Worlds apart

Britain's Labour Party embraces nuclear as the practical path to clean energy

Energy Minister Chris Bowen describes Small Modular Reactors as “a fantasy” and claims “they don’t survive contact with economic reality”.

The Labour Party in Britain begs to differ. "Small Modular Reactors will play an important role in helping the UK achieve energy security and clean power while securing thousands of good, skilled jobs," reads the Party's manifesto released last week.

Like Anthony Albanese, Keir Starmer has chosen to campaign on nuclear policy, but that’s where similarity ends. The Labour manifesto for the July 4 General Election chides the Conservatives for going slow on nuclear power.

 Starmer has pledged “to end a decade of dithering that has seen the Conservatives duck decisions.” Labour promises to extend the lifetime of existing plants, assisting it in seats like Hartlepool where the threatened closure of an ageing reactor is seen as a threat to jobs. Labour says it will complete the much-delayed Hinkley Point C reactor and build many more.

Britain is one of a growing number of countries where nuclear energy is not a partisan issue but a practical necessity. Meanwhile, the Australian Labor Party blunders on, firmly opposed to nuclear thanks to a dogma that took hold on the Australian intellectual left in the 1970s for reasons few can remember.

In Britain, Labour’s commitment to nuclear power is one of the few bright spots in the Party's ramshackle energy plan, the public policy equivalent of an unmade bed. It promises that oil and gas will remain part of the UK's energy mix but says Labor will ban new offshore drilling. After the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Labour says it will insulate Britain from fluctuations in world gas prices while preventing the expansion of domestic gas extraction.

It is self-contradictory nonsense, just like Starmer’s plan to invest £8.3 billion ($A 16 billion) in a new government-owned company, Great British Energy. Labour says this will somehow reduce electricity prices, although Starmer has been careful not to follow Albanese into the trap of saying how much cheaper household bills will be.

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government pledged to produce 25 per cent of the UK’s electricity with nuclear by 2050. Labour hints it will go further.

Ditto in Canada, where Justin Trudeau took a stand against the Greens inside and outside his centre-left Party by supporting nuclear power including SMRs.  "We're gonna need a lot more energy,” he said last year. “We’re gonna have to be doing much more nuclear.” 

In the Finnish parliament, every Party, including the Greens, is in favour of nuclear power. In Sweden, the Greens still oppose nuclear on paper but have dropped their commitment to phase out existing plants.

Public opinion in Germany has shifted radically in favour of nuclear power since the Putin-induced gas crisis in 2022. An opinion poll in August 2022 found that only 15 per cent of Germans supported the government’s plan for the accelerated closure of nuclear plants. Two-thirds of Green voters (68 per cent) either wanted the closures to be delayed or for nuclear to be part of the long-term energy future.

In Ireland, the Irish Academy of Engineers issued a report last week recommending SMR technology to protect the country’s energy sovereignty. The Irish electricity grid relies chiefly on wind power backed up by gas, which makes it a hostage for volatile international prices. The rise in gas prices in the last three years means that Irish consumers have Europe's second-highest electricity bills, even when offset by a government subsidy of €600  ($A 970) per household a year.

One way or another, nuclear will be part of Ireland’s energy mix, says the Academy. The choice is whether the grid relies on nuclear energy imported from Britain and France or deploys its own SMRs.

Bowen's view that SMRs are "a unicorn" and "unproven technology" is not shared by the European Commission, which established an industrial alliance in February dedicated to the deployment of SMRs in Europe by the early 2030s.

Last weekend’s European parliamentary election confirmed the drift away from anti-nuclear hardline parties of the radical green left towards a more pragmatic approach that takes greater note of the importance of energy security.

The earthquake's epicentre was in Germany, where the anti-nuclear Greens received just 12 per cent of the vote, eight points down on the last European election in 2019.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seen as the leading driver of the unpopular anti-nuclear policy. His Social Democrats (SPD) suffered its worst-ever result in a nationwide vote with just 14 per cent, pushing it into third place behind the nationalist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), which supports nuclear and fossil fuels and opposes wind. The Green contingent in the European Parliament was reduced by 18 MEPs to 53, prompting much chin-stroking over tactics. Luca Bergamaschi, the co-Founding Director of the Italian think tank ECCO, described results as "a strong wake-up call for climate action".

"The politics of climate action needs to be re-engineered and reconnected with the needs of society," he said.

Australia remains isolated from the debate taking place in other G20 Western democracies. Nevertheless, the backlash against the renewable-only energy strategy will only grow as consumers and businesses absorb the impact of higher power prices. The myth of cheap, renewable energy is colliding with reality, and Labor's 2030 targets cannot be met.

A government more astute than this would be building in some wriggle room in anticipation that a transition plan using renewables alone cannot succeed in the limited time available.

Instead, the Prime Minister and his Energy Minister have decided to go for broke, making an attack on nuclear power the centrepiece of their campaign to discredit Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

They may not yet realise that they are placing the Labor Party firmly on the wrong side of history as they approach the election, in which the goal will be to lose as few seats as possible in the hope of clinging to power.

The attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy is more about burnishing the Party's credentials in inner-city seats than it is about harming Dutton. The threat from the Green Party heavily weighs on the minds of Labor strategists.

Albanese has chosen to put the politics of energy policy above the security of the nation's energy supply. The best they can achieve is to delay the inevitable transition to nuclear energy for another three years.