A former CSIRO energy director has said Peter Dutton’s attempt to politicise the national science agency’s work on the likely costs of nuclear reactors is “incredibly disappointing” and “absurd”.
The opposition leader attacked the CSIRO after its latest GenCost report reaffirmed that electricity from nuclear energy in Australia would be at least 50% more expensive than power from solar and wind, backed up with storage.
Dutton claimed: “It just looks to me like there’s a heavy hand of Chris Bowen in all of this.”
Bowen, the energy minister, said GenCost was “an independent report with no role by any member of parliament or minister”, and said Dutton should apologise to the agency.
Prof Glenn Platt, of the University of Sydney and an energy industry entrepreneur, was research director on energy at CSIRO before leaving the national science agency in 2021.
He said instead of debating the substance of the CSIRO’s report, Dutton’s response was “lazy” and undermined the scientific process.
“It’s incredibly disappointing. It’s lazy just to say that you must have been politicised because the answer isn’t what you like,” said Platt, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering.
The Coalition is expected to reveal details this week on the costs of building taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors at seven sites of coal-fired power stations around the country.
CSIRO’s annual GenCost report details the likely costs of different electricity generation technologies in Australia.
Dutton has previously claimed the agency’s GenCost report had been “discredited”, prompting the agency’s chief executive, Doug Hilton, to hit back, saying the criticism was unfounded.
The latest report said evidence from other western democracies suggested it would take at least 15 years to plan, develop and build a nuclear reactor in Australia. A future Coalition government would have to repeal federal laws banning nuclear energy and negotiate on several state bans.
The Coalition has claimed it could have a large-scale reactor built by 2037, by which point the Australian Energy Market Operator’s blueprint for the electricity market estimates 90% of the coal-fired power will already have closed.
During his time at the CSIRO, Platt helped to instigate the GenCost report as a response to the needs of industry and the public to understand the economics of electricity generation in the future.
He said the latest GenCost report had responded to requests from nuclear advocates to account for longer lifespans of nuclear generators and how they generated power for longer periods when deployed in other countries.
Platt added that the team at CSIRO welcomed debate but that the “lazy reply that it has been politicised just undermines the scientific process” as well as Australia’s national reference point for energy costs.
He said the GenCost report’s conclusions that solar and wind were the cheapest low emissions technologies had changed little over the years, including from reports released during Coalition governments.
He said the nuclear issue had become a major distraction at a time when the country needed to be generating more electricity to address fears of shortfalls by the end of the decade.
