THERE are just two things that should concern you about nuclear power and the nuclear industry.

First, Australia doesn’t have nuclear power or a nuclear industry. Second, the reason we don’t is because of a complete failure of political leadership and bipartisanship.

Because of this failure, Australia missed a once-in-a-generation nation-building opportunity. We could have created a new science and technology-based industry that exported products and expertise to the world.

Instead, the Labor Party relentlessly opposed the Liberal Party’s attempts to foster a nuclear industry in the 1970s and 1980s — Labor even opposed uranium mining — and the rest of the world left us behind.

The World Nuclear Association reveals the extent of the opportunity Australia has missed. There are 434 nuclear power reactors currently operating around the globe. The US has 100, France 58, Japan 48, Russia 33, India 21, China 20, Canada 19, the United Kingdom 16 and Sweden 10.

An additional 73 nuclear power reactors are under construction, 172 are planned and 309 proposed. Australia could have been part of this significant global industry. But Labor opposed uranium enrichment and a nuclear industry, and we missed the opportunity to create thousands of jobs and untold export income.

You may not think this matters because, with 31 per cent of the world’s uranium reserves, we’re one of the world’s biggest uranium producers, aren’t we? No, actually, we’re not. The world’s biggest uranium producer is Kazakhstan, a country which in 2002 produced 2800 tonnes of uranium and now produces 21,317 tonnes.

During the decade Kazakhstan’s production increased tenfold, Australia’s remained exactly the same. Kazakhstan’s total uranium production is nearly double Canada’s production, and triple that of Australia’s.

But Australia’s competitors are perhaps the least of our worries. The whole uranium industry is facing future demand challenges. Nuclear weapons have been reprocessed to fuel nuclear power reactors, new generation reactors use less fuel, and many will be able to use reprocessed high-grade waste.

According to one of Australia’s leading nuclear policy experts, Professor Barry Brook (who holds the Sir Hubert Wilkin’s Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide) Generation IV reactors will produce virtually no waste, will use spent uranium “waste” as fuel and then, when required, will “breed” their own fuel.

By mid-century, the nuclear waste “problem” won’t exist. So much for Australia storing the world’s high-grade waste — there won’t be any. All we might do now is store domestic low-medium grade nuclear waste such as that from hospitals.

media_camera A reactor cooling tower at the Chooz nuclear power plant, in northern France.

Australia has also missed the opportunity to capitalise on these carbon-obsessed times given nuclear power generation provides carbon-emission freebase load power, at an increasingly competitive price (yet Labor and the Greens still oppose nuclear power).

Which brings us back to political leadership. When it mattered, back in the 1970s, only a few brave Labor Party MPs like Commonwealth Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, and South Australia’s Norm Foster were willing to support the Liberal Party’s attempts to encourage a nuclear industry.

So Australia has, because of Labor, missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a value-added industry based on an abundant resource.

All we might do now is learn from this monumental mistake.

media_camera The nuclear power plant in Fessenheim, eastern France.

Last week The Australian’s Paul Kelly wrote that our “nation’s economic advantages are extensive but unless buttressed by effective public policy they will erode relentlessly”.

Australia’s failure to build a value-added industry around our abundant uranium reserves is a prime example of an economic advantage eroded by a missed public policy opportunity. It was a failure of political leadership and bipartisanship.

Because of this we’ve missed significant employment, economic and even environmental opportunities. You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to work that out.

Join us on Facebook