Australia’s new chief scientist open to nuclear power but warns country will ‘miss the bus’ if it waits | Energy

Australia’s new chief scientist says he is open to the prospect of nuclear power playing a role in the country’s energy mix, but remains focused on forms of energy that were “available to help us right now”.

On his first day in the job, Prof Tony Haymet said new energy-intensive technologies like artificial intelligence could be powered by renewables, but that he thought serious discussions about nuclear in Australia were likely to be years away.

“If you go back and look at Chornobyl and Three Mile Island and so on, there wasn’t enough transparency and openness. I think the nuclear industry has accepted the fact that they have to rebuild their social licence to operate,” Haymet told a press conference when asked about small modular reactors (SMRs).

“You know, for the next chief scientist in 2030 or 2040, I think you can re-ask your question.”

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Haymet said Australia shouldn’t “rule out any energy source” but said new technologies, like AI datacentres, would require much more power in the short term.

“So I’m looking at the slate of energies that are going to be available to help us right now. If we wait until we perfect wave energy or nuclear fusion, or some other source of power, we’re going to miss the bus,” he said.

Responding to Haymet’s comments, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said many of the world’s largest economies included nuclear in their energy mixes.

“What do the chief scientists in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, what do they know or don’t know that [the energy minister] Chris Bowen somehow has worked out?” he told a press conference.

Haymet said there should be a “civil debate” about energy, noting research in the US on more advanced forms of nuclear energy.

“There are actually lots of candidate energies that might be great for Australia once they’re built, once we’ve paid the cost of developing and eventually building them and then deploying them.

“The trouble they all have, including my favourites, is they’re up against an incredibly cheap competitor in solar and wind, and that is really the commercial factor arresting those energies.”

The CSIRO’s GenCost report in December reaffirmed that electricity from nuclear energy in Australia would be at least 50% more expensive than power from solar and wind, backed up with storage. Electricity from SMRs would be significantly more expensive again, with the report rejecting opposition claims that nuclear power plants could be developed in Australia in less than 15 years.

Dutton labelled the report “discredited” and claimed its findings were influenced by “a heavy hand of Chris Bowen in all of this”.

The former chair of the Antarctic Science Foundation and high-level working groups on climate change, Haymet has also held senior roles at the CSIRO, with a particular focus on oceans.

Amid a heated debate on nuclear energy, sparked by the Coalition’s pledge to build conventional large reactors and SMRs – a developing technology that does not exist anywhere on a commercial basis – Dutton and his shadow ministers have been strongly critical of scientific reports and experts who have cast doubt on the viability of an Australian nuclear power industry.

Energy experts have noted the Coalition’s modelling forecasts much lower consumption of energy in Australia than Labor’s renewables-focused energy policy, which the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, claimed would see a $4tn hit to Australia’s economy. The Coalition modelling does not forecast a reduction in power bills and the Coalition senator Matt Canavan admitted the plan was “unachievable”.

At the press conference alongside the science minister, Ed Husic, Haymet strongly backed his former colleagues in the CSIRO.

“You may not be surprised to hear that I think the CSIRO report is a very fine piece of work. I don’t know of any mistakes in it, and if you do, please let me know. Having been inside CSIRO, I see the care and the diligence that goes into these reports,” he said.