Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The idea that Australia should waste time, resources and taxpayers' money on the pursuit of nuclear energy is bananas. It is daft in the extreme. There is literally nothing in favour of that course of action. It would waste taxpayers' money on projects that are fundamentally uncommercial. It would delay the supply of new energy generation. It would make us more dependent on foreign technology. It would lock in higher energy prices for decades. It would create new health and environmental risks. It would have negative geostrategic consequences. That is some scorecard right there, yet the coalition, which couldn't settle a national energy policy in nine years and presided over a decrease in energy generation capacity, has now got just one bright idea: let's go nuclear.

They are obsessed with having a perpetual conversation about nuclear while complaining that we need to have a conversation about nuclear, never mind the Howard government inquiry chaired by Dr Ziggy Switkowski in 2006 or the South Australian royal commission or the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry or the inquiry by the Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy in the last parliament, back in 2019, that was chaired by the current shadow minister for energy, the member for Fairfax, and participated in by the member for Lyne. At that most recent inquiry, Dr Switkowski said:

… one of the things that have changed over the last decade or so is that nuclear power has got more expensive rather than less expensive.

All of the inquiries and endless conversations tell us that nuclear is the most expensive form of new generation and the slowest to deliver and the least flexible. Don't worry about the fact that nuclear is not being delivered on a commercial basis anywhere in the world or that the nuclear power industry, now more than 70 years old, has still not delivered a single permanent storage site for its high-level waste.

Those are the consistent conclusions reached by the same merry-go-round nuclear conversation we've been having for decades. That's why the existing ban under the EPBC Act is utterly sensible. It provides absolute clarity, and that clarity protects us from wasting precious time and resources. If for some insane reason you open the door to nuclear energy in Australia, the first thing you would need to do is establish a fit-for-purpose regulatory and oversight framework that would suck up millions of dollars in taxpayers' money. The budget requests of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States in 2022 was US$887 million. The first thing we would need, if we went down the crazy nuclear path proposed by those opposite, would be an expensive and distracting expansion of bureaucracy and red tape. The second thing you would get, for sure, is the nuclear white-shoe brigade, all the spruikers who would end up in these halls trying to chisel some taxpayers' money for their pet pilot projects. That's because nuclear energy is fundamentally uncommercial. It is funded by governments. The still-to-be-delivered NuScale small modular reactor project that is beloved of the nuclear fantasy crowd is being funded by government, and as predicted during the inquiry we held three years ago, NuScale has revised its costs upwards and upwards, including a 53 per cent jump in January this year.

For those who persist in pretending that nuclear is favoured elsewhere, this is from the World nuclear industry status report in 2019:

In 2018, ten nuclear countries generated more power with renewable than with fission energy. In spite of its ambitious nuclear program, China produced more power from wind alone than from nuclear plants. In India, in the fiscal year to March 2019, not only wind, but for the first time solar out-generated nuclear, and new solar is now competitive with existing coal plants in the market. In the European Union, renewables accounted for 95 percent of all new electricity generating capacity added in the past year.

The most recent report, from 2022, said:

Nuclear energy's share of global commercial gross electricity generation in 2021 dropped to 9.8 percent—the first time below 10 percent and the lowest value in four decades …

And, it said:

In 2021, wind and solar alone reached a 10.2 percent share of gross power generation, the first time, they provided more than 10 percent of global electricity and surpassed the contribution of nuclear energy.

Globally, the contribution of nuclear power to our energy needs continues to decline while the contribution of renewables grows strongly year on year. The bottom line is this: we know everything we need to know about nuclear energy technology. It is uncommercial. It is eye-wateringly expensive. It is slow and inflexible. It is toxic and dangerous. It has no solution for its own waste after 70 years. Nothing tells you more about the coalition's complete abandonment of any faintly sensible or reasonable position when it comes to energy policy than the fact that the only new idea they have is for Australia to go nuclear.

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