The Coalition is now badly split over Peter Dutton’s push to build a nuclear power industry from scratch, sufficient to delay what was once trumpeted by his cheerleaders as a bold pre-budget announcement of a new era in Australian energy policy.
Nine’s James Massola, who last month exposed how many Coalition MPs were all for nuclear power, but just not in their electorates thanks, yesterday pinpointed what the real driver behind Dutton’s push is — reducing Australia’s emissions abatement targets, sufficient to take us out of the Paris Agreement.
Coalition MPs are understandably nervous about going to an election promising to impose half a dozen potential Fukushimas on voters, albeit with the caveat that there’ll be no risk, just a very large construction site, until the 2040s. Dutton has mused about bribing voters in the target electorates to accept nuclear power plants, and presumably with more than the iodine tablets the British governments hands out to residents and workers around the UK’s nuclear submarine facilities.
The problem with bribing voters like that is that it’s a de facto admission that there’s something problematic about nuclear power — otherwise, why do you feel the need to do it? We don’t bribe voters who live near coal-fired power plants. We don’t even compensate them for the hundreds of premature deaths that occur because of them.
Luckily there’s a solution at hand for Dutton, and it springs from his on-again, off-again love of small modular reactors (SMR) (watch how the opposition leader ducks the question when asked by David Speers about the fact that there’s no such thing as a working SMR in a Western country).
Even though SMRs produce power that’s even more expensive than conventional nuclear power plants while having the same safety concerns, theoretically they’d be quicker to build, not cost as much and could even be moved around. The problem is that you need a lot more of them than a traditional nuclear reactor of the kind that would take 20 years and $10 billion to build.
So forget only putting a reactor in six electorates — put one in every electorate. It would be much fairer than subjecting only a handful of voters to bearing the costs of the net zero transition by having a nuclear reactor nearby. This, surely, is the benefit of SMRs — they can be put where energy users are rather than at locations that will require extensive and expensive transmission lines.
Dutton’s pitch to voters would be simple: 151 SMRs across the country. Some electorates could even have two or three, depending on the energy use there, but everyone would get a reactor nearby. Instead of reactors in Gippsland, and the Hunter Valley and Gladstone, there’d be a reactor in Sutherland and Penrith and dotted across the outer western suburbs of Sydney, and one in Frankston and Belgrave and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, and one in Ipswich and Fortitude Valley in Queensland and right up the coast, and reactors across Adelaide and liberally scattered over Perth and five of them in Tasmania.
Most Australians would not need to be more than a few kilometres from a nuclear reactor; only people living in regional communities would live some distance from one — unless they got two or three of them. By leveraging off the advantages of SMRs, this is the sensible and fair solution to the Coalition’s problem that people don’t want a possible nuclear accident down the road. Everyone shares the burden equally.
And if there’s a safety incident with your local SMR, they’re only little, so the radiation would only affect a few square kilometres of a major city or suburb. We’re not talking Chernobyl here. Evacuate the schools and the hospitals, tell people to leave their homes for a few days, close the businesses for a couple of weeks, distribute the iodine pills — it’s a small price to pay for the transition to net zero. The kids might even enjoy the holiday while their school is scrubbed clean of radioactive particles.
You know it makes sense. But does Peter Dutton?
How would you feel about a nuclear reactor up the road? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
