{"id":185631,"date":"2025-10-02T18:19:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T18:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/185631\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T18:19:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T18:19:11","slug":"nuclear-power-to-be-central-plank-at-next-election-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/185631\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear power to be central plank at next election"},"content":{"rendered":"

When she was elected to replace Dutton, Ley said she would not make any captain\u2019s calls \u2013 unlike her predecessor \u2013 and tasked Tehan with leading a review of the Liberal\u2019s commitment to net zero.<\/p>\n

\"<\/p>\n

Credit: Matt Golding<\/p>\n

Debate in the Liberal and Nationals party rooms will be heated, with Nationals Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan, as well as Liberals Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Price, advocating to ditch the policy<\/a>, which is a prerequisite of Australia\u2019s commitment to the Paris Agreement.<\/p>\n

Dutton promised to use taxpayer funds to build nuclear power plants across the country, including large-scale plants as well as small modular reactors that are in development but yet to be commercialised.<\/p>\n

The Coalition cited modelling that costed its nuclear plan at $330 billion, but Labor claimed it would be $600 billion<\/a>. \u201cThe disinformation, misinformation campaign that was run by the Labor Party \u2026 put a fear on our costings,\u201d Tehan said.<\/p>\n

Tehan has not confirmed whether his policy would include public funds or large-scale reactors, but has promoted the potential of modular reactors to feed power-hungry data centres and complement renewables, which are the bedrock of the Albanese government\u2019s energy policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnergy abundance is going to become the keyword, or keywords, going forward, and we\u2019re going to have to be able to provide for that energy abundance otherwise Australia is going to be left behind,\u201d Tehan said.<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

NSW senator Maria Kovacic, a leading moderate, called in the wake of the election loss for the party to dump Dutton\u2019s nuclear policy. She backed Tehan\u2019s stance today, saying she supported lifting the nuclear moratorium and backed potential use of small modular reactors.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe we should allow markets to make a determination about any emerging technology or opportunity, and in that sense, if the market sees there\u2019s some viable emerging technologies in relation to nuclear, then that\u2019s something we would look at,\u201d Kovacic told the ABC. <\/p>\n

Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear policy analyst Dave Sweeney said the Coalition would face similar backlash from anti-nuclear protesters if it continued to push for the technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Australian people rejected Dutton\u2019s policy right across the country, and if the Coalition goes down this path it will be strongly opposed by environment organisations and the energy industry,\u201d Sweeney said.<\/p>\n

Ahead of the past election state premiers, except for South Australia, as well as energy companies that own the sites where Dutton planned his reactors, said they would not co-operate with plans for nuclear energy.<\/p>\n

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When she was elected to replace Dutton, Ley said she would not make any captain\u2019s calls \u2013 unlike…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-185631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}