End of the Road for Australian Nuclear? Three Inconvenient Truths.

The 2025 federal election was over quite quickly, and just as quickly came the revelry of Australia’s anti-nuclear campaign.

Keeping with tradition, theirs is far from a clean victory. Here are three of the most important reasons why.

1. The Rest of the World

Australia’s culture war over nuclear energy is notably parochial, with the greatest volume of consistently good overseas news filtering in for the last three years.

Just a sample:

• Multiple data centre deals announced between tech companies and advanced nuclear reactor vendors. Google signed on for at least 600 megawatts of nuclear capacity just last week.

• Numerous countries — just in Australia’s neighbourhood — are pursuing nuclear power, and Indonesia is the closest.
  

• The global pledge to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 was joined by more countries last year at COP29’s World Climate Action Summit. The full list is Armenia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Republic of Korea, Kosovo, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the USA; with support for the declaration from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Ares Management, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Brookfield, Citi, Credit Agricole CIB, Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim Securities LLC, Morgan Stanley, Rothschild & Co., Segra Capital Management, and Societe Generale.
  

While we quibble, the rest of the world is getting on with it.

2. The Energy Transition Will Be Far Harder and Longer Than They Realise

Last year, up until November, a price tag of $122 billion was widely proclaimed for the government’s “system-wide non-customer owned cost of renewable energy generation, transmission and storage” until 2050.

Subsequent analysis from Frontier Economics clarified that the full, real costs of this scenario, including new transmission, are $642 billion, and that $122 billion is the “net present value” calculated from FY2025 to FY2052.

Consumers do not pay the Net Present Value, they pay the actual costs.

Ever since this was revealed, the misleading $122 billion figure has faded from commentary, and the government no longer boasts so precisely about the affordability of the energy transition.

All of this was preceded by stalled renewable energy investment:

Well into the government’s first term, commentary insisted that “The move to clean energy is faltering due to governments and public agencies, not because the machinery can’t do the job.” In fact there’s no guarantee that the machinery — mainly solar and wind capacity — can “do the job”, or that investment won’t dry up again as new project viability increasingly grinds against value deflation, delayed infrastructure expansion, and other real world barriers. Even when mostly ignoring all of this, recent optimistic analysis sees 65% renewable energy share in 2030, significantly below the government’s ambition of 82%.

It hardly needs to be said that costing more and taking longer than we wanted isn’t a good reason to give up. We just need to be honest about the future we’re aiming for if we actually want to get there.

3. Six hundred Billion Dollars? Treating Voters Like Idiots.

The anti-nuclear movement has always exploited an information vacuum. In the years after Chornobyl melted down in Soviet Ukraine, while international authorities methodically evaluated the real environmental and health impacts, fringe researchers publicised a distressing overestimate of 800,000 deaths by 2004. No less than Helen Caldicott megaphoned this statistic, credulously and incessantly. Nowadays, she is appalled at how ignorant (her word) people are of the radiation dangers which she’s never tried to properly understand.

Indeed, polling clearly showed how the perception of extreme cost was the dominant concern before the election. The $600 billion cost claim became part of the election campaign, and was even attributed to the CSIRO.

Calling it the CSIRO's work is as deceptive as calling it “detailed analysis”, as the Smart Energy Council did, when it released its one-page press release — the origin of the number — in June last year. The analysis?

$600 billion AUD corresponds to a rudimentary calculation of 11 gigawatts worth of nuclear capacity at the same cost as the 3.2 gigawatt Hinkley Point C twin EPR plant in Somerset, UK, at AUD$87 billion in 2024, and then doubled. That’s it. 11 ÷ 3.2 = 3.4375 87 × 3.4375 = 299 × 2 ≈ 600

Maybe some stakeholders still want to claim a referendum-style win on this basis, but there are certain places where it doesn’t stand up so well.

Image source.

Labor gained no appreciable traction in the seats that host the Callide, Mount Piper, Loy Yang, Tarong, Northern, and Muja power stations. Calare, the electorate containing Mount Piper near Lithgow, was gained by an independent candidate who would like nuclear power to be a possible option. Only Hunter, where Liddell power station is located, is a Labor seat.

"I have been hearing from experts in Australia and internationally that we need to be adopting a more balanced approach to meet our future energy needs. Firming of solar and wind energy sources means there is less need to over-build capacity, and the entire system can operate at a cheaper average cost to consumers. Energy security is a matter of national security: every country needs to be able to keep the lights on, run the public transport network, hospitals and universities, and ensure businesses and farmers can still produce goods at a competitive price, which are needed in a modern society. If we are going to host both large-scale nuclear and renewable energy infrastructure in the future, there has to be respect shown to local communities and measurable benefits for our region."

Does this sound reasonable? Because it’s part of what Nationals MP Darren Chester wrote last November, and reinforced in mid-April before the election. He went on to win on first preferences.

His opponent? Joined roughly a dozen anti-nuclear protestors in the middle of coal country and promoted the $600 billion nonsense.

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Permanent exclusion of nuclear energy in Australia would seem to depend on further scaremongering, inept analysis, political division and deliberate blindness to international progress. Or we could start the work towards basic consistency with the increasing majority of nations and stakeholders, now, on the inclusion of the proven power source.