A former Miss America takes her nuclear sales pitch to audiences in Australia
By Hilary Whiteman, CNN, February 6, 2025, Brisbane, Australia,
Nuclear engineer and former Miss America Grace Stanke has entered the fierce debate in Australia over its future energy policy with a 10-day national tour extolling the benefits of nuclear power in a country where it’s been banned for almost 30 years.
The speaking tour is familiar territory for the 22-year-old former beauty queen, who said she studied nuclear engineering as a “flex,” but now works for US energy giant Constellation as a spokesperson and as an engineer on its nuclear team.
Her recent arrival comes at a delicate time in Australia, months before a national election that could put the opposition Liberal Party in power, along with its promises to build seven nuclear power stations – upending the current Labor government’s plan to rely on renewable energy and gas.
For several days, Stanke has been speaking to hundreds of Australians, in events organized by Nuclear for Australia (NFA), a charity founded by 18-year-old Will Shackel, who has received backing from a wealthy Australian pro-nuclear entrepreneur.
Most talks were well-attended by attentive crowds, but not all audience members were impressed by Stanke’s message.
As she started to speak in Brisbane last Friday, a woman in the audience began shouting, becoming the first of several people to be ejected from the room as other attendees booed and jeered. One woman who was physically pushed from the premises by a security guard has since filed a formal complaint.
……………Those against nuclear power say it’s too expensive, too unsafe and too slow to replace Australia’s coal-fired power stations that would need to keep burning for several more years until nuclear plants came online.
………………….A numbers game
Australia banned nuclear energy in 1998 as part of a political deal to win approval for the country’s first and only nuclear research facility that’s still operating in southern Sydney.
A change in government in an election, to be held before mid-May, would see seven nuclear reactors built in five states to provide power alongside renewable energy – a bold shift in direction that would not only require changes to federal law, but amendments to laws in states where premiers oppose nuclear power.
According to the plan proposed by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, the nuclear reactors would be funded by 331 billion Australian dollars ($206 billion) in public money and the first could be working by 2035.
Both forecasts are disputed as underestimates by the government acting on the advice of the country’s independent science agency – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – which says renewables are still the cheapest and the most efficient way for Australia to reach net zero by 2050.
…………………..“I do believe that a strong grid requires both renewables and nuclear energy combined,” Ms Stanke said, referring to the argument for a “baseload” energy source that doesn’t rely on unpredictable weather.
That argument is challenged by experts worldwide, who say the need for “baseload” energy is an outdated concept, and that stability can be achieved by other means, including batteries.
……………………………………………..Advance, a conservative campaign group that says it works to counter “woke politicians and elitist activist groups” is promoting a 48-minute documentary it claims tells the “untold stories” of farmers whose “lives have been upended by the rapid rollout of wind and solar projects.”
………………………………….Rural areas where opposition is building to renewable projects are fertile ground for Shackel and his nuclear campaign. He’s already visited some areas earmarked for power stations under the Liberal proposal. And while he says NFA isn’t politically aligned with either of the major parties, he accepts he’s doing some of the groundwork to bring the community on side………………………….
Nuclear ‘foolishness’
Bringing a former Miss America to Australia was part of a plan to raise support for nuclear power among Australian women, who according to one survey are far less enthusiastic than men about the proposal.
According to several people who attended sessions in various states, the audience was dominated by older men, many of whom didn’t seem to need convincing.
Jane McNicol, the first protester escorted from the room in Brisbane, told CNN she’s been an anti-nuclear campaigner since the 1980s. She said she stood up to “ensure that this foolishness does not take off.”
“It’s just a way of spinning the fossil fuel industry out for a bit longer, and we cannot afford to do that,” she said. “You can see how the climate is collapsing around us. Look at Los Angeles. Those poor people over there lost everything.”
Others said the panel – which included local nuclear experts – made generalizations and didn’t get to the nub of issues specific to their area, like the potential strain they say a nuclear power station could have on resources in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
“There is literally no water for a nuclear power station. The existing allocation is already committed to mine repair,” said Adrian Cosgriff, a member of community advocacy group Voices of the Valley, who attended the Melbourne talk.
“Australians know nuclear power exists. That’s fine. It’s just not suitable for here. That’s kind of the argument,” he said.
David Hood, a civil and environmental engineer who attended the Brisbane talk, said: “Renewables are working right now. We can’t wait 10 to 20 years for higher cost and risky nuclear energy.”
Stanke and Shackel delivered a parliamentary briefing in Parliament House, Canberra on Wednesday, to politicians and aides across the political spectrum.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was unsurprisingly not in attendance, having already labelled his political rival’s nuclear proposal as “madness” and a “fantasy, dreamed-up to delay real action on climate change.”……………. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/australia/australia-nuclear-debate-grace-stanke-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
How Australia’s CANDU Conservatives Fell in Love with Canadian Nuclear
This time around, with the current push to embrace nuclear energy, the federal Australian Coalition’s ideas appear to be shaped by the internet, where a pro-nuclear media ecosystem of influencers and podcasters has flourished just as nuclear has become attractive to conservative parties worldwide.
Ontario, Canada is the only place in the world to tear out wind turbines and embrace nuclear power. Australia’s conservatives have been taking notes.
DRILLED, Royce Kurmelovs 5 Feb 25
If there is a Holy Land for nuclear energy, Australian Shadow Climate Change and Energy Minister, Ted O’Brien, seems to think it’s Ontario, Canada.
Other countries have well-established nuclear power industries, of course. There’s the United Kingdom where the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor – dubbed “the world’s most expensive power plant” – where work began in 2007 with an expected start date of 2027 but is now at least ten years behind schedule and billions over budget. Meanwhile, it’s sister project, Sizewell C, is estimated to cost the equivalent of AUD $80bn (GBP £40bn, USD $49bn). There’s France where, in mid-August 2022, half the country’s nuclear reactors were forced offline, many as a direct result of climate impacts such as heat and drought.
Over in the United States, storied home of the Manhattan Project, where newly minted energy secretary (and fracking CEO) Chris Wright has announced a commitment to “unleash” commercial nuclear energy, one of the last two new nuclear power builds attempted this century forced Westinghouse into bankruptcy protection, and a separate effort by NuScale to build a cutting edge small modular reactor (SMR) was cancelled in November 2023 due to rising costs. There’s also Finland, a country of 5.6 million people, that finally turned on Europe’s newest nuclear reactor 18 years after construction began, finishing up with a price tag three times its budget. Though it had a noticeably positive effect on prices after start up, the cost of building Olkiluoto-3 was so high, its developer had to be bailed out by the French government. Since then, technical faults continue to send the reactor temporarily offline – a remarkably common occurrence among nuclear reactors.
Ontario, however, is so far the only place in the world that has ripped out wind turbines and built reactors – though the AfD in Germany has pledged to do the same if elected, and US President Donald Trump has already moved to stop new windfarm construction. Thanks to much self-promotion by pro-nuclear activists and Canada’s resources sector, that move caught the imagination of O’Brien and Australia’s conservative party. Now, as Australians head to polls in 2025, the country’s conservatives are looking to claw back government from the incumbent Labor Party with a pro-nuclear power play that critics charge is nothing more than a climate-delay tactic meant to protect the status quo and keep fossil fuels burning. “This is your diversion tactic,” says Dave Sweeney, anti-nuclear campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation. “There’s a small group that have long held an ambition for an atomic Australia, from first shovel to last waste barrel to nuclear missile. Some of the people who support this are true believers, for others it’s just the perfect smoke screen for the continuation of coal and embedding gas as a future energy strategy.”
Apples and Maple Syrup
On the face of it, Ontario is an odd part of the world on which to model Australia’s energy future. Privatization in both places has evolved messy, complicated energy grids, but that’s about all they have in common. One is a province on the sprawling North American landmass, and the other is a nation that spans a continent. Ontario has half the population of Australia and spends five months a year under ice. Its energy system has traditionally relied on hydro power and nuclear, where Australia is famously the driest inhabited continent on the planet that used to depend on coal but now boasts nearly 40% renewable electricity as of 2024.
One Australian state, South Australia, already draws more than 70% of its power from renewables and frequently records weeks where all its electricity needs are met with solar and wind. Unlike Ontario, and the rest of Canada, Australia has no nuclear industry aside from a single research reactor in the Sydney suburbs. The cost of transmitting power over vast distances in Australia makes up approximately two-fifths of retail power prices. Electricity prices in Ontario, meanwhile, have been artificially lowered by an $7.3bn a year bundle of subsidies for households and businesses. Comparing the two jurisdictions is stranger than comparing apples and oranges; it’s more like comparing apples and maple syrup.
None of this has stopped the province from becoming O’Brien’s touchstone for the marvels of nuclear energy, and “Ontario” from becoming his one-word reply to critics who question the wisdom of creating a new nuclear industry from scratch in Australia. If the country wanted to transition away from coal, the Coalition’s suggestion was it should be embracing nuclear energy — not more renewables — just look at Ontario. “We have to keep learning the lessons from overseas,” O’Brien told Sky News in August 2024. “There’s a reason why countries like Canada, in particular the province of Ontario, has such cheap electricity. They’ve done this many years ago. They were very coal-reliant and eventually, as they retired those plants, they went into nuclear.”
Weirder still, O’Brien is not the only Australian political leader to be chugging the maple syrup. Ever since the conservative Liberal-National Coalition began to float the idea of an atomic Australia as part of their 2025 election pitch, its leader, Peter Dutton, has similarly pointed to the Canadian province as an example for Australia to follow. In interview after interview, Dutton referred to Ontario’s power prices to suggest that nuclear is the future for Australia – raising the question: how did Ontario capture the hearts and minds of Australia’s conservatives?
Atomic Australia
The idea of an atomic Australia has long lived in the heart of Australian conservatism. Former conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies once begged the United Kingdom to supply Australia with nuclear weapons after World War II, going so far as to allow the British to nuke the desert and the local Indigenous people at a site known as Maralinga. The first suggestion for a civilian nuclear power industry evolved out of this defense program and has never been forgotten. Iron ore magnate Lang Hancock and his daughter, Gina Rinehart, today Australia’s richest woman, both remained fascinated by nuclear energy. In 1977, Hancock, a passionate supporter of conservative and libertarian causes, brought nuclear physicist Edward Teller to Australia on a speaking tour to promote nuclear power, including an address to the National Press Club where he promised thorium reactors would change the world.
Though Australian plans to build a domestic nuclear industry have failed due to eye-watering costs and public concerns about safety, the country today is the fourth largest exporter of uranium according to the World Nuclear Association, sending 4820 tonnes offshore in 2022 and providing 8% of the world’s supply. The country is also planning to acquire a nuclear-powered submarine fleet through AUKUS, an alliance with the US and UK. This increasingly tenuous defense deal is thought unlikely to happen thanks to issues with US and UK shipyards, but the existence of the program has been used to justify the creation of a civilian nuclear power sector. There have been at least eight inquiries or investigations into the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia since 2005, and five proposals to build government-owned nuclear waste dumps since 1990. Each inquiry has concluded that nuclear power would largely be a waste of time and money and, with the exception of two facilities in Western Australia that store low-level radioactive waste, efforts to build additional dumps capable of storing higher grades of waste have mostly foundered for lack of community support. This time around, with the current push to embrace nuclear energy, the federal Australian Coalition’s ideas appear to be shaped by the internet, where a pro-nuclear media ecosystem of influencers and podcasters has flourished just as nuclear has become attractive to conservative parties worldwide.
When Australia LNP opposition leader Peter Dutton formally unveiled the gist of his “coal-to-nuclear” transition plan in June 2024, for example, he was asked what the plan would be to handle the waste and responded with a curious sleight of hand: “If you look at a 470MW [nuclear] reactor, it produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of Coke each year.” A fact check published in the Nine papers pointed out that nuclear reactors typically operate on much larger scales than 470 megawatts. Citing World Nuclear Association figures, it found a typical large-scale nuclear reactor with 1-gigawatt capacity will generate 30 tonnes of spent fuel each year – roughly 10 cubic metres, or 10,000 litres a year. It is unclear where Dutton or his speechwriters stumbled onto this talking point, but it appeared to be a corruption of the idea that one person’s lifetime waste from nuclear energy could fit inside a soda can – a common Facebook meme promoted by the Canadian Nuclear Association. A similar claim was repeated last year in a social media video by Brazilian model and Instagram influencer Isabelle Boemeke.
Boemeke, who goes by the online persona Isodope and claims to be the “world’s first nuclear energy influencer,” begins her video by outlining her daily diet, starting with black coffee and ending with a post-gym snack of energy-dense gummy bears. In a dramatic transition, she then compares the size of a gummy bear to the size of a uranium pellet, before launching into a didactic explanation of the role these pellets play in generating nuclear power.
“It also means the waste it creates is tiny. If I were to get all of my life’s energy from nuclear, my waste would fit inside of a soda can,” she says, before ending by advising her viewers not to drink soda because “it’s bad for you.”
Neither the Canadian Nuclear Association nor Boemeke elaborated on how the world might dispose of the cumulative waste if a significant proportion of the Earth’s population drew their energy from nuclear power – but then that is not the point.
Boemeke is hardly alone. Online there is a small but determined band of highly networked, pro-nuclear advocates, podcasters and social media influencers working to present an alternate vision for an atomic world. Many of those involved in this information ecosystem are motivated by genuine belief or concern over environmental issues, even if their activities often align with right-wing causes and ideas. Nuclear is often positioned as an essential climate solution, as well, although it’s typically a cynical promise: nuclear reactors take decades and billions of dollars to build, buying fossil power more time. In the U.S. especially, pro-fossil conservative politicians often use nuclear as a rhetorical wedge: they will ask any expert or advocate in favor of climate policy whether they support nuclear and imply that if they don’t, they must not be serious about actually addressing the climate crisis by any means necessary.
One of those helping export the strategy from North America to Australia is Canadian pro-nuclear advocate, Chris Keefer, host of the Decouple podcast and the founder of Canadians for Nuclear Energy. A self-described “climate hawk”, Keefer is a practicing emergency physician in Toronto who built an online presence as an advocate for keeping existing nuclear power plants open. Through his public advocacy, he has been instrumental in cultivating the image of Canadian – and particularly Ontarian – nuclear excellence, a legend he has recently promoted in Australia through a series of meetings, speeches and his podcast.
Nuclear on Tour
…………………………………………………………………in September 2023, when Keefer traveled to Australia to give a keynote address at Minerals Week, hosted by the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) at Parliament House in Canberra. Ahead of his visit, a write up published in the The Australian Financial Review framed Keefer as a “leftie” and “long time campaigner on human rights and reversing climate change” who had previously “unthinkingly accepted long-standing left-wing arguments against nuclear” but had embraced nuclear due to his unionism. During his time in Australia, Keefer says he met with federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton to discuss “Ontario’s coal phaseout and just transition for coal workers”,………………………………………..
As political folklore this was a tale that would have appealed deeply to Keefer’s audience, whose constituencies were threatened by renewable energy projects. The MCA itself has historically been hostile to Indigenous land rights and campaigned heavily to stop or delay any government response to climate change during the 90s, largely in defence of coal producers…………………………………………. The promise of an Ontario-style “blue-blue alliance” – a political alignment between certain blue-collar unions and conservatives – would be alluring, especially given how well a pro-nuclear campaign paired with anti-wind scaremongering. Even a nuclear-curious Labor member may have spotted a way to stem the flow of votes to Greens.
Changing Winds
What Keefer presented to the Australian resources sector as a glorious triumph, Don Ross, 70, recalls as a difficult time in his small community that became a flashpoint in a fight over Ontario’s future. ……………………………………………
As a longtime member of the County Sustainability Group, Ross says an awareness that the climate is changing pushed him and others to fight for the White Pines Wind development back in 2018. In his telling, the community had the best wind resource in the area and had been pitched as a site for development since the year 2000. There were six or seven serious efforts over the years, all small projects in the range of 20 megawatts that would have allowed the community to be largely self-reliant in terms of power. Only White Pines came closest to completion. It was a ten year development process that Ross says was fought at every step by an anti-wind campaign, with some of the campaigners active since 2001.
“They just took all the information from Australia or America or around the world to fight the same fight – they used the same information, same tactics, played on the same fears and uncertainties,” Ross says. “They were very effective. They had the media backing them, and the conservatives saw an opportunity to drive a wedge.”……………………………………………………………………………………………..
By election day, four of the nine towers at the White Pines windfarm development were already built, the cranes were on site, and the other towers were laying in position ready to go. The development was just four weeks from completion when the election was called for Ford.
On his first day in office, Ford cancelled 758 renewable energy contracts. ……………………………… Ontario’s future Energy Minister, Todd Smith – a former radio presenter who has since left politics and now serves as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at the Canadian nuclear technology firm, Candu Energy, a subsidiary of AtkinsRealis – had opposed White Pines from its inception. ………………………………………………………………….
Next the Ford government slammed the brakes on renewables investment. It shredded a cap-and-trade program that was driving investment in the province, a successful energy efficiency strategy that was working to reduce demand and a deal to buy low-cost hydropower from neighbouring Quebec. During the campaign, Ford promised Ontario’s voters that taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the cost of literally ripping the turbines out of the ground and ending the other 750 or so projects. He had pledged that doing so would actually save CAD $790 million. When the final tally came in, that decision alone ended up costing taxpayers at least CAD $231 million to compensate those who had contracts with the province. The amount finally paid to the German-company behind the White Pines development is unknown. The former developers remain bound by a non-disclosure clause.
Canada’s Nuclear Heartland
…………………………………..Under Ford, Ontario – and later, Canada itself – fell into a nuclear embrace. Much of this, Professor Winfield says, played on a historical amnesia and nostalgia for what was considered a hero industry that traced its origins to the dawn of the atomic era. The province supplied the refined uranium used in the Manhattan Project and its civilian nuclear industry grew out of the wartime program. At first, the long-term strategy was to use domestic nuclear power as a base for a new export industry, selling reactor technology and technical expertise to the world. Development on a Canadian-designed and built reactor, the heavy-water CANDU – short for “Canadian Deuterium Uranium” – began in 1954. Two sites, Pickering and, later, Darlington were set aside for the construction of nuclear plants. The first commercial CANDU reactor would start up at Pickering in 1971 but the hope of a nuclear-export industry died on the back of questions about risk, waste, cost and scandals involving Atomic Energy of Canada that included attempts to sell CANDU reactors to Nicholai Ceausescu’s Romania.
………………………………………………“So Ontario went from an electricity system that was basically almost 100% hydroelectric to a system that was about 60% nuclear by the early 90s. By 1997, eight of the original 20 reactors in Ontario were out of service.”
……………………………………….Until 2018, the idea of a nuclear revival in Ontario seemed a fantasy. Then Doug Ford began ripping out wind turbines and blocking the province from considering renewables as part of its energy mix. It was an act designed to play to his base, especially the workforce within the nuclear industry………………… Whatever the precise figure is today, the weight of numbers from those directly involved, or further out in the supply chain, offered a constituency that could be appealed to. It also helped that Ford’s government was able to run its energy systems largely by executive fiat. …………………….
More of the Same
So far, Ford’s government – re-elected in 2022 – has taken advantage of this opaque arrangement to pursue its plan to refurbish 10 existing nuclear reactors, build four new 1200 megawatt units at the Bruce Nuclear Facility, and four new small-modular reactors (SMR) at Darlington – the centerpiece of Ontario’s promised nuclear revival. ………………………….
…………………….Each [smr] unit is built to be smaller, more standardized, with fewer components or systems. On paper, this is supposed to make it possible to manufacture the units in large batches, bringing down costs, which are historically the barrier to a broader embrace of nuclear power. As the Globe and Mail reported in early December 2024, Christer Dahlgren, a GE-Hitachi executive, acknowledged as much during a talk in Helsinki in March 2019. The company, which is responsible for designing the BWRX-300 reactors – an acronym for “Boiling Water Reactor 10th generation” – to be installed at Darlington, needed to line up governments to ensure a customer base. Keeping the total capital cost for one plant under $1 billion was necessary, he said, “in order for our customer base to go up”.
The initial price for Ontario’s new reactors, however, was offered before the design had been finished. As the cost is not fixed, any change to the design at any part of the process will up the cost as the plans are reworked. ………………………….the publicly-owned utility companies most likely to invest in nuclear power take on considerable financial risk with any given project – a risk that only goes up as the price tag climbs through the billions………..
………………..So far Ontario is the only jurisdiction to fully commit to a new SMR build. In January 2023, Ontario Power Generation, the successor entity to Ontario Hydro, signed the contract to deploy a BWRX-300, and preliminary site preparation at Darlington is currently underway. As Darlington was already an approved site for nuclear operations, the regulatory process is expected to be shorter, meaning the project will move towards construction much more quickly than others might – such as any new greenfield development in Australia. If everything goes to plan – a questionable assumption given the project will bind Ontario and Canada to United States at a time when US President Donald Trump is threatening to impose tariffs – the first reactor is expected to come online by 2028, with additional reactors to follow by 2034 and 2036.
………………….. Some estimates, such as Professor Winfields’, put the total cost of the Ford government’s nuclear refurbishment and SMR build plan in the range of $100bn, but firm numbers on the expected cost of the SMR build and the refurbishment of existing reactors have remained elusive. Industry insiders expect the numbers to be released by the end of 2025 potentially after an early provincial election.
……………….“The idea that anybody would be looking at us as a model in terms of how to approach energy and electricity and climate planning is just bizarre,” says Professor Mark Winfield from York University,. “You can’t make this stuff up. We’re a mess.”
……………………………………………………………..Ontario’s Soft Power
Winfield’s is a very different read of the landscape than the one presented by Chris Keefer, who rejects these criticisms, saying claims about overblown costs and delays are themselves overblown – a deflection that has been repeated by Australian political figures.
……………………………………………………….Nuclear, in Keefer’s view, remains not just a climate solution, but the climate solution. A self-described “climate realist”, he has developed this theme across more than 300 episodes of his podcast, Decouple – much of this output devoted to specifically promoting the Canadian nuclear industry and the CANDU reactor. It is a story told again and again, whether in conversation with figures like climate contrarian and long-time nuclear advocate Michael Shellenberger……………………….
Keefer knows his reach. He says he has given no formal advice to the Australian federal Coalition on nuclear but adds that his podcast “is listened to by policy makers throughout the anglosphere,” meaning that “it is possible that the thinking of Australian policy makers has been influenced by this content.” Among his lesser-known guests have been a small contingent of Australian pro-nuclear activists such as Aidan Morrison and former advisor to Ted O’Brien, James Fleay, both of whom have been publicly involved in making the case for an atomic Australia.
As far as pro-nuclear advocates go, Morrison has self-styled himself the “bad boy of the energy debate”. A physicist who abandoned his PhD with the University of Melbourne, he worked briefly as data scientist with large banks and founded a Hunter S. Thompson-themed bar “Bat Country”. His first foray into public life and nuclear discourse was as a YouTuber, where he used the platform to attack the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and its Integrated System Plan (ISP), a document produced from a larger, iterative and ongoing planning process that guides the direction of the National Electricity Market. ………In December 2023, Morrison was hired into the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), another free market think tank and Atlas Network partner, as head of research on energy systems.
………………………………..As Keefer hosted Morrison on his podcast, Morrison returned the favor in October 2024 when he brought Keefer back to Australia for a CIS event titled “Canada’s Nuclear Progress: Why Australia Should Pay Attention.” Leading up to the event, they toured the Loy Yang coal-fired power plant together, and visited farmers in St Arnaud, Victoria who have been campaigning against the construction of new transmission lines. Where Keefer previously presented himself as a lefty with a hard realist take on climate change, his address to the free market think tank took a different tack.
Over the course of the presentation, Keefer once more retold the story of the pivotal 2018 provincial election in Ontario, but this time elaborated on how an alliance between popular conservative movements and blue-collar unions mobilised against what he called a “devastating” renewables build out. Because “it was astonishingly difficult to convert environmentalists into being pro-nuclear”, Keefer explained how he had sought to exploit a vacuum around class politics by targeting workers unions and those employed in the industry by playing to an underlying anxiety…………………………..
In the mix were union groups such as the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA), the Society of United Professionals, the boilermakers union and, critically, the Power Workers’ Union. These were all unions whose membership depended on big infrastructure builds, but it was helpful that Keefer’s advocacy aligned with the interests of capital and government.
Twenty thousand signatures on a petition wasn’t enough to save the White Pines wind farm from demolition in 2018, but according to Keefer, 5874 names on an online petition to the House of Commons he organized as part of a campaign to save the Pickering nuclear plant in 2020 was enough to earn him access.
“That really opened the doors in Ottawa politically for me,” he said of the petition to save Pickering. His go-to tactic to achieve this influence, he said, was the “wedging tool” to pull left and centrist parties “kicking and screaming at least away from anti-nuclearism.”
………………………………………………………………………. “So the environmental NGOs were very, very powerful. We needed to form a countervailing force within civil society, and so with that intent I co-founded Canadians For Nuclear Energy in 2020 very quickly, to have some kind of influence.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
A Confluence of Energies
Within this convergence of pro-nuclear activism, internationalist conservative political ambition and new media ecosystems, companies within Canada’s nuclear industry have also been positioning themselves to take advantage should the prevailing wind change in Australia. In October 2024, Quebecois engineering services and nuclear company, AtkinsRéalis – the parent company of Candu Energy that now employs Ontario’s former energy minister, Todd Smith – announced it was opening a new Sydney office to “deliver critical infrastructure for Australians”.
Though little known in Australia, the company has a storied history in Canada. Formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, the Quebecois company changed name in 2023 in the long wake of a lingering corruption scandal involving allegations of political interference by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the justice system. Today the company holds an exclusive license to commercialize CANDU reactor technology through Candu Energy and in 2023 signed an agreement with Ontario Power Generation to help develop Canada’s first SMR reactor. A year later, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to support the deployment of its BWRX-300 reactors in the UK.
………………………………………………Under a future Coalition government, AtkinsRealis’s work with traditional reactors and SMRs would make it one among a field of contenders for lucrative contracts to design, build and operate any nuclear facility……………………………………………………………………………….
Just getting started, however, would require lifting a ban on nuclear power introduced in 1998 by former conservative prime minister John Howard, and any state-level equivalent. Communities, many of which are already concerned about unanswered questions such as how material will be transported and stored, or how much water will be required in the driest inhabited continent, would need to be consulted. …………………………………..
If all goes according to plan – a heroic “if” – the earliest any nuclear generator would come online in Australia is 2037 – or 2035 if the country embraces SMR technology – with the rest to follow after 2040. In the short-to-medium term, the Coalition leader Peter Dutton has freely admitted his government would continue with more of the same in a manner reminiscent of Ontario: propping up Australia’s aging fleet of coal-fired power plants, and burning more gas as a “stopgap” solution in the interim.
………………………………“This is not going to deliver anything in the times that are relevant to what the Australian system needs, or certainly what the climate needs. It’s not a serious policy or proposal.” – Dylan McConnell, an energy systems expert with University of New South Wales
……………… …………………………..To sell this vision to the Australian public, the Coalition released a set of cost estimates in late December 2024, claiming its plan would be (AUD) $263bn cheaper than a renewables-only approach. These figures, however, were declared dead on arrival. Not only did the modelling underpinning them assume a smaller economy, with a vastly lower take up in electric vehicles over time, but it excluded the entire state of Western Australia – a state twice as big as Ontario and nearly four times as big as Texas with a tenth of the population – and did not consider ancillary costs such as water, transport and waste management. Even more nuanced reviews, published weeks later, found the assumptions underpinning the model outlined a program of work that would choke off renewables and backslide on Australia’s commitments under the Paris Agreement………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Power Politics
The lack of detail and apparent effort to crib from Ontario’s conservatives on strategy underscores how the politics of nuclear power is what made it attractive to the federal Coalition, a party that continues to fiercely protect the interests of oil, gas and coal producers. As the reality of climate change increasingly compels action, the party has been facing a challenge from independent, climate-conscious candidates known collectively as the “Teals”, running in seats previously thought safe. Nuclear power offers the perception that the party is taking climate change seriously even as it still serves its traditional constituency ………………………………………………… https://drilled.media/news/aus-nuclear
Former Miss America’s Australian nuclear tour clouded by Chinese AI blow to her employer
Royce Kurmelovs, Jan 30, 2025, https://reneweconomy.com.au/former-miss-americas-australian-nuclear-tour-clouded-by-chinese-ai-blow-to-her-employer/
Miss America 2023 winner Grace Stanke has begun her Australian tour to promote nuclear power, just as the US energy giant that employs her has taken a big market hit after Chinese company DeepSeek claimed to have found a cheaper way to make AI.
Stanke, who flew into Perth on Wednesday, is a nuclear engineer who works in public relations for Constellation to promote nuclear technology, and has been brought out for an Australian tour by campaign group Nuclear For Australia in an attempt to drum up local support for the technology.
Nuclear For Australia is nominally headed by 18-year-old Will Shackel. But Stanke’s tour has reportedly been bankrolled by Australian businessman Dick Smith, who also provided the funding to establish the group.
The tour comes amid an aggressive expansion drive by Constellation, which holds a suite of nuclear and fossil fuel assets. According to the company’s 2024 Sustainability Report, nuclear makes up 67% of its generation capacity, with natural gas and oil making up 25% and renewables and storage accounting for 8%.
Constellation has increasingly been looking to capitalise on the development of AI as a driver in future electricity demand that it hopes to meet with nuclear power.
In September last year the company announced it would buy the Three Mile End nuclear facility under a deal to supply Microsoft with power to run its AI data centres.
Earlier in January, Constellation bought out rival Calvine for $US 27 billion, a move that meant it acquired the company’s gas-plants.
As gas-peaking plants currently help smooth out spikes in the wholesale electricity market by turning on during periods of high demand — at the expense of nuclear generators — the acquisition potentially gives Constellation greater influence over wholesale prices.
Late last week, President Donald Trump announced the US would pour $US 500 billion into AI development in what has been described as an “arms race” with China, a decision welcomed by Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez.
“President Trump is right that sustaining and enhancing America’s global AI dominance goes hand in hand with reliable, abundant American electricity,” he said. “Data center developers, generators, utilities, and other stakeholders should continue to work together to accomplish the President’s goals on behalf of the American people.”
On Tuesday, however, the assumption that power-hungry chipsets needed to train and run AI data centres would continue to drive demand for “clean” nuclear power ran into a wall.
Chinese firm DeepSeek announced it developed an open large-language model (LLM) that provides roughly the same service as ChatGPT with a smaller team and a fraction of the hardware as their US counterparts.
With the Chinese market subject to sanctions that limit access to the full-power graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to build their own models, the company was forced to find a workaround to do more with less.
These GPUs perform the calculations needed to drive LLMs and are manufactured by chipmaker Nvidia that was, until Wednesday, considered the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company with a market cap of $3.45 trillion. That changed with the latest news from DeepSeek.
In December, DeepSeek claimed it cost (USD) $5.6m and two months to develop its V3 model – a portion of what it cost to create ChatGPT. The accuracy of this figure, however, is questionable as the price of electricity is unknown.
Last week the company released the full version of its R1 model that it said is 30-times cheaper to run than equivalent models produced by US competitors such as OpenAI. The company has not released the training data, but has published papers outlining its methods, effectively allowing anyone to take DeepSeek work and expand upon it for free.
The announcement of a cheaper, less-demanding model triggered a massive 17% drop in Nvidia shares — wiping off $USD593bn, and knocked 20 per cent off the price of Constellation shares. By Thursday Constellation’s performance had partially recovered but not nearly enough to make up for Tuesday’s losses.
These events coincide with the arrival of 22-year-old Stanke, now a pro-nuclear influencer, in Australia to help local campaigns sell the technology to the Australian public.
Her tour includes appearances in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, a parliamentary briefing and appearances at private events, including a community meeting in Lithgow, New South Wales.
The town selection is interesting as it has been a flashpoint for an anti-wind and anti-renewables campaign and has traditionally been a strong Nationals stronghold.
Lithgow falls within the federal seat of Calare which is currently held by federal independent Andrew Gee, who resigned from the National Party in 2022 over its opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
‘I was exposed to evil in British nuclear tests’
Kirsteen O’Sullivan & Marcus White, 15 Jan 25, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpp5ze28ro?fbclid=IwY2xjawH5E-JleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHegxfVRLO66gQNKipt3Y5f9BWzRPbu0h6QWkys9CWH2yBTjZhE1YRCwhmA_aem_E7q8FCNDKoWD6DMMToVaoQ
A nuclear test veteran who witnessed the detonation of several British atomic bombs in the 1950s has said he was “exposed to evil”.
Robert James, 87, was an RAF firefighter stationed in Maralinga in Australia, where seven major UK tests took place.
Mr James, from Fordingbridge, Hampshire, said many service personnel had suffered fatal illnesses as a result and he was angry that the UK government had still not offered compensation.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said ministers were continuing to discuss issues with families.
Veterans’ campaign groups have said British service personnel were lined up and deliberately exposed to bomb tests to see what effect they would have.
Mr James said many of his comrades had died as a result of cancers and diseases associated with radiation exposure.
He said: “A lot of the guys suffered a lot. There’s lads dying every day… and after having long illness.
“We were exposed to evil, we were exposed to radiation. That’s pretty serious and I think that warrants compensation.
“Not only for people that are surviving like myself but the families that have suffered where their husbands or fathers died.”
In 2019, the Labour Party, then led by Jeremy Corbyn, pledged £50,000 for each surviving British nuclear test veteran.
Sir Keir Starmer met veterans in 2021, before becoming Prime Minister, but made no promises – and the 2019 offer was not in the 2024 manifesto.
However, the current Defence Secretary John Healey posted on his website in 2021: “UK remains the only nuclear power that refuses them recognition or compensation, unlike the US, France, Canada and Australia.”
Mr James said: “Don’t go back on your word, Mr Starmer… You promised us full compensation and recognition. Keep to your word.”
Virginia, we have a problem
14 Jan 2025, |Peter Briggs, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/virginia-we-have-a-problem/
Australia’s plan to acquire Virginia-class submarines from the United State is looking increasingly improbable. The US building program is slipping too badly.
This heightens the need for Australia to begin looking at other options, including acquiring Suffren-class nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) from France.
The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted work at the two shipyards that build Virginias, General Dynamics Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ yard at Newport News, Virginia. It badly hindered output at many companies in the supply chain, too. With too few workers, the industry has built up a backlog, and yards are filling with incomplete submarines.
Within six years, the US must decide whether to proceed with sale of the first of at least three and possibly five Virginias to Australia, a boat that will be transferred from the US Navy’s fleet.
Nine months before the transfer goes ahead, the president of the day must certify that it will not diminish USN undersea capability. This certification is unlikely if the industry has not by then cleared its backlog and achieved a production rate of 2.3 a year—the long-term building rate of two a year for the USN plus about one every three years to cover Australia’s requirement.
The chance of meeting that condition is vanishingly small.
The situation in the shipyards is stark. The industry laid down only one SSN in 2021. It delivered none from April 2020 to May 2022. The USN has requested funding for only one Virginia in fiscal year 2025, breaking the two-a-year drumbeat, ‘due to limits on Navy’s budget topline and the growing Virginia class production backlog’.
As of January 2025, five of 10 Block IV Virginias ordered are in the yards, as are five of 12 Block Vs for which acquisition has been announced. (Work has not begun on the other seven Block Vs.)
The building time from laying down until delivery has increased from between 3 and 3.5 years before the pandemic to more than 5 years. The tempo is still slowing: the next Virginia, USS Iowa, is due to be delivered on 5 April 2025, 5.8 years after it was laid down.
On the original, pre-pandemic schedule, all the Block IVs could probably have been delivered to the USN by now. This is a gap that cannot be recovered in a few years, despite all the expensive manpower training and retention programs in hand.
Exacerbating the problem for the yards, the Block V submarines are 30 percent larger, and more complex to build, making a return to shorter build times unlikely. Speaking to their shareholders in October, the chief executives of Huntington Ingalls and General Dynamics blamed their slowing delivery tempo on supply chain and workforce issues. HII says it is renegotiating contracts for 17 Block IV and Block V Virginias.
Furthermore, Electric Boat has diverted its most experienced workers to avoid further slippage in building the first two ballistic missile submarines of the Columbia class, the USN’s highest priority shipbuilding program, in which the Newport News yard also participates.
It gets worse. Many USN SSNs that have joined the US fleet over the past few decades are unavailable for service, awaiting maintenance. The pandemic similarly disrupted shipyards that maintain the SSNs of the Los Angeles and Virginia classes. In September 2022, 18 of the 50 SSNs in commission were awaiting maintenance. The Congressional Budget Office reports lack of spending on spare parts is also forcing cannibalisation and impacting the availability of Virginia class SSNs.
Australia’s SSN plan must worsen the US’s challenge in recovering from this situation, adding to the congestion in shipyards and further over loading supply chains already struggling to deliver SSNs to the USN.
A US decision not to sell SSNs to Australia is inevitable, and on current planning we will have no stopgap to cover withdrawal of our six diesel submarines of the Collins class, the oldest of which has already served for 28 years.
In the end, Australia’s unwise reliance on the US will have weakened the combined capability of the alliance. And Australia’s independent capacity for deterrence will be weakened, too.
As I wrote in December, it is time to look for another solution. One is ordering SSNs of the French Suffren class. The design is in production, with three of six planned boats delivered. It is optimised for anti-submarine warfare, with good anti-surface, land-strike, special-forces and mining capability. It is a smaller design, less capable than the Virginia, but should be cheaper and is a better fit for Australia’s requirements.
Importantly, it requires only half the crew of a Virginia, and we should be able to afford and crew the minimum viable force of 12 SSNs.
Let’s build on the good progress in training, industry and facility preparations for supporting US and British SSNs in Australia, all of which should continue, and find a way to add to the alliance’s overall submarine capability, not reduce it.
The Australian election as a game of cricket: cost of living is the issue, but does Nature bat last?
December 26, 2024 , By Noel Wauchope, https://theaimn.net/the-australian-election-as-a-game-of-cricket-cost-of-living-is-the-issue-but-does-nature-bat-last/
It is not nice to talk about politics at this happy festive time. But you can talk about cricket. Indeed, in Melbourne, it is your patriotic duty. So, I will – sort of.
A prestigious political analyst, Paul Bongiorno, writes in The Saturday Paper about the focus of campaigning for the 2025 Australian federal election. He sees both political parties emphasising the economy, and the “cost of living”. But Bongiorno warns that climate change could suddenly become once more the big factor in the political game, if summer does bring bushfires and floods.
Bongiorno argues that Dutton and the Liberal Coalition are out to stop renewable energy development:
“If the Dutton-led Coalition manages to take the treasury benches, the brakes will be dramatically applied to climate action. The energy transition would be stalled and billions of dollars of new-energy investment put in jeopardy.A key Labor strategist says… it would take only another summer of catastrophic bushfires or floods to significantly jolt public opinion.”
Bongiorno goes on to argue that “The portents here are not favourable for Dutton.” And he cites powerful arguments about “deep flaws” in Dutton’s energy plan’s economic modelling. Bongiorno draws the conclusion that if climate change extremes hit Australia, voters will recognise the value of renewable energy, and vote for the present Labor government’s policies on climate action.
If only that would be the effect of weather disasters – Australian voters embracing action on climate change – the development of renewable energy and energy conservation!
Paul Bongiorno is a much-admired and well-informed analyst. And I am presumptuous to doubt his opinion. But I do doubt it. Look what happened in 2023, with the Australian public first supporting the concept of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament, but finally voting a resounding “No” to that plan.
How did it happen?
We are in a different era of media and opinion. We are in extraordinary times. When it comes to national elections, people still do vote according to what they see as “their best interest”. It’s just that now, due largely to the power and influence of “social” media, information about “one’s best interest” has become very confusing.
We thought that the Internet would give everyone a voice. And it did. But very soon the new information platforms found money and power could be bought by corporate interests, and indeed, that they themselves could become ultra-lucrative corporations. The media has become a smorgasbord of conflicting information, with so much of it not fact- checked. The “old” media still checks its facts (though I’m not sure about Sky News), but the old media has always been beholden to corporate influence. Even the ABC is circumspect in what it covers, and what it omits – and still makes sure to provide “balance”, even when one side is plainly unreasonable.
Anyway, for the old media to compete – the news has to be preferably exciting, dramatic, even violent. Except for sport and feel-good stuff.
In the new zeitgeist of 24 hour information barrage from so many different outlets, political news can be, and indeed is, swamped by cleverly designed brief messages, from forces like the Atlas Network, from the dominant global fossil fuel corporations. That swamping propelled many Australians to vote against the Aboriginal Voice.
In political news, media emphasis has shifted dramatically away from facts to personalities. In the USA, Donald Trump was seen as a strong, confident, interesting man, as against weak, indecisive, (and female) Kamala Harris. In Australia, there’s an obvious contrast between careful, measured, Anthony Albanese, and strong, outspoken Peter Dutton. In the USA, it didn’t matter that Trump offered few positive policies, so in Australia, the Liberal Coalition does the same.
In the USA, with a population of 334.9 million, approximately 161.42 million people were registered to vote. But only about 64% of these actually did vote in the 2024 general election. in the 2024 general election. So, the majority of Americans don’t vote anyway. Trump was elected by a minority. The rest either didn’t care, or weren’t able to vote.
The Australian election system is so different. With compulsory voting, preferential voting, and the nationwide and highly reliable Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), most Australians do vote. You’d think that with factual news being provided by mainstream media, climate change information would become so important to voters, in the event of summer weather disasters. Paul Bongiorno thinks so.
I think so, too, But the advantage for Peter Dutton in the current national mood might be twofold.
First, Dutton is still that “tough, decisive person” with a tough plan, too – nuclear power instead of renewables. Secondly, the Dutton plan can so easily be marketed as the only real solution to global heating – nuclear power portrayed as “emissions free”, and “cheaper” than solar and wind power.
Never mind that there are substantial greenhouse gas emissions from the total nuclear fuel cycle. Never mind the astronomic cost. Never mind problems of radioactive wastes, safety, and weapons proliferation. The very telling point is that nuclear reactors cannot be up and running in time to have the needed effect on cutting greenhouse emissions. The time for effective action is now, not decades later.
Action on climate change is critical for Australia – and now!
But for the global nuclear lobby, getting Australia as the new poster boy for nuclear power – is critical – now!
Nuclear power should be a dying industry. There is ample evidence of this: reactors shutting down much faster than new ones are built, and of the mind-boggling cost of decommissioning and waste disposal. However, “peaceful” nuclear power is essential to the nuclear weapons industry – with the arms industry burgeoning in tandem with the increasing risk of nuclear war. It seems that the world cannot afford to weaken this war economy.
And the cost and trouble of shutting down the nuclear industry with its tentacles in so many inter-connected industries, and in the media, and in politics, is unimaginable.
The old poster boy, France, has blotted its nuclear copybook recently with its state energy company EDF deep in debt, and things rather crook with its latest nuclear station. But hey! What about Australia, a whole continent, with a national government perhaps ready to institute nuclear power as its prime energy source, and all funded by the tax-payer!
The long-promised nuclear renaissance might really come about – led by Australia, the energetic new nation, with its AUKUS nuclear submarines, with brand-new nuclear waste facilities, and kicking off this exciting new enterprise – nuclear power. This is the opportunity for a global nuclear spin machine to gear up for an onslaught on Australia. They really need the Liberal-National Coalition to win this election.
Dutton will be fed with the right phrases to regurgitate. It’ll be all about a “balanced” economy – nuclear in partnership with renewables and so on, if people have any worries about that. All the same, there are those problems of pesky independent politicians like Monique Ryan and David Pocock, and there’s still the ABC, Channel 9 TV and its print publications.
First, I’m hoping that Australia does avoid bushfires and floods this summer. And second, I’m hoping that in the event of climate disasters, Australians will choose the Labor Party with its real plan for action against climate change, and reject the Coalition with its nuclear power dream. There is a good chance of this result.
I’m hoping that Paul Bongiorno is right, if climate change does bat last in the election game, and that I am wrong about the power of personality politics + slick lies.
The Australian Libera/National Coalition is playing voters for mugs once again with its nuclear costings
the Coalition documents released on Friday don’t seem to get around to mentioning is that its proposal for nuclear power involves taxpayers taking on all the massive financial risks (apart from the other sorts) and costs.
By Laura Tingle, 7.30 ABC 17 Dec 24
The August 2010 federal election campaign was conducted amid continuing shock waves from the Julia Gillard coup against Kevin Rudd a little less than two months earlier.
So, you may be forgiven for forgetting much that happened in the actual campaign, and specifically, how the federal Coalition didn’t bother releasing the costings of its election promises until just 48 hours before voters went to the polls.
It had already refused to submit the policy promises for independent analysis — which in those days was done by Treasury and the Department of Finance rather than the Parliamentary Budget Office.
That refusal might not have mattered too much to the broad sweep of history if the election result had been different. But a knife-edge result left three crossbench House of Representatives MPs to make the call on which side of politics would get their support and, therefore, be able to form government.
In making their decision the “Three Amigos” — Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and the subsequently infamously loquacious Rob Oakeshott — relied heavily on a Treasury and Finance analysis requested by them post-election.
Its findings? That the Coalition’s claimed budget savings were out by almost $11 billion. In the current age of announcements measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that might not sound like a lot.
But given that the claimed cost of Coalition policies was originally only $31.5 billion, that’s a rather spectacular …. miscalculation.
It felt for all the world like the work of an ill-prepared, lazy opposition that thought it could coast to office amid the chaos of a dysfunctional government. And it almost did.
A perfectly timed announcement
There’s something spookily familiar about the circumstances now, as the opposition finally unveiled its much-promised nuclear energy costings on a Friday one week before the country closes down entirely for Christmas.
There may be a lot more detailed modelling in the document prepared by Frontier Economics for the Coalition than there was in 2010.
But the modelling, and more importantly the Coalition’s political message wrapped around it, doesn’t answer the myriad of questions raised by the idea of nuclear energy. And this belated release of what we are led to believe is a signature policy for the election comes as the Coalition still hasn’t released details of most of its other key policies — from tax to immigration.
The decision to release the costing on December 13 feels like the Coalition is once again playing voters for mugs at a time when it is up against a federal government that has spent the year apparently determined to prove it is not very good at politics, or persuading voters that it knows what it is doing.
The Frontier modelling does implicitly raise important questions about the government’s own energy plans: just how much coal-fired power will the system need as we move towards a system that is dominated by renewables, and for how long?; how much gas will be needed (and is it in the right place) to be used to “firm” or underwrite the system?; how much can we really rely on battery technology that is still evolving to store renewables? and just how much transmission infrastructure do we need (and where) for a mostly renewables future?
The government has “sort of” answered these questions. Most analysts will tell you that it is almost impossible to answer them precisely because the wheel is still in spin. Prices and technologies are changing.
But, up against an opposition leader who is better at cut-through messages, it will need to do a lot better than that.
Crucial to the political debate is the fact that much of the uncertainty around these decisions arises because they are being made by individual investors who are taking on all the risks in building new energy capacity.
And this must surely be the threshold point of difference with what the federal Coalition is proposing.
For the one thing that the Coalition documents released on Friday don’t seem to get around to mentioning is that its proposal for nuclear power involves taxpayers taking on all the massive financial risks (apart from the other sorts) and costs.
The Coalition wants this big shift to be overseen by a public sector which it usually loves to point out is notoriously bad at running big projects, either directly or via massive subsidies.
The nuclear divide
The electorate is a lot more disengaged than it was in 2010, but the politically dangerous part of the nuclear policy from the government’s perspective is how it plays to regional Australia and, a bit like Brexit, likely divides the country into two very different blocks of voters.
Many regional voters, most pollsters will tell you, are worried about job losses as coal mining disappears, are unconvinced renewables offer job replacements, and are very exercised about the proliferation of wind and solar farms, and by the transmission lines to link them to the grid.
Earlier talk of small nuclear reactors has disappeared from the model set out using the Frontier modelling, and that modelling doesn’t seem to make provision for the fact that there are usually high costs for a first build, or that most expert opinion says it will take until at least 2040 to have the regulatory system and build in place for a first nuclear reactor to be functional, not 2036………………………………………………………………..
The Coalition has been pledging all year that its plans would lead to lower energy prices for stressed households.
But Peter Dutton had to sidestep on that issue on Friday because there is no clear mechanism for his plans to bring down those costs any time soon.
All the energy experts will be poring over the details for days. One could say they would be poring over them for weeks but (almost as if it was planned that way) the media coverage and the debate seem likely to come to a screeching stop in a week’s time as everything shuts down for Christmas.
Like the 2010 election costings, not many voters may remember the details of any analysis.
But the Coalition will have to be hoping there is no political equivalent of the Three Amigos to answer to this side of the 2025 election.
Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/politics-dutton-release-nuclear-costings/104723416
Australia’s Nuclear Neverland politics: The Lost Boys of Costings | The West Report
It’s hard to take the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy seriously, so we didn’t. And frankly, why would they put taxpayers on the hook for the biggest public funded project in history when renewables are crowding private investment en masse? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSeaybp9oAA
Rupert Murdoch loses his legal battle, leaving future of media empire in the balance
The Conversation, Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd, December 10, 2024
In the seemingly never-ending psychodrama surrounding Rupert Murdoch and his family, life has imitated art. Again.
A report on December 9 in The New York Times revealed details of the recent secret hearing in a Nevada probate court that was literally prompted by the epic HBO drama Succession…………………………..
The probate commissioner in Nevada who heard Rupert Murdoch’s application, Edmund Gorman “resoundingly” ruled against his attempt to change his family trust in a way that would have secured Lachlan’s position atop the global media empire.
Gorman was scathing in his ruling, saying father and son had acted in “bad faith” in their bid to change an “irrevocable” family trust that divides control of Fox News and News Corporation equally among Murdoch’s four eldest children from his first and second marriages: Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.
In the 96-page ruling, Gorman described the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to permanently consolidate Lachlan’s executive roles inside News, “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust……………………………………….
Gorman’s ruling is not the end of the matter, however. It’s technically a recommendation to the Probate Court, which a district judge will ratify or reject.
Whatever the judge decides is open to appeal, which a lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan has already said they plan to do. Meanwhile, the other three siblings have released a statement welcoming the decision and expressing hope that “we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members”.
Good luck with that. The strongly worded ruling seems likely only to drive the parties further apart………………………………………………………………………………….
Lachlan’s description of James as the trust’s “troublesome beneficiary”.
By “troublesome” the plan was obliquely referring to the split in the family between Lachlan and Rupert – who are wedded to a media empire that is both right-wing and profitable – and James, who severed all ties with the company over its denialist coverage of climate change and its credulous reporting of baseless conspiracy theories about the result of the 2020 US presidential election………………………………………………………………………………….
If Prudence, Elisabeth and James can assert control, sideline Lachlan, and settle on a unified path forward, they can potentially reshape the company and redefine its journalism.
If they have already war-gamed it, and surely by now they have, the three siblings would know their greatest risk is alienating their current audiences, subscribers and advertisers.
In Australia, News operates in a virtual monopoly, so it can shapeshift with fewer consequences. But the US market is awash with emerging right-wing alternatives, each of which is eager to steal a share of the Fox audience. These viewers are the people who make Fox such a valuable commodity, and they’re the reason why it’s been so hard to stand up to Trump and his anti-democratic tactics, even on the odd occasions when Rupert and Lachlan wanted to.
The challenge is to somehow bring those audiences along for whatever transition the siblings envisage for the company. Can it be done, and if so, how?
The company’s own history suggests editorial change can happen quickly and audiences do tend to retain some loyalty. Murdoch’s takeover of The New York Post in the 1970s shows it is possible to radically change a masthead’s editorial position while expanding its audience, in that case from a mostly Democrat-leaning readership to a larger and more conservative one. But that was a moribund newspaper due for a radical makeover. There’s no guarantee it would work in reverse.
Fox News is arguably at the peak of its powers. The incentive to impose change has everything to do with journalistic standards and nothing to do with finances. In 2023–24 the Fox Corporation’s net income was US$1.5 billion (A$2.35 billion).
Even so, it must be possible to introduce incremental changes that reacquaint Fox viewers with more considered and ethical journalism without scaring them off. This wouldn’t work universally. Some of the demagogues who couldn’t cope would have to go – Sean Hannity springs to mind, as does former Fox firebrand Tucker Carlson.
Under new management, News could reintroduce some of the elements lost to Talk-TV in the mid-1980s, when the US scrapped the fairness doctrine that guaranteed balance and greater civility on the airwaves. It could ensure programs canvas different views, ask devil’s-advocate questions, and investigate issues without fear or favour.
Change of this nature wouldn’t be easy. News Corp has an echelon of editors across its global mastheads, most of whom are culture warriors and battle-hardened loyalists. They can and probably would work together to undermine progressive change.
During his tenure as the Australian head of News Corp, well before he became chair of the ABC, Kim Williams saw how the editors sneeringly white-anted his efforts to introduce reform. Even Lachlan Murdoch discovered that senior staff could undercut him. Paddy Manning recounts in his 2022 biography of Lachlan Murdoch, The Successor, that the infamous Roger Ailes did just this as Lachlan was learning the ropes at Fox in the early 2000s.
The three siblings will need resolve to dispense with those who get in their way, and they’ll need to introduce firm but gradual changes that don’t unduly scare their audiences or the market. But if Prudence, James and Elizabeth do share such a vision and are up for a fight, the world could soon be in for a fascinating media transition. more https://theconversation.com/rupert-murdoch-loses-his-legal-battle-leaving-future-of-media-empire-in-the-balance-245665?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2011%202024%20-%203195432592&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2011%202024%20-%203195432592+CID_9d007a3b0e7578f878c65cbd5b463722&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Rupert%20Murdoch%20loses%20his%20legal%20battle%20leaving%20future%20of%20media%20empire%20in%20the%20balance
Will Donald Trump kill US-UK-Aussie sub defense deal?
The landmark defense agreement between the U.S, U.K. and Australia could be in jeopardy with the maverick Republican back in the White House.
Politico, December 9, 2024, By Stefan Boscia and Caroline Hug
LONDON — There are few issues on which we do not know Donald Trump’s opinion.
After thousands of hours of interviews and speeches over the past eight years, the president-elect has enlightened us on what he thinks on almost any topic which enters his brain at any given moment.
But in the key area of defense, there are some gaps — and that’s leading global military chiefs to pore over the statements of the president’s allies and appointees to attempt to glean some clues, specifically over the $369 billion trilateral submarine program known as AUKUS he will inherit from Joe Biden.
Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on the AUKUS pact — named for its contingent parts Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — which would see the U.S. share technology with its partners to allow both countries to build state-of-the-art nuclear submarines by the 2040s.
This uncertainty has left ministers and government officials in London and Canberra scrambling to discover how the Republican is likely to view the Biden-era deal when he returns to the White House in January.
Two defense industry figures told POLITICO there were serious concerns in the British government that Trump might seek to renegotiate the deal or alter the timelines.
This is because the pact likely requires the U.S. to temporarily downsize its own naval fleet as a part of the agreement — something Trump may interpret as an affront to his “America First” ideology.
Looking east
There is hope in Westminster that Trump would be in favor of a military project which is an obvious, if unspoken, challenge to China.
The deal would see American-designed nuclear submarines right on China’s doorstep and would form a part of Australia’s attempts to bolster its military might in the Indo-Pacific.
When former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in September 2021 that the deal was not “intended to be adversarial toward China,” President Xi Jinping simply did not believe him.
The Chinese leader said AUKUS would “undermine peace” and accused the Western nations of stoking a Cold War mentality.
Mary Kissel, a former senior adviser to Trump’s ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said “you can assume Trump two will look a lot like Trump one” when it comes to building alliances with other Western countries against China.
“We revivified the Quad [Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.], got our allies to bolster NATO funding and worked to prevent China from dominating international institutions,” she said.
However, the deal also forces the U.S. government to sell Australia three to five active Virginia attack submarines, the best in the U.S. Navy’s fleet, by the early 2030s as a stopgap until the new AUKUS subs are built.
Is America first?
This coincides with a time where there is a widely recognized crunch on America’s industrial defense capacity.
In layman’s terms, the U.S. is currently struggling to build enough submarines or military equipment for its own needs.
One U.K. defense industry figure, granted anonymity to speak freely, said there was “a lot of queasiness” in the U.K. government and a “huge amount of queasiness in Australia” about whether Trump would allow this to happen.
“There is a world in which the Americans can’t scale up their domestic submarine capacity for their own needs and don’t have spare to meet Australia’s needs,” they said.
“If you started pulling on one thread of the deal, then the rest could easily fall away.”
One U.K. government official played down how much London and Canberra are worried about the future of the deal, however.
They said the U.K. government was confident Trump is positive about the deal and that the U.S. was “well equipped with the number of submarines for their fleet.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
‘Everyone’s a winner
This attempted U.K.-China reset will likely be high on the list of talking points when Healey meets with his Australian counterpart Richard Marles next month in London for an “AUKMIN” summit.
The Australian Labor government, after all, has conducted a similar reset with the Chinese government since coming to power in 2022 after relations hit a nadir during COVID.
Also at the top of the agenda will be how to sell the incoming president on the AUKUS deal in a positive way.
A second defense industry insider said the British and Australian governments should try to badge the deal in terms that make it look like Trump has personally won from the deal.
“Everybody is worried about America’s lack of industrial capacity and how it affects AUKUS,” they said.
“He is also instinctively against the idea of America being the world’s police and so he may not see the value in AUKUS at all, but they need to let him own it and make him think he’s won by doing it.”………………………………………………………………………..
Pillar II
While the core nuclear submarine deal will get most of the headlines in the coming months, progress on the lesser-known Pillar II of AUKUS also remains somewhat elusive.
Launched alongside the submarine pact, Pillar II was designed to codevelop a range of military technologies, such as quantum-enabled navigation, artificial intelligence-enhanced artillery, and electronic warfare capabilities.
One Pillar II technology-sharing deal was struck on hypersonic missiles just last month, but expected progress on a range of other areas has not transpired.
Ambitions to admit Japan to the Pillar II partnership this year have also gone unfulfilled……………………………………………………………
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-aukus-kill-us-uk-aussie-sub-defense-deal/
Nuclear energy debate draws stark gender split in Australia ahead of next year’s election.
Lisa Cox, 5 Dec 24, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/04/nuclear-energy-debate-draws-stark-gender-split-in-australia-ahead-of-next-years-election
Survey finds 25 percentage point gender gap across all age brackets on whether nuclear power would be positive for the country, with majority of men saying it would.
New data points to a stark gender split in attitudes towards nuclear energy, with women much more likely to say they don’t support it or think the risks are too great.
Research company DemosAu surveyed 6,000 people on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation and found 26% of women thought nuclear energy would be good for Australia, compared with 51% of men.
DemosAu head of research, George Hasanakos, said the 25 percentage point gender gap was “the sharpest divide in attitudes between men and women” that the research firm had seen on any issue.
The polling found the split was pronounced regardless of the age of the people surveyed, with young men and women just as divided as those from older generations.
While 51% of men agreed nuclear energy would be good for Australia, that support dropped when asked if they would be happy to live near a nuclear plant.
A reported 38% of men agreed they would support a nuclear plant being located close to their city, with 44% disagreeing and 18% neutral. Among women, just 18% agreed they would be happy to have a nuclear plant near their city, with 63% disagreeing and 19% neutral.
“Men support nuclear much more than women,” the ACF chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said.
“But as soon as you ask men more details such as ‘Would you be happy to live next door to a plant?’ or ‘Do you think one will be built within the next decade?’ – that level of support really comes down.”
The report found female respondents were more likely to answer “neutral” compared with male respondents. It identified this as both “a risk and opportunity for campaigners on both sides of the issue” as Australia approaches a federal election but said pro-nuclear campaigners would have to contend with widely held safety concerns about nuclear among women.
On the subject of transporting nuclear waste, the poll found 57% of women and 43% of men said it wasn’t worth the risk.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has said the next election will be a referendum on nuclear power.
The Coalition has proposed seven sites where it says it would eventually replace coal-fired power plants with nuclear plants but not how much this would cost. The government has rejected the idea and the federal House of Representatives is conducting an inquiry into the consideration of nuclear power in Australia.
Multiple energy analysts have argued nuclear energy would be more expensive than other options and a nuclear industry would not be possible in Australia until after 2040.
O’Shanassy said among the report’s more interesting findings was that despite the gender gap on many aspects of nuclear, men and women were aligned in the view that renewables were cheaper.
A reported 47% of men agreed renewables would deliver cheaper energy, compared with 31% who disagreed (with 22% neutral).
While 47% of women also agreed renewables would deliver cheaper energy, 20% disagreed and 33% were neutral.
In separate data, the climate advocacy organisation 1 Million Women surveyed an additional 3,351 women among its own supporters and found 93% were concerned about nuclear.
“Nuclear energy is a distraction to meaningful climate solutions and women don’t have the time or patience to entertain the Coalition’s proposal,” its founder, Natalie Isaacs, said.
Consultation, full disclosure, and an environmental audit: Nuclear Free Local Authorities’ triple demand of Australian government over nuke sub waste dump down under
the NFLAs have raised our fundamental objections to any siting of nuclear powered, and possibly nuclear armed, submarines at Garden Island as a violation of Australia’s legal commitments as a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a South Pacific nuclear free zone. The proposal will increase military tensions with China and make Rockingham a target for a counterstrike should war break out.
a White House paper states that Australia ‘has committed to managing all radioactive waste generated through its nuclear-powered submarine program, including spent nuclear fuel, in Australia’.
NFLA 22nd Nov 2024
With an international outlook and solidarity in mind, in response to a consultation by the Australian Federal Government, the UK / Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities have posted their objections to plans to station nuclear-powered subs and establish a waste dump in Western Australia.
As part of the AUKUS military pact established between Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, Australia intends to acquire a fleet of nuclear powered submarines, powered by reactors built by Rolls-Royce in Derby, as well as permitting Royal Navy and United States Navy nuclear submarines to operate from Australian naval bases.
In March 2023,the AUKUS Nuclear-Powered Submarine Pathway was announced by the three partners centred on the HMAS Stirling Naval Base on Garden Island in Western Australia’s Cockburn Sound. The Australian Government has allocated AUS $8 billion for base improvements.
Under the AUKUS ‘Force Posture Agreement’, from 2027, US Virginia Class submarines are to be stationed here, with British Astute submarines joining them on rotation in the 2030’s. Around this time, the base will also become the home port of Australia’s first nuclear powered submarines, with three and up to five Virginia Class submarines being purchased from the US (subject to Congressional approval).
The Federal Government has passed new legislation to allow for the domestic storage of nuclear waste from all these submarines, and in July after a limited consultation the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) issued a licence to the Australian Submarine Agency to prepare a nuclear waste storage site at the base. Without it, visiting United States and British nuclear-powered submarines could not undertake maintenance in Australia, so the nuclear dump is seen as essential to the pact.
The extent and nature of the waste to be stored, and for how long it would be stored, remains unclear. The Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA) complained to the regulatory authorities that: ‘The consultation documents provided no details about the volume of waste or how long it would be stored at the island. They also made confused and misleading claims about the types of low-level waste that would be accepted’.
Whilst regulators insist that it would be low-level waste, this claim has been refuted by critic Australian Green Senator David Shoebridge who said the Federal legislators were told in a Senate Estimates Hearing by the Australian Submarine Agency that it would include intermediate waste. It is also contradicted by a White House paper which states that Australia ‘has committed to managing all radioactive waste generated through its nuclear-powered submarine program, including spent nuclear fuel, in Australia’.
This waste would include US Virginia-class submarine reactors, which each weigh over 100 tonnes and contain over 200 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Ian Lowe, an expert on radiation health and safety, told The Conversation in March 2023 that when the first three AUKUS submarines are at the end of their lives — 30 years from when they are commissioned — Australia will have 600 kilograms of ‘spent fuel’ and ‘potentially tonnes of irradiated material from the reactors and their protective walls’. The fuel being weapons-grade will require ‘military-scale security’.
Australian campaigners have also complained bitterly that the submarine base and the storage site are located in the wrong place.
Mia Pepper, Campaign Director at the CCWA, said that ‘Garden Island in one of the most pristine and diverse environments in the Perth region’ and that ‘This plan for both nuclear submarines and nuclear waste storage will inevitably impact access to parts of Cockburn Sound and Garden Island’.
And when responding to ARPANSA, the CCWA stated that the facility is ‘within an area of dense population’ and in the vicinity of ‘important and diverse heavy industrial facilities, including a major shipping port’. The CCWA also raised the ‘unaddressed community concerns regarding an accident’ on the site and complained about the ‘lack of transparency and rigour’ throughout the regulatory process.
Nor is there any long-term solution to storage. Garden Island would be seen as a temporary store, but it is unclear for how long. A Federal Government proposal to establish a nuclear waste dump at Kimba was resisted by local Indigenous people who launched a successful legal challenge to defeat the plan.
In its response to the consultation being conducted by the Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the NFLAs have raised our fundamental objections to any siting of nuclear powered, and possibly nuclear armed, submarines at Garden Island as a violation of Australia’s legal commitments as a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a South Pacific nuclear free zone. The proposal will increase military tensions with China and make Rockingham a target for a counterstrike should war break out.
We also called on the Federal Government to conduct a proper consultation and make a full disclosure of the facts, and requested that officials conduct a full environmental audit of the likely impact of the waste storage site…………………………………………. https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/consultation-full-disclosure-and-an-environmental-audit-nflas-triple-demand-of-australian-government-over-nuke-sub-waste-dump-down-under/
Nuclear is not really back
Think the Cop29 climate summit doesn’t matter? Here are five things you should know,
Adam Morton in Baku, Guardian, Sat 23 Nov 2024
…………………………………………………..Some media outlets went to great lengths this week to claim that nuclear energy was at the centre of Cop29 talks, and Bowen had been embarrassed by Australia not signing up to a UK-US civil nuclear deal.
Take it from a reporter on the ground: this has no basis in fact.
The UK made a mistake by listing on a press release Australia and another nine countries that it said it expected would sign up to a Generation IV International Forum on nuclear. That sentence were quickly removed once it was pointed out that no one had checked and it wasn’t true. Instead, Australia will continue as an observer, as it was in the forum’s previous iteration.
The slip-up had no obvious impact on the relationship between the countries – Bowen and his UK counterpart, Ed Miliband, held an event to sign a renewable energy agreement shortly after the story broke. And nuclear has been barely visible as an issue at the talks.
Thirty-one countries have signed up to a side pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050, with six new countries joining at Cop29. But the global focus is renewable energy. Cop28 agreed global investment in renewables needs to be tripled by 2030, and the bulk of the non-fossil energy investment is going that way.
Only one country that signed the pledge to triple nuclear, Slovakia, has started work on planning a new plant in the past year. And those plants take about 20 years to build…………………………………………………………. fact.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/think-the-cop29-climate-summit-doesnt-matter-heres-five-things-you-should-know
Australian government gives firm ‘no’ to joining UK-US agreement to advance nuclear technology
The Conversation, November 19, 2024, Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
The Albanese government has been put on the spot by a new agreement – which it has declined to join – signed by the United Kingdom and the United States to speed up the deployment of “cutting edge” nuclear technology.
The original version of the British government’s press release announcing the agreement said Australia, among a number of other countries, was expected to sign it.
But the reference was removed from the statement.
The UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and the US deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk signed the agreement in Baku during COP29…….
A spokesperson for Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who is at the COP meeting, said: “Australia is not signing this agreement as we do not have a nuclear energy industry.
“We recognise that some countries may choose to use nuclear energy, depending on national circumstances.
“Our international partners understand that Australia’s abundance of renewable energy resources makes nuclear power, including nuclear power through small modular reactors, an unviable option for inclusion in our energy mix for decarbonisation efforts.”
Australia would remain as observers to the agreement to continue to support its scientists in other nuclear research fields, the spokesperson said………
In parliament, acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said for Australia to pursue a path of nuclear energy would add $1200 to the bills of each household in this country.
………………………Update: UK government seeks to clear things up
Later The Guardian reportred: “The UK government has conceded it made a mistake in including Australia in a list of countries that has signed up to a US-UK civil nuclear deal”. https://theconversation.com/albanese-government-gives-firm-no-to-joining-uk-us-agreement-to-advance-nuclear-technology-244041
Trumped: $9B to US and UK shipyards … but why not make Australia make again?
The Government is shy on spending money on a steel works which they would have complete control over, in terms of success, but are happy to recklessly throw money at US shipyards.
Senator David Shoebridge: “The AUKUS submarine deal is a non-refundable $368 billion gamble on the goodwill of some future US President, and the US just elected Donald Trump. You only need to put these two facts side by side to realize what a disaster the whole thing is.”
by Rex Patrick | Nov 16, 2024, https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-9b-to-us-and-uk-shipyards-but-wait-theres-more/
Make Australia Make Again?
The future of Whyalla’s steelworks is of vital national importance and should matter to all of us. It is critical to Australia’s manufacturing, construction and national security and resilience.
Being frank, the steelworks are in dire straits. They are 60 years old and have been on a rocky road for well over a decade. Its blast furnace has been out of action for over six months now, and whilst there is some optimism that they will get it back up and running it will not change the fact that the steelworks have been in operation for some six decades.
In 2016 when the previous owner, Arrium, went into administration with $4 billion in debts, UK billionaire Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance bought the steelworks making lots of big promises for a bright future, but it was not to be. At the turn of the decade Greensill Capital, GFG’s financier, collapsed and there’s been trouble ever since.
As it stands, the future of the steelworks, and Whyalla, is in the hands of a court entangled foreign billionaire with a gaping chasm between his promises and delivery. Those promises of a 21st century industrial transformation look very much like ever receding mirages.
The Federal Government needs to have the SA Government bring matters to a head by putting GFG’s South Australian operations into administration (by calling for unpaid and overdue mining royalties), taking an equity stake in the steelworks alongside someone like BlueScope Steel, and investing the necessary billions to build a new green steel industry for Australia.
It would be a part of Make Australia Make Again.
Make America Great Again!
Prime Minister Albanese’s focus is on investment in US industry, not Australian industry.
In September 2023 the Federal Government announced it was pouring $4.7 billion ($US3B) into the US submarine industrial base to assist the largest economy in the world get their submarine production rate up to 2.3 subs per annum (from the current rate of 1.4 subs).
Some $1.5 billion will be paid to the US this financial year, and $1.8 billion next financial year. The remaining $1.4B will follow thereafter.
The Government is shy on spending money on a steel works which they would have complete control over, in terms of success, but are happy to recklessly throw money at US shipyards.
Go figure!
Make Great Britain Great Again Too!
That’s not the end of the story though.
The British are in on this deal of a lifetime too. They’ve managed to pull $4.4B (£2.4 billion) over the next decade from Australian consolidated revenue.
There is no clawback on payment to the United Kingdom either.
Everyone must be feeling pretty chuffed in Groton, Connecticut, and Barrow-in-Furness, England.
But Wait, There’s More!
Whilst the Federal Government has been open about the totals, albeit with a little ‘encouragement’ from Green’s Senator David Shoebridge at Senate Estimates, there’s a dark secret being withheld from the Parliament and the public.
There’s more ‘shared’ cost to come.
FOI returns from the US Department of the Navy reveal that behind the scenes the three AUKUS government participants have been negotiating trilateral cost sharing principles to guide future cost sharing negotiations.
Whilst the Federal Government has been open about the totals, albeit with a little ‘encouragement’ from Green’s Senator David Shoebridge at Senate Estimates, there’s a dark secret being withheld from the Parliament and the public.
There’s more ‘shared’ cost to come.
FOI returns from the US Department of the Navy reveal that behind the scenes the three AUKUS government participants have been negotiating trilateral cost sharing principles to guide future cost sharing negotiations.
Senator David Shoebridge backed this in telling MWM, “Why on earth do cost-sharing principles need to be secret? Of course they should be made public.”
He went on to comment, “Once again, we get more transparency on AUKUS out of the US than Australia.“
“The one-sided secrecy is because the US has a whole lot less to be embarrassed about than Australia. They are the ones getting all our money after all.”
Transactional Trump
Transactional Trump
The approved appropriations in the US for enhancing their submarine industrial base through upgrades as well as recruitment and training of thousands of additional workers amount to $US14.7B. Australia adds another $US3B to that. But the total the US administration is seeking for this work is in the order of $US28.4B.
Of course, there is some quid quo pro in all of this with the Australia Government having committed to spending $8 billion upgrading HMAS Stirling near Rockingham to support the operations of UK and US nuclear powered submarines from 2027, and possibly Australian nuclear submarines from 2035.
There is a danger under the incoming Trump administration that the President will seek a greater contribution from Australia – just as he has demanded that members of NATO pull their weight. And it will be a case of having no choice but to pay, no matter the cost sharing principles negotiated, because our Defence Department simply has no Plan B.
Senator Shoebridge commented, “The AUKUS submarine deal is a non-refundable $368 billion gamble on the goodwill of some future US President, and the US just elected Donald Trump. You only need to put these two facts side by side to realize what a disaster the whole thing is.”
Ships and Steel
Meanwhile, as Australian money is being tossed around the US and UK like it’s free, Albanese is sitting on his hand on the issue of green steel manufacturing in Whyalla.
Anthony Albanese says he wants to revitalise manufacturing and Make Australia Make Again. But in this topsy-turvey world, he’s instead working to deliver on Donald Trump’s slogan to Make America Great Again.
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