Why are young people like this 18-year-old fronting the pro-nuclear push in Australia?
SBS News, 13 February 2025
The regional sessions were not publicised beforehand on Nuclear for Australia’s social media accounts or the tour page on its website — you could only register for tickets if you knew the URL for the event’s webpage.
Campaigns director for the Conservation Council of Western Australia, Mia Pepper, said when she tried to get tickets for the Perth event online, she was denied. She said a colleague also failed to get tickets using their real name, but able to get in using an alias.
Shackel said Nuclear for Australia Googles people’s names beforehand to determine whether they are “likely going to cause a disruption or a threat”
Some polling suggests older Australians are more supportive of nuclear power than their younger counterparts. So why are young people fronting a pro-nuclear push?
SBS News, By Jennifer Luu, 13 February 2025
In a function room at Brisbane’s The Gabba sports ground, around 600 people have gathered to hear Miss America 2023 try to convince Australians nuclear power is a good idea.
Sporting a blue cocktail dress, blonde hair and a wide smile, 22-year-old Grace Stanke looks the part of a beauty pageant contestant.
She’s also a nuclear engineer touring the country with Nuclear for Australia: a pro-nuclear lobby group founded by teenager Will Shackel and funded by donors that include entrepreneur Dick Smith.
The event — billed as an information evening featuring a panel of experts — is off to a rocky start. A protester steps in front of the audience and speaks into a microphone.
“All of the organisers, presenters and sponsorship of this event tonight has a very deep vested interest — ” he says, before he’s drowned out in a chorus of boos and the mic is seized from his hand.
Audience members continue to disrupt last month’s event, raising their voices and speaking to the crowd before being herded out by security.
Among them is Di Tucker, a retired psychologist concerned about climate change. She said she became upset after submitting half a dozen questions online to be answered by the panel — and felt like they were being deliberately ignored.
“I felt so frustrated by the lack of factual information in that so-called information session forum on the safety, the timescale and the reality of nuclear energy,” Tucker told The Feed.
“I did stand up and I addressed the crowd, and I said something like: ‘You people need to go away and do your own research … it’s glossing over facts’.”
Nuclear for Australia founder Will Shackel, who was emceeing, estimated there were 20 to 30 protesters heckling the room.
He labelled their behaviour “simply unacceptable and … not in the interest of a fair discussion”.
“They were yelling abuse at us on stage. We had people come up to Grace at the end, call her a clown,” he claimed.
Shackel told The Feed: “We had people [who] had to be physically dragged out because they were resisting security … it was pretty ugly and pretty disturbing.”
Tucker disputes this: “Nobody I saw leave the room was hostile or aggressive, physically aggressive towards the security guards.”
“In fact, it was the opposite. The security guards were shoving the people outside.”
Outside, a separate group of protesters wields banners warning against the dangers of radioactive waste.
The words “Nuclear energy distracts from the climate emergency” are projected onto The Gabba over the image of a red herring.
The teen and the beauty queen
Tucker said the audience was mostly male and over 60. So why are two young people fronting the pro-nuclear movement in Australia?………………………….
As well as launching Nuclear for Australia — which describes itself as “the largest nuclear advocacy organisation in Australia” with over 80,000 supporters — he’s addressed a Senate committee and interviewed French President Emmanuel Macron for his organisation’s social media at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in 2023.
Shackel first became fascinated with the nuclear debate while in high school in Brisbane.
“I’d just done a school assignment on nuclear energy when I realised it was banned. And that, as a 16-year-old kid, was pretty shocking to me,” he said.
Australia is one of the few countries where using nuclear energy to produce electricity is illegal. The ban was introduced in 1998, when the Howard government made a deal with the Greens in order to build a nuclear reactor in Sydney for research purposes.
At 16, Shackel launched a petition calling on Australia to lift its nuclear energy ban, garnering a flurry of media attention……….
As well as launching Nuclear for Australia — which describes itself as “the largest nuclear advocacy organisation in Australia” with over 80,000 supporters — he’s addressed a Senate committee and interviewed French President Emmanuel Macron for his organisation’s social media at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in 2023……………………………
Nuclear power is still a contentious topic, but more Australians have become supportive of the idea over time.
A 2024 Lowy Institute poll of 2,028 Australians
indicates 61 per cent support Australia using nuclear power to generate electricity, while 37 per cent were opposed.
Among the 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed, 66 per cent supported nuclear power while 33 per cent were opposed.
In contrast,
a December 2024 poll of 6,709 people conducted for the Australian Conservation Foundation suggests young people were less likely to agree that nuclear is good for Australia, compared to older respondents. For example, 42 per cent of males aged 18-24 agreed, while 56 per cent of males over 54 agreed.
There’s also a gender gap — in the same poll, just over a quarter of women thought nuclear would be good for Australia, compared to half of men.
Nuclear for Australia hopes Grace Stanke can convince the sceptics. Dubbed “the real-life Barbenheimer”, she works for the operator of the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the US, Constellation. (The company operates 21 of the US’s 94 nuclear reactors).
Now 18, Shackel suggests young Australians are more open-minded towards nuclear power than older generations and are more likely to support parties that are concerned about climate change……..
Physicist Ken Baldwin speculates the rise in support for nuclear power is due to shifting demographics.
He said older generations are more likely to have historical hangups around the dangers of nuclear power, having lived through the British and French weapons tests in the Pacific and nuclear catastrophes like the 1986 accident in Chernobyl and the 2011 accident in Fukushima. ……
“The younger generation … doesn’t have that particular historical baggage, and perhaps they’re more attuned to thinking about the need to do something about climate change,” he said.
Nuclear for Australia hopes Grace Stanke can convince the sceptics. Dubbed “the real-life Barbenheimer”, she works for the operator of the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the US, Constellation. (The company operates 21 of the US’s 94 nuclear reactors)…………….
Nuclear for Australia has been drumming up public support for nuclear power over the past fortnight, touring every capital city (except Darwin) and holding a parliamentary briefing in Canberra.
It also targeted regional areas near the Coalition’s proposed sites for future nuclear power stations — including Morwell in Victoria, Collie WA, Port Augusta SA, Callide and Tarong in Queensland and Lithgow in NSW. The Coalition says its taxpayer-funded plan is for five large and two smaller reactors, with the smaller ones to come online in 2035 and the rest by 2037.
Nuclear for Australia was slow to reveal all the names for a total number of regional locations for the tour. During the first week of the tour, Nuclear for Australia told The Feed there would only be two regional stops.
The regional sessions were not publicised beforehand on Nuclear for Australia’s social media accounts or the tour page on its website — you could only register for tickets if you knew the URL for the event’s webpage.
Campaigns director for the Conservation Council of Western Australia, Mia Pepper, said when she tried to get tickets for the Perth event online, she was denied. She said a colleague also failed to get tickets using their real name, but able to get in using an alias.
She accused Nuclear for Australia of blacklisting known anti-nuclear activists and trying to avoid criticism by attempting to “creep around the country”.
“If they were really genuine about having a mature debate, they would do their best to invite some people like myself that have engaged really respectfully in the debate over many years to answer the tough questions,” she said.
Shackel said Nuclear for Australia Googles people’s names beforehand to determine whether they are “likely going to cause a disruption or a threat”, and that regional events aren’t publicised on social media because they are not relevant to city-based audiences.
“We care about the safety of our attendees, we care about the safety of our experts,” Shackel said.
“If we believe that someone is a known protester … someone who could cause a physical threat to people in there, we will not allow them in.”
Pepper said: “I have never been physically aggressive to anybody in my entire life.”
“The idea that because you are opposed to nuclear power, you somehow would be aggressive or violent is absolutely outrageous.”
Locals left with more questions than answers
South of Perth, around 100 of the 9,000 residents of the tiny coal mining town of Collie showed up to the Nuclear for Australia event, hoping to learn more about how living next to a nuclear reactor could affect them.
The Coalition has proposed converting Collie’s coal-powered station into a nuclear power plant. But the state government is vowing to phase out coal by 2030 and there’s little chance nuclear power could come online by then, leaving coal workers in limbo.
Resident Jayla Anne Parkin said the information session was “an utter waste of time”, and she came away with more questions than answers. “Their whole speech was very generic. They were probably using the same speech for every single area,” she said.
Parkin asked one of the experts where the water for a nuclear power plant would come from — with large amounts needed to cool the radioactive core.
“He gave a long-winded speech about how we can take any body of water, whether it be the ocean, the river, pool, sewage, and treat it and turn it into the water. But at the end of him answering it, he still didn’t tell me what source of water in Collie they were going to use,” she said.
“We’re very limited with water here as it is.”……………………………………………
there have been reports about Shackel’s alleged political ties.
A 2024 research report from progressive activist group GetUp on nuclear disinformation in Australia
analysed Shackel’s LinkedIn connections and reported that their political party affiliation leant heavily towards Liberal Party MPs, Senators and advisors.
GetUp reported at least 36 of Shackel’s connections, including 11 current or former politicians, were directly linked to the Liberal Party — with the party having the highest concentration of current employees from a single organisation in his network…………………………………..
Lobby groups are allowed to have political party affiliations. While registered charities can participate in campaigning and advocacy, they “cannot have a purpose of promoting or opposing a particular political party or candidate”, according to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
……………………………………………………… Professor Ken Baldwin said nuclear is “not really viable” as an option for decarbonising Australia by 2050, as it would take 15 years at the very minimum to develop the necessary regulations and build a nuclear power station.
“We will have, according to the current plans, converted our current energy system to almost an entirely renewable energy system by that time,” Baldwin said.
“Australia is at the leading edge of the renewable energy transition. We’re installing solar and wind at one of the fastest rates per capita of any country in the world.”…………… https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/will-shackel-australia-pro-nuclear-movement-young-people/gucu0iefz
Doctors fear health fallout from nuclear energy plans
Canberra Times, By Marion Rae, February 12 2025
Doctors have warned of no “safe” level of radiation from a proposed network of nuclear reactors as battlelines are drawn for the federal election.
Similar to other nuclear-powered nations, Australians living within a certain radius of a reactor would need to be issued potassium iodide tablets for use in a radiation emergency, a nuclear briefing has learned.
“The only reason that everyone in that radius is given that is because they might need it,” Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Josh Wilson told a nuclear briefing on Tuesday.
If anyone comes to buy your house, the proximity of a reactor will be noted on the land titles register, and insurers will not cover nuclear accidents, he said.
The warning came as doctors fronted parliament to warn of long-term health risks for workers and surrounding communities, particularly children.
Evidence included a meta-data analysis of occupational and environmental exposure that accumulated data on more than seven million people.
It found living within 30km of a reactor increased overall cancer risk by five per cent, with thyroid cancer increasing by 14 per cent and leukaemia by nine per cent.
A separate study of workers in the nuclear industry in France, the United Kingdom and the United States analysed results from more than 300,000 people who were monitored for over 30 years.
Finding not only increased cancer rates but surprisingly increased rates of heart attacks and strokes, it found impacts at low doses were larger than previously thought.
“There is no ‘safe’ lower dose of radiation. The science is clear. All exposure adds to long-term health risks,” vice-president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War Dr Margaret Beavis said……………………………
Under the coalition’s nuclear energy blueprint, seven reactors would be built across five states to replace ageing coal-fired power plants with more gas-fired plants to provide baseload power in the interim.
“Zero-emissions nuclear plants” are a key part of the Nationals’ election pitch to regions where coal plants are already closing, while Labor is pressing ahead with the transition to renewable energy backed up by big batteries.
Public Health Association of Australia spokesman Dr Peter Tait said the idea that the nuclear industry was free of greenhouse gas emissions was a “furphy”, given the construction and uranium supply chain involved.
Emissions would rise threefold under the nuclear plan due to increased coal and gas use, he warned, with the first plant not due to come online until the late 2030s.
From a public health perspective, Australians can’t afford that delay, Dr Tait said.
Executive director of Doctors for the Environment Dr Kate Wylie said prolonging the dependency on fossil fuels would mean more Australians would be affected by their known health risks, including increased rates of asthma.
Nuclear energy would also put communities at risk during the next drought, when reactors would be first in line for scarce water, Dr Wylie said.
“The ethical thing to do is to choose the least water-intensive energy sources, which are wind and solar,” she said. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8890265/doctors-fear-health-fallout-from-nuclear-energy-plans/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIan3hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHaAJ7wF9BUi9CgA1_tQDXS5gC2WCrX8HSFZUrOQPGgXABnNkhEvlgHKolQ_aem_OShH2FPpE3tO3RIv_gAgBg
Why the USA’s Endless Wars Harm Global Stability & Australia
February 12, 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Denis Hay
Discover how USA’s endless wars destabilise nations and why Australia’s alignment with the US military threatens its sovereignty and security.
Introduction
For over a century, the United States has engaged in military interventions worldwide, often framed as efforts to spread democracy and protect human rights. However, history shows these interventions have frequently served corporate interests, ideological dominance, and geopolitical strategies rather than humanitarian concerns.
From orchestrating coups to funding proxy wars and setting up military bases across the globe, US actions have led to mass displacement, economic turmoil, and loss of sovereignty in many nations. Australia’s increasing alignment with the US military brings significant risks, potentially compromising national security and financial independence.
This article examines the history of US interventions, their consequences, and why Australia must develop an independent foreign policy free from US influence.
The Foundation of US Imperialism
Colonial Expansion and the Displacement of Indigenous Peoples……………….
Military Interventions for Economic and Geopolitical Gain…………………………
US Corporate Interests and Nazi Germany……………….
The Korean War: US Expansion Beyond the 38th Parallel…………………..
Regime Change and Proxy Wars in the Cold War Era………………….
US-Backed Coups in Latin America……………………….
The Vietnam War: A 30-Year US Military Disaster……………
The Post-Cold War Era and US Hegemony……………….
The US Military Empire – 800 Bases Worldwide………………
The Dangers of Australia Aligning with the US Military
Loss of Australian Sovereignty
• The increasing military integration between Australia and the US, including bases and joint operations.
• The AUKUS agreement and its implications for Australian independence.
Increased Risk of Conflict
• Australia’s involvement in US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite no direct national security threat.
• Potential entanglements in US-China tensions and future conflicts in the Indo-Pacific.
Economic and Social Costs
• Military spending redirected toward US-led initiatives rather than domestic priorities.
• The risk of Australia becoming a target in global conflicts due to its close military ties with the US.
Conclusion
…………………………………………….. For Australia, continued alignment with US military strategies poses significant risks. By participating in US-led wars, maintaining military bases, and deepening its commitment to the AUKUS agreement, Australia risks being drawn into unnecessary conflicts that do not serve its national interests. Moreover, prioritising militarism over diplomacy diminishes Australia’s ability to foster independent international relationships, negotiate trade agreements on its own terms, and establish a sovereign defence strategy that prioritises regional stability over foreign interventions.
To protect its sovereignty and long-term security, Australia must adopt a foreign policy that prioritises diplomacy, peace-building, and multilateral cooperation rather than blindly following US military agendas. A truly independent approach would involve reassessing military alliances, reducing foreign troop presence, and focusing on strengthening regional partnerships, particularly within the Indo-Pacific, to ensure a more balanced and peaceful international order. Australia has the resources, economic power, and global standing to lead by example – choosing peace over war, cooperation over subservience, and true independence over external influence………………. more https://theaimn.net/why-the-usas-endless-wars-harm-global-stability-australia/
Nuclear advocates: Splitting atoms and spinning agendas
Ed COMMENT. I can’t help noticing how the Liberal ad Labor agendas overlap here – in this carefully controlled pro-nuclear event -described by Sybilla George.
Labor is pushing on with the AUKUS nuclear submarine folly. Liberal is pretending that jt really intends to start nuclear power in Australia.
Both in the grip of USA militarism and the nuclear lobby
Despite having three women on stage – including Stanke – for the panel event, the Celebrity Room at Moonee Valley Racing Club was dominated by men on Saturday night. Opening the evening, Shackel said his charity aimed to “enable civil debate”, yet panels on the tour featured only pro-nuclear views.
By Sybilla George | 6 February 2025, https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/nuclear-advocates-splitting-atoms-and-spinning-agendas,19407
Former Miss America and nuclear energy activist Grace Stanke‘s Melbourne visit saw a pro-nuclear panel push persuasion over debate, with filtered questions and few dissenting voices, writes Sybilla George.
FOLLOWING EVENTS in Perth and Brisbane, Nuclear for Australia’s ‘An Evening with Miss America 2023 Grace Stanke’ took place last Saturday at the Moonee Valley Racing Club.
Nuclear for Australia is a nuclear power advocacy charity started in 2023 by teenager Will Shackel and patronised by electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith. The Miss America 2023 Australia Tour is also supported by Smith, according to the Nuclear for Australia website which has served as a platform for Smith’s response to The Guardian’s fact-checking of his anti-renewables arguments.
Nuclear for Australia is a nuclear power advocacy charity started in 2023 by teenager Will Shackel and patronised by electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith. The Miss America 2023 Australia Tour is also supported by Smith, according to the Nuclear for Australia website which has served as a platform for Smith’s response to The Guardian’s fact-checking of his anti-renewables arguments.
The tour aims to ‘help bridge the current divide between men and women for nuclear energy’ and cites the Australian Conservation Foundation statistic that 51% of men versus 21% of women support nuclear energy.
Despite having three women on stage – including Stanke – for the panel event, the Celebrity Room at Moonee Valley Racing Club was dominated by men on Saturday night. Opening the evening, Shackel said his charity aimed to “enable civil debate”, yet panels on the tour featured only pro-nuclear views. Questions put to the panel were selected from those sent in before and during the event, omitting the opportunity for live questions.
Stanke, who has an undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering, advocates for clean energy, including wind, solar and nuclear power. She began working for the United States’ largest nuclear energy provider, Constellation Energy, in 2024. Of Constellation’s energy capacity, 60% derives from nuclear power, while 25% comes from oil and natural gas fossil fuels.
The panel portion of the event featured Stanke alongside fellow American Mark Schneider, former operator of U.S. civil and defence nuclear reactors and current chief nuclear officer for UBH Group — an Australian defence consultancy firm angling for a ‘piece of the AU$368 billion nuclear sub [AUKUS] pie’.
They were joined by energy and resources lawyer Kirsty Braybon and Global Nuclear Security Partners’ (GNSP) Australia branch managing partner Jasmin “Jaz” Diab.
Army officer and nuclear engineer Jaz Diab is a star of the pro-nuclear media circuit. She’s made several appearances on Sky News and spoke at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Navigating Nuclear conference in May 2024 alongside Coalition Shadow Energy Minister Ted O’Brien, before the Coalition’s nuclear energy plan announcement in July 2024.
Diab joined the business group AUKUS Forum, suggesting GNSP will be making a play for the AUKUS pie and nuclear energy contracts should the Coalition get into government at the next federal election.
As reported by the Australian Financial Review in December 2024, the Australian Department of Defence spent AU$811 million on just the big five consultancy firms in 2022-23.
Braybon, who teaches a subject on nuclear law at the University of Adelaide, responded to a question about the current illegality of nuclear power in Australia under the 1998 Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act.
Some legal barriers to nuclear energy have already been watered down to accommodate AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, Braybon said, and “no one noticed”, pointing to the entwined framework of defence and civil nuclear programs.
The defence backgrounds of panel members Diab and Schneider also attest to this. Braybon did not specify which law changes she was referring to, however, the Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Act 2024, which was pushed through the Senate in October 2024 – designating waste “zones” in Adelaide and Perth for AUKUS-related nuclear waste – was reported on by Independent Australia, Michael West Media, The Advertiser and The Guardian.
While anti-nuclear protesters attended the Perth and Brisbane events – including a community action projecting ‘Nuclear energy distracts from the climate emergency’ outside the Gabba – there were no visible objectors in Melbourne.
However, Latrobe Valley Sustainability Group (LVSG) members attended the Moonee Valley Racing Club ahead of the Morwell event the next evening. The Coalition selected Loy Yang – a coal-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley – as one of seven sites around Australia for proposed nuclear power plants.
LVSG is concerned about the questions that Nuclear for Australia will not answer regarding the impact of nuclear power in fighting climate change and the economic cost of constructing and maintaining nuclear power plants. It points out that renewables have surpassed nuclear energy production in the U.S. in just 15 years and that there is a lack of private investment in nuclear power because of its unprofitability.
Indeed, a popular argument in favour of nuclear power appealing to the increasing energy demands of artificial intelligence data centres took a blow in recent days with the announcement that the Chinese AI program DeepSeek performs a similar function to the U.S. program ChatGPT, at a fraction of the cost and energy.
According to LVSG member Dan Caffrey, the Nuclear for Australia Morwell event attracted 240 attendees, but panel members “expressed a complete ignorance” of issues in the local area that reduce the viability of nuclear power, such as water availability and rehabilitation of the existing coal-fired station. The avoidance of challenging questions about nuclear power was “very disheartening”.
Sybilla George is a freelance writer with an interest in nuclear policy and the Pacific region.
Dutton’s nuclear policy is a Coalition scam
By Steve Bishop | 10 February 2025, https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/duttons-nuclear-policy-is-a-coalition-scam,19427
Overwhelming evidence is proving the Coalition’s nuclear plan to be a scam, writes Steve Bishop.
OPPOSITION LEADER Peter Dutton is scamming Australians with a nuclear power promise he knows he cannot deliver.
LNP research would have revealed the impossibility of providing nuclear power by the Coalition’s target of the mid-2030s.
This means a Dutton government would continue the years of Coalition ineptitude in tackling climate change and failing to provide a workable energy policy.
Coalition Senator Matt Canavan has revealed it’s nothing more than a “fix”.
Canavan said:
“Nuclear is not going to cut it. But we’re latching on to it… because it fixes a political issue for us… But it ain’t the cheapest form of power.”
In other words, it’s a con. Or to use a good Aussie word: a rort.
It’s why an internet search has found no trace of an authoritative nuclear body or expert endorsing the Coalition’s nuclear timeframe.
It’s simply a version of the old-time medicine show that peddled worthless cures to the gullible. The evidence demonstrates that the flimflammery of Mr Dutton’s Miracle Nuclear Elixir cannot work.
Mr Dutton promised:
‘A Federal Coalition Government will initially develop two establishment projects using either small modular reactors or modern larger plants such as the AP1000 or APR1400. They will start producing electricity by 2035 (with small modular reactors) or 2037 (if modern larger plants are found to be the best option).’
The CSIRO found in its GenCost 2023‐24 report that the earliest deployment for large-scale nuclear rectors would not occur until after 2040.
In the U.S., which has a nuclear power industry, AP1000 units at Vogtle, Georgia took 15 years to build, more than twice the projected timeline.
In Finland, the 1600mw Olkiluoto 3 was completed in 2023 — 18 years after construction started.
Even in China, with fewer hurdles to jump and a massive nuclear industry, it took 14 years for the Sanmen1 nuclear power station to be completed with plans for two units approved in 2004 and the first 1200mw reactor starting commercial operation on September 2018.
So it would be impossible to switch on a large plant in Australia before 2040. Is it feasible for the Coalition to build small modular reactors (SMRs) by 2035 as projected?
The ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions suggests it would be more like 15 years before the first reactor could start producing.
It says:
In Western countries… recent construction times have far exceeded a decade.
Before any nuclear power plant can be built here, we would first need to establish a regulatory system. That could take up to five years.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) has found:
‘SMRs would not be operating before the 2040s in Australia, too late to replace coal.’
It also revealed construction delays of 12 to 13 years had occurred in four of the few completed SMRs in Argentina, China and Russia.
Similarly, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) has found
‘…a mature market for the technology may emerge in the late 2040s.’
Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte, a nuclear engineer, told a NSW inquiry in 2020 that it would be naïve to think a power plant could be built in less than two decades.
The UK, which already has nuclear power stations, claims it is running the world’s fastest process to deliver an operational SMR by the mid-2030s. But it started this process in 2021 with a target date of the early 2030s and that has already blown out to the mid-2030s — some 16 years on from 2021.
This process aims to invest in demonstration SMRs in 2029. But a research paper filed on Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has found that if it then takes only two years to deploy resources ready for construction, only three years to build the plant and a further two years to demonstrate successful operation, any follow-on capacity would only come online well after 2040.
Even if a Coalition government was able to emulate this “fastest” process it would be after 2040 before an SMR is built. But a graph on page 7 of the plan released by Mr Dutton shows about 1,750mw of nuclear power being produced by 2036.
That would require six reactors having gone through the planning process, built, tested and commissioned — an impossibility based on the expert evidence.
In June, Mr Dutton said:
“I’m very happy for the Election to be a referendum on energy, on nuclear, on power prices…”
The overwhelming evidence means the Coalition scam should be rejected at the ballot box.
Australia’s technocratic drive to nuclear ignorance
The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.
ARENA, Sybilla George, 11 Dec 2024
Australia is ‘going nuclear’. The addition of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia’s defence arsenal through the $368 billion AUKUS deal passes a threshold of nuclear legitimisation that Oceania’s anti-nuclear activists have been battling for decades. Nuclearisation used to be an eco-ethical debate, as with the anti- vs pro-uranium mining battles since the 70s that have seen wins and losses on both sides. The rapid increase of Australia’s nuclear involvement, however, signals the reframing of national nuclear rhetoric as techno-scientific rationality that precludes dialogue and authorises executive ruling.
While the AUKUS deal plays out in the limelight, at RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory the building of facilities to host six United States B-52H Stratofortress bombers on rotational deployment, alongside ‘up to 75’ US Armed Force permanent staff, is underway. The facility renovations are funded through the Force Postures Initiative, the most recent phase of the Force Postures Agreement which since 2014 has defined the United States’s military agenda in Australia, with the consent of successive Australian governments. The Enhanced Air Cooperation branch of the US Alliance was recently ratified when Australian Defence provided ‘air-to-air refuelling’ to B-2 Spirit bombers involved in the US’s October strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
More than half of the United States’s stock of 76 active B-52 bombers is capable of carrying and deploying nuclear weapons; the remainder is conventionally armed. These jets have been flying over Australian airspace for half a century; however, stationing them at RAAF Tindal signals a significant escalation in nuclear involvement, as it will produce for the first time the conditions ‘to support potential nuclear combat missions from Australian soil’, according to a Nautilus Institute Special Report published in August.
This would be illegal under the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), an agreement on which Australia under Labor has abstained since 2022 when it rescinded the Coalition government’s ‘No’ vote. Signing and ratifying the treaty features as a goal in Labor’s 2023 National Platform. Yet progress seems unlikely, given Australia’s third abstention on the TPNW on 1 November 2024 and the persistent silence from the government on the United States’s policy to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ the presence of nuclear arms aboard aircraft or ships. Under this policy, Australia will not be informed whether B-52 bombers on deployment at RAAF Tindal are carrying nuclear weapons.
The public interest in the disclosure of the presence of nuclear weapons includes matters of security, ethics and democratic transparency. Of great concern is the Albanese government’s passive concession to a foreign state’s policy that conflicts with its own commitment to ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ of foreign activities conducted in Australia. Restricted speech has been increasingly utilised as a tactic to expedite pro-nuclear policy in the rush towards technological rationality.
Another example is Albanese’s Nuclear Power Safety Bill, which was rammed through the Senate without debate in October 2024. It stipulates two dumping ‘zones’ for highly irradiated ‘spent nuclear fuel’, to be located within dozens of kilometres of Perth and Adelaide—Western and South Australia being selected once again to play host to nuclear, as during the United Kingdom’s nuclear testing campaign. Indeed, Defence recently withdrew its environmental approval application for developments to prepare HMAS Stirling to host nuclear-powered submarines, and The Australian has reported that the government will resubmit the application with an additional request for the rights to store irradiated waste materials at the facility, which would thus be ‘subject to a single round of community feedback’.
Deferral to the United States’s ‘neither confirm nor deny’ nuclear weapons policy is an appeal to ignorance, and thus innocence, which in turn forecloses systems of accountability, since governments’ denial of information renders their constituents ignorant. The current government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft stationed at RAAF Tindal eerily resembles Robert Menzies’ ‘extreme’ commitment to the United Kingdom’s ‘need to know’ policy during the nuclear testing campaign from 1952 to 1963. As prime minister, Menzies exclusively assented without consulting Cabinet or scientific advisers to the use of the Montebello Islands as the site of Operation Hurricane, the nuclear bomb detonation that cemented the United Kingdom as the world’s third nuclear power. The program was not announced until 1952, prior to which Menzies deliberately misled the media about plans for nuclear testing on Australian soil, claiming he had ‘heard nothing’ about it.
The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.
. The UK nuclear testing campaign caused massive human and ecological suffering to Aboriginal communities in Western and South Australia. It was not until the publication of the 1985 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, more than two decades after the final tests, that the extent of Australian government collusion was revealed, typified by Menzies’ ‘complete’ acceptance that Australia be entirely excluded from technical information about the tests. This submission to an allied foreign state enacts the technocratic power of nuclear, which pitches influence disproportionally towards those with technical knowledge and renders those without it mute and nakedly vulnerable to, in the case of nuclear arms, annihilation………………………………
The Albanese government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons aboard B-52s at RAAF Tindal regurgitates the United States’s policy so as to allow it to skirt its democratic responsibility to inform the public of potential nuclear escalation. Extensive control of messaging and media across the decade-long nuclear testing campaign by Menzies on behalf of the United Kingdom, particularly regarding its true health risks, denied Australians the opportunity to establish informed opinions on the tests. The drive to ignorance common to both Menzies’s and Albanese’s nuclear policy strategies has been achieved via the interiorisation of allied foreign states’ intelligence protocols. This techno-scientific rationale dangerously licences executives to accelerate nuclear proliferation beyond the forum of public debate to which it belongs, and into reality. https://arena.org.au/australias-technocratic-drive-to-nuclear-ignorance/
American or Trump’s values, or are they the same?
Crispin Hull, 11 Feb 25 https://www.crispinhull.com.au/2025/02/10/american-or-tumps-values-or-are-they-the-same/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=crispin-hull-column
Australia can now either grimace and bear it for four years pretending nothing has happened; or face reality and question whether AUKUS and the US alliance more generally are worth it.
ANZUS and AUKUS were, from the start, purportedly based on “shared values”. Less than a month into the Donald Trump presidency can we put our hands on our hearts and say, “We share values with the US, and we will spill blood and treasure for those values”?
The acid question now is: to what extent are Trump’s values American values?
Can they be separated as if there is a separate pocket of American values – the rule of law; the separation of powers; freedom of the press; international order; liberal democracy and its spread throughout the world; and the helping hand to people and countries less fortunate?
It is difficult to see how.
The assertion by Trump of his “values” has attracted dozens of lawsuits in less than a month. He acts unlawfully; he bullies; he acts with cruel indifference to human suffering; he acts capriciously and vindictively and without diplomacy.
Trump is reversing 400 years of progress in governance: the rule of law; and the principle that those who are governed owe their loyalty to the law and not to the ruler and that those who govern do so with the consent of the governed and owe their loyalty to the law and the people not to themselves.
The time has come for the allies of the US to ask: what are the passing Trump values that we do not share that will disappear and what values, under Trump, have transmogrified into American values. After all, that is what Trump asserts: that his values are American values.
And, let’s face, a majority of voters voted for Trump.
If Trump values are now American values and American values Trump values, does Australia want to be a part of it? Is Australia safe relying on a new transactional America that sees everything through the selfish prism of only what is good for America, or more narrowly what is good for Trump.
Surely it is dangerous to presume that there are some underlying intrinsically good Amercian values that transcend Trump and will re-emerge when he is gone – when the chances are that this Trump administration will have trashed America’s constitutional framework and electoral processes so badly that the next election, if there is one, will be Trump’s for the taking, with the constitutional prohibition against third terms ignored. Or it will be a shoe-in for his anointed successor – probably JD Vance.
Surely, a better, safer, and more morally sustainable position would be for Australia to suspend the alliance until we can truly say that we have “shared values”.
How do we know that contributing militarily to any US international action is nothing more than Australian blood and treasure being expended to enhance Trump’s personal real-estate empire? He wants to buy Greenland; make Canada the 51st state; and overrun Gaza.
The treatment of Canada is alarming. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Trump’s desire to make Canada a 51st state “is a real thing”. Remember Trump referred to Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau”.
He threatened Canada with crippling tariffs They have been suspended, but you cannot undo the threat. The relationship dynamic is forever changed because threats (economic, violent, or psychological) destroy trust.
If he can treat Canada, the US’s closest neighbour geographically, linguistically, and historically in that way, surely Australia is no more than a bit piece in the American game of global dominance and economic exploitation.
Australia should now also look at its alliance with the US against the background of history. Against that it is alarming: Trump is not a passing aberration but part of a continuum of some deep-seated ugly American traits.
It starts with the Declaration of Independence when “all men are created equal” excluded women and slaves. Then the Constitution was framed with a deep suspicion of the mass of people and set up an Electoral College to elect the President, rather than by the people directly.
Violence, racism and guns have dominated US history, beginning with the dispossession and genocidal cruelty against the indigenous population. Shortly after fighting a civil war over slavery, the south reverted to segregationist racism that lasted into the 1960s.
In the 19th century, the US was a vicious colonial occupier of the Philippines, In the 20th century, rampant capitalism tipped the US into the Great Recession. Selfish America refused to join the fight against racist Nazism and Japanese fascism until it was itself directly attacked.
Yes, Australia benefited from the US joining the fight against Japan, but the US did not do it to help Australia; that was a side-effect. It just used Australia as a base for its efforts to counter Japan’s threat to the US.
What if our naïve belief in US goodness and exceptionalism is misguidedly founded upon those four or five years of US munificence immediately after World War II despite a 250-year violent history of a male, white, Christian assertion of supremacy?
In those brief years after World War II, the US led the foundation of the United Nations; set up the international rules-based order leading to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The US led the way promoting peace, law, harmony, and immense generosity in adopting the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe and a benign, forgiving occupation of Japan.
The US has benefitted and traded off that immediate sunlit post-war image for way longer than its used-by date. And US allies have fallen for it.
Later decades gave us the Korean war; the Vietnam War; Iraq; and Afghanistan. It gave us the Bay of Pigs and numerous other ill-founded, unwarranted interferences in small nations to promote US economic interests under the guise of promoting democracy over communism. The incessant US blood-spilling belligerence went on and on, and Australia was sucked into it at great cost to our blood and treasure.
Do we really now want to contribute to a genocidal expulsion of two million Palestinians so Trump’s America can erect a hotel-strewn shoreline in Gaza for Israel and exploit the rights to newly found oil and gas offshore?
Under Trump, the AUKUS deal takes on a different complexion. Australia, under then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was stupid enough to sign up to an asymmetrical deal where we pay (and have in fact mostly paid) $A4 billion to US shipyards to help them hasten the construction of Virginia-class nuclear submarines of which we are supposed to get three. But this would be contingent on the President of the day certifying that US would not need the submarine.
Does anyone imagine that transactional Trump would allow any submarines to go to Australia without some further payment or supplication?
The US does not protect Australia, it uses us – and puts us in harm’s way in doing so.
Perhaps we should just be honest and say we do not care about shared values or morality we just want protection and we are willing to pay for it – like some nervous shop owner being stood over by a gangster.
But I think Australia is better than that and that, in the face of the Trumpian wrecking ball, we should suspend AUKUS and the US alliance, or at least have an inquiry into them. Disruptive surprises need not be the sole purview of the attention-seeking and attention-demanding man in the Oval Office.
A former Miss America takes her nuclear sales pitch to audiences in Australia
By Hilary Whiteman, CNN, February 6, 2025, Brisbane, Australia,
Nuclear engineer and former Miss America Grace Stanke has entered the fierce debate in Australia over its future energy policy with a 10-day national tour extolling the benefits of nuclear power in a country where it’s been banned for almost 30 years.
The speaking tour is familiar territory for the 22-year-old former beauty queen, who said she studied nuclear engineering as a “flex,” but now works for US energy giant Constellation as a spokesperson and as an engineer on its nuclear team.
Her recent arrival comes at a delicate time in Australia, months before a national election that could put the opposition Liberal Party in power, along with its promises to build seven nuclear power stations – upending the current Labor government’s plan to rely on renewable energy and gas.
For several days, Stanke has been speaking to hundreds of Australians, in events organized by Nuclear for Australia (NFA), a charity founded by 18-year-old Will Shackel, who has received backing from a wealthy Australian pro-nuclear entrepreneur.
Most talks were well-attended by attentive crowds, but not all audience members were impressed by Stanke’s message.
As she started to speak in Brisbane last Friday, a woman in the audience began shouting, becoming the first of several people to be ejected from the room as other attendees booed and jeered. One woman who was physically pushed from the premises by a security guard has since filed a formal complaint.
……………Those against nuclear power say it’s too expensive, too unsafe and too slow to replace Australia’s coal-fired power stations that would need to keep burning for several more years until nuclear plants came online.
………………….A numbers game
Australia banned nuclear energy in 1998 as part of a political deal to win approval for the country’s first and only nuclear research facility that’s still operating in southern Sydney.
A change in government in an election, to be held before mid-May, would see seven nuclear reactors built in five states to provide power alongside renewable energy – a bold shift in direction that would not only require changes to federal law, but amendments to laws in states where premiers oppose nuclear power.
According to the plan proposed by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, the nuclear reactors would be funded by 331 billion Australian dollars ($206 billion) in public money and the first could be working by 2035.
Both forecasts are disputed as underestimates by the government acting on the advice of the country’s independent science agency – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – which says renewables are still the cheapest and the most efficient way for Australia to reach net zero by 2050.
…………………..“I do believe that a strong grid requires both renewables and nuclear energy combined,” Ms Stanke said, referring to the argument for a “baseload” energy source that doesn’t rely on unpredictable weather.
That argument is challenged by experts worldwide, who say the need for “baseload” energy is an outdated concept, and that stability can be achieved by other means, including batteries.
……………………………………………..Advance, a conservative campaign group that says it works to counter “woke politicians and elitist activist groups” is promoting a 48-minute documentary it claims tells the “untold stories” of farmers whose “lives have been upended by the rapid rollout of wind and solar projects.”
………………………………….Rural areas where opposition is building to renewable projects are fertile ground for Shackel and his nuclear campaign. He’s already visited some areas earmarked for power stations under the Liberal proposal. And while he says NFA isn’t politically aligned with either of the major parties, he accepts he’s doing some of the groundwork to bring the community on side………………………….
Nuclear ‘foolishness’
Bringing a former Miss America to Australia was part of a plan to raise support for nuclear power among Australian women, who according to one survey are far less enthusiastic than men about the proposal.
According to several people who attended sessions in various states, the audience was dominated by older men, many of whom didn’t seem to need convincing.
Jane McNicol, the first protester escorted from the room in Brisbane, told CNN she’s been an anti-nuclear campaigner since the 1980s. She said she stood up to “ensure that this foolishness does not take off.”
“It’s just a way of spinning the fossil fuel industry out for a bit longer, and we cannot afford to do that,” she said. “You can see how the climate is collapsing around us. Look at Los Angeles. Those poor people over there lost everything.”
Others said the panel – which included local nuclear experts – made generalizations and didn’t get to the nub of issues specific to their area, like the potential strain they say a nuclear power station could have on resources in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
“There is literally no water for a nuclear power station. The existing allocation is already committed to mine repair,” said Adrian Cosgriff, a member of community advocacy group Voices of the Valley, who attended the Melbourne talk.
“Australians know nuclear power exists. That’s fine. It’s just not suitable for here. That’s kind of the argument,” he said.
David Hood, a civil and environmental engineer who attended the Brisbane talk, said: “Renewables are working right now. We can’t wait 10 to 20 years for higher cost and risky nuclear energy.”
Stanke and Shackel delivered a parliamentary briefing in Parliament House, Canberra on Wednesday, to politicians and aides across the political spectrum.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was unsurprisingly not in attendance, having already labelled his political rival’s nuclear proposal as “madness” and a “fantasy, dreamed-up to delay real action on climate change.”……………. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/australia/australia-nuclear-debate-grace-stanke-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
Confused about nuclear energy? The fossil fuel industry is trying to mislead women.
by Madeline Hislop, https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/confused-about-nuclear-energy-the-fossil-fuel-industry-is-trying-to-mislead-women/ 10 Feb 25
An advertising campaign targeting women ahead of the federal election is promoting misleading information about nuclear energy.
New analysis undertaken by the Climate Council shows that 63 per cent of all nuclear energy advertising active across Facebook and Instagram as of January 2025, was viewed by women.
The ads are largely being driven by the Get Clear on Nuclear group, which is backed by the Minerals Council of Australia, a peak mining lobby group.
The ads are part of a misinformation campaign targeting women voters to undermine their confidence in renewables and promote nuclear energy and gas as false solutions to the climate crisis.
Speaking to Women’s Agenda, CEO of the Climate Council Amanda McKenzie said the advertising campaign is using misinformation to compel women to vote for the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy.
“What [our analysis] indicates is that it’s being pushed specifically towards women, and it’s largely driven by the Minerals Council,” she said.
“That’s where the funding for those ads is coming from, and I think it reveals what is known in the polling, which is that women tend to be more undecided in their vote, and that women need to be persuaded if Australia was to go nuclear.”
Polling shows women are unconvinced about nuclear energy and are more likely to consider nuclear to be high risk and high cost.
“Women are quite inherently skeptical of nuclear power as a proposal,” McKenzie said.
“I think women have a lot of valid concerns about the risks of nuclear reactors, whether that’s concerns around disaster risk, toxic waste, cost blowouts or the length of time it takes to build nuclear. And I think women feel a bit left in the dark when it comes to the Coalition’s nuclear scheme.”
Despite some claims the ads are making, McKenzie says that all the evidence, including from the CSIRO, shows us that nuclear power is the most expensive form of new power. On top of that, the Coalition’s policy would see Australia remain reliant on fossil fuels until at least 2036.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has pledged to build seven publicly-owned nuclear power plants in locations across the country if he is elected Prime Minister this year. The first of these plants would be operational by 2036, Dutton claims, although experts have questioned this date and suggested it is more likely to be the 2040s.
McKenzie said it’s important to know that over the last few years, Australia has moved to 40 per cent renewable power for our whole economy. And we can get to nearly 100 per cent renewable power within the 2030s.
“Nuclear wouldn’t come online until the 2040s, so it’s inherently a big delay in changing our energy system,” McKenzie says. “Our coal fired generators—all of the ones that are the most polluting energy source—are all slated to retire because they’re very old, by the end of the 2030s.”
“We have this urgent climate crisis because of the pollution that all of those fossil fuels are creating, and we’re actually underway in solving the problem now.
“The main message for women is that there is actually progress that has been made. The energy system is changing and becoming cleaner, but we need to double down on that this decade if we’re going to safeguard our kids’ future.”
Women are not being exposed to the facts
Ahead of the election, McKenzie said she is concerned that women are not being exposed to the information they need to make informed decisions on energy policy.
She says the Get Clear on Nuclear advertising is attempting to persuade women on nuclear power, but it’s misleading.
“The advertising is really being designed to try and persuade women, but our concern is that women are not being exposed to the facts,” she says.
“There is this sort of David and Goliath battle between groups like ours, who are representing the community, trying to educate the community with facts and with scientists versus industry bodies that are trying to push ideas that are going to benefit their vested interests.”
There are also many unanswered questions about nuclear, McKenzie says.
“Where will the toxic radioactive waste be buried? Which communities will the trucks drive through when they carry that toxic rate waste? Will the proposal for seven nuclear power plants be the full story?” she says. “Because actually, you would need far more nuclear plants if you were genuinely going to be powering Australia with nuclear.”
“There’s a sense that there’s a downplaying of risks, and women want those sorts of questions answered.”
Going nuclear: Meet Grace Stanke, the American pageant queen on a mission in Australia
COMMENT. This article is pretty good for SCRUTINY, giving both the nuclear propaganda in spades, but also the environmental, safety, economic and political objections to it.
It does show Grace Stanke as a clever operator, with her giving simplistic, but impressive sounding pro-nuclear spin
By Maddison Leach, Feb 8, 2025, https://www.9news.com.au/national/nuclear-power-australia-miss-america-grace-stanke/74f1791d-be18-420f-8a76-5026bb3de4c1
Nuclear power has been banned in Australia since the turn of the century. Former Miss America Grace Stanke is the unlikely figure who wants to change that.The 22-year-old American has been in Australia for over a week, advocating for nuclear power at events hosted by Australia’s largest nuclear power advocacy organisation, Nuclear for Australia.
Her arrival seems perfectly timed for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition as they promote their nuclear plans ahead of the 2025 federal election.
If elected, the Coalition says it plans to build taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors at seven sites around Australia. The first is slated to start operating in 2035.
Mr Dutton has said the plan will help lower carbon emissions and make electricity cheaper for Australians, however climate experts have challenged those claims.
Hailing from the US, which home to 94 operable nuclear reactors and remains the world’s largest producer of nuclear power, Stanke wants to see Australia follow in her home nation’s footsteps and embrace nuclear power.
“This is a necessary part of the future,” she told 9news.com.au, adding that the federal and state bans on nuclear power “baffle” her.
“Nuclear is safe, it’s effective, it’s reliable, it requires a small amount of land, it provides high paying jobs and helps build up strong communities around it.”
With a degree in nuclear engineering and a Miss America title (she was crowned in 2023), Stanke is already the poster girl for nuclear advocacy in the US.
“People look at a woman and they make assumptions,” Stanke said, then laughed.
“Usually they are not expecting me to speak about nuclear energy or nuclear engineering, so it is a ton of fun.”
The Wall Street Journal called her the “new face of nuclear energy” in 2023 and she appeared on the Forbes 30 under 30 for Energy list the following year.
Inspired by her impact in the US, Nuclear for Australia’s 18-year-old founder Will Shackel flew her to Australia in a bid to further the conversation around nuclear power here too.
That has meant addressing environmental and financial concerns around the Coalition’s nuclear plans.
Mr Dutton claims the plan will slash energy bills but research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) suggests it would actually increase Aussie households’ energy bills by about $665 annually.
The Coalition also claims the plan would reduce Australia’s carbon emissions but energy experts estimate that extending the life of coal plants as part of the plant could produce 1.7 billion tonnes of extra emissions by 2050.
Stanke questioned these figures, citing studies from the Nuclear Energy Institute in the US as proof nuclear power is a cost-effective and “emissions free” energy source.
“To produce your entire lifetime’s amount of electricity, we’ll only create enough waste that it fits inside of a soda can,” she said in response to environmental concerns.
Though she acknowledges that building the reactors would come with financial and environmental costs, Stanke is focused on the end result: “clean energy” for millions of Australians.
However, there are also questions about how long it would take Australia to build seven nuclear reactors.
The Coalition plans to have the first up and running by 2035 but CSIRO experts argue that it’s unlikely any of the plants would be ready until at least the early 2040s.
It takes an average of nine years to build a nuclear power station according to the Australian Conservation Foundation, plus another 10 years for planning and licensing, but Stanke firmly believes Australia can get these reactors built within a decade.
“I would completely disagree on the idea that Australia is not a nuclear nation,” she said.
She noted that Australia’s only nuclear reactor OPAL in Lucas Heights, which opened in 2007, was built in just nine years and said that “if Australians can do that in nine years”, this country can surely “do even better in the future”.
However, OPAL was build on the site of an existing nuclear reactor while the Coalition’s proposed reactors would be built on coal-fired power stations.
And the Coalition doesn’t just have to build these nuclear reactors; it also has to regulate and staff them, and overturn federal and state bans on nuclear power.
It will be easier said than done given that Labor, the Greens and some independents oppose nuclear energy, as do many state premiers and opposition leaders.
As well as the financial, environmental and legal concerns, some Australians fear the potential community and health risks associated with building nuclear reactors across the country.
Though she’s received some pushback from everyday Aussies and anti-nuclear groups while touring Australia, the 22-year-old hopes her visit will inspire more open dialogue about the possibilities nuclear power presents for Australia.
“This deserves a fair discussion [and] I’m here to help start that conversation.”
Explained: Why nuclear power has been banned in Australia for more than 25 years
COMMENT. This news item from 9 news is a rare example of SCRUTINY, in that, although it basically delivers the facts (Stenography), it shows some insight into the arguments and reasons behind Australian attitudes.
For a commercial media article, this is remarkably unbiased.
By Maddison Leach Feb 9, 2025, https://www.9news.com.au/national/why-is-nuclear-power-banned-in-australia-explained/9f758cf3-0677-4787-bfce-a5
Opposition accuses Labor of scare campaign over Nuclear, PM says he holds economic concerns
Nuclear power is shaping up to be a hot button issue in the 2025 federal election, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition pushing a plan to build seven nuclear reactors across Australia if elected.
Such reactors are currently banned at a federal level, meaning the Coalition would have overturn federal and even some state laws to build their proposed reactors.
Here’s everything you need to know about the nuclear power bans in Australia.
Why is nuclear power banned in Australia?
Nuclear power as an energy source has been banned in Australia since the late 1990s, when Prime Minister John Howard’s Coalition government passed two laws prohibiting it.
First came an amendment to the National Radiation and Nuclear Safety Act (1998) which banned the development of any new nuclear power sites in Australia.
The following year, the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999) introduced new rules prohibiting the construction or operation of any facilities that generated nuclear power, fabricated nuclear fuel, enriched uranium or processed nuclear waste.
At the time these laws were passed, there was only one site in Luca Heights, south of Sydney. It remains the site of Australia’s only nuclear reactor, which is used for medical and industrial research.
Some state governments have also introduced additional nuclear prohibitions.
Which countries have banned nuclear power?
Countries that have banned the construction of new nuclear power plants like Australia include Austria, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway and Serbia.
Several other nations have also announced plans to phase-out nuclear power, including Belguim, Germany, the Phillipines and Switzerland.
Why is Australia anti-nuclear?
There was a dramatic shift in public opinion on nuclear power after the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
That shift likely contributed to the introduction of anti-nuclear laws in Australia in 1998 and 1999, which have remained in place ever since.
Modern Australian attitudes towards nuclear power are mixed but the majority of anti-nuclear sentiment centres around the financial and environmental costs.
It would cost billions to establish a nuclear power network in Australia and though nuclear power is considered “clean” (it doesn’t produce carbon emissions), it is not renewable.
Is it illegal to build a nuclear reactor in Australia?
Yes. The National Radiation and Nuclear Safety Act (1998) and Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999), as well as some additional state legislations, prohibit the construction or operation of nuclear reactors.
Is there support for nuclear power in Australia?
Some. The Coalition is leading support for a nuclear future for Australia with its nuclear power proposal, which would see seven nuclear reactors built across the country.
Nuclear for Australia, the country’s largest nuclear power advocacy organisation, has voiced support for the plan.
What is Peter Dutton proposing?
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition are proposing overturning existing laws banning nuclear power in Australia in order to build seven new nuclear plants.
“This will make electricity reliable, it will make it more consistent, cheaper, for Australians and it will help us decarbonise as a trading economy as we must,” Dutton said.
“The fact is we can deliver a plan which is going to keep the lights on and we have a plan and a vision for our country which will help grow businesses, not close them down.”
The Coalition has claimed the plan is 44 per cent cheaper than the government’s renewable energy plan and would lower Australians’ electricity bills.
However, the Coalition’s figures are based on a scenario that produces about 45 per cent less energy by 2050 than renewables.
What does nuclear power cost?
Modelling from the Coalition suggests its nuclear policy would cost Australia more than $300 billion, significantly less than the government’s renewables plan.
But the CSIRO’s draft GenCost 2024-25 report projected that building nuclear reactors would actually cost at least twice as much as renewable power in Australia.
By 2040, it predicted nuclear-generated electricity would cost about $145-$238 per MWh by 20204, compared to $22-$53 per MWh for solar, and $45-$78 per MWh for wind.
What does nuclear power mean for the climate/environment?
Nuclear power doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses, however it’s not renewable as the process of fission (which generates nuclear energy) requires fuel, typically uranium.
Though Australia has one of the world’s largest uranium reserves, it is a finite resource and therefore isn’t renewable.
Nuclear waste also poses an environmental threat, especially in the case of a disaster like the Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Is “Bad Faith”‘s Council for National Policy the Atlas Network’s half-brother?
Ed COMMENT. I put this article up on the Australian website. You might think that it has nothing to do with Australia.
But it does! The fascist chaos now developing in the USA could spread to Australia, as the Atlas Network promotes its Australian off-shoot “Advance”. Advance will funnel $millions into Trumpian-style propaganda, to influence the coming Australian federal election.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy.
February 6, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/is-bad-faiths-council-for-national-policy-the-atlas-networks-half-brother/
The Council for National Policy is the ultra-secret body tracked in the documentary Bad Faith. Are the Mont Pelerin Society fingerprints there just by chance?
The chaos that is erupting from the people around Trump was forecast in the 900 pages of Project 2025 for those paying attention. The firehose of brutality and stupidity is coming too fast for observers to encompass. Whether it’s 25 year olds with the power to alter code in the Bureau of Fiscal Service or a Christian Nationalist-driven freeze on all public spending or trying to deport Navajo people, the whole project reeks of reckless cruelty and apparent irrationality.
Just as Ronald Reagan implemented 2/3 of the first Mandate for Leadership, Donald Trump implemented 2/3 of his first iteration. Now the Mandate is known as Project 2025 and it’s no longer just a “business republican” project. It’s a Christian Nationalist project too. And 2/3 of the first executive orders of this Trump administration came from Project 2025.
The man likely to take the helm of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was revealed as the Christian Nationalist radical he is in this undercover sting operation last year. The chaos is intended to continue. He has said he intends to put career civil servants “in trauma.” He also intends to use the military to crush protests.
This domestic chaos will be deadly; the freeze on USAID spending will kill people sooner. These radicals around Trump do not care: their eugenicist beliefs run deep. It’s a longterm goal: this 2006 annual Atlas Network report contains an essay repeating disdain for foreign aid as a failed concept by (MPS member since 1984, erstwhile president and critical figure in the growth of Atlas and several junktanks), Leonard Liggio. There is no reflection on how many nations need foreign aid because of MPS-driven restructuring and neoliberal interventions to keep those nations impoverished and dependent.
Ronald Reagan, the first de facto Atlas Network US president said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The Trump apparatchiks are trying to make that a vicious reality.
The long game of the Mont Pelerin Society that spawned the Atlas Network became colonising government and the law, to make them the servants of the largest players in the economy. They sold the mission as “freedom” in a “free market,” with “small government” staying out of the little guy’s way. That was not the real intent. Democratic projects, rights or a decent life for the individual (below enabler class) were intended by few in the project. Neofeudalism is a more apt label. You are not even to be allowed to protest your (or others’) immiseration.
People committed to the neoliberal project have a firm commitment to making government look ineffective and wasteful. It may be that government efforts to tackle the pandemic risked making people trust government. The steps towards a UBI might have stung badly for people who believe government spending should only serve the already rich. It is likely also that coercive measures like lockdowns, mask wearing and vaccine mandates triggered their socialism-alarms. There is extensive evidence of junktank partners’ investmentin pandemic disinformation and the fighting of public health measures including masking.
It’s possible that the greater inclusivity of a pluralist society might have been enough on its own to repulse the narrow-minds of this machinery; it could be that the pandemic broke them.
Either way, after the worst of the pandemic, one of the Atlas Network’s most pivotal junktanks appointed a Rad Trad Catholic extremist with connections to Opus Dei as its president, in September 2021. Kevin Roberts was an Atlas operative before this. He used to run the Atlas Texas Public Policy Foundation.
He was also however, by 2022, already on the Council for National Policy board.
The Bad Faith (2024) documentary reveals in grim detail how the Council for National Policy (CNP) was the theocratic machine that built the Moral Majority. It was the network that brought together the extremist Evangelical preachers of that movement, media organisations and funders with some of the Republican Party’s most effective strategists. The documentary is based on journalist Anne Nelson’s extensive investigations in Shadow Network.
Key figures amongst the Republican Party strategists that founded the CNP belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, just as the key operators in the Atlas Network did – and do.
(Atlas has, since it was founded in 1981, vacuumed up other junktanks and networks into its web of shared strategies and personnel connections: whether they are Atlas spawned or interlinked can be complex to disentangle. Whether CNP was in part an MPS project at its foundation is opaque. It could be that class interests of a small band of operatives led to overlaps in strategising. The two networks are, however, overtly operating in concert now with both strongly represented in the Project 2025 Advisory Board.)
Catholic zealot Paul Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Many historic clips of Weyrich uttering his extreme beliefs are to be viewed in Bad Faith. In 1981, the CNP was founded to galvanise the 1978 undertaking to use the issue of abortion to create a Christian Republican voter bloc. (In 1978, abortion was a fringe Catholic issue, of little interest to Evangelicals.)
Weyrich’s co-founder at Heritage was Catholic Edwin Feulner, later an MPS president, but a member from 1972. He is also a CNP member.
The CNP’s Republican founders included Episcopalian (Anglican) Morton Blackwell, an MPS member from 2007, who created the Atlas Network-and-CNP’s Leadership Institute founded in 1979. It aims to increase “the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in the public policy process. More than 300,000 conservatives have become leaders through Leadership Institute training.”
Fellow CNP founder was Evangelical? Edwin Meese III who worked with Atlas’s Ronald Reagan from 1966, and was later one of his attorney-generals. Meese was involved with Heritage from 1988. A third was Catholic Richard Viguerie who invented the direct mail scam that fostered the demonising of Democrats to scare grannies out of their pittance.
Both Atlas and the CNP receive funding from Charles Koch and his circle including the Bradleys. On the CNP leaked membership list, Lawson Bader is identified. He is an MPS member and has been president and CEO of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund since 2015. Donors Trust is known as the “dark money ATM of the right.” The Mercer family, that funded Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, is also listed as a CNP donor. The united Devos and Prince families are key donors. Betsy DeVos has roles at several Atlas junktanks. Peter Thiel, tech plutocrat, is now a significant funder of Donors Trust.
Boeing, Coors, Cinemark, Forbes media and Morgan Stanley all have senior figures affiliated with CNP. (Coors money was central to the Heritage Foundation’s funding, with Joseph Coors, Evangelical and white supremacist, a co-founder.)
Currently the CNP and Atlas share several critical partner organisations apart from Heritage and Leadership such as the Federalist Society which has been described as creating the imperial juristocracy around Donald Trump’s second presidency. Another is the American Legislative Exchange (ALEC) that produces reactionary and anti-labour model bills for state legislatures to reproduce. A thirdis Americans For Tax Reform, which Grover Norquist (CNP member) founded at Ronald Reagan’s “request.”
The Acton Institute, Media Research Center, Capital Research Center, Buckeye Institute, National Center for Public Policy Research, Center for Security Policy, Young America’s Foundation, American Conservative Union (parent of CPAC), Discovery Institute and Americans for Prosperity are other joint members. Tea Party Patriots is a CNP member that is spawned as an astroturf outfit out of Atlas’s Freedomworks.
The CNP’s members include the Club for Growth, which is another Koch-supported entity. It funds Republican candidates who fight labour rights. The farce of fighting for the working man that Trump’s campaign feigns is exposed by the many junktanks here strategising to suppress workers.(1)
The CNP is a particularly ugly partner for the Atlas Network which advertises itself as “strengthening the worldwide freedom movement.” It unites the NRA with Turning Point USA with a range of hate groups promoting Islamophobia and homophobia. Its Christofascist members fight rights for women as well.
A key member is the Alliance Defending Freedom which the SPLC summarises as having supported “the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.” Not much freedom there.
The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) founded by Senator Jim DeMint, former Heritage Foundation president, in 2017, is a CNP member since 2020. This sub-network has spawned a range of extreme election denial and reactionary policy junktanks. One notable CPI entity is America First Legal, white supremacist Stephen Miller’s critical creation. It is largely funded by Bradley donations.
One of the significant names on the CNP list is Steve Bannon. He has been fighting for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” for years. His esoteric traditionalist beliefs call for the destruction of the age of slaves (democracy) to be replaced by the age of priests. His ally Curtis Yarvin, inspiration of many of the tech-fascist oligarchs, argues a CEO-monarch should replace the democratic experiment. It looks like Elon Musk thinks that should be him.
Many of the Christofascist organisations and individuals in the CNP are anti-democratic, believing that a theocracy is the answer to America’s ills. There is, at minimum, no freedom of religion allowed.
The destruction around Trump is a genuine threat to American’s democratic experiment.
That Reagan’s Mandate for Leadership should have become Project 2025 is startling on its own. The linking of Atlas’s ostensible campaign for freedom with the CNP’s campaign for theocratic coercion illustrates starkly that the freedom is only for a few.
* * * * *
Mont Pelerin is a secretive, invitation only organisation, but some of its leaked members can be found here. The Council for National Policy is ultra-secretive but its leaked members can be found here.
(1) (Business donors who had captured former Democrat Kirsten Sinema years back seem to have sent her back from early retirement to vote down Biden’s choice for a Labor Relations Board that might have been able to protect workers’ rights into the Trump era.)
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
The EPBC Act ‘Impact Assessment’ Report on Federal imposition of N-Subs fails to provide answers to community’s ‘Right to Know’ on nuclear risks facing Port Adelaide
Initial Brief by David Noonan Independent Environment Campaigner 8 Feb 2025. Flawed ‘assessment’ of Osborne / Port Adelaide nuclear submarine site ignores accident risk (David Noonan, Feb. 2025)
The Federal Impact Assessment Report “SUBMARINE CONSTRUCTION YARD STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT
OSBORNE, SA” (IAR, 21 Jan 2025) clearly does is not intend to answer lead community concerns over
N-sub nuclear reactor accident risks and radioactive waste storage at Osborne, Port Adelaide.
A deluge of Federal Gov doc’s, a IAR of 200 pages with Appendices of 750 pages, are out for ‘public
consultation’. The proponent Australian Submarine Agency (see ASA web) are to run four Public
Information ‘Drop-In’ Sessions over 19 – 22th Feb. Public input is due in by cob the 17th March.
However, the Federal Gov has ruled a range of lead community concerns as “out of scope” of this
‘Strategic Assessment’, see IAR Section.6 Impact factors 6.16 Radiation (p.6-40 to 6-44).
The management facility for radioactive waste at Osborne, and the disposal pathway for such
radioactive waste, “is considered outside the scope of the Strategic Assessment” (p.6-41).
The IAR says: “Information on potential sources of radiation has been provided to inform, however
does not form part of the Strategic Assessment as these sources will be managed via separate
environmental assessment processes and approvals as necessary.”
The IAR Radioactive waste management section (p.3-19 to 3-21) says: “The facility is to be designed to
have the capacity to manage radioactive material over the 50-year Strategic Assessment timeframe.”
N-sub radioactive wastes may accumulate and stay ‘stored’ at Osborne for decades…
The IAR also mis-represents N-sub radioactive wastes to be stored at Osborne, as: “similar to those
that occur in over 100 locations nationwide, including hospitals, science facilities and universities” (3-
20), and “similar to the waste generated by hospitals and research facilities around Australia” (6-41).
Key health and safety issues are excluded from this EPBC Act public consultation. ASA (p.6-43) is to
conduct a separate ‘Environmental Radiological Assessment’ to license impacts at Osborne. The IAR
(at 6-44) says: “No nuclear actions are included within the Actions or Classes of Actions of the Plan.”
Impacts of commissioning and operation of the ‘power module’ (the nuclear reactor) “is considered
outside the scope of this assessment” (p.3-19 & 6-41) – to be held over for a military nuclear regulator.
The Federal Labor Gov are in denial over N-sub nuclear reactor accident risks. The word ‘accident’
does not even appear in this 200-page IAR. This is a multi-year Federal Gov failure to study and make
public required nuclear accident Emergency response measures and Evacuation plans at Osborne.
See a 2-page Briefer: “Labor imposes AUKUS nuclear submarines while failing to inform the affected
SA community of the health risks they face in a potential reactor accident” (29 July 2024).
Brief sub-heading: ‘SA Emergency workers may face “catastrophic conditions” at a N-Sub accident.’
It is disrespectful of the Federal Gov to continue to push N-sub accident risks onto community across
Lefevre Peninsula and Port Adelaide while only conducting partial impact assessments and limiting
‘public consultation’ to only those aspects that suit Labor’s roil out of the AUKUS N-sub agenda.
The Federal Gov are also now seriously misleading community and misrepresenting nuclear health
and safety risks, see IAR Effects of Radiation p.6-41 and Figure 34 potential health effects p.6-42.
SA State Gov ‘impact’ assessment for the Osborne Submarine Yard concludes ‘No
significant effects’ on community wellbeing, but fails to release nuclear accident studies:
The SA State Gov has released a “Submarine Construction Yard Environmental Impact Statement”
(EIS, Nov 2024, 427 pages, plus 22 x ‘Technical Report’ Appendices) for ‘consultation’ to 17 March. This EIS
process has a ‘YourSAy’ webpage, a Plan SA webpage, and a proponent’s Australian Naval
Infrastructure (ANI) page that promotes the three ASA ‘Drop-In’ Info Sessions over 19 to 22 Feb.
The EIS claims “there is no risk to people or the environment of radiation exposure” (EIS Summary p.9)
from ‘nuclear-powered propulsion systems’ on-site testing of N-sub nuclear reactors at Osborne.
The EIS Ch.23 ‘Social Impact Assessment’ concludes there are “No significant effects” on community
wellbeing (EIS Summary p.36-37), and no danger to people or property across an ‘immediately
impacted community’ who live or work in North Haven, Largs Bay and Semaphore; or in the ‘wider
community’ within Greater Adelaide who it is said ‘may feel some real or perceived broader impacts’.
These claims and concocted conclusions derive from an abject failure to recognise the effects and
impacts of a potential N-sub nuclear reactor accident, with required Evacuation Zone planning. The
word ‘evacuation’ appears 3 times in the 400-page EIS – all to do with flood risks not reactor risks
Why have key public safety accident studies still not been made public for N-subs at Port Adelaide?
Even a visit by a nuclear-powered submarine to a port in Australia requires Emergency response
planning that sets Evacuation Zones for potential nuclear reactor accidents (see a 2-p Briefer).
The SA Premier Hon Peter Malinauskas MP is effectively targeting Osborne Port Adelaide for N-sub
nuclear reactor accident risks, just as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton MP targets Port Augusta for
his nuclear power reactor accident risks and impacts: see David Noonan’s Public Submission No.261
(14 Nov 2024, 10 pages) to an ongoing Federal “Inquiry into nuclear power generation in Australia”
The EIS 4.12 Nuclear-powered propulsion systems and radiation exposure from accident (p.85-88)
says (p.85) that it has assessed: “the process to transport, receive, secure, store, install, test and
commission a nuclear-powered propulsion system”, and: “radiation exposure pathways to workers,
the public and non-human biota during construction and operation (including incident scenarios)”.
The EIS admits (p.87): “A loss of fuel element integrity within the power unit, while highly unlikely,
could result in a radiological release direct from the NSRP into the atmosphere”, and cites: “a number
of scenarios that could lead to a radioactive release from the Power Unit have been extensively
modelled by the NSRP Design Authority”, but fails to make these public safety studies public.
At this late stage, it is unacceptable for the SA Gov to fail to consult the public on N-sub nuclear
reactor accident Emergency response measures including required Evacuation Zone planning.
This EIS also assesses N-sub generation and storage of radioactive wastes at Osborne but concludes
“No significant waste management effects have been identified” (see Executive Summary p.28-29; EIS
Ch.16 Waste Management p.262 to 288; and Appendix 1.11 Waste Management 44 pages). The EIS cites a
‘Low-Level’ radioactive waste category that can require waste isolation for up to a 300 year period.
The EIS further admits (p.87): “Loss of control of any liquid or solid waste could result in the release of
radioactive material and therefore pose a hazard to individuals and the environment. … An aquatic
release into the Port River could result in a wider spread of contamination, and would be dependent
on quantity of the release and the tidal flow at the time of the release.”
For further information, see FoE Australia webpage: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/nuclear-subs/
How Australia’s CANDU Conservatives Fell in Love with Canadian Nuclear
This time around, with the current push to embrace nuclear energy, the federal Australian Coalition’s ideas appear to be shaped by the internet, where a pro-nuclear media ecosystem of influencers and podcasters has flourished just as nuclear has become attractive to conservative parties worldwide.
Ontario, Canada is the only place in the world to tear out wind turbines and embrace nuclear power. Australia’s conservatives have been taking notes.
DRILLED, Royce Kurmelovs 5 Feb 25
If there is a Holy Land for nuclear energy, Australian Shadow Climate Change and Energy Minister, Ted O’Brien, seems to think it’s Ontario, Canada.
Other countries have well-established nuclear power industries, of course. There’s the United Kingdom where the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor – dubbed “the world’s most expensive power plant” – where work began in 2007 with an expected start date of 2027 but is now at least ten years behind schedule and billions over budget. Meanwhile, it’s sister project, Sizewell C, is estimated to cost the equivalent of AUD $80bn (GBP £40bn, USD $49bn). There’s France where, in mid-August 2022, half the country’s nuclear reactors were forced offline, many as a direct result of climate impacts such as heat and drought.
Over in the United States, storied home of the Manhattan Project, where newly minted energy secretary (and fracking CEO) Chris Wright has announced a commitment to “unleash” commercial nuclear energy, one of the last two new nuclear power builds attempted this century forced Westinghouse into bankruptcy protection, and a separate effort by NuScale to build a cutting edge small modular reactor (SMR) was cancelled in November 2023 due to rising costs. There’s also Finland, a country of 5.6 million people, that finally turned on Europe’s newest nuclear reactor 18 years after construction began, finishing up with a price tag three times its budget. Though it had a noticeably positive effect on prices after start up, the cost of building Olkiluoto-3 was so high, its developer had to be bailed out by the French government. Since then, technical faults continue to send the reactor temporarily offline – a remarkably common occurrence among nuclear reactors.
Ontario, however, is so far the only place in the world that has ripped out wind turbines and built reactors – though the AfD in Germany has pledged to do the same if elected, and US President Donald Trump has already moved to stop new windfarm construction. Thanks to much self-promotion by pro-nuclear activists and Canada’s resources sector, that move caught the imagination of O’Brien and Australia’s conservative party. Now, as Australians head to polls in 2025, the country’s conservatives are looking to claw back government from the incumbent Labor Party with a pro-nuclear power play that critics charge is nothing more than a climate-delay tactic meant to protect the status quo and keep fossil fuels burning. “This is your diversion tactic,” says Dave Sweeney, anti-nuclear campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation. “There’s a small group that have long held an ambition for an atomic Australia, from first shovel to last waste barrel to nuclear missile. Some of the people who support this are true believers, for others it’s just the perfect smoke screen for the continuation of coal and embedding gas as a future energy strategy.”
Apples and Maple Syrup
On the face of it, Ontario is an odd part of the world on which to model Australia’s energy future. Privatization in both places has evolved messy, complicated energy grids, but that’s about all they have in common. One is a province on the sprawling North American landmass, and the other is a nation that spans a continent. Ontario has half the population of Australia and spends five months a year under ice. Its energy system has traditionally relied on hydro power and nuclear, where Australia is famously the driest inhabited continent on the planet that used to depend on coal but now boasts nearly 40% renewable electricity as of 2024.
One Australian state, South Australia, already draws more than 70% of its power from renewables and frequently records weeks where all its electricity needs are met with solar and wind. Unlike Ontario, and the rest of Canada, Australia has no nuclear industry aside from a single research reactor in the Sydney suburbs. The cost of transmitting power over vast distances in Australia makes up approximately two-fifths of retail power prices. Electricity prices in Ontario, meanwhile, have been artificially lowered by an $7.3bn a year bundle of subsidies for households and businesses. Comparing the two jurisdictions is stranger than comparing apples and oranges; it’s more like comparing apples and maple syrup.
None of this has stopped the province from becoming O’Brien’s touchstone for the marvels of nuclear energy, and “Ontario” from becoming his one-word reply to critics who question the wisdom of creating a new nuclear industry from scratch in Australia. If the country wanted to transition away from coal, the Coalition’s suggestion was it should be embracing nuclear energy — not more renewables — just look at Ontario. “We have to keep learning the lessons from overseas,” O’Brien told Sky News in August 2024. “There’s a reason why countries like Canada, in particular the province of Ontario, has such cheap electricity. They’ve done this many years ago. They were very coal-reliant and eventually, as they retired those plants, they went into nuclear.”
Weirder still, O’Brien is not the only Australian political leader to be chugging the maple syrup. Ever since the conservative Liberal-National Coalition began to float the idea of an atomic Australia as part of their 2025 election pitch, its leader, Peter Dutton, has similarly pointed to the Canadian province as an example for Australia to follow. In interview after interview, Dutton referred to Ontario’s power prices to suggest that nuclear is the future for Australia – raising the question: how did Ontario capture the hearts and minds of Australia’s conservatives?
Atomic Australia
The idea of an atomic Australia has long lived in the heart of Australian conservatism. Former conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies once begged the United Kingdom to supply Australia with nuclear weapons after World War II, going so far as to allow the British to nuke the desert and the local Indigenous people at a site known as Maralinga. The first suggestion for a civilian nuclear power industry evolved out of this defense program and has never been forgotten. Iron ore magnate Lang Hancock and his daughter, Gina Rinehart, today Australia’s richest woman, both remained fascinated by nuclear energy. In 1977, Hancock, a passionate supporter of conservative and libertarian causes, brought nuclear physicist Edward Teller to Australia on a speaking tour to promote nuclear power, including an address to the National Press Club where he promised thorium reactors would change the world.
Though Australian plans to build a domestic nuclear industry have failed due to eye-watering costs and public concerns about safety, the country today is the fourth largest exporter of uranium according to the World Nuclear Association, sending 4820 tonnes offshore in 2022 and providing 8% of the world’s supply. The country is also planning to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine fleet through AUKUS, an alliance with the US and UK. This increasingly tenuous defense deal is thought unlikely to happen thanks to issues with US and UK shipyards, but the existence of the program has been used to justify the creation of a civilian nuclear power sector. There have been at least eight inquiries or investigations into the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia since 2005, and five proposals to build government-owned nuclear waste dumps since 1990. Each inquiry has concluded that nuclear power would largely be a waste of time and money and, with the exception of two facilities in Western Australia that store low-level radioactive waste, efforts to build additional dumps capable of storing higher grades of waste have mostly foundered for lack of community support. This time around, with the current push to embrace nuclear energy, the federal Australian Coalition’s ideas appear to be shaped by the internet, where a pro-nuclear media ecosystem of influencers and podcasters has flourished just as nuclear has become attractive to conservative parties worldwide.
When Australia LNP opposition leader Peter Dutton formally unveiled the gist of his “coal-to-nuclear” transition plan in June 2024, for example, he was asked what the plan would be to handle the waste and responded with a curious sleight of hand: “If you look at a 470MW [nuclear] reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year.” A fact check published in the Nine papers pointed out that nuclear reactors typically operate on much larger scales than 470 megawatts. Citing World Nuclear Association figures, it found a typical large-scale nuclear reactor with 1-gigawatt capacity will generate 30 tonnes of spent fuel each year – roughly 10 cubic metres, or 10,000 litres a year. It is unclear where Dutton or his speechwriters stumbled onto this talking point, but it appeared to be a corruption of the idea that one person’s lifetime waste from nuclear energy could fit inside a soda can – a common Facebook meme promoted by the Canadian Nuclear Association. A similar claim was repeated last year in a social media video by Brazilian model and Instagram influencer Isabelle Boemeke.
Boemeke, who goes by the online persona Isodope and claims to be the “world’s first nuclear energy influencer,” begins her video by outlining her daily diet, starting with black coffee and ending with a post-gym snack of energy-dense gummy bears. In a dramatic transition, she then compares the size of a gummy bear to the size of a uranium pellet, before launching into a didactic explanation of the role these pellets play in generating nuclear power.
“It also means the waste it creates is tiny. If I were to get all of my life’s energy from nuclear, my waste would fit inside of a soda can,” she says, before ending by advising her viewers not to drink soda because “it’s bad for you.”
Neither the Canadian Nuclear Association nor Boemeke elaborated on how the world might dispose of the cumulative waste if a significant proportion of the Earth’s population drew their energy from nuclear power – but then that is not the point.
Boemeke is hardly alone. Online there is a small but determined band of highly networked, pro-nuclear advocates, podcasters and social media influencers working to present an alternate vision for an atomic world. Many of those involved in this information ecosystem are motivated by genuine belief or concern over environmental issues, even if their activities often align with right-wing causes and ideas. Nuclear is often positioned as an essential climate solution, as well, although it’s typically a cynical promise: nuclear reactors take decades and billions of dollars to build, buying fossil power more time. In the U.S. especially, pro-fossil conservative politicians often use nuclear as a rhetorical wedge: they will ask any expert or advocate in favor of climate policy whether they support nuclear and imply that if they don’t, they must not be serious about actually addressing the climate crisis by any means necessary.
One of those helping export the strategy from North America to Australia is Canadian pro-nuclear advocate, Chris Keefer, host of the Decouple podcast and the founder of Canadians for Nuclear Energy. A self-described “climate hawk”, Keefer is a practicing emergency physician in Toronto who built an online presence as an advocate for keeping existing nuclear power plants open. Through his public advocacy, he has been instrumental in cultivating the image of Canadian – and particularly Ontarian – nuclear excellence, a legend he has recently promoted in Australia through a series of meetings, speeches and his podcast.
Nuclear on Tour
…………………………………………………………………in September 2023, when Keefer traveled to Australia to give a keynote address at Minerals Week, hosted by the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) at Parliament House in Canberra. Ahead of his visit, a write up published in the The Australian Financial Review framed Keefer as a “leftie” and “long time campaigner on human rights and reversing climate change” who had previously “unthinkingly accepted long-standing left-wing arguments against nuclear” but had embraced nuclear due to his unionism. During his time in Australia, Keefer says he met with federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton to discuss “Ontario’s coal phaseout and just transition for coal workers”,………………………………………..
As political folklore this was a tale that would have appealed deeply to Keefer’s audience, whose constituencies were threatened by renewable energy projects. The MCA itself has historically been hostile to Indigenous land rights and campaigned heavily to stop or delay any government response to climate change during the 90s, largely in defence of coal producers…………………………………………. The promise of an Ontario-style “blue-blue alliance” – a political alignment between certain blue-collar unions and conservatives – would be alluring, especially given how well a pro-nuclear campaign paired with anti-wind scaremongering. Even a nuclear-curious Labor member may have spotted a way to stem the flow of votes to Greens.
Changing Winds
What Keefer presented to the Australian resources sector as a glorious triumph, Don Ross, 70, recalls as a difficult time in his small community that became a flashpoint in a fight over Ontario’s future. ……………………………………………
As a longtime member of the County Sustainability Group, Ross says an awareness that the climate is changing pushed him and others to fight for the White Pines Wind development back in 2018. In his telling, the community had the best wind resource in the area and had been pitched as a site for development since the year 2000. There were six or seven serious efforts over the years, all small projects in the range of 20 megawatts that would have allowed the community to be largely self-reliant in terms of power. Only White Pines came closest to completion. It was a ten year development process that Ross says was fought at every step by an anti-wind campaign, with some of the campaigners active since 2001.
“They just took all the information from Australia or America or around the world to fight the same fight – they used the same information, same tactics, played on the same fears and uncertainties,” Ross says. “They were very effective. They had the media backing them, and the conservatives saw an opportunity to drive a wedge.”……………………………………………………………………………………………..
By election day, four of the nine towers at the White Pines windfarm development were already built, the cranes were on site, and the other towers were laying in position ready to go. The development was just four weeks from completion when the election was called for Ford.
On his first day in office, Ford cancelled 758 renewable energy contracts. ……………………………… Ontario’s future Energy Minister, Todd Smith – a former radio presenter who has since left politics and now serves as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at the Canadian nuclear technology firm, Candu Energy, a subsidiary of AtkinsRealis – had opposed White Pines from its inception. ………………………………………………………………….
Next the Ford government slammed the brakes on renewables investment. It shredded a cap-and-trade program that was driving investment in the province, a successful energy efficiency strategy that was working to reduce demand and a deal to buy low-cost hydropower from neighbouring Quebec. During the campaign, Ford promised Ontario’s voters that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the cost of literally ripping the turbines out of the ground and ending the other 750 or so projects. He had pledged that doing so would actually save CAD $790 million. When the final tally came in, that decision alone ended up costing taxpayers at least CAD $231 million to compensate those who had contracts with the province. The amount finally paid to the German-company behind the White Pines development is unknown. The former developers remain bound by a non-disclosure clause.
Canada’s Nuclear Heartland
…………………………………..Under Ford, Ontario – and later, Canada itself – fell into a nuclear embrace. Much of this, Professor Winfield says, played on a historical amnesia and nostalgia for what was considered a hero industry that traced its origins to the dawn of the atomic era. The province supplied the refined uranium used in the Manhattan Project and its civilian nuclear industry grew out of the wartime program. At first, the long-term strategy was to use domestic nuclear power as a base for a new export industry, selling reactor technology and technical expertise to the world. Development on a Canadian-designed and built reactor, the heavy-water CANDU – short for “Canadian Deuterium Uranium” – began in 1954. Two sites, Pickering and, later, Darlington were set aside for the construction of nuclear plants. The first commercial CANDU reactor would start up at Pickering in 1971 but the hope of a nuclear-export industry died on the back of questions about risk, waste, cost and scandals involving Atomic Energy of Canada that included attempts to sell CANDU reactors to Nicholai Ceausescu’s Romania.
………………………………………………“So Ontario went from an electricity system that was basically almost 100% hydroelectric to a system that was about 60% nuclear by the early 90s. By 1997, eight of the original 20 reactors in Ontario were out of service.”
……………………………………….Until 2018, the idea of a nuclear revival in Ontario seemed a fantasy. Then Doug Ford began ripping out wind turbines and blocking the province from considering renewables as part of its energy mix. It was an act designed to play to his base, especially the workforce within the nuclear industry………………… Whatever the precise figure is today, the weight of numbers from those directly involved, or further out in the supply chain, offered a constituency that could be appealed to. It also helped that Ford’s government was able to run its energy systems largely by executive fiat. …………………….
More of the Same
So far, Ford’s government – re-elected in 2022 – has taken advantage of this opaque arrangement to pursue its plan to refurbish 10 existing nuclear reactors, build four new 1200 megawatt units at the Bruce Nuclear Facility, and four new small-modular reactors (SMR) at Darlington – the centerpiece of Ontario’s promised nuclear revival. ………………………….
…………………….Each [smr] unit is built to be smaller, more standardized, with fewer components or systems. On paper, this is supposed to make it possible to manufacture the units in large batches, bringing down costs, which are historically the barrier to a broader embrace of nuclear power. As the Globe and Mail reported in early December 2024, Christer Dahlgren, a GE-Hitachi executive, acknowledged as much during a talk in Helsinki in March 2019. The company, which is responsible for designing the BWRX-300 reactors – an acronym for “Boiling Water Reactor 10th generation” – to be installed at Darlington, needed to line up governments to ensure a customer base. Keeping the total capital cost for one plant under $1 billion was necessary, he said, “in order for our customer base to go up”.
The initial price for Ontario’s new reactors, however, was offered before the design had been finished. As the cost is not fixed, any change to the design at any part of the process will up the cost as the plans are reworked. ………………………….the publicly-owned utility companies most likely to invest in nuclear power take on considerable financial risk with any given project – a risk that only goes up as the price tag climbs through the billions………..
………………..So far Ontario is the only jurisdiction to fully commit to a new SMR build. In January 2023, Ontario Power Generation, the successor entity to Ontario Hydro, signed the contract to deploy a BWRX-300, and preliminary site preparation at Darlington is currently underway. As Darlington was already an approved site for nuclear operations, the regulatory process is expected to be shorter, meaning the project will move towards construction much more quickly than others might – such as any new greenfield development in Australia. If everything goes to plan – a questionable assumption given the project will bind Ontario and Canada to United States at a time when US President Donald Trump is threatening to impose tariffs – the first reactor is expected to come online by 2028, with additional reactors to follow by 2034 and 2036.
………………….. Some estimates, such as Professor Winfields’, put the total cost of the Ford government’s nuclear refurbishment and SMR build plan in the range of $100bn, but firm numbers on the expected cost of the SMR build and the refurbishment of existing reactors have remained elusive. Industry insiders expect the numbers to be released by the end of 2025 potentially after an early provincial election.
……………….“The idea that anybody would be looking at us as a model in terms of how to approach energy and electricity and climate planning is just bizarre,” says Professor Mark Winfield from York University,. “You can’t make this stuff up. We’re a mess.”
……………………………………………………………..Ontario’s Soft Power
Winfield’s is a very different read of the landscape than the one presented by Chris Keefer, who rejects these criticisms, saying claims about overblown costs and delays are themselves overblown – a deflection that has been repeated by Australian political figures.
……………………………………………………….Nuclear, in Keefer’s view, remains not just a climate solution, but the climate solution. A self-described “climate realist”, he has developed this theme across more than 300 episodes of his podcast, Decouple – much of this output devoted to specifically promoting the Canadian nuclear industry and the CANDU reactor. It is a story told again and again, whether in conversation with figures like climate contrarian and long-time nuclear advocate Michael Shellenberger……………………….
Keefer knows his reach. He says he has given no formal advice to the Australian federal Coalition on nuclear but adds that his podcast “is listened to by policy makers throughout the anglosphere,” meaning that “it is possible that the thinking of Australian policy makers has been influenced by this content.” Among his lesser-known guests have been a small contingent of Australian pro-nuclear activists such as Aidan Morrison and former advisor to Ted O’Brien, James Fleay, both of whom have been publicly involved in making the case for an atomic Australia.
As far as pro-nuclear advocates go, Morrison has self-styled himself the “bad boy of the energy debate”. A physicist who abandoned his PhD with the University of Melbourne, he worked briefly as data scientist with large banks and founded a Hunter S. Thompson-themed bar “Bat Country”. His first foray into public life and nuclear discourse was as a YouTuber, where he used the platform to attack the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and its Integrated System Plan (ISP), a document produced from a larger, iterative and ongoing planning process that guides the direction of the National Electricity Market. ………In December 2023, Morrison was hired into the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), another free market think tank and Atlas Network partner, as head of research on energy systems.
………………………………..As Keefer hosted Morrison on his podcast, Morrison returned the favor in October 2024 when he brought Keefer back to Australia for a CIS event titled “Canada’s Nuclear Progress: Why Australia Should Pay Attention.” Leading up to the event, they toured the Loy Yang coal-fired power plant together, and visited farmers in St Arnaud, Victoria who have been campaigning against the construction of new transmission lines. Where Keefer previously presented himself as a lefty with a hard realist take on climate change, his address to the free market think tank took a different tack.
Over the course of the presentation, Keefer once more retold the story of the pivotal 2018 provincial election in Ontario, but this time elaborated on how an alliance between popular conservative movements and blue-collar unions mobilised against what he called a “devastating” renewables build out. Because “it was astonishingly difficult to convert environmentalists into being pro-nuclear”, Keefer explained how he had sought to exploit a vacuum around class politics by targeting workers unions and those employed in the industry by playing to an underlying anxiety…………………………..
In the mix were union groups such as the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA), the Society of United Professionals, the boilermakers union and, critically, the Power Workers’ Union. These were all unions whose membership depended on big infrastructure builds, but it was helpful that Keefer’s advocacy aligned with the interests of capital and government.
Twenty thousand signatures on a petition wasn’t enough to save the White Pines wind farm from demolition in 2018, but according to Keefer, 5874 names on an online petition to the House of Commons he organized as part of a campaign to save the Pickering nuclear plant in 2020 was enough to earn him access.
“That really opened the doors in Ottawa politically for me,” he said of the petition to save Pickering. His go-to tactic to achieve this influence, he said, was the “wedging tool” to pull left and centrist parties “kicking and screaming at least away from anti-nuclearism.”
………………………………………………………………………. “So the environmental NGOs were very, very powerful. We needed to form a countervailing force within civil society, and so with that intent I co-founded Canadians For Nuclear Energy in 2020 very quickly, to have some kind of influence.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
A Confluence of Energies
Within this convergence of pro-nuclear activism, internationalist conservative political ambition and new media ecosystems, companies within Canada’s nuclear industry have also been positioning themselves to take advantage should the prevailing wind change in Australia. In October 2024, Quebecois engineering services and nuclear company, AtkinsRéalis – the parent company of Candu Energy that now employs Ontario’s former energy minister, Todd Smith – announced it was opening a new Sydney office to “deliver critical infrastructure for Australians”.
Though little known in Australia, the company has a storied history in Canada. Formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, the Quebecois company changed name in 2023 in the long wake of a lingering corruption scandal involving allegations of political interference by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the justice system. Today the company holds an exclusive license to commercialize CANDU reactor technology through Candu Energy and in 2023 signed an agreement with Ontario Power Generation to help develop Canada’s first SMR reactor. A year later, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to support the deployment of its BWRX-300 reactors in the UK.
………………………………………………Under a future Coalition government, AtkinsRealis’s work with traditional reactors and SMRs would make it one among a field of contenders for lucrative contracts to design, build and operate any nuclear facility……………………………………………………………………………….
Just getting started, however, would require lifting a ban on nuclear power introduced in 1998 by former conservative prime minister John Howard, and any state-level equivalent. Communities, many of which are already concerned about unanswered questions such as how material will be transported and stored, or how much water will be required in the driest inhabited continent, would need to be consulted. …………………………………..
If all goes according to plan – a heroic “if” – the earliest any nuclear generator would come online in Australia is 2037 – or 2035 if the country embraces SMR technology – with the rest to follow after 2040. In the short-to-medium term, the Coalition leader Peter Dutton has freely admitted his government would continue with more of the same in a manner reminiscent of Ontario: propping up Australia’s aging fleet of coal-fired power plants, and burning more gas as a “stopgap” solution in the interim.
………………………………“This is not going to deliver anything in the times that are relevant to what the Australian system needs, or certainly what the climate needs. It’s not a serious policy or proposal.” – Dylan McConnell, an energy systems expert with University of New South Wales
……………… …………………………..To sell this vision to the Australian public, the Coalition released a set of cost estimates in late December 2024, claiming its plan would be (AUD) $263bn cheaper than a renewables-only approach. These figures, however, were declared dead on arrival. Not only did the modelling underpinning them assume a smaller economy, with a vastly lower take up in electric vehicles over time, but it excluded the entire state of Western Australia – a state twice as big as Ontario and nearly four times as big as Texas with a tenth of the population – and did not consider ancillary costs such as water, transport and waste management. Even more nuanced reviews, published weeks later, found the assumptions underpinning the model outlined a program of work that would choke off renewables and backslide on Australia’s commitments under the Paris Agreement………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Power Politics
The lack of detail and apparent effort to crib from Ontario’s conservatives on strategy underscores how the politics of nuclear power is what made it attractive to the federal Coalition, a party that continues to fiercely protect the interests of oil, gas and coal producers. As the reality of climate change increasingly compels action, the party has been facing a challenge from independent, climate-conscious candidates known collectively as the “Teals”, running in seats previously thought safe. Nuclear power offers the perception that the party is taking climate change seriously even as it still serves its traditional constituency ………………………………………………… https://drilled.media/news/aus-nuclear
Coalition trying to brainwash Queenslanders into nuclear
David Wilson, Rothwell, Qld, The Saturday Paper, 8 Feb 25
The Coalition are spending big trying to brainwash Queenslanders into nuclear, and as this letter to the Saturday Paper points out, it contains a lot of misinformation.
“… Selective reasoning
I have just received the Coalition’s A3 double-sided promo arguing the case for nuclear energy. When a political party argues a policy case based on misinformation, suppression of economic and critical science analysis, and contextomy of scientific experts, they go beyond bias and enter the realms of propaganda.
The pamphlet argues we should develop small modular reactors (SMRs) because nuclear generation is common in 32 other countries. It fails to point out that no country has established the cost-benefit of SMRs or operates them commercially.
Furthermore, the 32 countries cited employ large-scale reactors that have achieved cost-benefit only by their economies of scale. SMRs depend on a supply of enriched uranium. While pointing out Australia has uranium, it fails to address the virtual impossibility of enriching it – given the enormous cost of set-up, supply chains, political opposition, and available expertise (Karen Barlow, “Exclusive: Dutton’s nuclear plan requires ‘huge’ new bureaucracy”, February 1-7). Importing enriched uranium will have similar problems and costs.
Former chief scientist Alan Finkel is quoted selectively as a supporter of Coalition policy when in fact his focus is renewable energy and energy storage. Perhaps we can speed up political fact-checking with AI? – …” https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/letters/2025/02/07/selective-reasoning?fbclid=IwY2xjawITiE1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHSG1rbvgyOAkw2CIH8F4KBgSOe81fOz4SJAZ8JmjDMZaGceUg1ZguRtGNA_aem_ki4o0GqJqIOC-jNRB_HK8A#mtr
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Host Contact Info: australia@icanw.org
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 