Earthquake fault lines delay Coalition nuclear plan

The guessing game over where the reactors will be placed has been headline news since Opposition leader Peter Dutton promised to unveil them "within weeks" on March 12, while Energy Minister Chris Bowen said this week that the looming federal election will be a "referendum" on nuclear energy.

However, ACM-Agri understands that while the risk of earthquakes damaging reactors has yet to permeate the public narrative, tremors over the perceived threat have rippled through Liberal ranks since Mr Dutton first flagged the policy.

While the "high level and nuanced" seismology considerations are being undertaken by experts, another major logistical consideration has been how to ensure that each site would have adequate water supply to cool the reactors.

There is a very narrow field able to host nuclear reactors under the Coalition's flagged criteria of using retiring coal plants with a coal fired generator and existing distribution network, including poles and wires, to transmit power.

Potential sites have been earmarked in the federal division of Gippsland in Victoria, where the Yallourn power station is scheduled for closure in 2028, Eraring (2025) and Bayswater (2033) in the Hunter Valley, Collie (2027) in southwest Western Australia, and Port Augusta in South Australia.

Others include Mount Piper in NSW and Tarong in the federal seat of Maranoa in Queensland held by Nationals leader David Littleproud. However, a question mark hangs over the latter given reliability of water supply might mean adding to existing infrastructure.

The bind for the Coalition is that many of the nation's retiring coal-fired power stations are in and around fault lines (see map above).

The final site selection will likely be made by the Coalition leadership team before the overarching idea of building over fault lines is put up for a 'yes or no' party room decision, insiders believe that in mitigating risk from the policy fallout around potentially controversial sites will need to be removed.

Risk reduction would also make the proposals more attractive should the Coalition want private enterprise to take on the construction and running of the nuclear program or to work in partnership with future governments.

The other conversation circulating among Coalition decision makers is public sentiment and being able to fully explain the policy and quickly and unequivocally answer questions, such as 'no we will not build them on fault lines or where there are other geological threats and that rules out sites X, Y and Z'.

Once the sites are settled it will then shift its focus to the core of its energy policy which is to overturn Australia's nuclear ban.

There is also one less potential base after the old Anglesea coal mine in southwest Victoria was ruled out after shadow immigration minister and local MP Dan Tehan pulled rank.

The problem with being so careful and being determined to launch a policy on overturning the ban on nuclear energy by debating the science and the merit of the proposal overall is to admit the inherent problem with fault lines.

The process has been hobbled by Mr Dutton being cornered into revealing the sites well before the election and opening the door for localised scare campaigns involving three-eyed fish that featured in The Simpsons cartoon series to be run by Labor and environmental groups.

In 2007, Kevin Rudd's campaign team ran a negative ad campaign, playing on a fear of nuclear fallout, after then Prime Minister John Howard ran the nuclear idea up the flagpole and Labor will doubtlessly seize on polls suggesting that local residents are adverse to nuclear.

However, the Coalition's own polling suggests that younger Australians, not born when the ban was rolled out and Greenpeace campaigns and American cartoons dominated, are increasingly open-minded to nuclear as an energy alternative while older Australians may be the opposite.

The issue for Labor is that younger demographics are increasingly wanting to be engaged in an authentic debate rather than be a bystander to negative political campaigning.

The Coalition's pitch will likely argue that resistance is overstated.

The problem to overcome local disapproval could also be solved with money.

Similarly to Labor believing that it's energy rebate, due to kick-in on July 1, for every Australian household will be remembered at the ballot box, the Coalition are believed to be strongly considering emulating Boris Johnson's nuclear sweetener of footing the yearly energy bills of UK residents living in the shadow of nuclear cooling towers.

The other issue is the time and cost being attached to nuclear with CSIRO recently estimating that even if the ban was lifted now and reactors commissioned immediately, the first small modular reactor would not be in full operation before 2038.

However, Mr Dutton has disputed this finding.

Meanwhile, Seismology Research Centre chief scientist Adam Pascale said a site specific scoping study would only take around three weeks, with that information normally included in an engineers report to determine the overall merits of a project.

He said that predictions over seismic activity can be made for at least 500 years, however while researchers can scope an area up to 300 kilometres around a site they also cannot guarantee that all fault lines not mapped previously will be found.

While nuclear reactors can continue to operate safely during low-level earthquakes and are set to trip during earth tremors to avoid disaster, there have also been instances where things have not gone to plan.

Following a major earthquake, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan, causing a nuclear accident beginning on 11 March 2011 and all three cores largely melted in the first three days.

Meanwhile, Labor's campaign will also likely extend to the potential risk of accidents in transporting radioactive waste from reactors to dump sites with experts believing the most stable rock formations able to store fissures for 100,000 years are in outback Australia.

This means trucks would need to travel from, for example, the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland and either through Melbourne on the Monash and over the Westgate Bridge, or north through Healesville.

It is also unknown if the cost of transportation to a storage site and the subsequent storage has been factored into Coalition costings.

Nuclear waste is currently only kept in temporary storage facilities around the world, however Finland is set to become the first country to bury spent nuclear fuel rods in a permanent storage site.

The Onkalo site will soon become operational and features tunnels that have been carved out of living rock 450 metres underground to deposit the waste in bedrock for the at least 100,000 years it needs to lose its potency.

Mr Dutton announced the nuclear option in August 2022 in a concession to the Nationals and as a way for him to unify the Coalition and enter the emissions reduction debate.

Shadow energy minister Ted O'Brien was asked whether the placement of nuclear reactors over or near fault lines had been considered as a factor in deciding where to potentially place the infrastructure and if the issue had been raised in Coalition party room discussions.

He was also asked whether the Coalition would or had commissioned seismology feasibility studies on the potential sites but his office did not respond by deadline.

Insiders have revealed that some Coalition MPs would have preferred that the policy was fully-furnished when first announced by Mr Dutton and that a discussion on lifting the nuclear ban was lifted before the narrative shifted to selecting locations.