CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The Federal Opposition has this week managed to land themselves a few headlines by calling for the Albanese Government to do something they would definitely never do.
Liberal leader Peter Dutton has said his party are considering a push to end Australia’s ban on nuclear power, believing it could boost energy security and reduce power prices.
Despite being emissions-free, nuclear power has been banned in Australia since 1998 under Commonwealth laws – because everyone here remembers what happened when the Soviet Union first wheeled out the extremely high risk ‘atomic energy’ in the late 1980s.
And Chernobyl hasn’t been the only example of how badly things can go with nuclear power – with even the super-organised Japanese causing potentially irreversible damage to both their soil and the Pacific Ocean with the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
However, these very recent catastrophes appear to be have been completely forgotten by Peter Dutton and the rest of his coalition, who would rather flirt with an accidental nuclear holocaust than ever admit that the wind and the sun are also pretty good at keeping the lights on.
“Yeah Nuclear power is the way to go,” said the leader of the opposition who weirdly didn’t really float the idea during his party’s year stint in power.
“It’s absurd that the Labor party isn’t considering it,” said the man whose party never considered it until they weren’t in a position of power.
A 2006 report on nuclear power claimed Australia “could have up to 25 reactors providing over a third of the country’s electricity by 2050” – giving Australia 25 different opportunities to destroy every crop in this country and poison every fish.
The Opposition’s newfound love of this form of energy that they never once mentioned when they were still taking donations from coal mining corporations comes after energy prices soared due to rising demand for coal and gas prompted by the early onset of winter and Russia’s war on Ukraine.
‘Sixty per cent of the capacity of our coal-fired generators is expected to leave the market by 2030,’ he said in a statement.
‘This will leave Australian households and businesses vulnerable to a re-run of the chaos we are now seeing under Labor.’
Despite Dutton’s contrarian eagerness, the rest of the nation kind of feels like a country that can’t even manage to roll out a decent broadband network during a mining boom, or run an online census survey, shouldn’t go anywhere fucking near Nuclear Power.
“Feels like we could explore a few other options before that,” said one concerned citizen at the checkout of the Betoota Heights Bunnings this afternoon.
“I don’t know, I don’t wanna be one of those doubters, but like, I kind think we are blessed with an abundance of other natural resources which we could utilize before we go building reactors that could cause entire regions to become ghost towns.”
More to come.
