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

All the evidence, all the expertise and all the inquiries have made it crystal clear there's no case for nuclear energy in Australia. With each passing year, renewables and storage get cheaper and more efficient, and yet nuclear takes longer and becomes more expensive. This is a 70-year-old technology with enormous decommissioning costs and no technical solution for the permanent storage of nuclear waste.

The Leader of the Opposition is having a laugh when he claims the nuclear industry is going strong elsewhere. The truth is that nuclear peaked as a share of global energy back in 1996. Today it is half that. The number of reactors peaked in 2002. In France, nuclear generation in 2022 was less than in 1990. In the US, nuclear has hit a 25-year low.

Only France, South Korea and Russia build reactors overseas, and the French company EDF was renationalised last year on the brink of bankruptcy. In 2022, the Korean state owned utility booked a record $25 billion loss. Last year, the world added 348 gigawatts of renewable energy, but only four gigawatts of nuclear energy. Sadly, last August Japan commenced a 30-year program of discharging contaminated water from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. There are still 27,000 people displaced in Japan and the clean-up cost is listed at US$223 billion.

The coalition's secret and virtually invisible nuclear plan is senseless, baseless, reckless and dangerous. It is bananas with chocolate sprinkles on top. (Time expired)