“I’m not interested in the fanatics:” Dutton responds to science academy’s report on nuclear SMRs

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has dismissed a report on nuclear small modular reactors by the highly respected Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, saying the Coalition has consulted its own experts and it is not interested in the views of “fanatics.”

ATSE on Wednesday described SMRs as a “chimera”, and said they were unlikely to be able to be built in Australia before the mid to late 2040s, more than a decade before the Coalition’s timeline of 2035.

The report by ATSE is in line with other assessments by the CSIRO, the Australian Energy Regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator, former chief scientist and virtually everyone in the energy industry.

But Dutton dismissed it out of hand.

“What this report shows is that the lights are going to go out, and that wind, in particular, is not reliable,” he told journalists in the Hunter Valley, not far from one of the sites identified by the Coalition to host a nuclear power plant, according to a transcript posted on his website.

Actually, the ATSE report says nothing of the sort. It doesn’t address grid reliability problems, nor does it look at SMR costs or waste issues.

It observes that the technology does not yet exist in OECD countries, will not likely be commercially available for another 20 years, and concludes that any move to go earlier – as the Coalition wants to do – would be both costly and risky.

Dutton, however, is undeterred by such expert arguments, and by fact-checkers.

“Well, we’ve done analysis and we’ve spoken to experts. Our analysis is that we can have nuclear into the system 2035 to 2037 in the first two sites, and then we continue to roll it out from there,” he said.

Asked again about the ATSE report, and its view that 2035 is simply not doable, Dutton said: “I’m not interested in the fanatics from both sides of the argument.”

He then went on to repeat the same misinformation that he trots out at every opportunity: That Australia is the only G20 country not doing nuclear (not true), that the market operator has warned of blackouts and brownouts (not true), and that it plans 28,000 kms of new transmission (not part of its central scenario, only in the export superpower scenario and by 2050).

“You can’t have – as Barnaby (Joyce) rightly pointed out today, and I thought it was a great way to put it – you can’t run a full-time economy on part-time power,” he said.

Apart, of course, from South Australia, which is already running at 70 per cent wind and solar, has a bipartisan target of 100 per cent net renewables by 2027, and is luring new industry attracted to the state by low cost and low emissions power.

See also: Peter Dutton and crew get close to planned nuclear power plant site and repeat same nonsense.

And: Forget EVs, the Coalition has a plan for nuclear fuelled hydrogen cars