The Coalition's nuclear power plan misses one key component: the cost

In one corner, you have a Labor Party plan for a grid that by 2050, will be powered almost entirely by renewables and backed by gas. In the other corner,There are too many unknowns to say, confidently, whether either will achieve it.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has sought to directly link power price rises with the rollout of renewables, but building a fleet of nuclear power plants, from scratch, certainly won't come cheap either.and estimates building a large-scale nuclear power plant in Australia would cost at least $8.5 billion and produce electricity at roughly twice the cost of renewable sources.

The Coalition is looking to build five large-scale reactors and two small modular reactors , which according to the CSIRO would be even more expensive . Professor John Quiggin, an economist at UQ, says there's no clarity around what the final project costs are. More than 90 per cent of coal power – the backbone of the power grid that's producing about 60 per cent of our electricity today – is set to be phased out in the next 10 years.Dutton points to modelling by Net Zero — a partnership between the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, Princeton University, and management consultancy Nous Group — which estimates Australia will need $1.5 trillion in capital investment by 2030 to get there.

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