Peter Dutton’s going nuclear.
When you set aside his proposed intention to build actual reactors on our landscape, there is a figurative meaning which I feel underpins the spirit of the man and his political approach.
Going nuclear can also mean ‘to become furious; to resort to drastic measures in an attempt to undermine an opponent.’
Yep, drastic measures. Nuclear isn’t a solution. It’s a threat. And it’s being used to undermine the conversation about renewables.
It’s straight from the seven-second messaging playbook they used for the ‘No’ campaign.
If you don’t know, vote ‘No-clear’.
Seven reactors in seven seconds.
When it comes to community safety, nuclear power makes climate-destroying coal mines look like a trip to Disneyland.
Is that the intention? It feels like a crazy bluff.
It’s a show of strength. It’s the big guns. It’s an attempt to capture the renewables narrative, and put it in the shadow of a giant reactor. All over my newsfeed I have pictures of Peter Dutton with a nuclear reactor. It’s power porn. It’s not something you want to look at before you fall asleep.
This is not a pathway to hope. It is however, quite literally, a pathway to power.
Good old-fashioned, trickle-down capitalist power. Not power sharing. The renewable model threatens to destabilise the core values of a system that keeps us hooked in like dependent energy junkies. Dutton is never going to be a fan of a system that delivers power sharing. He’s not into sharing power. He’s into taking power. He’s a big reactor.
The end of coal and gas has always signalled a philosophical conundrum for the capitalist monsters who fund governments and have kept us dependent on their supply. We have been plugged in and disempowered. They don’t want us to unplug. They don’t want small community micro-grids. They don’t want energy sovereignty. They don’t want us to create our own energy – because quite literally we’d be powered from the ground up. That’s scary. How do you have power over people who make their own power? Think about it. Billionaires don’t get to make more billions when we unplug.
The renewable economy has the potential to create a viable alternative to the trickle-down capitalist model. If communities are able to set up self-sustaining micro-grids where they control the flow of energy, they’re no longer plugged into the giant ‘grid’. There is no longer one ring to rule them all. It’s a decentralised model. There are no giant ‘power plants’ as there would be with Dutton’s plan for seven nuclear reactors, to be put, by the way, in someone’s backyard. Would you want it in yours? Give me a solar panel, a windmill and a battery any day. Shit, I’d be happy with a candle.
And before we get into the dialogue about nuclear providing ‘safe, clean’ energy, let’s reflect on the risk. And there is MASSIVE risk. We’ve seen it play out. In 1986 after a reactor meltdown and a giant blast at Chernoybyl something like 40 operators were killed. More have died from radioactivity-related cancers since. The site is still radioactive today.
And Fukishima. There are over 2,000 disaster-related deaths from the 2011 nuclear disaster. This was caused by a 15-metre tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling of the three reactors, causing a nuclear accident that saw all three cores melted in the first three days. 160,000 people who lived near the plant were displaced. Many are still fighting for compensation. Female infants affected by the worst fallout have a 70% chance of developing thyroid cancer. And may I remind you, children are more at risk from radiation than adults and more likely to develop cancers. And this is the energy solution?
Oh, and we live in a world where the climate has been destabilised to the point where catastrophic disasters are on the increase. Awesome environment for nuclear! Fire, floods, cyclones. We got it all.
If Dutton is such a nuclear fan then let’s start with a reactor in Vaucluse. Maybe Gucci can sponsor it.
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