YESTERDAY'S report by the Australian Conservation Foundation arguing against any consideration of nuclear power as a source for electricity is one move in a chess game of opinion over the ways that Australia can dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining a stable and reliable energy grid.
The report's conclusions are unsurprising.
Authors Dave Sweeney and Dr Jim Green are self-described anti-nuclear campaigners.
Their major finding is that the "small modular reactors" being championed by the pro-nuclear lobby are "mostly paper designs" that "lack any meaningful commercial existence in the real world".
That may well be true, but if that was the only criteria for considering our power sources, then we wouldn't be going down the renewables route.
Solar panels and wind turbines are well established methods of power generation, but governments would not be pumping billions into hydrogen research and other technologies if they were already commercially viable.
When Malcolm Turnbull began promoting pumped hydro for energy storage, studies predicted networks of linked dams up and down the east coast. Snowy Hydro 2.0 aside, so little has happened in five years that the former PM described the situation in April as "the ignored crisis within the crisis".
Despite an apparent lack of market interest, pumped hydro remains part of Australia's "net zero" roadmap.
Nuclear power has its problems, no doubt, with the handling of nuclear waste high on the list. But its supporters see it as an obvious way to maintain a stable and reliable power grid without the coal-fired power stations that we are now preparing to do without.
As we reported from last month's Hunter Defence conference, the AUKUS deal puts Australia in the nuclear club.
We will be expecting our submariners to live cheek-by-jowl with nuclear reactors, so it does not seem unreasonable that we should consider them on land.
Labor opposed nuclear power in a dissenting 2019 report commissioned by the Morrison government, but now that it is in power, it may well have to take a different view.
For as the Ukraine war has shown the world, the European championing of renewable energy has only been possible thanks to buttressing from Russian fossil fuels.
Nuclear proponents fear closing our existing power stations will put us in a similar situation.
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