Achi news desk-
Peter Dutton believes he can turn Australia into a nuclear powerhouse with a number of plants installed across the country to replace coal-fired stations, provide an alternative to green energy, and lower electricity prices.
But Australia has been down this road before – many, many times. Cricket looking back on decades of the nation trying to go nuclear.
1952
South Australian premier Thomas Playford was one of Australia’s earliest nuclear proponents, naming “the shores of the Spencer Gulf” as his preferred site for a plant. In an article of April 4, 1952 in The Advertiser, the leader of the Liberals and the Country Alliance was quoted as saying that atomic energy was not “something for the dim and distant future … it could be developed here in the next 10 years”.
The Advertiser the reporter went further, stating that “South Australia stands on the threshold of a new era of development and progress which would have seemed impossible a few years ago… it may take all of 10 years, or perhaps longer, before energy atomic end. an established fact, but there is no reason to suppose that Mr. Playford spoke rashly in either of his predictions”.
The project never took off.
1969
In a 1969 election speech, the current Liberal prime minister John Gorton declared: “We will, during the next Parliament, take Australia into the atomic age by starting to build an atomic plant at Jervis Bay, to generate electricity. We believe that Australia will make increasing use of atomic power in the coming years and that the time for this nation to enter the atomic age has now arrived.”
Having scraped through in that year’s election to keep his job, Gorton set about realizing his plan, seeking expressions of interest for the Jervis Bay factory and closing tenders the following year. The Illawarra Mercury it was reported in February 1970 that the Jervis Bay plant would be the “first of 20 atomic plants costing more than $2,000 million to be built in Australia by 1990”.
But as so often happens in Australia, the overflow of party leadership got in the way. By 1971, William McMahon had been elected Liberal leader and prime minister, and he canceled the nuclear project in June.
1979
A decade after Jervis Bay, Western Australian premier Charles Court began looking at possible sites for a nuclear power station out west. That project was not fully disclosed until three decades later, when state cabinet documents were released to journalists under a 30-year secrecy rule. ABC News reported in 2010 that the Liberal premier had serious plans to build a nuclear power plant by the turn of the century.
“Looking for future sites for power stations 20 to 30 years ahead, so that land can be preserved, and cabinet documents mention that nuclear energy could be an option,” one of Court’s ministers of state told the ABC.
The project never went ahead.
1980
Around the same time as the plans for Western Australia were being made, Liberal-led Victoria was also being highlighted as a potential nuclear state. As the journalism academic Bill Birnbauer wrote in Cricket in 2011, documents from the former State Electric Commission released under freedom of information laws in the mid-1980s “reveal more than 20 years of research by the state power authority and show how enthusiastic the agency was in pursuing a future nuclear”.
Portland, on Victoria’s south-west coast, was mentioned as one of the possible sites for a station that would have been operational by the year 2000.
In 1982, Labor was elected to the state government after almost three decades of opposition, and by 1983, legislation had been enacted which banned the construction and operation of nuclear power stations in the state.
2006
In the dying years of the Howard government, the prime minister called for a “full-blooded” debate about establishing a nuclear power industry in Australia. While his finance minister Nick Minchin believed nuclear power might not be economically viable for up to a century, another colleague, resources minister Ian Macfarlane, believed an industry focused on uranium enrichment could be “only five to 10 years away”, the Australian Associated Press reported at the time.
That same year, Howard announced a uranium and nuclear energy task force chaired by nuclear physicist Ziggy Switkowski. The report, presented in November of that year, found that Australia would need to build 25 nuclear reactors to produce a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. “The controversial report found that nuclear reactors would need to be built close to centers population, mainly on the east coast, but that nuclear power would not be competitive with coal unless a price was placed on carbon emissions,” the AAP reported.
Labor announced that the 2007 election would be a “referendum on nuclear energy”, and Kevin Rudd attacked Howard’s atomic ambitions on the campaign trail. In 2008, prime minister Rudd reiterated that Australia had “a huge range of energy options available … beyond nuclear that we can use to respond to and through the challenge of climate change”.
2015
In 2015, a royal commission was established to look at the prospects for establishing a nuclear power industry in South Australia. When the report was released the following year, it said “it would not be commercially viable to develop a nuclear power station in South Australia beyond 2030 under current market rules”.
2017-2022
In the years that followed the South Australian royal commission, the nuclear debate was rekindled several times, in several jurisdictions: NSW deputy premier John Barilaro, of the National Party, called for nuclear power to be “part of the debate” about state energy. supply in 2017; a federal parliamentary committee recommended Australia consider the idea again in 2019; One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham sought to repeal NSW’s ban on nuclear power in 2019; a Victorian parliamentary committee found in 2020 that “without subsidya nuclear power industry will remain economically unviable in Australia for the time being”; and Nationals MP Matt Canavan sought to repeal a federal ban on nuclear power in 2022.
