From a sports media I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Peter Dutton's first major promise when he became Opposition leader was to build nuclear power plants. It was a curious idea with no cost attached and not a lot of community support.
According to Poling, Peter Dutton's had an idea nuclear power stations that will cost six hundred billion to build.
Now the government has signaled it wants the next election to be fought on the idea, with the release of a new attack ad.
And because nuclear is the most expensive form of energy for Australia, your power bill will.
Go up beyond the cost. Questions remained about the legality and safety of nuclear power plants in Australia. Today, emeritus professor and the former head of the School of Science at Griffith University, Ian Lowe fact checks Peter Dutton's nuclear promise. It's Wednesday, September eleventh.
Okay, Fron, thank you very much for being here today. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleagues because it's a major announcement.
And when Peter Dutton announced that a future coalition government would introduce nuclear energy into Australia, what was your immediate reaction to the announcement, Well, it.
Was initially disbelief at the most fundamental level.
And today we announced seven locations that we have looked at in great detail over a long period of time that can host nuclear sites, and that will be He.
Was announcing something that is legally impossible because the Howard government twenty five years ago legislated a prohibition of nuclear energy. In fact, that legislative prohibition on all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, beyond mining and export of uranium oxide.
And in addition to the federal prohibition which was legislated twenty five years ago by a liberal government, the three mainland eastern states, Queens and New South Wales and Victoria all have legislation which would prohibit some or all of
the steps needed to build a nuclear power station. The only possible explanation I can see is that there are still people on the backbench of the coalition who are skeptical about climate change, and given that they lost previously rock solid coalition seats at the last election to teel independence campaigning to see stronger action on climate change, it's not politically credible to go to the electric saying we're going to do nothing about climate change. We're going to
keep burning colon gas. But if you go to the electric and say we're going to build nuclear power stations, what that's implicitly saying is we need to keep burning cold.
We already are a nuclear nation, and it's with enormous hope and optimism that I look towards the only credible pathway to decarbonize and reach net zero while ensuring Australia remains a highly prosperous country, a strong country.
The seven nuclear power stations that they announced, what if they were built, provide about five percent of the electrical capacity that we need to get to zero emissions, and both the media release and subsequent comments by the coalition have been totally silent about where the other ninety five percent of our electricity would come from. And of course, in the absence of a nuclear industry, the energy to
build nuclear power stations would be fossil fuel energy. So if we were to build seven nuclear power stations, we'd be burning more because it takes considerable amounts of fossil fuel energy to build a nuclear power station. So our greenhouse gas emissions would actually accelerate in the next ten or fifteen years if we were going to go down the nuclear path. So I think it's really a smoke screen to disguise the fact that their agenda is to keep burning fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
One of the key claims that PEDIDUTM is also pushing is around energy prices. We've all experienced the cost of rising energy prices. Pettidutm is claiming that nuclear power would help get our bills down, and of course that's an appealing thought. The opposition is even said that that nuclear has helped bring prices down around the world. Is that correct?
Well, that's as close to being a bare faced lie as you can say in public and get away with it. Firstly, nuclear power is not used all around the world.
People look at what's happening with nuclear around the world. Nineteen of the twenty biggest economies have adopted nuclear or have signed up to it. They've done it because it's safe, it's zero missions, it can deliver cheaper electricity, and it's a constant source of twenty four to seven power.
There are thirty countries that have nuclear power, including the four that have one reactor and the six that have two. In most countries it either doesn't exist or as a minor component of electricity supply. Secondly, it doesn't bring prices down. In fact, when I looked at average world prices for different forms of energy last year, the figures were solar three point seven cents a killer what hour, wind four
point one, gas eight, coal eleven nuclear sixteen. So it's not just a bit more expensive, it's about four times as expensive as solar or wind. And I'm in the UK at the moment, and not very far from here. The UK is building one nuclear power station, Hinckley Point C. It was initially supposed to cost about twenty billion Australian dollars and befunctioning by twenty sixteen. They're now talking about generating electricity by twenty twenty eight, with a final cost
somewhere north of one hundred billion dollars. And in fact, all of the only three nuclear power stations being built in Western Europe are all years behind schedule and billions over budget. And the claims of cheap electricity were based on the industry statements of cost, but nothing built in recent years has come anywhere near the cost that the industry has claimed that will been way over budget.
You mentioned the cost of building a nucular reactor in Britain. We haven't spoken about the costs of building these seven reactors here. What does the opposition said about the cost of their plan.
The silence has been deafening. The Coalition have released no figures and in a sense they probably can't because at the moment there are no working small modular reactors. You can't write a check and buy a small modular reactor.
Nobody knows what the cost will be because they are not yet operational, and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering has released a discussion paper about small modular reactors, pointing out that there are several possible designs being considered around the world, but none of them are yet commercially available, and they said it would probably be the twenty forties before it's possible to write a check and buy a so called small modular reactor if we wanted to go
down that path, and similarly, if we were to build large nuclear reactors. The cost depends on what design you adopt and who you to build them. Basically, the nuclear industry in recent years has been going way of a budget, with every new nuclear power station that's been built in the northern hemisphere.
Okay, but what about one of the claims underpinning this announcement and actually arguably spurred this announcement on, and that is that coal fired power stations are coming to the end of their life over the next ten to fifteen years. That much is true, isn't it? And why did they need to be replaced by something.
That is certainly true? There are two problems that they're announcement. One is that they've said that some stations that aren't
projected to close will close. If we were to close down the power stations that are listed in their media release as due to close by twenty thirty seven, and if we were improbably to build seven nuclear power stations by twenty thirty seven, they would only provide about a third of the electricity that we will have lost through the closure of coal So the numbers just don't add up.
It's also wildly improbable that we could build seven nuclear power stations in the next twelve years, because the Switzkowski report, chaired by the head of the Australian Nuclear Organization, presented to the Howard government, said that it would take at least ten years in more likely fifteen to build one nuclear power station, so the idea we could build seven by twenty thirty seven seems pure fantasy.
Coming up after the break Peter Dutton versus the States, and we've been talking about the claims that have been in the opposition's planned for nucular power. You've mentioned that they have outlined seven sites in which they are looking to build these nuclear power stations. Tell me about where these nuclear stations are proposed to go well.
The proposal is to cite them where existing coal fired power stations are likely to close in the next twelve years. The argument for citing nuclear power stations where coal is being closed down is that there is a distribution system so you don't need to invest in new power lines. Not all those sites are even potentially available in the state governments in Queens and New Southales. Victoria said they are not interested at all in overturning their state prohibitions.
We've got a prohibition on nuclear generated power in New South Wales and we're not going to remove that in the state. And I don't know whether the Opposition is planning or doing it if they were to win government either.
I think it's the same.
And we would fight him every step of the way. As I have said, we own the sites. We own the sites that he wants to use, and we own the transmission lines that he wants toxic.
It's risky, it's more expensive.
And it is decades and decades are white.
And the L and P. Dutton's own political colleagues in Queensland have said that they're not interested in building nuclear power stations.
No, no, no, I got to be really clear. It's not part of our plan.
We won't look at it.
It is not part of our plan.
He didn't know's my position on it.
So none of the state governments where nuclear power would need to be established, and even the potential alternative government in Queensland have said they're not on board with this proposal.
It just seems politically unrealistic. Even if the government were somehow to find a majority in both houses in Parliament to repeal the federal prohibition of nuclear power, and there's only been one brief period in the last thirty years where the government in power had control of the Senate, and since it was the Crossbench that persuaded John Howard to put the ban on nuclear power in the Environmental
Protection of Vadavasity Conservation Act. It defires credibility to suggest that a coalition government would be able to persuade the Crossbench to support moving that from the federal legislation.
And do we have the expertise to build these reactors here? Do we have an industry to build these things?
That would be a massive challenge. We don't have a workforce that is skilled in building nuclear reactors, and we don't have a regulatory regime that would give the community confidence that a nuclear power station could be built and operated safely. And that was why these Swurdkowski reports said it would take at least ten years fifteen to build one nuclear reactor because we would need to develop the workforce and develop the regulatory regime that would allow that.
Even in countries that have an existing regulation system and a trained workforce like the UK, nuclear power stations are taking much longer than that to build.
And what about the risks of waste management when it comes to nuclear power plants. Have you had the coalition speak about that at all?
The Coalition is silent about the issue of waste management. But I was on the expert Advisory committee for the South Australian Nuclear Oil Commission, and it estimated in twenty fifteen, nearly a decade ago, that it would then cost about forty billion Australian dollars to build a secure storage for
the radioactive waste that comes from nuclear power stations. So as well as the huge cost of building nuclear power stations, there is the unexplained and yet unknowable cost of managing the radioactive waste which needs to be managed for geological time. I mean we're not talking about a few years or
a few decades. We're talking about tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of years, is the period for which radioactive waste from nuclear power stations needs to be isolated from the biosphere to prevent damage to humans and ecological systems.
Allan thank you for your time, A real pleasure mate. Also in the use today, Prime Minister Anthony Alberesi has vowed to ban children from social media, with legislation to be introduced by the end of this year. Children up to the age of sixteen could be prevented from platforms like Snapchat Instagram, but the cutoff age won't be decided until the government has trialed age verification technology. The Prime minister says he wants to get kids off devices and
onto footy fields. Oppositional lyder Peter Dunne says he will support a ban, and thousands of farmers have gathered at parliam the House to protest the government's ban on live
sheep exports. The ban, which is said to be phased in over four years, passed the House and the Senate overwhelmingly earlier this year, but National's leader David little Proud has told the crowd of farmers that the first bill he would bring to Parliament if the Coalition wins the next election will be a repeal of the live export ban. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.