"Peter Dutton has called a press conference for 10am, so it is all official – nuclear is go.
The Coalition teleconference meeting has wrapped up, and the seven sites have been named and it is as we thought: Collie in Western Australia, Mt Piper and Liddell in New South Wales, Callide and Tarong in Queensland, Northern Energy in South Australia and Loy Yang in Victoria."
"There are already issues being identified with the sites – first, the sites would need to be purchased from private operators. There will need to be some pretty major changes to legislation, both state and federally. The Queensland LNP, as recently as yesterday, said it would not lift the nuclear ban for the state, which is a problem given two Queensland reactor sites have been identified by Dutton’s team.
Tarong in Queensland is a particular issue as it doesn’t have a secure water source. In 2006, then-premier Peter Beattie had to propose a waste water pipeline as a last ditch measure to save the plant during a drought."
Let me paraphrase the LNP here:
“Private companies have researched Nuclear and decided it’s not cost effective.”
“Financial institutions have investigated Nuclear and decided they WILL NOT INVEST.”
“But our financial backers at the Mineral Council and the private companies dragging the last of the profit out of their end of life coal power stations are insisting that we continue with our current market AS LONG AS POSSIBLE, so we’ve decided to announce an extremely long term plan, to scare private investment out of renewables short term.”
“Don’t worry, between NIMBYs in the target areas, laws surrounding nuclear energy, lack of local expertise and the general unsuitability of Nuclear for our widely dispersed yet small population, we won’t actually build more than one of these things.”
“Jokes on them, we were only pretending to be retarded.”