PAUL MURRAY: British PM’s decision to go nuclear is a damning indictment of Anthony Albanese’s inaction

How terribly unkind of British Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer to drop a neutron bomb on his Australian counterpart’s ideological opposition to the advancement of nuclear power in this country.

Last week Starmer brought in sweeping new planning rules to allow the rapid development of small modular nuclear reactors anywhere in Britain — the first to open by 2032 — under a plan specifically designed to force down electricity costs.

Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese continues to parrot his hapless Energy Minister’s paranoia about Peter Dutton’s policy for seven nuclear power plants around Australia — including a small modular reactor at Collie — to secure our energy future.

They say the plants would be too expensive, couldn’t be built before the late 2040s and would not bring down the price of power.

These words from Starmer’s announcement should be ringing in Albanese’s ears: “This country hasn’t built a nuclear power station in decades. We’ve been let down and left behind.

“I’m putting an end to it — changing the rules to back the builders of this nation, and saying no to the blockers who have strangled our chances of cheaper energy, growth and jobs for far too long.”

It’s almost as if they were tailor-made to back Dutton’s audacious plan. Each rhetorical flourish shreds the core of Labor’s archaic opposition to the development of an Australian nuclear power industry.

Included in Starmer’s statement were quotes from the head of the UK’s huge GMB union, Gary Smith: “GMB has long said there can be no net zero without new nuclear.

“For too long, the failure to deliver new nuclear has weakened our energy security and undermined economic growth. Now we need to see spades in the ground without delay.”

The reason for Starmer’s revolution in a country that long ago shut coal-fired power stations is because renewables are not sufficient to get to net zero after a heavy reliance on gas.

Worsening the UK’s position is that firming gas in Europe is subject to huge price fluctuations that have hurt British families.

But in Australia we have a ban on nuclear power, Labor State administrations that resist new gas developments and a national government committed to renewables-only, net zero madness.

And we have national advisers to government with the blinkers on. This is what Energy Minister Chris Bowen said in December about the CSIRO-AEMO Gencost report that he used to attack Dutton’s plan: “The draft report draws heavily from local and international data sources when examining nuclear construction timelines.

“It finds mature democracies, such as Australia, face significant lead time for planning, financing, safety and other regulatory approvals, with an average construction timeline of between 17 and 21 years, putting first power from the Liberal’s nuclear plan well into the 2040s, consistent with evidence from other experts.”

Starmer has now exposed that as crap. Britain will do what Bowen and his stooges say we can’t do.

“Reforms to planning rules will clear a path for smaller, and easier to build nuclear reactors — known as small modular reactors — to be built for the first time ever in the UK,” Starmer said.

“This will create thousands of new highly skilled jobs while delivering clean, secure and more affordable energy for working people.

“This is the latest refusal to accept the status quo, with the Government ripping up archaic rules and saying no to the NIMBYs, to prioritise growth. It comes after recent changes to planning laws, the scrapping of the three-strike rule for judicial reviews on infrastructure projects, and application of common-sense to environmental rules.

“For too long the country has been mired by delay and obstruction, with a system too happy to label decisions as too difficult, or too long-term.

“The UK was the first country in the world to develop a nuclear reactor, but the last time a nuclear power station was built was back in 1995. None have been built since, leaving the UK lagging behind in a global race to harness cleaner, more affordable energy.

“Meanwhile, China is constructing 29 reactors, and the EU has 12 at planning stage, giving these places a huge advantage in the global race to harness new technologies, create jobs and deliver cleaner, cheaper, independent energy.

“Investors want to get on and build reliable, cheap nuclear power, which will in turn support critical modern infrastructure, such as supercomputers to power the UK’s ambitions — but they have been held back.”

That’s what the Australian Labor Party used to sound like under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating — not that Starmer is a patch on them. That was before Labor went fully woke under our first left-wing Prime Minister.

British Labour’s approach will supercharge moves already under way to install SMRs in specific energy-reliant industries as website The Chemical Engineer explained: “A deal has been struck to build a fleet of four small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) in Teesside to provide power to the local chemicals industry.

“Reactor builder Westinghouse Electric has signed an agreement with the project co-ordinator Community Nuclear Power to develop the plans, which if successful could see the UK’s first privately financed fleet of SMRs generating low-carbon power in the region during the early 2030s.

“Westinghouse would provide four AP300 SMRs, a 300 MW slimmed down version of its 1 GW AP1000 reactor, the first of which was connected to the grid in China in 2018.

“Westinghouse was among six companies selected last year to bid for contracts to build SMRs in the UK.”

The website noted UK Government plans to build new SMRs and conventional large-scale plants would meet its target of increasing nuclear power output from 6.5 GW to 24 GW by 2050.

“SMRs can be built in factories which could help reduce project costs and the lengthy overruns common with larger plants,” it said. “Westinghouse argues that it has reduced these risks further by basing its SMR on existing designs rather than the first-of-a-kind designs being used by other developers.”

While Starmer was blowing up Labor’s opposition to nuclear power, iconic Australian businessman and entrepreneur Dick Smith was exploding the notion that batteries solve the obvious deficiencies in a renewables-only strategy reliant on wind and solar.

In a national newspaper advertisement, Smith not only showed that battery storage forced up power prices, but that those investing in them were making huge profits.

This realistic focus on what is really driving the push towards batteries has been strangely missing from the national energy debate.

There is nothing altruistic about the involvement of private investors in such a lucrative business.

Smith relied on figures available from the east coast National Energy Market to show that in the 12 months from January 2024, power entering the grid from batteries was 670 per cent more expensive than the cost of the energy they stored.

As the canny businessman pointed out, the profit margins for those funding the big batteries is massive.

But even more important in terms of the cost-of-living crisis is the reality that the expensive batteries dictate the cost of power.

As Chris Uhlmann was able to show in his Sky documentary, The Real Cost Of Net Zero, the wholesale price of energy isn’t set by the relatively low input cost of wind or solar power as Bowen would have Australians believe.

It’s the cost of the power needed to fulfil demand that sets the price. This “marginal cost” principle determines that the most expensive generator required to balance supply and demand sets the price for electricity sold into a wholesale market.

Dick Smith shows that the average battery charging price for the NEM over the past 12 months was $39.35/MWh. But the average battery discharging price was an eye-watering $263.61/MWh.

The wholesale cost of electricity in WA’s coal-and-gas-reliant power system is around $60-$70/MWh.

“Batteries don’t generate energy — they lose energy while storing what’s left to resell at a massive markup,” Smith says.

As we push for more renewables, battery profits will only skyrocket, with much of the industry in foreign hands shipping profits overseas. No wonder renewables are so expensive.

Smith addressed his advertisement to Bowen and the paymaster of the climate-obsessed Federal teal MPs, Simon Holmes a Court, calling on them to consider nuclear power.

It appears he included Holmes a Court as an investor and promoter of battery projects, which notoriously have heavy capital costs and a relatively short lifespan, which Smith says explains the massive markups and resultant need for big profits.

But batteries will never match nuclear as a way of producing big amounts of reliable power over long periods to underpin inherently unreliable renewables.

While Britain only has about a third of Australia’s uptake of domestic solar panels, those figures are reversed for its reliance on wind power.

British Labour says its SMR policy puts the UK “back in the race for nuclear power”.

Australian Labor can’t get out of its own way to find the starting line.