Australia’s Refusal to be a Nuclear Nation is Utterly Insane
Shôn Ellerton, May 7, 2025
It’s crazy to thing that Australia, a modern first-world nation, still refuses to build nuclear power plants for its future within the energy market.
This made my blood boil!
Listening to this wishy-washy liberal and uneducated woman from Australia’s Labor government on ABC radio stating that nuclear energy is an insane idea and should never be implemented in Australia.
This came after Labor smugly won a landslide from the Federal election that took place earlier this month. A campaign which was smeared from both sides of the aisle by Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, both, in my opinion, substandard candidates.
Nor did it help that public free-to-air radio and TV stations are in Labor’s favour while the more conservative view by Sky News Australia is only available through paid digital services or through random snippets available on YouTube. It’s grossly unfair.
Energy prices are going to continue to rise further due to Australia’s seemingly inept and incompetent standpoint on banning nuclear power as a source of energy. Furthermore, Australia has already dismantled many of its coal and gas stations before they have implemented a sustainable baseline load of energy from renewable sources.
Australia is about to enter a real energy crisis, and we’ve not seen anything yet.
The excuses made by our politicians as to why nuclear power should never be implemented borders on utter insanity.
Labor says it’s too expensive and is going to cost the nation of six hundred billion Australian dollars. This claim has not been substantiated nor has it any real basis in fact. They also say it will take too long to build and could take up to thirty years to implement.
Bearing in mind that Australia had heard these exact same excuses more than thirty years ago by previous administrations, we could have had something built by now. But no. Clearly, Australia’s politics is based on short-term rather than long-term vision. Not just on the topic of nuclear power but on just about any scheme which takes longer to implement than the average term of a prime minister in power.
Why can’t Australia have nuclear power? What makes Australia different?
There is no reason why Australia can’t have nuclear power.
Australia is no different than many other countries with respect to suitability to having nuclear power. If anything, Australia may be one of the most suited in terms of land area and uranium ore supply.
The detractors will say that nuclear power is too complex and complicated, especially when it comes to storing the waste safely. Conveniently, these same people forget about the complexities that came with its Snowy 2.0 hydropower project in New South Wales. The price tag of this scheme is around twelve billion Australian dollars and is expected to generate an additional 350 GWh into the grid, although it doesn’t seem clear on what timescale, but I assume it’s on an annual basis. Taking the whole Snowy Hydro Power Scheme, it is anticipated that it will generate 4500 GWh of energy annually into the grid. The total cost of the Snowy Hydro Power Scheme is difficult to get a handle on in clear figures, but it’s likely that the costs will exceed many more billions of dollars to complete.
To put some perspective on that, there is one nuclear power plant in Slovenia which generates 5300 GWh of annual power providing Slovenia with over thirty percent of its energy. It was built in 1975 and in today’s money, it would cost around 5.8 billion Australian dollars.
Therefore, to compare these two drastically different schemes, the clear winner in terms of electrical output is Slovenia’s nuclear power plant. Snowy isn’t even finished yet and costs are projected to exceed past $25 billion!
The most cited example as a country which relies on nuclear power is France. With 56 nuclear powers in operation supplying the country with a staggering 65 percent of its demand, its annual generation of power is over 300,000 GWh.
Prices have certainly gone up in terms of construction, but through various sources I’ve come across, it works out that nuclear power will cost around $20 billion Australian dollars per gigawatt. And that’s a high and conservative figure. Bearing in mind that nuclear power plants run 24/7, a gigawatt plant equates to 8,760 GWh of energy annually which is still far cheaper than the entire Snowy Hydro Scheme. Moreover, it takes a far less footprint in terms of land and not reliant on natural topography, reservoir capacity and rainfall. In other words, one can build a nuclear plant in many locations throughout Australia as long as it is near a body of water.
How on earth Labor came up with $600 billion dollars is bizarre considering that they did not care to specify how many plants would be built for this price tag and how much power it would generate.
The truth is, when it comes to energy decisions, Australia is backward-thinking, short-term focussed, and, frankly, utterly irresponsible by leading the nation into what I believe will be a severe energy crisis.
Australia, should it had started nuclear power generation decades ago, would never have been in the energy predicament as it is today. The government and its propaganda arm with its news outlets have brainwashed our citizens into sheeplike subservience leading them to believe that renewables is the only way.
We will have countless more wind turbines being built destroying our countryside while offering very little power in return. We have not enticed those at home to invest in solar energy because our power companies are not providing decent enough feedback tariffs. Batteries are prohibitively expensive considering that the best can only deliver 10kwh per day and further, they do not have a very long life expectancies.
Australia has one of the richest deposits of uranium-rich ore on the planet and yet, we are not allowed to make one nuclear plant.
I will say this.
With ample energy, almost anything can be achieved. We can create fresh water from salt water cheaply. We can manufacture materials cheaply. We can build and improve our road and rail networks cheaply. We can build and improve our electricity transmission and water reticulation networks. Heck, we could even sell our electricity if we had a means of transmitting it to our neighbours!
Nuclear can achieve this.
It is considered a green source of energy, although some would wildly disagree.
As for conventional power generation, Australia has still not figured out how to build coal plants with adequate carbon-sinking technology which makes a complete mockery of Australia trying to go down the ‘green path’.
I’m not dismissing renewable entirely.
Renewables are good as a small percentage as long as it does not impinge grossly on our landscape. And unfortunately, as in the case of wind turbines, they do. They are, however, good for small-scale use such as farms, individual houses, or even small villages, but as for relying on them for national power, they are not practical nor reliable.
Ultimately, we will become a real first-class and modern nation with nuclear as our power base but we are too stupid to realise this. We have short-term focussed, corrupt, money-grabbing, and highly uneducated politicians who have no desire to seek expert non-partisan advice on the subject of nuclear power generation.
Sadly, I don’t think I will ever see Australia becoming a modern nuclear-power generating country in my lifetime, but I do hope, out of necessity, our future generations will overcome this ridiculous obstacle of Australia’s refusal to being a nuclear nation.
