting and heating our world and get on with using affordable, reliable energy that does not cause more climate chaos.

What possible reason is there for Australia to embark on building a completely new, expensive energy infrastructure we don’t need and which, incidentally, is already illegal in states where the reactors are meant to go?

Nuclear energy features eye-watering costs, which history repeatedly shows blow out. It features risks associated with managing radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years. It is also a massive safety risk from both accidents and attacks.

To cap the charade, this policy comes from the parties that supposedly champion free enterprise and want to reduce government spending, yet the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to fund the Coalition’s nuclear plan are to be borne by all of us, the taxpayer. Go figure!

The trend line is unarguable: renewable energy is cleaner, greener and getting cheaper every year. It will supersede fossil fuels in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Nuclear is a last-gasp delaying tactic.

Over 4 million Australian homes and businesses have solar panels on their roofs. South Australia routinely produces 75 per cent and sometimes up to 100 per cent of its power from renewables and is racing towards net zero, with the other states in hot pursuit. Most electricity added to global supply comes from clean energy.

When the Climate Change Authority, headed by former NSW Liberal government treasurer Matt Kean, released a report showing Dutton’s policy would result in a 2 billion-tonne blowout in dirty emissions, the Coalition’s response was to play the man and not the ball, and threaten Kean.

When a group of eminent former defence chiefs raised the spectre of nuclear plants scattered across the country vulnerable to the risk of terrorism and accidents, the Coalition response was virtual silence.

When farmers, scientists and community groups questioned the impact on precious groundwater of thirsty nuclear reactors running 24/7, the Coalition response was a shrug.

Compare this with Dutton’s proud promise that if elected, within 50 days he would approve the massive Browse Basin gas development in WA.

Due to its size, the Browse project is known as a “carbon bomb”, given it will release more than 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and blow Australia’s modest greenhouse emissions targets to smithereens.

In these circumstances, the Coalition promise of boosting fossil fuels with “boutique” nuclear reactors coming on stream at some mythical future date to satisfy energy needs and reduce costs is an utter chimera.

It is best understood as a delaying tactic, an Aussie version of US President Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill”, buying more time for multinational carbon producers to keep making super profits and heating the planet at our expense.

And there is another effect of the policy: it buttresses claims that Australia should become a site for the storage of large quantities of radioactive nuclear waste generated by other countries.

Periodically, there are calls for Australia’s outback, with its stable geology and low population density, to be the site for disposal of the world’s radioactive waste. It’s an idea that has been rejected before, but don’t expect it to go away soon.

Recently, a senior US official chided Australia for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about uranium mining. In the transactional Trumpworld we now inhabit, new AI facilities envisaged by Amazon, Meta, Google and the like are expected to draw vast amounts of power, often touted as coming from nuclear.

Given the US still doesn’t have a licensed, permanent nuclear waste site after 50 years of furious debate and unsuccessful political negotiation, storage and disposal of new streams of radioactive waste will be crucial.

If the US president can posit buying Greenland and incorporating Canada as the 51st state, impose tariffs on America’s trading partners at will, and promise to end the war in Ukraine in a day, who is to say earmarking Australia as an international nuclear waste dump is a fanciful scenario? Can anyone imagine “Temu Trump” saying no?

As for polls showing younger Australians are less concerned about nuclear energy … not so fast. I’m confident that equipped with relevant facts, and mindful of the scale of the climate crisis they have inherited, they’ll see Dutton’s nuclear con job in a whole new light by the time we get to polling day.

• Peter Garrett is a former Labor minister for the environment and a member of Midnight Oil.

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