Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

r PERRETT () (): The Nationals are banging the drum on nuclear energy. It's deja vu all over again, isn't it? It's always the same. I will include a few Liberal members in this as well who are representing the people in the bush. Anytime they're asked by the people in the bush to do something about dangerous climate change and reducing emissions, they go straight to the old nuclear power playbook: 'If irrelevant, break glass.' We've heard it all before. It's funny. I heard the member for Capricornia talk about nuclear power, and she didn't mention the coal-fired power station the Nationals committed to in Collinsville that they didn't deliver when in office.

The fundamental flaw in this motion right from the word go—with their happy go-to strategy—is that they didn't actually do anything about nuclear power when they were in government. No-one should be under any misapprehension here: this is just another attempt to undermine this country's need to transition to renewables. We didn't see former Minister Pitt or the member for Cook—the other minister for mines—bring in a policy for nuclear energy when they were in government. They had a decade to move on their nuclear ambitions and did not do so. If this is such an important and urgent need, why didn't they lift a finger during those dark ages from 2013 to 2022?

This morning's posturing is nothing more than a rearguard attempt to undermine and deny a transition to renewables—the equivalent of a policy Hail Mary, for those who are hanging out for the American football final coming up next week. As the energy minister, Chris Bowen, said in parliament last year:

What this represents is the third quiver in the armoury of those who don't want to see Australia take action on climate change. They accompany delay and denial with distraction.

Everyone knows, except those in the LNP, that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive form of energy. Compounding this further, as Australia doesn't have much of a nuclear industry, it makes it even more expensive Down Under.

You've heard in the debate those opposite talking about the small modular reactors, or SMRs, and about how successfully they're being built right across the globe. The opposition leader spruiked that they're being built in Canada, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and the US, but guess what? The number of SMRs being built in those countries is a big fat zero. The only country where we have at least some movement beyond an announcement is in the US where the figures for the price of energy from proposed SMRs is going up and up and up. From 2016 to 2020, NuScale and UAMPS said that the power price of the SMR would be just US$55 per megawatt hour. That's competitive, as the member for Hunter would know—he knows energy very well—but then it went up to US$58 per megawatt hour. And get this! The increased price included the project being halved in size and output.

A more detailed report recently says it has gone up to US$89 per megawatt hour. In anyone's language, except maybe that of the member for Fairfax, US$89 per megawatt hour isn't cheap energy. But it's actually more bleak than that. When you dig under the surface, the project expects to receive a US$1.4 billion contribution from the Department of Energy, which will deliver an estimated US$30 per megawatt hour subsidy through the Inflation Reduction Act, on top of the US taxpayer pumping in more than US$4 billion in subsidies to NuScale and UAMPS. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of where private capital should be investing. So we have an actual SMR project heavily subsidised by the US taxpayers that shrunk in scope by 50 per cent, delivering sometime in the never-never some of the most expensive energy on the planet at a real cost of around US$119 per megawatt hour, and that's even before it starts being built.

I didn't get an invite to the opposition's nuclear love-in last year, but I think there was a bit of backslapping about how good the SMR in the US was going to be—but look at that real cost. We know this because every energy expert with a scrap of integrity knows that nuclear is the most expensive and slowest form of energy to implement. We have cost-of-living pressures right now. We can't wait 15, 16 or 20 years to deliver a higher cost of energy. Nuclear power doesn't make sense. We know that, despite over 50 years of industrial experience, costs go up and up and up.

See this speech in context