Time to ditch nervousness over nuclear

Should Anthony Albanese feel a lingering ideological nervousness about going down the nuclear path, he might care to look at the example of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government has invested the equivalent of $1.1bn in the country’s first small modular reactor, which is soon to begin construction in Ontario.

having brought labor over the line on nuclear subs, the next logical step for anthony albanese is lifting the ban on a civil nuclear industry. BY NIck Cater.

First published in The Australian.

The instinct to turn to old allies in difficult times comes naturally to conservatives. They are less ashamed of their nation’s imperial origins than those on the left. They are more inclined to forgive the Americans for their less prudent foreign adventures since, just like the Brits, their hearts are in the right place.

While no one should underestimate the amount of mongrel determination required to get AUKUS over the line, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were simply playing their natural game in forming a fresh alliance of free, democratic nations with a mutual interest in maintaining the liberal world order.

For a leader from Labor’s intellectual left, however, it’s a different story. When the US, the UK and Australia linked arms in the war against terrorism two decades ago, Anthony Albanese took to the streets to join the Walk Against the War. He accused George W. Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair of “sending a message, particularly to the Islamic world, that we are a part of the old, white, Anglo-Christian order”, adding for good measure that “we should not be revisiting the Crusades”.

The courage and conviction required to commit a Labor government to a khaki, Anglo-spheric alliance is not trivial. Albanese’s commitment to nuclear submarines is even more remarkable, especially when they could be deployed against China, the country discovered by Gough Whitlam according to Labor folklore. And while President Joe Biden, Albanese and Rishi Sunak may not tick all the old, white, Anglo-Christian boxes, Sunak is a Tory, which, in Albanese’s firebrand days, would have amounted to the same thing.

Paul Keating’s recent press club appearance represents more than just a cruel experiment on the effects of limelight deprivation on a human being who once thrived on it. It was a reminder of how far Albanese has departed from Labor’s old China policy, a Nixon-goes-to-China moment in reverse. Ditching the Whitlam doctrine is a counterintuitive step that only a leader nominally from the left can achieve.

It leads conservatives to ponder how much more of Labor’s tired baggage Albanese will discard by the end of his term. How much purity might he relinquish, acknowledging that rare gem of Whitlam’s cutting wit that has stood the test of time: “Certainly, the impotent are pure”?

By bringing his party over the line on nuclear subs, Albanese has made the logical next step easy. Removing the ban on civil nuclear power is one small step for man but a giant leap for prosperity. The boost to our economy would be far greater and more sustained than a submarine factory in Adelaide.

We have reached an inflection point not dissimilar to the Sputnik crisis in 1957 when the Soviet Union’s launch of the first orbiting spacecraft prompted a rapid expansion of higher education in the US and a separate, but not entirely unrelated, growth of the university sector here. The extension of higher learning nuclear technology demands extends to STEM subjects in general and nuclear-related studies in particular. Sensible universities might be encouraged to review their purpose. Perhaps they might stop asking what their country’s taxes can do for their budgets and ask what they might do for their country. We can only hope.

A nuclear submarine program will not be possible without substantial changes to the state and federal laws that proscribe nuclear power. Opening the window a tiny bit more – for instance, to allow experiments with prototype small modular reactors while retaining the bans on older nuclear technology – may just be enough to encourage investment and settle any lingering concerns about safety and waste.

Resetting national energy policy is second in importance only to the reset towards China. It must happen before Labor’s ill-considered target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030 forces further misallocation of capital into wind turbines, transmission lines and industrial-scale solar generators. These are already redundant in a grid that is already saturated in an engineering sense, which is the only measure that actually matters, since no amount of clever thinking by climate scientists and economists can buck the laws of engineering.

The Victorian government’s recently announced plans to develop 13GW of offshore wind turbines is crazy beyond belief. A PwC report last year put the cost of this environmentally damaging exercise at $29bn, plus another $8bn for maintenance. The amount of steel required would be enough to build five Sydney Harbour Bridges. The turbines have a life of 15 years, while Sydney’s monument to 1930s modernity is now in its tenth decade.

Next time Daniel Andrews and Chris Bowen tell us cutting-edge nuclear technology is too expensive, would they care to explain to what they are comparing it?

The strategic value of developing a domestic civil nuclear industry should not be underestimated. Sooner or later, SMR technology will be adopted in Pacific nations such as Fiji, where diesel generators currently provide 75 per cent of electricity. We must be the ones to provide the SMR infrastructure, not Communist China.

Should Albanese feel a lingering ideological nervousness about going down the nuclear path, he might care to look at the example of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has incorporated nuclear power into a centre-left narrative.

Trudeau’s government has invested the equivalent of $1.1bn in the country’s first SMR, which is soon to begin construction in Ontario.

The Trudeau government’s message is that it is so committed to net zero it is keeping all clean-energy options open. It argues that SMRs have the potential to bring clean, affordable electricity to remote Indigenous communities currently powered by diesel.

Like the investment cost, the political cost to Labor may also be less costly than Albanese might imagine. A policy U-turn on nuclear may cost a little love from the press gallery and a gotcha interview or three on the ABC 7.30 program, which is coming to resemble the broadcasting arm of Green Left Weekly. But it is easy to make a case for nuclear power from centre-left principles, or even far left, like Finland’s Greens.

Albanese can safely dismiss any fear that the policy change might embarrass his Energy Minister. Through his artless performance in a portfolio he falsely believes he understands, Bowen has surpassed even Keating in his ability to embarrass himself.