Varun Ghosh (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, what's a mystery to all Australians are the details of the coalition's plan. I spoke on a misconceived urgency motion about this last week and raised questions about the missing details in the coalition's nuclear mud map, and none of those details have been revealed since. What are the type and size of the nuclear reactors to be used? How many reactors will there be at each site? How much radioactive waste will be produced? Where will the waste be stored? How much will it cost? How much time will it take? And will local communities have a real say about whether they have to live next to one of these reactors? Those questions need to be answered urgently, but they have not been.

Rather than bringing these vague and performative urgency motions to the Senate, the Liberal Party should urgently work out the details of its policy and urgently reveal these to the Australian people. Months on, they have no detail in their plan. Last time I spoke about the cost of nuclear energy and the Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy analysis, which says that nuclear energy is between three and six times more expensive than renewable options.

We could also talk about time. In the absence of the details referred to earlier, it is difficult to know when any Australian nuclear power plant would be able to be brought online. There are estimates being provided, but they are necessarily speculative. In circumstances where Australia has no substantial nuclear power production industry, there are legislative impediments to this plan at a state and federal level. Significantly more expertise in nuclear energy production will be needed, and there is already a shortage of people, materials and expertise around the country. Any estimates currently in the public debate may be quite far wrong. Indeed, there is reason to believe, logically, that this is going to take quite a bit longer.

But I want to talk about economic feasibility as well. Again, in the absence of details, it is impossible to be precise. Mr Dutton initially speculated that the plan would use small modular nuclear reactors. There's no detail on what reactors are going to be used, but small modular reactors are not currently in widespread commercial production. Where are the reactors coming from? Although they may have lower up-front capital costs, their economic uncompetitiveness or viability is neither established nor refuted. In the context of either smaller or larger nuclear reactors, how do they work in relation to existing power grids across the country?

Just today, Steve Edwell, who is the chair of the Economic Regulation Authority in Western Australia—that's the independent umpire tasked with keeping utility prices down in WA—observed that he struggled to see how nuclear would ever be cost competitive. He also observed that nuclear reactors were not designed to be turned on and turned off to match demand and thus would not work with existing renewables feeding into the Western Australian grid. So while my colleague opposite says this is designed to augment or supplement renewables, that's just not possible in the WA grid. So, there's a kind of furphy going on here.

To get nuclear into the grid, the coalition basically has two options. It either puts on hold existing renewable projects and hobbles existing renewable power options that are currently feeding into the grid, or it accepts that it's got nuclear power plants that are going to be severely underutilised, as they are in many of the examples that they and some colleagues opposite cited last week. How do they deal with underutilisation of nuclear power plants? The difficulty there is that, because these will be state owned nuclear power plants that the coalition has to pay for, you're effectively saddling Australia and the Australian taxpayer with uneconomic assets—assets that will become stranded in the short to medium term once they're brought online.

Put simply, this government has an alternative that involves commitment to renewable energy and using gas as a firming fuel in the interim. Since coming to office the Albanese government has seen a 25 per cent increase in renewable energy in Australian grids, has greenlit 50 Australian renewables projects which, when completed, will power three million Australian homes, or the equivalent, and continues to invest in battery and storage technology and infrastructure. The other point is: if long duration battery technology comes online, these nuclear power plants will not be economically viable, so either the Australian taxpayer pays through the energy bills or they pay because they've underwritten an uneconomic asset.