Peter Dutton continues to refuse to release costings for the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear plants, saying he will announce details “in due course” before the next election.
There was “zero chance of the Albanese government reaching net zero by 2050, using renewables alone” and so nuclear energy had to be in the grid, Dutton said in a speech at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in Sydney.
The much-anticipated speech from Dutton was entitled: “A Nuclear Powered Australia – could it work?”
Building the seven nuclear reactors would cost “a fraction of the $1.2tn of Labor’s plan”, he said, without indicating the likely size of outlays. The Australian Energy Market Operator has put the transition cost, excluding transmission, at about $122bn.
“We’ll have more information about the cost of nuclear … in good time,” Dutton said. “It will be independently verified, and will show a cost differential, which is significant in favour of nuclear coming into the mix.”
The void of Coalition costings and how nuclear plants could lower power bills has been seized upon by critics of Australia’s potential shift into nuclear.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis last week said electricity costs could be 3.8 times higher than present levels. Energy minister Chris Bowen has cited government modelling that going nuclear would cap renewables’ expansion, resulting in a “massive” supply gap.
Dutton argued because nuclear plants could run as long as 80 years, the amortised costs over that time would make the energy source competitive against renewables, such as wind turbines that might need replacing in a quarter of that time.
Internationally, though, most of the reactors being built are either Chinese or Russian design. Excluding China’s expansion, a net 51 units shut globally in the past two decades, the World Nuclear Industry Status report stated last week.
China, though, is also installing solar farms at a far faster rate than nuclear, adding as much capacity in the first eight months alone as the US’s total, energy expert Lauri Myllyvirta said.
Dutton said even though amortisation over eight decades made nuclear competitive, it would be necessary for the government rather than commercial firms to build the plants – at least to begin with.
“Our judgment is that it should be a government asset,” he said. “There are a number of reasons for that, not just around the finances, but also in relation to safety and regulation, and I think that’s the best starting point for us.”
Dutton was asked by Guardian Australia about the size of the public debt taken on by regions that have built nuclear plants, such as Ontario, Canada, but he did not provide an answer.
Tristan Edis, one of the Ieffa report’s authors, said Ontario’s public utility had racked up $C38bn in debt, or $A70bn in current dollar terms, before its restructure. Consumers in that province had also been forced to pay for a debt retirement charge up until 2018.
Dutton repeated his claim that 19 of the top 20 economies in the world were “on this [nuclear] pathway”, with Australia the lone absentee. That number, though, ignores the closure of nuclear plants in Germany and Italy.
Dutton also declined to answer how a query about the number of nuclear plants in western nations that had started construction this century. So far, the tally is five, with one of them – the Nuscale small modular reactor plant in the US – closing before its commissioning after costs blew out from US$3.6bn (A$5.3bn) for 720 megawatts in 2020 to US$9.3bn for 462MW in 2022.
The bipartisan federal support for the Aukus nuclear-powered submarines was the reason the Coalition had not promoted nuclear energy when it was in office for almost a decade, he said.
“If you have signed up, under Aukus to dispose of waste at end-of-life, you have made a decision that it is safe to do so,” Dutton said. “Therefore, why not a domestic nuclear industry?”
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