Extract from The Guardian
Opponents of policy say locals should be ‘very angry’ they will not be able to veto generators in their towns despite Coalition promise to consult them
Sun 13 Apr 2025 06.00 AEST
There is a “growing backlash” to the Coalition’s nuclear plan, with community groups furious at the lack of consultation and anger that the policy would not give local communities power of veto and the nuclear plants would be built regardless of local opposition.
Opponents say pro-nuclear lobby group Nuclear for Australia has been hosting information sessions but that they make it overly difficult for people to attend, make it hard to ask questions, and are not able to answer those questions that are posed.
Wendy Farmer, who has formed an alliance of the seven regions affected by the Coalition’s pledge to build nuclear reactors on the site of coal-fired power stations, says Australians should be “very angry” that they will not be able to veto any planned nuclear generators in their towns despite the Coalition’s promise to carry out a two-and-a-half-year consultation.
She refuses to call the policy a “plan” because of that lack of consultation. “They haven’t even looked at these sites,” she said.
Dave Sweeney, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s nuclear free campaigner, says it is “more con than consultation”. And he says in his many years in nuclear free campaigns he has never seen so many sectors – including unions, state leaders, energy producers, businesses and protest groups – aligned against nuclear.
The Coalition has pinpointed Tarong and Callide in Queensland, Liddell and Mount Piper in NSW, Loy Yang in Victoria, and small modular reactors (SMRs) in Port Augusta in South Australia and Muja, near Collie in Western Australia.
It says the $331bn nuclear plan will make electricity cheaper, while critics have called its costings a “fantasy”.
The Liberal party did not respond to questions about the lack of consultation and lack of veto power.
The alliance said there “has been no consultation or free prior and informed consent from traditional custodians”.
“You never asked locals if they want nuclear reactors in their back yards, instead you threaten compulsory acquisition and federal overrides with no right to veto,” it said in a petition to the Coalition.
It said the plan was a “distraction” designed to “create false debate” when communities are already transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Collie resident Jayla Parkin, a community organiser for Climate Justice Union, said pro-nuclear information sessions had not provided any answers, and had tried to stop First Nations people from entering.
Nuclear for Australia has held two information sessions with “expert speakers” in the town.
One elder was “devastated” after initially being refused entrance to a meeting last year, Parkin said. “She wanted to get the information,” Parkin said. “Not everyone is simply for nuclear or against. We are for being informed on what’s going to happen.”
At a January meeting, elders were told they couldn’t go in because of something wrong with their registrations, which Parkin then sorted out. Once inside, she said questions had to be submitted via an app.
“Not a single question could be answered … like ‘where is the water coming from?’, ‘how will this benefit Collie?’, and ‘where are you going to store the radioactive waste?’,” she said.
Since then, the community had heard nothing, she said.
Nuclear for Australia, founded by Will Shackel and boasting entrepreneur Dick Smith as a patron, describes itself as a grassroots organisation with no political affiliation.
Information sessions have featured Grace Stanke, a nuclear fuels engineer and former Miss America who says being called “Barbenheimer” was one of her favourite compliments.
Shackel told SBS that Nuclear for Australia Google people when they try to register for the sessions.
“If we believe that someone is a known protester … someone who could cause a physical threat to people in there, we will not allow them in,” he said.
Farmer, who is also the president of Voices of the Valley, said Nuclear for Australia was “silencing people” by only allowing questions through an app, and filtering them.
Nuclear for Australia has also taken out ads in local newspapers claiming 77% of coal jobs are transferable to nuclear plants and that nuclear workers are paid 50% more than other power generation-related jobs.
The fine print shows those claims come from a US nuclear industry lobby organisation and refer to the situation in the US.
Farmer said that, “adding insult to injury”, the advertisements misspell Latrobe Valley as La Trobe Valley, and in one case an ad aimed at Latrobe was put in an SA newspaper.
“Regional communities are desperate for jobs now,” Farmer said. “Nuclear is not the answer.”
Protesters heckled the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, for not meeting with the community when he visited Collie in October last year.
“Collie doesn’t like it when people like that come to our town and hide,” Parkin said.
“People have questions … at least openly answer them.”
In Perth last week, Dutton was asked about criticism from Collie residents that he hadn’t heard their concerns about nuclear power, and whether he would commit to visiting Collie during the election campaign.
“I’ve been to Collie before,” he said. “There are seven locations around the country and I won’t be able to get to all of them.”
Those communities know the Coalition is offering them “the ability to transform”, he said.
Greg Bannon is from the Flinders Local Action Group (Flag), which was formed in opposition to plans to build a nuclear waste dump in SA.
He said the community had not heard much apart from a February information session held by Nuclear for Australia. He said there were concerns about the safety of any power plant, and the impact on the local environment. “Port Augusta … is probably the most stupid place to put a nuclear power station in the world,” he said, pointing to the unique nature of Spencer Gulf and its very flat “dodge” tides.
“Any leakage … the water would end up in the top end of the gulf, with only one place to go, through Port Lincoln, the fish nurseries, the mangroves … only 50km further south is Point Lowly near Whyalla, where the annual migration of the southern giant cuttlefish occurs, which is a unique event in the world,” he said.
The other point, Bannon said, was that the region had already transitioned away from baseload power to renewables.
Guardian Australia has approached the Coalition and Nuclear for Australia for a response.
Tom Venning was preselected to replace retiring MP Rowan Ramsey in Grey, the federal electorate that Port Augusta sits within. He said he supported the policy as part of a “credible path to net zero” and that if the Coalition formed government there would be a 2.5 year community consultation and an independent feasibility study.
“I’m committed to keeping my community fully informed and involved,” he said, adding that he would take any concerns seriously and would work with local leaders and the energy minister to address them.
Sweeney said the Coalition already appeared to be backing away from their commitment to nuclear, and appeared reluctant to bring it up.
On Friday, Dutton said people would flock to nuclear if they subsidised it but that they could “subsidise all sorts of energies”.
“I don’t carry a candle for nuclear or any other technology,” he said.
“There is a growing backlash,” Farmer said.
“We are keeping it as a hot topic – because the Coalition doesn’t want to talk about nuclear, we will.”
No comments:
Post a Comment