Q: Where are the nuclear power plants going to be?

Response to question submission: "Where are the nuclear power plants going to be?"

Peter Dutton, Leader of the Opposition and the one we can thank for the whole idea of having nuclear in Australia, has proposed 7 Nuclear Power Plants with a varying number of reactors per site at the following locations:

• Tarong in Queensland, north-west of Brisbane

• Callide in Queensland, west of Gladstone

• Liddell in NSW, in the Hunter Valley

• Mount Piper in NSW, near Lithgow

• Port Augusta in SA

• Loy Yang in Victoria, in the Latrobe Valley

• Muja in WA, near Collie

(Taken from Tom Crowley and Jane Norman's ABC News report "Peter Dutton reveals seven sites for proposed nuclear power plants" 19 June 2024)

Five of these seven seats are held by the Coalition, the eighth seat by an ex-National Party independent (Andrew Gee in Mount Piper), and the final and only site not held by a pro-nuclear government faction is Liddell in the Hunter Valley which is held by Labor's Dan Repacholi.

However there a few important footnotes to consider.

Firstly, these power stations are only predicted to deliver 12% of the total energy required to run Australia's grid, so should we transition to a nuclear-dependent system, far more reactors and sites than the Coalition is currently budgeting for would be needed. The United States currently have 96 nuclear power plants that are still only powering 20% of its grid, while also having generated 80,000 metric tons (that's 72,574,780kg) of nuclear waste it currently has no way to process or long-term storage solution for.

That brings me to my second note, that there are currently no definitive plans regarding the transportation, storage, or reprocessing of the radioactive waste generated by these plants. This means that a) the waste will be stored temporarily on-site, increasing the risk factors of the facility, and b) further sites around Australia will need to be selected to house and process (the elements that are able to be processed) these high-level radioactive chemicals. Given that the Government has only recently passed a bill in the AUKUS project allowing radioactive waste from US and UK military submarines to be stored in Australia without public consultation, how can we know that the public will have any say in the storage of our own plutonium?

Thirdly, (you thought this would be a simple answer, right?) nuclear reactors consume massive amounts of water to operate - more water than any coal or renewable technology. This water must be taken from somewhere, and for the inland sites it is more than likely it must come from the local catchment.

Yes, pumped hydro obviously needs lots of water too, but the difference is that in pumped hydro, the water is recycled indefinitely and is open to the environment in so far as it can safely be a part of the water cycle. However, in nuclear fission the water is contaminated, in some uses with radioactive nuclei. The Nuclear Energy Institute estimate that a reactor uses between 1,514L and 2,725L of water per MWh (megawatt hour). That is billions of gallons every year, and this water must undergo intense filtering before it can be released back into the water cycle. And nobody likes the idea of drinking nuclear-power-water no matter how many times it's been filtered. It is unclear whether the Coalition has budgeted for the costs and area required for nuclear water filtration.

Finally, each nuclear site will have a range of 'regulatory' or 'buffer' zones surrounding it that will restrict agriculture and horticultural activities, and well as have implications for residential areas within a certain radius of the plant. Currently no specific plans for these zones have been released by the Liberal Party, however the international standard is an 80km radius for an "ingestion exposure pathway", in which people may be exposed to radiation through ingesting any goods that have been produced from within the zone (including animal products, water, and horticultural food products) if a leak from the site occurs. More than 11,000 farms currently sit within this zone for the proposed Australian nuclear power plants. In all likelihood, any land within this 80km radius is going to experience significant devaluing and there are currently not any options for compensation being discussed. International standards also indicate the need for a 'low population zone' and an 'exclusion zone', each with a closer proximity to the reactor, however the exact size of these areas varies across countries.

Hope this has helped answer your question, and if it happens you are in one the postcodes within an 80km radius of a proposed site it might be worth having a chat to your neighbours to make sure that your community is informed of the personal implications of nuclear power has for them before the next election.

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Anti-Nuclear Party Secretary

Naomi