Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are, only a few days from the bizarre event at which the Leader of the Opposition filed to provide any detail about his nuclear fantasy apart from the seven reactor locations, which we more or less already knew. It was good to see the coalition finally acknowledge that nuclear is so profoundly uncommercial and uninsurable that the only way any reactor would ever be built in Australia would be through an eye-watering Sydney-Harbour-scale waste of taxpayer money. We still don't know how much they would cost to build, when they might be operational, how much energy they would deliver, which country and company would build them, what the price of energy would be and for how long guaranteed offtake agreements would run. There was also a lot of confusion about how the consultation would work and whether that would be genuine consultation in any meaningful sense.

It's interesting to note that the shadow minister for energy, when he chaired an inquiry into nuclear power generation into 2019, chose as the title for his inquiry report Not without your approval: a way forward for nuclear technology in Australia. Now it sounds like he's shifted to a different title altogether: more like 'You will get nuclear when we tell you to get nuclear'.

It's interesting to see how much credit the Leader of the Opposition is getting from some commentators for being brave enough to make a paper-thin announcement with no detail, based on a proposition that can fairly be described as deeply unintelligent. If you look to what the actual experts say, as the ABC has reported, Damien Nicks, of AGL Energy, said:

… the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive.

Jeff Dimery, CEO of Alinta Energy, compared the federal opposition's plans to replace coal plants with nuclear power to 'looking for unicorns in the garden'. Brett Chatfield, Chief Investment Officer of Cbus Super, said:

We don't see nuclear as really a part of the energy transition going forward.

Of course, we know that even the head of the IEA has said nuclear isn't the right choice for Australia.

I want to take a minute to give people at home a sense of the global reality when it comes to the comparison of nuclear to renewables. In 2022 there was US$495 billion invested in non-hydro renewables. That was a 35 per cent increase from the previous year and represented 74 per cent of all new generation investment. In the same year, the nuclear spend was only US$35 billion. That's barely seven per cent of the spend on renewables. In 2022 the world added 348 gigawatts of renewable energy and only four gigawatts of nuclear. Last year, 2023, the world added 440 gigawatts of renewables, a 26 per cent jump on the previous year. Meanwhile, net nuclear energy capacity globally actually decreased by one gigawatt. Last year, China alone added 217 gigawatts of renewables and only one gigawatt of nuclear.

Let's compare a nuclear reactor to a hydro storage project with similar dispatchable power capacity. The British nuclear reactor Hinkley Point C, being built by the French company EDF, which was renationalised last year on the brink of bankruptcy, is already hugely delayed and has already experienced a massive cost blowout. The site was selected in 2010. Currently, it's predicted to commence operation in 2031. That is 21 years from go to woah for a country that has operated nuclear for a long time. At present, it will cost $90 billion for three gigawatts of energy, and it depends on a 35-year offtake agreement under which the British government guarantees to buy all the electricity produced at an indexed price that's already considerably more than what they pay for wind energy from the North Sea. On the other side of the equation, you have Snowy 2.0, a hydro storage project for firming renewable energy, commissioned by the Turnbull government. At present, it will cost $12 billion and dispatch two gigawatts of energy, with a much shorter time frame from announcement to delivery and no long-term waste legacy issues and costs. The former is the very definition of a multidecade economic disaster, for which the British will continue to depend upon the French. The latter is an example of the cost-effective transition we're making to an affordable and substantially Australian-made clean energy independence. The latter is the kind of outcome you get from the sensible and responsible, fully costed, fully detailed, adult national energy policy of the Albanese government. What you would get from the coalition would be a massive blow to Australia as an investment destination and as a trusted regional global partner, through their decision to trash the Paris climate agreement while at the same time putting Australia in hock for generations by wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on a 70-year-old technology that is in decline globally and for which we will always be dependent on another government. Let's have that debate, by all means.

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