Sixteen still remain, silhouettes of steel and concrete, belching their smoke across eastern and southern Australia. Within the next fifteen years, all of these coal-fired power plants will have closed their doors. To replace them and decarbonize its electricity mix, the Labor majority has invested, since coming to power in May 2022, in renewable energies. But as legislative elections scheduled for the first half of 2025 approach, the conservative opposition wants to convince voters to go nuclear.
Peter Dutton, leader of the right-wing political coalition, defended his proposal on Monday, September 23, during a highly anticipated speech. “You can’t run a full-time economy on intermittent, unreliable power. “If our national goals are to achieve cheaper, cleaner and more consistent energy, then Australia must join the growing number of nuclear powered nations.”alleged the former Minister of the Interior and Defense.
For Australia, which formally banned nuclear energy production on its territory in 1998, this would be a real revolution. Although it has the largest reserves of uranium in the world, the island continent is one of the few industrialized countries without civil nuclear energy. Public mistrust, fueled by the tests carried out by the United Kingdom on its territory between 1952 and 1963, weighed on the debates for a long time. But since the early 2000s, Australians’ views on the climate crisis and the need to reduce fossil fuel use have evolved. A survey published by the Lowy Institute in June shows that 61% of them now support “in part” EITHER “strongly” the use of nuclear energy to produce electricity.
To meet Canberra’s commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, the Conservatives promise to build seven nuclear power plants in place of some end-of-life coal plants and connect them to the existing grid. His plan, whose implementation and costs remain poorly detailed, foresees an energy transition in two stages. By 2037, the first two units (either small modular reactors (SMR) or larger modern plants such as the AP-1000 or APR-1400) should see the light. By mid-century, all state power plants should be operational.
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