The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, the opposition’s climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, also said a Coalition government would consider supporting Generation III+ large-scale nuclear reactors, and not just the unproven small modular reactors it has strongly touted.
The statement at the global summit confirmed the Coalition was on a markedly different path to Labor. The Albanese government last week joined more than 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030, but did not sign up with 22 countries that supported tripling nuclear power by 2050.
While only 11% of countries at the talks – mostly nations that already have a domestic nuclear energy industry – backed the nuclear pledge, O’Brien declared “Cop28 will be known as the nuclear Cop”
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The Coalition want Nuclear to be the next coal and gas. Meaning big, long-running industries that will receive tons of taxpayer money. Everybody knows that big nuclear projects almost always run over budget and over time. If they start building big nuclear reactors in Australia, I’ll take almost any bet that we are going to see ludicrous cost ‘blowouts’, just so they can maximise the amount of money they extract from the taxpayer. And who will run these projects? Coalition donors. Also it’s going to be the Coalition-affiliated mining companies who dig up the nuclear materials.
