Ah, the magic of clean, safe nuclear energy - Fukushima style! Credit:AP And the fact is that nuclear energy is actually pretty safe – much safer than the toxic smoke belched out by coal fired plants, certainly – but if ever there was a time to build nuclear plants in Australia, now isn't it. Other times that nuclear energy isn't the way for Australia to go include the past and also the future. Why? Let's game this out. The biggest problem is one that you might not be aware of, which is that electricity demand in Australia has been dropping for years - partially because of better efficiency, partially because of higher prices, partially because of government regulation, and partially because of the decline of heavy manufacturing in Australia. This is one of the reasons our liquid natural gas manufacturers have been focusing on export rather than local generation: the demand in Australia just doesn't exist to a suitably profitable extent.

More worrying for a country that is still banking heavily on exporting coal and LNG, energy demand worldwide is also dropping: the huge peaks we enjoyed during the resources boom were from developing economies that are now, in the appropriate words of the Reserve Bank, "maturing". And as the SA storms showed us, the biggest liabilities relating to Australia's energy security is the profiteering of the national electricity market, and the weakness of the grid itself. If we're seriously thinking about large scale investment devoted to shaking up the way we meet Australia's energy needs, maybe having a handful of large, centralised generators with long spindly arms of distribution towers which get blown over isn't the best model to maintain. So you might conclude that right now might not be a great time to sink billions into making more large-scale electricity plants of any shade – but there are some extra costs that are unique to nuclear reactors. First up, nuclear reactors are very, very, VERY expensive to build. So are coal and gas fired plants, to be clear, but nuclear reactors cost more: up to 75 per cent of their costs are construction-related.

Part of this is because they're enormous, complex machines, part of it is because there are extra safeguards unique to nuclear energy, and a huge amount of it is because no one ever wants one built anywhere near their children. No Australian nuclear power station is going to be built within cooee of any inhabited area. So that means that plants would be built somewhere a good distance away, which means it needs bonus infrastructure out to the site: roads, water, power, telecommunications, that sort of thing. That all costs money – and, as our offshore detention policies have amply demonstrated over the years, when you do something a long way from any existing infrastructure, the costs get astronomical. Depending on the level of regulation a plant takes between five and seven years to build and another year or more to get online – so, again, not a great short-term solution for power generation by a government eager to improve energy security. And that's assuming that a large-scale project of this type and complexity never runs into any snags. It's not like doing something relatively straightforward like, for example. building a road – speaking of which, how's that WestConnex timeframe and budget looking? Once you've got your plant built, though, you're all set! Running costs are remarkably low, despite the massive initial cost, and the plant can be expected to last for 40 or 50 years. Except then you have the decommissioning costs, which are in the billions of dollars.

In theory, what happens is that the plant's owners set up a trust fund which grows over the life of the plant and pays for the decommissioning. In practice, what often happens is that the state is forced to pick up the tab for de-poisoning the site, which is what's currently happening at Sellafield in the UK. There's also the cost of storing radioactive waste, which is a whole extra issue – but if the British experience is anything to go by, the public can expect to be paying for that too. And we can dispense with the "b-but nuclear energy is greenhouse gas emission-free!" rhetoric: it's true that the plants don't emit any greenhouse gases, but any green credentials are more than offset by the carbon emission heavy process of mining the uranium to fuel it, which is an environmental nightmare. Right, Ranger Mine? Then again, the amount of viable uranium on the planet to fuel the world's nuclear reactors is currently estimated to be exhausted in 80 years, assuming that demand isn't increased by building more than the current 440 reactors around the world. So there's that. Loading