Of all the problems with Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy costings released in the dying days of 2024, probably the biggest is that the entire policy assumes much of Australian heavy industry closes over the next few years.
Given it took the Liberal Party six months to release the costings of its nuclear policy, I had time to predict what accounting tricks it would mount to overcome the reality that nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation.
The Coalition laments the need for more baseload power to keep our grids working properly. But it flies in the face of expert advice, shows an extraordinary level of hubris in ignoring the facts, and an inability to think beyond old paradigms.
Australia’s electricity system, the largest grid on earth, is a complex web of continuous, instantaneous expert decision making underpinned by world-class systems and long-term infrastructure planning.
For anyone concerned about how regional areas will fare as Australia transforms to a net zero electricity system, nuclear power might at first glance look like a pretty attractive aspiration.
What drives the Liberal Party’s push toward nuclear energy is not a concern that Australia’s renewable energy transformation is happening too slowly. The opposite is true.
Opponents of cleaner, cheaper renewables have used a particularly spectacular contortion of logic to claim the recent catastrophic storms in Victoria and the resulting power outages as evidence of the folly of acting on climate change...
For far too long electric vehicles have been the subject of ridiculous scare campaigns intended to discourage Australians from driving cleaner, cheaper-to-run vehicles.
