On nuclear, the media serve us up another round of climate denialism

How long would it take to build a nuclear power station in Australia? Likely, about as long as our media have been engaged in the bizarre and damaging game of false equivalence in the climate debate.

According to the Coalition’s energy spokesman Ted O’Brien — who last year compared large nuclear reactors to old Soviet technology while spruiking the now-abandoned option of small modular reactors — a nuclear power plant could be up and running in 10 years. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen replied that the average build time in the United States has been 19 years.

Let’s park the most problematic fact in O’Brien’s claim — that a nuclear power plant up and running by 2035 would fail to play any material role in Australia’s transition to non-fossil fuel power. That, after all, is the point — the Coalition is promoting nuclear as a way of propping up coal-fired power.

So how long would it actually take? First, you need the approval process for the reactor design as well as the construction project itself. We could import a regulatory process lock, stock and barrel from another country with a working nuclear power industry — say the Brits, who have what they call a Generic Design Assessment (GDA) process to expedite approvals of nuclear plants. How long does that take in Britain? “It takes around four years to complete the three steps of the GDA process,” they say.

If the Coalition were elected in 2025 and took six months to implement the UK scheme without any amendments to suit local needs, construction could commence at the start of 2030.

What about construction time? A 2022 list of nuclear power stations under construction around the world, including a couple abandoned because of delays (or since abandoned), suggests at least a decade, and in Western countries 11 years. Remember, these are all countries with established nuclear power industries, workforces, and regulators.

A 2011 paper based on International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) data concluded that “according to the IAEA data, the average construction time for plants with nominal power below 800 MWe is about 71 months, while for higher power reactors, the construction time increases about eight months for each increase of 100 MWe in power.” A pro-nuclear power study recently found there’d been no real increase over the years in the construction time for nuclear power plants — they’ve always taken a long time to build, and longer in OECD countries than dictatorships like Russia or China.

Peter Dutton has proposed building large nuclear power plants on the site of existing coal-fired power plants about to be decommissioned, like Eraring in NSW. Eraring produces 2.88 MW. Based on the 2011 study, that means a 19-year build to fully replace Eraring. Plus four years of regulatory processes, that’s 23 years. So Dutton’s nuclear power station would produce its first electricity in 2049. Assume the federal government, not a private company, does it, and the government runs the regulatory process at the same time as it begins construction (defeating the point of regulatory approval, but anyway) and scales it back to two MW. It would start operations in the late 2030s.

But wait, there’s more. Australia has been plagued by delays to major infrastructure projects, partly due to workforce constraints, partly due to governments undertaking multiple megaprojects at the same time. In its 2022 market capacity report, Infrastructure Australia concluded “it is no longer a question of if a project will slip, but more likely when, by how long and at what cost.” Its analysis showed that “75% of major public infrastructure projects could take up to 53% longer to complete than their schedule targets at final business case.” And that’s for industries and workforces that already exist in Australia.

So there’s a 75% chance that Dutton’s nuclear power station could take half as long again to build — meaning that even the 10-year scenario is likely to be up to 15 years. Which means as late as 2045 even on an optimistic schedule.

In short, some basic fact-checking shows that the Coalition’s claim about a nuclear power station operating within 10 years is ludicrous. And while it is comforting to see that the mainstream media are finally starting to report what a lonely Crikey has been patiently explaining for over a decade (some of the delayed plants we reported on back in 2009 are still not operating), the response in some sections of the media has been to place the claims of the Coalition and the factual rejoinder by Chris Bowen on an equivalent footing.

David Speers, for example, on Insiders, repeated the Coalition’s talking points at Bowen, compared Snowy 2.0 to nuclear power in cost and told Bowen “It is happening in other parts of the world. The Coalition often make this point. And you were at the COP summit in Dubai, where I think it was 22 nations signed up to a pledge to triple nuclear capacity to, along with renewables, meet their net-zero targets.”

This kind of equivalence of fiction and fact has been a characteristic of much media reporting — and noticeably at the ABC — over the last 20 years on climate issues. The last big outbreak of it was around Scott Morrison’s 2050 net-zero pledge, which the press gallery treated as a substantial and meaningful policy (and political triumph), rather than profoundly inadequate and an ongoing cover for the Coalition’s climate denialism. Even after Morrison’s net-zero plan was found to be reliant on unknown technological change, many in the media continued to treat his “policy” seriously, the same way they treated Tony Abbott’s risible “soil magic” policy as credible, or his claims of a catastrophic impact of the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme.

It’s a false equivalence that misleads audiences and helps legitimise barely disguised climate denialism. For 20 years, the Coalition has denied basic science around climate. Now it’s denying basic economics and financing as well. Will the media change its ways this time around?