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May 1, 2025
Thursday 1 May 2025
Alexi Demetriadi
The Australian
The Coalition have decried an 11th-hour “scare campaign dressed up as safety advocacy” after a group of health-focused unions claimed first responders would have to possibly react to disasters like that seen at “Chernobyl and Fukushima”.
Six organisations representing more than 350,000 emergency workers, including the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and the United Firefighters Union of Australia, called on the Coalition to abandon its flagship nuclear policy due to “health concerns”, expressing “grave concerns” around the capability to respond to possible disasters.
“Australia’s emergency services do not have the support or resources to respond to nuclear disasters,” the letter reads, pointing to the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters as “international precedents” of the threats facing first responders.
“Unlike other nations with established nuclear industries, Australia lacks the necessary infrastructure, resources, and expertise to manage incidents involving nuclear reactors or radioactive waste transportation and storage.”
But Senator James Paterson, the Coalition’s campaign spokesman, called the open letter a “desperate union scare campaign dressed up as safety advocacy”.
“Every major industrialised nation with nuclear energy has built the training, safeguards and emergency protocols to support it – Australia can too,” he said.
“The unions can’t say they support AUKUS nuclear submarines but oppose the exact same safety protocols when it comes to civilian nuclear power – it’s the same technology, managed under the same international standards.
“If the unions are truly concerned about worker safety, they should be supporting reliable baseload energy. Their members – nurses, firefighters, paramedics – can’t do their jobs in the dark when the grid fails.”
The former commissioner of Fire and Rescue New South Wales, Greg Mullins, said the Coalition’s nuclear policy would require firefighters and first responders “to deal with situations for which they have no training, equipment or experience, and like in Chernobyl, possibly lose their lives”.
“The Coalition’s nuclear scheme gives rise to far more questions than answers,” he said.
In emergency scenarios, the acceptable radiation exposure limit for responders is up to 500 times higher than civilian safety limits and can lead to increased cancer risks.
The open letter said that emergency services were “already stretched due to escalating climate-fuelled disasters” and that introducing nuclear power would add “another layer of complexity and risk”, saying that the threat was more acute for communities and workers living around the proposed reactors.
“In light of these concerns, we call on the Coalition to abandon plans for nuclear energy in Australia, and prioritise safer energy solutions that do not endanger workers or communities, like solar and wind backed up by storage,” the letter said.
Nuclear has dominated political debate since the Coalition’s mid-2024 announcement that it would build seven government-owned nuclear reactors co-located alongside retiring coal-fired generators by 2050, with the first two smaller generators in operation by 2035. Last week, Nationals leader David Littleproud accused Anthony Albanese of telling a “blatant lie” by claiming the nuclear policy would cost $600bn, well above the $330bn forecast in the Coalition’s modelling, undertaken by Frontier Economics.
It comes as the former head of Australia’s charity watchdog on Wednesday slammed the Smart Energy Council for donating to Labor and attacking other sources of energy, like nuclear, for what he called “selfish motives”.
The unions’ letter follows antinuclear campaigners disrupting and forcing Peter Dutton to cancel a campaign event in NSW marginal Gilmore on Tuesday and Jim Chalmers claiming that Mr Dutton would construct a nuclear power plant in his marginal Qld seat of Dickson, despite the Coalition’s plan containing no such proposal.
Labor’s opposition to nuclear, and the unions’ “scare campaign”, is in sharp comparison to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who pledged to “build baby build” in February as he announced plans to make it easier to construct mini nuclear power stations in England and Wales.
At November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or Cop29, 31 countries agreed to try to triple their use of nuclear power by 2050, including the United Kingdom, France and Japan.