to build government-owned nuclear reactors on the sites of seven coal-fired power plants scattered across every mainland state is a huge political gamble.
Regrettably, that means the next federal election, which Mr Dutton says the Coalition is “happy to be a referendum on energy”, will cast more doubt over the viability of energy projects and renewed political regulatory risk and uncertainty for the billions of dollars of long-term business investment needed to get the transition back on track.
Yet, the political opportunity to re-fire the climate wars, which the Coalition has seized to promote nuclear as a clean, reliable and affordable alternative, has come from a cost-of-living squeeze worsened by the over-inflated activist claims that renewables are a cheap energy source. Australia didn’t follow France, Germany, Britain, Japan, Canada and the United States down the post-World War II nuclear path fundamentally because it could not compete with its plentiful supply of cheap coal-fired power.