Labor’s campaign spokesperson, frontbencher Jason Clare, claimed on Monday that CSIRO had put a $600bn price tag on the Coalition’s plans to build taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors at seven sites.
“Have a look at the work that the CSIRO has done that proves that this will cost $600bn. It won’t turn a light on for 20 years. It’ll only produce about 4% of the energy that Australia is going to need,” Clare told ABC Radio National.
The Coalition’s energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, said Clare’s statement was a “lie” and that the CSIRO’s work had put the cost at one-fifth of the $600bn.
Where does the $600bn figure come from?
Labor has repeatedly used the $600bn figure in its campaign, but that number does not come from the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and Clare was incorrect to say that it did.
The number comes from the Smart Energy Council (SEC), a renewable energy industry group that used the $600bn figure in analysis put out as a press release last June.
That analysis was released almost six months before the release of modelling used by the Coalition, carried out by Frontier Economics, to promote its nuclear policy. That modelling assumed there would be 13GW of large-scale nuclear-generating power by 2050.
The SEC analysis assumed there would only be 11GW of nuclear. This included 1GW of capacity coming from so-called small modular reactors that are not yet commercially available.
How were the costs calculated?
The SEC analysis set a cost to build reactors at between $116bn and $600bn – the lower figure matching O’Brien’s claim that CSIRO’s work had estimated the cost as one-fifth of the $600bn.
SEC based its lower figure on the estimated costs of building nuclear calculated in the CSIRO’s GenCost report.
But importantly, the CSIRO costs were based on the assumption that reactors would be built as part of an established and rolling nuclear program – which is not what Australia would have at the start.
CSIRO experts warned that the first few reactors to be built in Australia – if the Coalition could lift the national ban – could cost double its estimates because of a “first of a kind” premium.
The CSIRO thinks that for each gigawatt, SMRs would be more than three times the cost of conventional nuclear – those plants were not part of the Frontier modelling but were included in the SEC analysis.
The SEC assumed the first 2GW of nuclear capacity built would be double the CSIRO cost, and the rest would be 25% higher.
Frontier estimated nuclear plants would cost $10bn a gigawatt to build in 2025, but also assumed those costs would fall 1% every year.
What about other costs?
To get to the $600bn figure, SEC also said it had added estimated costs of refurbishing and maintaining coal plants to keep them running for longer, but didn’t say how much it thought these would be.
The Coalition has said it would be necessary to keep coal plants running longer while nuclear reactors are built.
The SEC also pointed to the UK’s Hinkley C nuclear project that has faced ongoing delays and a doubling of the initial cost estimates as a real-world example of costs being much greater than initial estimates.
Tristan Edis, an analyst at Green Energy Markets, said if the full costs of Hinkley C – including the cost of interest payments over the long build time of nuclear – were translated to Australia, then the Coalition’s reactors would cost about $532bn.
Other experts have suggested that CSIRO’s costings for large-scale nuclear are too conservative because they were benchmarked to costs in South Korea – a country building some of the cheapest reactors anywhere.
While the modelling used by the Coalition assumes a first nuclear plant could be producing power in 2035, the CSIRO has said it will probably take until the early 2040s. Others have suggest even longer timeframes.
One analysis has warned that keeping coal plants running for longer could lead to large shortfalls in electricity generation, with even bigger supply gaps to fill if nuclear plants faced delays – as they usually do.
• This story was amended on 28 April 2025. An earlier version said Frontier estimated nuclear plants would cost $1bn per gigawatt to build in 2025 – the correct figure is $10bn.
