It seems that the Liberal National Party (LNP) are pushing for Australia to go big on nuclear power rather than embrace renewables. So in an effort to understand their logic, and their reasoning behind this apparent policy, I tried to investigate and find out more.

Thinking that there must be some solid arguments in order for a major political party to embrace this direction, I checked the National Party website. Not much at all to be seen there, and especially no well researched evidential arguments. Surely they don’t just expect me to take a politicians word that this is good for the country? Unfortunately politicians are sometimes seen by some people as not the most
credible of species!

Knowing how popular my local federal MP is I decided the next course of action would be to contact him and ask him to explain the policy in more detail and refer me to the science and economic research on which it was based. After all he must know a lot about this policy area
given his electorate includes an existing power hub and one of the flagged nuclear sites.

Again no luck in getting to either how this policy came to be, or as to his own position on it! Just a great deal of fence sitting interspersed with self promotion. Fortunately for me I don’t live in the Latrobe Valley, but if I did I would definitely want to know if my local MP is pushing for a nuclear power plant in my backyard!

Perhaps that is the whole point of the policy, to have people argue into infinity as to where these menacing power plants can be put. “Not in my backyard” becomes the catch phrase for a plan such as this, and that is before we even start to explore what we do with the nuclear waste and where that might be put?

Perhaps the LNP have a plan for that also, if only I could discover what it is? I can’t help but start to think that just maybe they don’t want people like me knowing what is going on. Surely this cannot be the case with such a transparent political regime!

It certainly does seem difficult to see how carefully digging up uranium and then even more carefully processing it, building a power plant that takes a very long time and requires huge expertise and vast amounts of water to run, and then disposing of the waste at great cost, can be
even vaguely good economics.

On my roof I have solar panels. The sun lands on these and generates power through the inverter in the garage which then directly runs the appliances in my house. Very efficient. As a precaution, and because we are old and dottery, we choose to remain connected to the grid. For this we pay around $550 a year connection fees and then a further $250 in the power that we use. This is the total of our power bills as we are an all electric house.

On top of that we export to the grid four times the power that we use ourselves, after all there are only so many loads of wash and cakes one can bake during the day. The four fifths of the power we generate can then be used by industry.

In a country like Australia where sun and wind are plentiful and free it is hard to understand why the LNP are choosing to support nuclear. If my local National Party MP can’t even give me an explanation then what hope have I got to find out what their argument is?

At the risk of being cynical the only real reason I can come up with is that it just might be a delaying tactic so that the fossil fuel barons, who pay no taxes while exploiting our natural resources, can do even more exploiting and tax avoiding. Unfortunately they just might be destroying our planet home while they do it.

Seems sad and senseless to me.


N.K. from Metung

This article has been previously published in Great Eastern Mail – GEM

Image generated with instructions to Gemini AI and edited by Tony Peck