In this article, Adam Creighton contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research on Net Zero.
We absurdly turn blind eye to the nuclear energy future that is so obvious
Argentina’s incipient economic renaissance under libertarian President Javier Milei has reminded the world just how disastrous state-led economic management has been for once one of the world’s richest nations.
Much of that malaise stemmed from the influential rule of Juan Perón, whose unique Latin fusion of socialism and fascism – Peronism – scarred Argentina’s development for generations.
But, in fairness, Perón did leave one enduring achievement: he launched a nuclear industry in 1950 that still provides safe, cheap, reliable electricity, and even supports highly sophisticated technology exports Australia can only dream of matching.
Indeed, it was an Argentinian company that built Australia’s only nuclear reactor – the Lucas Heights research reactor – in the mid-2000s, at a cost of about $400m. Unfortunately, that remains our only one, despite the enormous economic and environmental benefits a small civilian nuclear sector would bring. Instead, Australia has settled for one of the most embarrassing and fact-free nuclear debates in the developed world.
When I interviewed Professor Germán Guido Lavalle in Buenos Aires last week – the director-general overseeing some 3500 nuclear scientists at Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission – he was far too polite to criticise Australia’s bizarre prohibition on nuclear power. “Kazakhstan was in a similar situation, but they are changing their mind,” he told me gently, before offering a more candid observation off the record about Australia’s globally unique ban.
In June, that former Soviet republic – the world’s largest uranium exporter – selected Russia’s Rosatom to build its first domestic nuclear plant, with a second to be built by China.
Lavalle also rejects the conventional Australian wisdom that nuclear is too expensive. He argues a new medium-sized reactor of around 300MW could be built for between $1USbn to $US1.5bn ($1.541bn to $2.331bn) – an order of magnitude lower than the absurd $600bn figure the Albanese government circulated when rubbishing the Coalition’s proposal for seven reactors at the last election.
“No, it’s not extremely expensive,” he insists. “The reactors’ capital cost might be high, but operational costs are very low if you take into account that it will be running for 40 or more years.”
This stands in stark contrast to the CSIRO’s GenCost assumption that reactors last only 30 years – a figure wildly at odds with global experience. Argentina’s two large reactors, built in the 1970s and 1980s and providing around 7 per cent of the nation’s electricity, are about to receive life-extension upgrades that will take them to a staggering 50 years of full-power operation.
“Refurbishment is a very good deal,” Lavalle says. “It’s about a third of the cost of a new reactor.”
New large reactors, he adds, can be built for about $US4000 per kW. “At that level they are in the same range as wind and solar – but nuclear produces energy even without wind and through the night.”
This is precisely what Australia’s beloved Levelised Cost of Energy comparisons omit: wind and solar only work about a third of the time, and require massively expensive transmission expansions and batteries that remain laughably inefficient and costly.
Argentina is a reminder of how ideological – and frankly unserious – Australia’s energy policy has become, even putting Labor’s three-eyed fish antinuclear campaign aside. As a global nuclear revival accelerates, driven by surging demand for airconditioning in developing nations, rising electric vehicle loads in rich ones, and the explosion of AI data centres, Australia is positioning itself as an irrelevant outlier.
China has about two dozen reactors under construction, France has plans for a least half a dozen new ones. Last month, the US, finally recognising the geostrategic folly of allowing its nuclear expertise to atrophy, announced it would spend $US80bn on at least 10 Westinghouse reactors. Australia, meanwhile, continues to pretend the 21st-century nuclear renaissance isn’t happening. Australia sends hundreds of officials to COP talkfests riven with antinuclear ideology. Argentina sent no high-level representative to COP30 in Brazil this year – nor to Azerbaijan last year. Don’t expect a delegation for COP31 either.
The Coalition has torn itself apart over net-zero emissions targets when more populous nations, including the US and Argentina, clearly do not care. One of Argentina’s assistant economic ministers, Luis Lucero, told me he didn’t know his country’s emissions target – and, mercifully, didn’t appear remotely concerned. (For the record, it’s a 21 per cent cut from 2007 levels by 2030, far easier than Australia’s 43 per cent cut from 2005 levels.)
Milei has repeatedly called climate change a “socialist lie”. Australia pretends to be ashamed of its uranium, while Argentina is issuing new exploration licences – including one to Australia’s own Piche Resources – to develop reserves Lavalle hopes will one day power its own nuclear fleet.
Despite superb solar potential in the Andes and world-class wind in Patagonia, Argentina has sensibly ignored the fading ideological obsession with intermittent energy. The idea of subsidising unreliable power is laughable for a government determined to run fiscal surpluses. Compare that to Australia’s vast, opaque off-budget Capacity Investment Scheme, funnelling billions into technologies that require the wind to blow and the sun to shine.
In the early 1970s prime minister Billy McMahon choked off what might have become a domestic nuclear power industry by cancelling the Jervis Bay plant proposed by his predecessor, John Gorton. It’s not too late to try again. With a better-quality public debate inspired by the verifiable facts in Argentina and elsewhere, it might even be popular. More than 70 per cent of Kazakhstanis backed nuclear power in a referendum last year.
