PLEA Network

21 April 2025, Renew Economy: Taylor’s nuclear spin is an intense form of greenwashing from a party hellbent on fossil fuels. We’re deep into what’s been described as “debate season”, and for a political party that began this election campaign on shaky ground, there are increasing signs of desperation and weirdness coming from the Coalition. Part of the party’s plan to keep coal and gas at their maximum levels over the coming decades has been offering a false, manufactured vision of nuclear power for the future. It’s an intense form of greenwashing and the important thing to remember is that the party that spent nine years not legalising nuclear power when they were in government will absolutely never, ever decide to do that if they were to win power again. Honestly, Labor is more likely to eventually legalise nuclear power than the Coalition is. The dynamic of fabricated promises was demonstrated perfectly on the ABC’s 730 program debate between shadow treasurer and former energy minister Angus Taylor, and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Taylor has a long and amusing history of gaffes and mistakes in energy, and during this debate, he claimed: “We know that by building seven 2 gigawatt baseload generators which will deliver a return to shareholders, which will be the taxpayers – they’ll deliver a return – that’s how they’re paid for.” The Global Energy Monitor’s amazing nuclear power tracker lets us quickly check out how large nuclear power units tend to be, and we can see that they’re consistently smaller than two gigawatts: Read more here: