Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has described his successor's scrapping of the French submarine deal as "clumsy, deceitful and costly" and believes Australia will need to develop a nuclear industry.
Mr Turnbull, who in 2016 sealed the $90 billion deal to acquire conventional submarines, has criticised Scott Morrison for not being upfront with France.
The "clumsy, deceitful and costly" way Australia went about scrapping the deal left the country without a submarine program, Mr Turnbull wrote in an opinion piece in Nine newspapers.
There was instead a commitment to spend 18 months looking into whether it's viable for Australia to acquire nuclear submarine technology from the US and UK under the new AUKUS pact.
Mr Turnbull on Wednesday wrote his government had looked into nuclear submarines, but was advised it could not operate such a fleet without a civil nuclear industry.
"Safety and sovereignty dictate that we will need to develop nuclear facilities in Australia to maintain and support these submarines," he said.
"The safety and non-proliferation advantages of regularly inspected LEU (low enriched uranium) reactors should have been openly explored with France and the United States."
The Morrison government says a domestic nuclear industry is not needed to support the submarines, as they come with whole-of-life nuclear power plants which do not need further refuelling.
Former prime minister Paul Keating said AUKUS was a sign of the formation of an "anachronistic Anglosphere" in Asia.
But British high commissioner to Australia Victoria Treadell rejected the assertion.
"This is not an issue of this Anglosphere and I really do think we have to move away from defining countries like Australia, US and the UK as Anglosphere," she told ABC radio.
