Nuclear power is a risky and dangerous pipe dream, which Australia neither needs nor wants. It’s being used by the Coalition to buy time to allow the big fossil fuel polluters to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere and destroying our planet.

1. Nuclear would just divert investment away from our transition to renewables, which is already providing 40% of our energy and on track to provide 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. Nuclear would cost twice as much as renewables.

2. Nuclear would take around 15-20 years to come online in Australia and possibly longer. We'd first need to bring about major legislative change which would face strong opposition. We don't have time to wait for nuclear.

3. There’s no evidence to support the claim of an 80-year life span. The oldest reactor in the world is 55 years. Most have an operating life time of between 20 and 40 years.

4. Nuclear uses much more water than renewables, a critical consideration in a dry and drought-prone country such as ours.

5. Nuclear power plants are vulnerable to extreme weather events which are only going to increase in frequency and severity.

6. Catastrophic accidents can and do happen. In addition to Windscale, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, there have been at least 15 accidents involving fuel or reactor core damage, and many near misses.

7. There's no safe solution for the disposal of the highly toxic radioactive waste. It has to be isolated from the environment for more than 100,000 years. Nobody wants this waste. Australia has been searching for a suitable site for over 40 years and still hasn’t found one.

8. Decommissioning a nuclear reactor is a lengthy, complex and costly process, taking from around 15 to 30 years and costing from around $500 million to $2 billion.

To be continued ...

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9. Nuclear industry workers suffer increased risk of cancer, heart attack and stroke.

10. Children living near nuclear reactors suffer increased risk of leukaemia, lymphoma and other types of cancer.

Australia has more sun, wind and hydro potential than most countries. We have the resources and the ingenuity and we’re already well on the way to becoming a renewables powerhouse. We don’t need or want nuclear power. It’s too risky, too expensive and it's too little, too late for Australia. Its waste would be a selfish legacy to bequeath to future generations. And who in the country wants to live anywhere near one of these monstrosities?

An article so riddled with fallacies (including straw-manning their opponents, no less) could only be written to create noise or encourage the faithful to stay the course.

Waving off climate change as "imagined fears" is so obviously incorrect that it discredits everything that follows. You don’t need to be a scientist to know that dismissing decades of peer-reviewed research and global consensus is a bad look.

The authors rail against subsidies for renewables but stay oddly quiet about the massive support fossil fuels and nuclear have enjoyed for decades. They pretend to be champions of the free market - until it's nuclear on the receiving end of handouts. Suddenly, the government’s role isn’t wasteful - it’s just in the way. That’s not economic philosophy - that’s cherry-picking.

Their portrayal of renewables is equally dishonest. Wind and solar are framed as expensive failures, yet the data says otherwise: they’re now some of the cheapest sources of new energy worldwide. Integration challenges? Real, yes - but solvable, and being solved every day. But you'd never know that from this piece, because nuance is nowhere to be found.

Instead, the article leans hard into conspiracy-flavoured rhetoric. Government = bad. Protesters = naive. You = a pawn. It’s less an energy policy piece and more a libertarian fever dream.

Nuclear power deserves serious discussion. It can absolutely play a role in decarbonization. But it won’t win hearts and minds with overblown promises, like “penny per kWh” electricity just around the corner. That’s not serious analysis - it’s wishcasting.

Energy policy is something that is clearly over the heads of this trio. It takes tough decisions, reliable data, and a willingness to deal honestly with competing viewpoints. These jokers offer none of that. Their article is all bombast and no backbone.

As can be easily shown, the more a country moves toward renewables, the higher the cost of that country's average electricity costs. Countries that have the highest level of renewables in their system also have the highest power costs while countries that rely more on fossil fuels/ Nuclear have comparatively lower power costs.

The green power complex continue to claim that renewables are cheaper, but this is all smoke and mirrors. These claims are only achieved by carefully ignoring most of the indirect costs of renewable installation. When all costs are included, renewables don't measure up which is why renewables the world over require massive subsidy to even exist.

Recently, in the US there's been a push by several of the larger technology companies to get more access to power supplies due to the gigantic electricity needs of their proposed AI centres. And in each case, these companies, after evaluating their options, have gone with nuclear power to meet those needs.

Increasingly, populations have become inured to the scare campaigns of the green movement, realising that the predictions over the past 50 years of imminent doom have all been proven wrong. You can only tell people that we've got ten years left to fix the problem so many times before they stop listening. Wasn't the Arctic supposed to be ice free by now, New York City under water and Perth a ghost town?

The world is moving on from the daffy notion that we can run the entire economy on renewables. Australia will eventually catch on to that.

Thanks, mhaze.

I would have thought the “renewables make power expensive” correlation-causation conflation was too amateurish for someone as versed as you in denialism.

Countries with higher renewable uptake often do have higher electricity prices, but not because of renewables. Germany didn’t just slap on a few wind turbines and call it a day - it built a whole framework around climate policy, legacy feed-in tariffs, and infrastructure upgrades. Blaming solar panels for the entire bill is like blaming airbags for the cost of a car.

As for subsidies - let’s not pretend renewables are the only ones at the trough. Fossil fuels still enjoy eye-watering support globally (over $7 trillion in 2022, says the IMF), and nuclear doesn’t exactly run on bake sales. If renewables are only “propped up by subsidies,” what does that say about industries that have been getting handouts for a century?

The tech-company shift to nuclear? Sure, baseload power matters for energy-hungry AI centres. But many of these same companies also invest in renewables, batteries, and demand-side tech. Picking nuclear doesn't mean renewables "failed" - it just means energy systems are complex. If your takeaway is “renewables bad, nuclear good,” you’ve oversimplified it to the point of parody.

“WaSn't ThE aRcTiC sUpPoSeD tO bE iCe FrEe By NoW?”

No, it wasn’t.

You've distorted early, worst-case projections. Some models suggested the possibility of ice-free summer Arctic conditions by now if emissions stayed high and trends accelerated, but even those came with huge caveats. Consensus has always pointed toward mid-century.

And in case they’re not reporting this in denialist echo chambers: Arctic sea ice is vanishing - just not on the cartoonish timeline deniers keep inventing so they can laugh when it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not that the science was wrong - it’s that the deniers never bothered to read it properly.

No, the world isn’t moving on from renewables - quite the opposite. Renewables are growing fast because they’re cheap, clean, and getting smarter every year. Australia will catch on - but hopefully not by clinging to outdated talking points that confuse nostalgia for wisdom.

" it built a whole framework around climate policy, legacy feed-in tariffs, and infrastructure upgrades. "

Yes that's what I said. When you look at the entire cost of the so-called renewable revolution, the move to renewables becomes more expensive than the alternative. Again, when you plot a country's electricity costs against their level of renewables (I showed you this before but it clearly went over your head) you see that more renewables means more cost. Its rather simple and simple to see but alas....

"over $7 trillion in 2022, says the IMF"

I'll leave you to go and research how that number is arrived at and then you can come back at offer your mea culpas. (Hint: most of that number is about supposed climate change costs and the rest is primarily oil rich countries providing cheap fuel to their citizens)

"You've distorted early, worst-case projections. "

Yes, the sky-is-falling crowd now tell us they were worst case predictions - now that they've been proven wrong. But at the time NASA, NOAA, the IPCC and HadCrut were all on board with the scare. That nice Mr. Gore won a Nobel and several hundred million dollars based on the scare. As with all such scares, all the cognoscenti believes them until they fail to happen.

" Arctic sea ice is vanishing ".

Minimum sea ice extent in millions of square kilometres...

2007...4.17
2012...3.41 (still the lowest ever - hence the scare)
2020...3.92
2024...4.28

Vanishing?