As I drove out to Emerald last week to visit the AG-Grow Field Day, I passed train after train full of coal. The coal trains were travelling to Gladstone to be put on a ship and sent to Japan, China, India, Korea and many other countries.
The day before the Liberal and Nationals parties had announced plans to build nuclear power stations at seven locations around Australia, including one here in Central Queensland at Biloela.
The most common reaction to our plans was that nuclear was fine but why don’t we just build a coal-fired power station?
It is a fair question. Why is it that we are happy to send all of this coal for other countries to use but we do not want to continue to use it ourselves?
If coal has no future, why are we selling so much of it at record prices?
Indeed, at the same time Australia was engaged in its nuclear debate the news broke that India was set to add its biggest increase in coal-fired power in a decade.
Over the next year India will install a number of coal-fired power stations equal to three quarters of all the coal-fired power in Australia.
Even the United States is not walking away from fossil fuels.
Last year the United States, a country ostensibly committed to this mad net zero idea under Joe Biden, produced more oil than any country in any year.
But we here in Australia persist with the delusion that we can change the global weather patterns from our own little island.
We are shutting down our reliable energy sources for no environmental or other benefit.
The cost of this folly has become stark in recent months.
Over the past few months we have generated about the same amount of wind as we did in 2021 despite an extra 2500 of wind towers being built since then.
We are going through the regular occurrence of wind droughts.
They are so regular that the Germans have a word for them, *dunkelflaute* – or the dark doldrums.
This wind drought has meant we have had to run our gas-fired power stations much more than expected.
This is running down our gas supplies so much that our energy regulator warned last week that we may run out of gas this winter.
Gas prices have surged to levels not seen since the fallout from the Ukraine war.
Your power bills are going up because the government has decided to shut down reliable energy supplies (like coal and gas) and replace them with unreliable supplies (like wind and solar).
That’s why we need to consider nuclear power.
Nuclear power is used in every continent in the world except Australia and Antarctica. It is us and the penguins that are holding out.
More than 30 countries in the world are looking to build new nuclear power stations and Australia has the largest uranium reserves in the world.
There remains some who have understandable questions about the safety of nuclear.
But a recent Australian Chief Scientist said that “nuclear power has an excellent safety record”.
Our plans for nuclear would include ways to attract manufacturing around a new power station.
If we persist down the failing renewable energy route we will lose thousands of manufacturing jobs in Central Queensland.
We may still keep exporting that coal but even that won’t be enough to make up for the folly of sending all those manufacturing jobs to those countries that are happy to use our coal.
