Ban on technology is a nuclear over-reaction
The best defence is a good offence, or so the saying goes. If you are on the ropes don’t block, start swinging! And so after a lacklustre result in the heartland seat of Dunkley, Peter Dutton and the Coalition have gone nuclear, declaring that our country could have a nuclear reactor in the next 10 years.
I have no problem with this; Australia’s current moratorium on nuclear energy is patently absurd.
We already sell our uranium to other countries and then take all that toxic waste back and bury it here.
Much like Operation Sovereign Borders, we do it but we just don’t talk about it. We don’t comment on onwater matters and we don’t comment on under-sand matters.
But that’s still cool. I’ve been in this country for almost 48 years and I still haven’t grown a second head – though possibly only because my first is too large to make room for it.
So let’s talk nuclear.
For decades other countries have done it, including the US, Britain, France and Japan. Namely pretty much every country we’ve ever had a submarine deal with, including – incoming zinger! – nuclear ones.
This neat little irony is just one crux of the absurdity: we want to buy and operate nuclear subs while banning ourselves from fully servicing them.
And there are bigger and broader issues at play, including our everreceding emissions targets.
If we really want to meet and beat them, we should be leaving nothing out on the field.
A couple of decades ago the notion of mass household solar power was considered complex and expensive. But as soon as the market opened up, homeowners and businesses went ballistic. Demand and production soared and prices plummeted.
Nuclear is, of course, a different beast.
Few householders will be rushing to plug a Chernobyl into their hot water systems and building a conventional nuclear reactor, with all the physical and technical demands as well as the safety and regulatory and long-tail waste containment obligations, is lengthy and prohibitive.
In this sense Energy Minister Chris Bowen is right to call the Coalition’s prophesy a pipe dream. In 2024, it is nothing more.
But prophesies are concerned with the future, not the present, and many believe it could be only a matter of a decade or so before small modular reactors are available.
Perhaps they could be retrofitted into obsolete coal-fired power stations or attached to high-energy industrial operations like steel and aluminium smelters.
No one knows, and that’s the point. So why not simply lift the moratorium and let the market, the provider and the consumer decide? If the case for nuclear does not stack up then let it collapse in full view.
Personally I have my own prophetic take on what will happen.
For a while there will be nothing. Then a few start-up evangelical Elon Musky types will propose sexy-edgyhi-tech solutions that nobody really understands.
And then every resident action group in the country will protest against any nuclear reactor being built in their suburb under any circumstances, all the while maintaining the existential threat of climate change and the desperate need to cut emissions to zero in order to save our planet from extinction.
After all, they do it for every apartment block and mosque. A reactor’s got no chance.
And of course they won’t say it’s because of the climate or emissions or extinction, which of course they still wholeheartedly believe in.
They’ll say it’s because of the local streetscape and lack of parking spots.
But perhaps our friends in the regions will be more reasonable. Maybe a reactor could replace the coal-fired power plants in the bush.
After all, rural communities welcomed coal seam gas and solar and wind farms and … Oh, hang on.
And so bring on the nuclear debate, but we may find that it’s not just that nuclear is not ready for Australia. Maybe we’re not ready for it.
The truth is Australia is a NIMBY nation, as anyone who tries to bring so much as a banana into the country quickly discovers.
From our ultra-strict quarantine laws to hard border protection to the ludicrous state closures during Covid to the ban on importing vaping devices that could save countless smokers’ lives, the truth is there before us in plain sight.
Ultimately we are an island nation obsessed with our own delicate purity and convinced that the best response to anything new or scary or even untested is to simply lock it out.
Sometimes that may be the best policy, but as we have seen with the rise of cancel culture, that contagion has now spread even to words. Yes, even the woke left have a hard border policy – it’s just an intellectual one.
So, sure, nuclear may not be right for Australia. But let’s at least have the moral courage and the regulatory freedom to discuss it.