It wasn’t enough of a vote-winner to reverse conservative fortunes.
There’s a notable dog that didn’t bark amid the results of Australia’s election.
The opposition Liberal-National Coalition and its leader, Peter Dutton, led a shambolic campaign that resulted in a historic defeat, losing roughly a quarter of its seats to the government at a time when high inflation and interest rates should have favored challengers. Still, his implausible plan to replace the government’s renewables-focused climate targets with a switch to nuclear energy didn’t prove the liability one might have predicted.
Indeed, politicians in the seven seats where Dutton proposed to build reactors did relatively well. The best results on a grim night were in two electorates where he had promised new plants, at Callide, Queensland, and Muja, Western Australia. Voters swung away from the government in each, by 5.9% and 7.2%, respectively, keeping them firmly in opposition hands. With the country as a whole shifting toward Labor by 2.6% the seats representing the six main nuclear sites moved in Dutton’s favor by 0.3%.1The day ended where it started, with five of the seats in coalition hands, one under Labor, and another with a former National MP running as an independent.
That’s surprising.
There are several potential explanations for why this rule didn’t play out Saturday. None are very favorable to the fortunes of nuclear power.
One possibility is favored by nuclear advocates elsewhere: That switching to reactor-driven power can win support for the energy transition in places where it would otherwise struggle.
All but one of the proposed plants were on the site of existing coal generators. That comes with financial and logistical benefits. Some of the infrastructure, from transformers to cabling to permits, will already be in place. Even so, the remaining construction costs would be enormous. Total expenditure for Dutton’s nuclear program — a hotly-contested issue in the campaign — would probably have been well over A$500 billion ($323 billion).
The political advantages would be more decisive, though. Most of the coal facilities in question are scheduled to close by the mid-2030s, pulling jobs out of small rural communities. The multi-decade engineering works required for a modern nuclear power plant would reverse that process, potentially fueling a brief boom like that experienced in the port of Gladstone, where three LNG terminals were built in the early 2010s.
Atom Boom
Australia’s opposition had proposed building seven nuclear power plants
A more cynical possibility is that even the voters who backed the policy didn’t really believe it. No country except for China, India, and Russia has a credible plan to build as many reactors as Dutton proposed. Even using his suspiciously low costings, such a program would eat up many years’ worth of the government’s roughly A$100 billion annual capital spending budget, leaving not a cent for defense, roads, schools, hospitals and the rest.
In that context, Dutton’s nuclear policy was best understood as a way of continuing the coalition’s long-standing backing for fossil fuels, under the guise of a net-zero policy. Coal can’t survive in Australia without subsidies that are unpalatable to the city-dwellers who make up about 90% of the electorate.
A never-to-be-realized promise of atomic power in the late 2030s provides an excuse to throw up more roadblocks to renewables in the 2020s, buying a few more years for coal operators to eke out a return on their investments. If your community depends on mining solid fuel, that policy gets a thumbs-up.
In truth, the prospects for nuclear power in rich countries remain as limited as they have for decades. Almost all the remaining growth is in China and emerging economies. While the coal communities that Dutton targeted seem to have been supportive, public opinion as a whole isn’t. Support for a long-standing ban on nuclear power rose to 59% after he announced the policy last year, from 51% in 2023.
Stalling Power
The capacity of nuclear plants in rich countries has stagnated
Note: Based on Stated Policies Scenario.
Even where nuclear advocates have had occasional success in reversing the industry’s image problem, costs remain far too high to be a serious contributor to the energy transition.
That’s a pity. While the best prospects for decarbonization over the next decade or so come from renewables and batteries, we’ll still need more nuclear power from the late 2030s. It will help remove fossil fuels from the last 20% or so of our electricity grids, while providing heat for some of the heavy industrial processes ill-suited for solar, wind and batteries.
Such vast public investments aren’t going to be made so long as advocacy is dominated by those like Dutton who use it as a stalking horse to advance fossil-fuel interests. Even his own allies are now reportedly looking to dump the policy as toxic. Catastrophic failure at the ballot box may finally have done the industry a real favor, by giving nuclear a last chance to step out of the shadow of coal.
Source: Bloomberg
