On the front cover of Frontier Economics’ costings of the Coalition’s nuclear policy is a stock photo entitled fork in road, implying that we’re at some kind of juncture where we must decide between a nuclear or renewables path.

In 1969 John Gorton’s Liberal government chose the nuclear path with the construction of the Jervis Bay nuclear power plant project. As Gorton later said, “We were interested in this thing because it could provide electricity to everybody and it could, if you decided later on, it could make an atomic bomb.”

In 1971 Billy McMahon’s Liberal government cancelled the project after a review deemed it too expensive. The cleared site became a massive car park at Murray’s Beach.

No nuclear power station was built in the intervening 27 years before John Howard introduced a federal ban on nuclear power. There were no attempts to overturn the ban during the next 18 years of Liberal government.

At the start of the 1970s we were indeed at an energy crossroads, we took the road towards coal, and as one of those who’d like to pass a safe climate on to the next generation, I wish we had taken the road towards nuclear instead. Our emissions would be dramatically lower.

In 1997, just before he banned nuclear, Howard took us down a different path – he announced the mandatory renewable energy target, a plan to add a tiny slice of renewable energy to our sliver of hydroelectricity. In 2009, in what was perhaps the last act of bipartisanship on domestic energy, parliament agreed to massively increase the target to 20% renewables by 2020. Today we’re just shy of 40%, and the government’s policy is to double it again by the end of this decade.

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Howard’s modest renewable energy target was surely more successful than he ever intended, in great contrast to the 22 failed energy policies the Coalition famously held during its last tenure. Its latest energy policy began shortly after the last election, when in August 2022 Peter Dutton tasked Ted O’Brien to “examine the potential for advanced and next-generation nuclear technologies to contribute to Australia’s energy security and reduce power........

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