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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am

The Coalition is going all in on nuclear power. The opposition’s vision for Australia’s future puts the technology front and centre, despite experts’ concerns about its costs, risks, and impracticalities.

So, is there more to it than first appears? Have the Coalition found the answers to making nuclear work in Australia?

Today, National correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on the real reason why the coalition is going after nuclear, and the factional warfare simmering underneath.

It’s Thursday, March 21.

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ANGE:

Mike, the coalition have made a promise to build nuclear power stations if they're elected. It's their first new policy commitment since the last election. To start us off, how does this policy compare to what experts say about nuclear power?

MIKE:

Well Ange, first thing is, we don't know a whole lot about the specifics of the policy at this stage. Since Peter Dutton announced it, you know, it's largely fall under the Coalition's energy and climate spokesman, Ted O'Brien, to lay out what the coalition means, and we haven't heard a lot from him either.

Audio Excerpt – News Host:

“There will be plenty of fear-mongering and misinformation from Labour, but the facts all favour the nuclear energy argument. Let's go to Coalition spokesman on climate and energy, Ted O'Brien. Ted, thanks for joining us…”

MIKE:

But it seems that if the Coalition wins, then in all likelihood he will be the one overseeing this big nuclear project because he's the relevant shadow, presumably he'd become the relevant minister in government.

Audio Excerpt – Ted O’Brien:

“There are 33 economies right now with nuclear energy, and they want more. And then there are another 50 countries that are looking at introducing nuclear energy for the first time. And we're talking about the Prime Minister…”

MIKE:

What we do know is that the Coalition is talking about putting nuclear reactors in six places around Australia, probably where there were existing coal fired stations, and they would, it appears, now be large scale nuclear plants. Originally they were talking about small modular reactors, which is a very new technology, but now it appears that it could be either or both.

Audio Excerpt – Ted O’Brien:

“The new stuff, the new and emerging technology. No one wants the stuff from the 1950s, the Soviet era technologies.”

MIKE:

Just going off of what we've been told, there are some issues. You know, for a start, a host of energy experts and analyses have concluded that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive option for meeting Australia's future energy needs, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would cost consumers a lot more, a lot more, several times more, than wind or solar. And that's if, of course, you can get them up and running in the first place. Ted O'Brien has been making the case that it would be easy.

Audio Excerpt – Ted O’Brien:

“Now, if you look at the most recent entrant in the civil nuclear program globally, it's the UAE and they host the COP.”

Audio Excerpt – Sarah Ferguson:

“To be…to be clear to the audience. Just, just let's make it clear to the audience...”

MIKE:

But the UAE isn’t Australia, right? There are some big differences for a start.

Audio Excerpt – Sarah Ferguson:

“We're talking about a country that is partially a command economy. So it's not a country like Australia. It's not a country where people can object to a nuclear reactor in their constituency. So just to be clear, UAE is not comparable to Australia.”

MIKE:

When you look at the bigger picture, you get a quite different view. According to the most recent World Nuclear Report, over the last three years, up until 2022, only two of 18 nuclear reactors connected to the grid around the world started up in time. And most of those were in places like China and Eastern Europe - other command economies. So perhaps we can discount them a little bit. Perhaps a more pertinent example might be the reactor in the UK. They've been trying to build that since 2008 and it's still not open. And the cost at the moment is £46 billion, which is roughly three times the original budget. And it's still not scheduled to generate any power until 2031. So Ange it's fair to say, the big picture that Ted O'Brien and the coalition are trying to paint as nuclear being easy and cheap is pretty starkly at odds with the best independent assessments, and with the real world evidence that shows it is slow to bring online and shockingly expensive.

ANGE:

Right Mike, so if all of that is, you know, well-established, it's out there about nuclear power, the flaws and how challenging it would be to establish in Australia, why would someone like Ted O'Brien be out there on TV in interviews spruiking this plan?

MIKE:

Well, it's a very good question. And I think it's worth looking at the history of how the coalition came to embrace nuclear power, because I think some of the factional power plays around it are quite revealing and sort of tell us how Ted O'Brien ended up being the guy in the middle of all this. Take it back a few years to just after Scott Morrison won the 2019 election, and at that time there was a group of disgruntled, feisty MPs, mostly from Queensland, mostly from the sort of National party end of things, mostly climate deniers and big advocates of coal, which is important in this, all started talking about nuclear. And chief among them was Barnaby Joyce…

Audio Excerpt – Alan Jones:

“You'll note the headline that Barnaby Joyce has said today has sparked the showdown. Well, if Barnaby Joyce doesn't win the showdown, you can call it a shutdown.”

MIKE:

…who had already been dumped as the Nationals leader and was grumbling about all sorts of policy ideas. So one area that he found that would get him some attention was nuclear energy.

Audio Excerpt – Barnaby Joyce:

“Nuclear energy is vastly more advanced and safer than it was in the past. They're going to smaller units, effective units, zero emission units, if that's what you want…”

MIKE:

And he made a big public pitch for the Morrison government to build reactors, and he was joined in that by a number of others as well. Now, Scott Morrison didn't want to bar of nuclear, quite frankly, but equally, he was under a lot of pressure from these people to sign up to a really expensive policy. He didn't want to dismiss it out of hand, because that would have brought more heat to what was already shaping up as a nasty internal brawl. So he did what a lot of prime ministers in that sort of position do, and he promised an inquiry.

Audio Excerpt – News Host:

“7 News revealed last night that the Morrison government has commissioned a joint parliamentary inquiry to examine whether Australia should build nuclear power plants.”

MIKE:

… and he needed the right person to lead that inquiry to get the outcome that he wanted and out of the whole government, he chose this not very well known, reasonably recent backbencher - I think he'd only been in the Parliament about three years - from the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Ted O'Brien.

ANGE:

Right. And so is Ted O'Brien like some kind of big nuclear advocate from a while back, why was he considered the right person and why did he get chosen to lead that inquiry?

MIKE:

Well, in relative terms, he actually wasn't such a big nuclear advocate. When I interviewed him last year, he reckoned that he started out as an anti-nuke. But there's no doubt about it - he's drifted. It appears that he wasn't chosen because he was either pro or anti-nuclear. He was chosen because he was not as rabid as the Joyce mob. If anything, he was chosen because he's seen as pretty polite, pretty inoffensive, pretty middle of the road bloke. One Liberal colleague of O'Brien's that I spoke to, put it this way, and I'll quote, my initial impression was that he was about the most beige person I'd ever met. That was what they said. And they didn't mean that assessment unkindly. They hastened to add that when they got to know him better, they realised he wasn't colourless, but that he was just calm and considered and actually pretty switched on. Because O'Brien really isn't the typical Queensland coalition member. You know, they tend to skew to the right and to be quite, you know, as they say, colourful. And speaking to other people who are on the inquiry, like Labour's Josh Wilson and the independent MP Zali Steggall, they both believe that he was chosen because he might produce the most anodyne, careful, politically boring report possible, one that wouldn't force Morrison into any big calls on nuclear power in the short term and that might just say, yeah, let's keep a watching brief and see what happens in the future.

And Zali Steggall said she became convinced that O'Brien's job was simply to placate the pro-nuclear nets and come up with a report that was not outright canning nuclear, but acknowledged its difficulties. And so anyway, the committee met, it was given a very short timeframe to produce the report. And O'Brien delivered as asked, and I think that marked him as a future minister.

ANGE:

After the break, is the coalition’s nuclear policy actually a coal policy in disguise?

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ANGE:

So Mike, back in 2019, Ted O'Brien's given the job to deliver a very evenhanded, neutral inquiry on nuclear power in Australia. How does that turn into the coalition and Ted O'Brien being so strongly pro-nuclear now?

MIKE:

Well, you're right, it's fascinating how it's morphed. I mean, the one big thing that happened, of course, was that the coalition lost the election. Scott Morrison was gone, we got Peter Dutton in this place. Peter Dutton is from Queensland and he's very hard right wing, and he's much more tuned to the politics of Queensland, which are rather different to the politics of much of the rest of Australia. So going back to the inquiry, we had a couple of rightwing agitators on the committee. MPs David Gillespie and Keith Pitt, who I've mentioned already, haranguing witnesses and other members of the committee who were sceptical of nuclear. I mean, when I spoke to Josh Wilson about this, he kind of imitated their voices and he said it was like, “come on, you bloody greenies, you inner city lefties. You don't want nuclear, but it's fine.” And it was that kind of thing. And that's my impression of him doing an impression of them. But Wilson defended Ted O'Brien a bit. He said Ted wasn't like that. He was the serious person on the coalition side. He knew he had a job to do, and he was going about doing it in a very methodical and calm way. And in the end, he delivered a pretty anodyne report, which didn't endorse nuclear power as an immediate priority, but simply said that Australia should continue to evaluate the possibility that it could be part of our energy grid. But during the course of this inquiry, it appears something else happened to Ted O'Brien. You know, he'd met all these nuclear industry figures from around the world, and he became increasingly enamoured of the whole promise of nuclear power. And since then, as he told me last year when I interviewed him about this, he said he'd been quote, personally on the ground talking to nuclear people everywhere from China to Taiwan to Japan to Canada, US, Switzerland, France, India. He's been all over the place and he's become increasingly convinced that nuclear is the way to go, and he's become increasingly a big proselytiser for it. And I think today he's regarded as perhaps the biggest booster of nuclear power in the parliament.

ANGE:

And, Mike, is there something else that's motivating this push for nuclear? You know, if the inquiry itself didn't find much to support an Australian nuclear power industry, is there another reason that this would suit the coalition as a policy area?

MIKE:

Well, yes. And Zali Steggall puts it very well. She thinks the whole thing was basically engineered as a distraction. She said, I actually genuinely think that under Peter Dutton's leadership, they're doing what the coalition has been focussed on doing for ten years, which is trying desperately to keep more coal and gas in the system for as long as possible. So what she means by that is that if your solution for reducing emissions is building nuclear power plants instead of wind and solar, and building nuclear power plants takes a long time, you know, at least a decade, in that case, you've got to do something to keep the lights on in the meantime. And it's essentially a delaying tactic to put off the transition to renewable energy. I'm not sure this is true of Ted O'Brien, I might say. When we spoke last year, he said he was not about delaying the energy transition and he wasn't anti-renewables. And he said that Australia needed an all of the above strategy and nuclear, as well as all the other measures to address climate change. But even if he's genuine, there's a big reason to suspect that the same isn't true of a lot of his party colleagues, particularly in Queensland. And on this recent 7.30 report that I mentioned earlier, he was asked if the uncertainty about the time it would take to build a nuclear plant might necessitate running coal fired power stations for longer, he gave what I thought was a very revealing answer. He said:

Audio Excerpt – Ted O’Brien:

“Our view is we should not be closing our coal fired power stations prematurely.”

ANGE:

And Mike, if you look back on this story, it sort of started with Barnaby Joyce throwing out an idea to get some attention, which was basically dismissed by the majority of the coalition. But today, that idea from Barnaby Joyce isn't actually too different from the party's official position. So what does that tell you about where Ted O'Brien and Peter Dutton are taking the party on climate change and energy?

MIKE:

Well, they're taking it back to the future. I mean, you're quite right, back in July 2019, Barnaby Joyce gave this interview to the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he reckoned he had the formula for making the nuclear industry saleable to the Australian electorate, which, you know, has traditionally been very resistant to nuclear power. And he said you would give incentives to people living near nuclear power stations and that would make them go for it. And I'm quoting him here: “If you can see the reactor from your house, your power is free. And if you're within 50km of the reactor, you get your power for half price.” And by Barnaby Joyce’s reckoning, that would have communities around the country lining up to get reactors in their neighbourhoods. But only about a week ago, Peter Dutton appeared to dust off the old Joyce idea, and he told a business conference in Sydney that the coalition would offer incentives for people living in the areas where they were proposing to build nuclear power stations. Dutton claimed that this had worked in other countries. But it is true, I checked, and there are some other countries that give handouts to people living near nuclear power stations. in France and the US, for example, they give them free access to potassium iodide to protect them from thyroid cancer in the event of a nuclear accident. So I'll be very interested to see if Dutton's policy goes to that kind of detail. And if he did that, I would suggest it meant he was serious, but I suspect he's not. I suspect Zali Steggall is right. And what the coalition is really about, is using this as a way to slow the rollout of wind and solar to say, yeah, let's just wait 10 or 20 years and we'll meet our climate targets with nukes. And in the meantime, we'll just keep burning fossil fuels. Essentially, this is not a nuclear policy. It's a coal policy. And I think it's a bad policy in both scientific terms, but also in electoral terms. I just think that people will see through it, and it will be a dud.

ANGE:

Mike, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

MIKE:

Thanks for having me Ange.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

Donald Trump’s criticism of Kevin Rudd's position as US ambassador, has led to the federal opposition calling the appointment a ‘mistake’.

During an interview with Nigel Farage on British TV, Trump was told that Rudd had criticised him in the past, leading the former US president to call Rudd ‘nasty’ and claimed he ‘isn’t the brightest bulb’.

And,

The chief of the United Nations Human Rights Office, Volker Turk, has warned that Israel’s “extensive restrictions” on aid entering Gaza could amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which would be a war crime – calling for Israel to allow the unimpeded entry of food to the territory.

Both Israel and the US rejected Volker’s statement, with a spokesperson for Volker later clarifying that a court would ultimately decide whether starvation was being used as a weapon of war.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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