Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has issued a challenge to Chris Bowen over nuclear energy as Labor and the Coalition continue to butt heads following the release of a scathing report last week.
Nationals MP Keith Pitt says the CSIRO’s estimates of nuclear power costs are “based on assumptions”.
The Coalition is pushing back against modelling done by CSIRO on the costs of nuclear power in Australia.
“Modelling is modelling right, it’s based on assumptions,” Mr Pitt told Sky News Australia.
“What is actually accurate is we know the build costs in South Korea because they’ve built four of these things.”
Since the release of the CSIRO’s report last Wednesday, which showed the steep cost and time projections for building large-scale nuclear plants, Coalition ministers have expressed their dissatisfaction with organisation’s modelling.
Shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien earlier this week requested the CSIRO re-run its costs modelling for nuclear to move its estimates “closer to how zero-emissions nuclear energy operates around the world”.
Chris Bowen took aim at the Coalition in Question Time on Tuesday, arguing they were “falling over themselves to discredit the CSIRO”.
Barnaby Joyce has challenged Chris Bowen’s nuclear stance after a scathing CSIRO report last week.
When questioned about the remark on Wednesday, Mr Joyce told Sky News Australia the Coalition argued the “bleeding obvious”.
“How can you have, of the 20 largest countries in the OECD, all of them involved in nuclear except Australia, because we’ve got a report,” Mr said.
“I’ll challenge Mr Bowen – if he stands behind that report that says that there is no market chance of nuclear coming on, why … do you need prohibitions at a federal and state level?
“What’s the point of them?”
Energy Minister Chris Bowen accused the Coalition of trying to discredit the CSIRO in Question Time on Tuesday. Picture: NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard.
He urged the government to talk to a “myriad” of companies and countries who are building nuclear plants.
“We don’t have nuclear power so why don’t you talk to the CEOs of Rolls-Royce, Westinghouse, Hyundai, Skoda, General Electric, Ontario Coal, a myriad of Chinese companies, United States companies, Argentinian, Brazilian, Indonesian, Korean, who are all building nuclear plants,” he said.
The CSIRO’s GenCost 2023-24 report found a nuclear plant would produce energy twice as expensive as renewables, take upwards of 20 years to build and at a cost of at least $8.6 billion.
The shadow energy minister held a meeting with CSIRO chief executive Doug Hilton on Monday night.
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He later released a statement in which he requested the organisation to re-run its modelling on the basis of how technologies such as nuclear energy “are actually utilised across the world and how they would be deployed and operated in Australia”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the CSIRO has “completely torpedoed” the “uncosted nuclear fantasy” of Peter Dutton’s.
“Nuclear costs more and it takes longer and Peter Dutton won’t tell us where the reactors are going to go – which suburbs, which regions, which towns, which cities are going to house Peter Dutton’s reactors,” he said.
“The madness of this, I think, is laid bare in the CSIRO report. For Australia, we have immense opportunity in the renewable sector as the world transitions to net zero and one of the key motivations of the budget was to ensure that Australia grabs the vast industrial and economic opportunities presented by the global net zero transformation.”