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Premier squibs the nuclear debate we need to have

The Premier’s latest nuclear foray had a half-life of 24 hours, but he doesn’t need to look far for the culprits who keep killing the debate, writes Matthew Abraham.

Dec 09, 2022, updated Dec 09, 2022
Long week: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (right) and Premier Peter Malinauskas in Renmark last weekend. Since then, the PM has come down with COVID and the pair have clashed over nuclear power. Photo: AAP/Dean Martin

Long week: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (right) and Premier Peter Malinauskas in Renmark last weekend. Since then, the PM has come down with COVID and the pair have clashed over nuclear power. Photo: AAP/Dean Martin

Our nuclear summer ended with a wimp out, not a bang. While Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, our latest frisson of nuclear fusion had a shelf life of 24 hours this week,

Enhancing his reputation as the ALP’s answer to Dr Strangelove, Premier Peter Malinauskas sent the balloon up on the nuclear power debate on Monday, bagging what he believes is the “ill-founded” ideological myths about nuclear energy.

He told The Advertiser that building nuclear submarines under the AUKUS pact with the US and UK would “bust a few myths” in the wider community about the safety of nuclear power generation.

“Nuclear power is a source of baseload energy with zero carbon emissions,” he said. “So, for someone like myself, who is dedicated to a decarbonisation effort, I think we should be open-minded to those technologies. It would be foolhardy to have a different approach.”

Declaring he was frustrated with the polarised nuclear debate that has now been “consumed by the culture wars”, he said that “in respect of my position on nuclear power for civil consumption, or use, I’ve always thought that the ideological opposition that exists in some quarters to nuclear power is ill-founded”.

This is trademark Mali-speak. Why use a few words when many will suffice?

But wait a minute. Just who are the most zealous of foot soldiers in these nuked-up culture wars?

Why, unless I’m sadly mistaken, that’d be the Labor Party, wouldn’t it, and their political allies, the Greens? For decades, they’ve blocked and frustrated any rational discussion about a nuclear industry for Australia.

If fears about nuclear power are so “ill-founded”, why did the Premier recently side with the Barngarla people who are opposing plans to construct the nation’s low-level nuclear waste dump on traditional lands at Kimba?

It’s a shame the Premier plays this game of teasing us on nuclear energy, then hiding behind the ‘it’s too expensive’ apron strings, because it’s a debate, and an option, we desperately need to explore.

After his election victory in 2002, former Premier Mike Rann ran a blistering campaign to derail the Howard Liberal Government’s well-advanced plans for a low-level N-dump near Woomera. The Howard Cabinet abandoned the proposal after Rann’s 2004 Federal Court victory, when it ruled the Commonwealth’s compulsory acquisition of land for a site in South Australia was unlawful.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese slapped the SA Premier down big time.

He told FIVEaa breakfast hosts David Penberthy and Will Goodings that the “numbers didn’t stack up” for nuclear energy and, along with the problem of waste disposal, it was “a distraction from what we need to do”.

“I have a great deal of respect for Mali, but everyone’s entitled to get one or two things wrong,” the PM said.

Labor’s federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek piled in for good measure, dismissing the debate as “nonsense”.

“It is slow to build and is really expensive,” she said. “All this nonsense about small-scale nuclear reactors and every summer, I don’t know if there are people on your street who want a nuclear reactor in the local park. But here in Rosemary, that is not the case.”

If she was speaking from Rosemary Place in Sydney’s western suburb of Blacktown, I think we can all agree the locals wouldn’t be too happy about a small-scale nuclear reactor at the end of the cul-de-sac. Instead, they may soon need diesel generators.

Scratch the surface, and both Albanese and Plibersek remain at heart old school Lefties who have spent a lifetime in a faction with an ideological phobia about nuclear energy. When Premier Malinauskas refers to the ill-founded “ideological opposition that exists in some quarters to nuclear power”, he could very well be talking about them.

By Tuesday night, it was all over red rover.

Incredibly, the Premier declared he was in “furious agreement” with his PM, telling the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on 730 that he wasn’t running a pro-nuclear case at all.

“I didn’t seek to suggest that nuclear power should be part of the mix in our nation,” he said.

“I think we should acknowledge that nuclear power would make energy more expensive in our nation and [we should] put it to one side, rather than having a culture war debate around nuclear power.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s just bollocks. The Premier’s remarks on Monday were indeed suggesting nuclear power should be part of the mix to “decarbonise” baseload power. They can’t be read any other way.

Besides, he’s been banging on about it, with almost identical wording, for years.

In February 2014, as leader of the Shoppies Union, he endorsed a Business SA campaign to open up the nuclear energy debate.

“I believe climate change is a real challenge we need to face up to, and nuclear energy can be a safe source of base load power, with zero carbon emissions,’’ he said.

“Thus, I find it contradictory and irresponsible when I see the Greens and environmentalists outright opposing nuclear power.”

Sound familiar?

In 2018, as Opposition Leader, he told InDaily’s Tom Richardson, now media adviser to energy minister Tom Koutsantonis, that: “I think nuclear power on balance is not a bad thing… because I believe climate change is real.”

“Nuclear power is a source of baseload energy and zero carbon emissions – for me, that means it’s potentially a good thing,” he said.

However, he flatly ruled out a nuclear industry for SA if elected “because it’s not economic… why would I advocate for something that’s not economic?”

Good question. Why does he keep advocating for something that he says isn’t economic?

He was at it again as recently as March this year, in an election debate with then-Premier Steven Marshall.

While the Liberal leader said “absolutely not” to a nuclear industry, Malinauskas said he thought there was “a lot of merit” in developing a nuclear industry around the AUKUS security pact arrangements. Sound even more familiar?

It’s a shame the Premier plays this game of teasing us on nuclear energy, then hiding behind the “it’s too expensive” apron strings, because it’s a debate, and an option, we desperately need to explore.

Minister Plibersek says the nuclear power option is nonsense because it’s “slow to build and it’s expensive”, and so it is. But so was the NBN. So was the Snowy Mountain Scheme Mark I and now Mark II, under construction. So was building our submarine fleet. So was the Overland Telegraph. All nation-building projects are slow to build and expensive.

Clawing our way out of crippling power prices with caps on gas and coal prices will be slow and expensive, but that’s the best the federal government can come up with to preserve baseload power.

I’ve physically experienced both ends of the nuclear fuel cycle and have mixed feelings about the merits of the stuff.

When the Roxby uranium mine was still a pup, along with other journalists I was lowered down into the pit in a huge, dirty steel bucket. My main impression was of a stifling, strangely heavy heat, like being pressed under a steam iron loaded with yellowcake.

And I’ve stood at Ground Zero of the Taranaki atomic test in the Maralinga lands, as part of a media contingent covering the Commonwealth’s push for clean-up compensation from the British Government that merrily exploded atomic bombs all over our backyard in the ‘50s.

We wore no protective clothing or masks and later that day the scientists told us plutonium particles were still in the red dust blowing across the site. The Advertiser arranged for us to fly to Melbourne for a full-body scan that revealed no plutonium particles in our lungs.

This is just as well because while the gamma radiation from Plutonium-239, the stuff they use in nuclear weapons, is weak, it is persistent.

The author (right) with Mike Rann at the site of the Maralinga nuclear tests.

That’s how I remember that its decay rate, or half-life, the time it takes to lose half its radioactivity, is 24,064 years. Boffins say that, decaying by half every 24,064 years, it takes roughly a million years for the radioactivity to be negligible.

But who’s counting? It will kill you, given time. Talking about it, though, is completely harmless.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.

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