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The typical rule in Australian politics is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. The most successful oppositions tend to employ a small target strategy - not putting out any big promises or agendas for the government to attack, and simply taking pot shots at the government for anything that goes wrong. The current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was an exemplar of this sort of strategy and he succeeded in dethroning a three-term Liberal government with it.
The current Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has decided to hell with that. Very unusually, he has proposed a big change in policy direction that is going to be one of the main issues that defines next year's election. He wants to go nuclear.
Australia does not have a nuclear industry (despite having more than a quarter of the world's uranium). In fact, nuclear power is explicitly illegal, at both the federal level and in multiple states. Victoria and Queensland (both ruled by Labor governments) have already ruled out any change in their laws or allowing nuclear plants to be built in their jurisdictions. Dutton is undeterred. He argues they will change their tune if he wins a mandate from the electorate for his policy.
The Albanese government meanwhile has made a big deal of the transition to renewable energy and acting on climate change. It has challenged Dutton to name the locations of his proposed nuclear plants (which he has now done) with the obvious intention of trying to stir up local resistance. It's running the argument that nuclear won't be built quickly enough to meet our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, and that nuclear will be more expensive than renewables. Most of the media has joined in the chorus of insisting that nuclear just doesn't make sense and that relying on wind and solar is much more sensible.
Much remains to be seen about how this debate develops. But Dutton in my estimation is an very pragmatic politician with a good sense of the public mood. He's certainly a conservative, but not someone who's about to let ideology get in the way of political advantage. It seems that he's judged that this is a good fight to have, and I suspect he's right.
I don't know what the politics of nuclear were like back in the 70s but today most people simply don't have a strong opinion on it. What they do have a strong opinion about is energy prices, and those have been going up and up. And while there's an endless stream of commenters ready and willing to assert that the path to cheaper prices is more renewables, I think Dutton is correct that he can win this argument.
Firstly, the actual experience of Australians has been that prices have gotten more and more expensive as more and more wind and solar has been deployed. It's easy to write a headline saying "Power prices went negative today" during a sunny period, but most people are very aware that they are paying more overall.
Secondly, the uptake of rooftop solar has been very high. Something like a third of houses have solar panels already, and this has led to widespread understanding of the intermittency of renewable energy. People understand that it's great when it works... but when it doesn't and they have to buy power from the grid, it's extremely expensive.
And there's a third underrated and underreported aspect to this debate. Dutton's plan is for these nuclear power stations to be government built and owned, while the Albanese government is relying on private investment for its renewable energy buildout. This is kind of an inversion of the traditional stance of the two parties involved, with the Liberals having led the charge in privatising our existing energy system. But I've encountered a not-insubstantial number of people who think that privatisation was a big mistake and really wish we had a nationalised energy system again. I've even heard doctrinaire libertarians say it.
I think Dutton expertly read the public mood on the Voice referendum, correctly judging where people would end up as the issue became more salient. And my feeling is he's done the same here, and is guiding the debate in a direction that will be rewarding for him. It's rare for first term governments to lose, we'll see if this play is able to create an exception.
How popular is nuclear power in Australia?
In the US, it's only a little over neutral, with a big gender gap. Nuclear has a reputation of being dangerous, which lowers its popularity.
Traditionally Australia has been nuclear free (except for a small research/medical isotope reactor in New South Wales). Back in the 70's/80's it was strongly anti-nuclear.
There are many left wing/green constituents that want to see renewables win in the nuclear/solar/wind showdown, but that isn't everyone. As AshLael says, most people care mainly about power prices and renewables can't deliver all the time (not nearly enough suitable locations for hydro-batteries to cover).
Edit: Poll from 2011 says 46% were strongly against.
Additional 2024 polling in this article from left leaning public news organisation with 35% for and 33% against.
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https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/report/2024/climate-change-and-energy/#nuclear-power
https://news.gallup.com/poll/474650/americans-support-nuclear-energy-highest-decade.aspx
Australians are mildly in favour of nuclear power, we're actually more pro-nuclear than the US by a small margin. There's a fairly large gender gap, a lot of women say they're unsure about nuclear energy (compared to men) and thus their support is lower while opposition is just as high or higher.
https://essentialvision.com.au/support-for-nuclear-energy-in-australia
Despite my heartfelt desire for nuclear energy, I am almost certain that Australia is not competent enough to make it work. There will be extremely bitter sabotage and wrecking campaigns from the Greens who utterly hate nuclear energy. If Labour win even a minority government, they'll have to work with the Greens to govern: nuclear will be toast. German Greens like Habeck sabotaged German nuclear energy by misrepresenting scientific reports to justify closure even in an energy shortage. Their order of operations is pretty clear - Green parties were founded on opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power and they are true to their beliefs.
There are countries that know how to build and countries that don't. South Korea, Japan and China are industrious and pretty efficient, they can get things done on-schedule and under budget, nuclear plants included. Australia is pretty terrible at manufacturing. We gave up on the car industry over a decade ago, labour is very expensive and unions are quite powerful. We are also pretty bad at construction, there are endless regulations and environmental reviews. The kind of country that outright bans nuclear energy is not going to have a permissive regulatory environment for anything! Indigenous people will probably also try to extract some cash from the government, they've been hostile to nuclear since the nuclear tests here.
Building your first nuclear plant is hard, there are always going to be delays and cost overruns. Likewise with Small Modular Reactors. Great, promising technology. But nobody's put them into production for civilian uses, there are only the military submarine reactors. The physics is simple, the engineering and safetyist regulation is the hard part. That's what happened to nuclear in the USA, costs rose 5-10x because of intense regulation.
I foresee years spent working to open a path through a thicket of regulation and legal obstacles, years more worrying about storing nuclear waste for millions of years (the US spent billions on this silly problem and still failed, see Yucca mountain). There will be some inevitable delay as industry wants cash paid upfront rather than trust that their capital-intensive, slow-payoff project won't be cancelled. The Greens and Labour will shout that it's too expensive and too dangerous, despite the expense stemming from overreactions to safety. Some crisis will come up and the government will get distracted. They might fall into the trap of constantly switching tenders like we did with submarines: Japan->France->US/UK. Our national defence is heavy on announcements, light on results. Nuclear could be the same. The Coalition might fall into the trap of replacing Dutton the moment his polls fall, like with the last couple of their prime ministers. There are so many roads to boondoggle and only a few to success.
Maybe the global tide is turning. China is constructing plenty of reactors, South Korea switched back in favour of nuclear. The US recently legislated to loosen the straitjacket: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-senate-passes-bill-support-advanced-nuclear-energy-deployment-2024-06-19/
But if Dutton makes nuclear work in Australia, if reactors actually enter service, he deserves a Lee Kuan Yew Medal for outstanding political achievement.
I still have a massive grudge against Harry Reid and his Yucca Mountain opposition, very frustrating. But yeah, your first reactor is very, very hard. There are only a select few companies in the world capable of building them and the pushback cannot be underestimated. I don't know how strong Australia's federal vs state power is, so that might come into play.
Federal and state governments are reasonably-similar in power, although frankly tugs-o-war don't happen all that often.
It should be noted, however, that the territories of Australia have very weak governments that can be overridden by the federal government at whim, and unlike in the USA those territories are actually pretty substantial in physical size and in at least the ACT's case wired into the main (Eastern) power grid. So if all the states go NIMBY, the federal government could just force the first one through in the backcountry of the Australian Capital Territory over the ACT's own objections.
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Finland has managed to build nuclear even with the Greens in government (though they've frequently left the government over it) and the result of the tension has recently flipped Greens to a (mildly, ambiguously) pro-nuclear stance.
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