Australia’s nuclear future is not blocked by physics, engineering, or economics. It is blocked by statute. A handful of deliberate prohibitions, written into Commonwealth and state law decades ago, still make it unlawful to license, assess, or construct a nuclear power station in any Australian jurisdiction. The objective is not further debate. It is the systematic neutralisation of every one of those statutory bars.
The path forward is sequential, disciplined, and timed. It begins in Canberra, moves through the states, and ends with the construction of the regulatory and industrial architecture required to turn legal permission into operating plants.
Almost 20 years ago, the Labor Queensland government of Premier Peter Beattie and his Deputy, Anna Bligh, passed the Nuclear Facilities Prohibition Act (2007) with great fanfare. The legislation, which commenced in 2007, prohibits the construction or operation of nuclear reactors, uranium conversion and enrichment plants, nuclear fuel fabrication plants, spent fuel processing plants, and facilities used to store or dispose of material associated with the nuclear fuel cycle. Medical and research use and nuclear-powered vessels are exempt. Unusually, the Act also requires a plebiscite if the Commonwealth appears likely to override the state ban,
The state purpose was ‘to help protect the health, safety, and welfare of the people of Queensland’. Beattie declared that the Nuclear Facilities Prohibition Bill (2006) ‘would help protect regional and rural Queensland from the threat of nuclear facilities being built in their backyard’. Queensland communities, he said, faced ‘the very real threat of becoming home to nuclear reactors and a dumping ground of dangerous nuclear waste’. He further warned of the threat nuclear generation posed to Queensland’s multi-billion-dollar coal and mineral industry, which he described as the backbone of the state’s booming economy. Deputy Premier Bligh echoed his concerns. She noted that while the industry’s safety record had improved since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, worries remained about locating major facilities near population centres. She highlighted the ‘negative impact on our coal industry and the economy’ and cited an independent study commissioned by the Queensland government claiming a nuclear power station would use 25 per cent more water than a coal-fired power station, which was an unattractive prospect, she said during the worst drought on record. Clean coal technologies and renewable energy were, in the government’s view, safer and more economically sensible options than nuclear power.
A reasonable person, with the benefit of hindsight, might reflect on the hypocrisy of heroically trumpeting legislation that prevents power generation assets from being built in people’s backyards in regional and rural Queensland, then watching the subsequent proliferation of wind turbines and solar farms across those same landscapes. The same reasonable person might also note the timing. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had been released the previous year. Beattie and Bligh were simultaneously pledging to protect Queensland’s carbon-intensive coal industry while the climate alarm was being sounded at full volume.
Consequently, at the state level, Queensland remains prohibited from using a form of generation that operates safely and at scale in the United States, China, France, South Korea, Japan, Canada, India, Spain, and even Ukraine, which are still producing power while fighting a war. Modern reactors in those jurisdictions deliver reliable, low-emission electricity with safety records that compare favourably with other large industrial activities. Water consumption claims from 2006 also require an update. Nuclear plants, like coal plants, are thermal generators that use cooling water, modern designs, closed-loop systems, dry cooling and advanced reactor concepts have narrowed or eliminated meaningful differences in many settings. The 25 per cent figure was never a decisive technical barrier, it was a convenient political one.
It is reasonable to suggest that when Beattie and Bligh pushed the legislation, they could not have fully foreseen the scale of change that would follow. Queensland’s population has grown from roughly four million in 2006 to more than 5.7 million today. Electric vehicle adoption is accelerating. The AI and data centre economy is rapidly expanding, with national forecasts pointing to data centres consuming a sharply rising share of grid electricity over the coming decade. Reliability and firm capacity matter more, not less, as intermittent generation grows and coal plants approach retirement. Queensland’s energy system faces rising demand, the need for dispatchable power and the political difficulty of keeping ageing coal assets online indefinitely while simultaneously opposing the one proven technology that can deliver large-scale, low-emission baseload.
The Commonwealth prohibitions compound the problem. Section 10 of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act (1998) (ARPANS) and corresponding provisions in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC), effectively ban the licensing and approval of nuclear power plants, fuel fabrication, enrichment, and reprocessing facilities. These federal bans, together with Queensland’s own Act and similar legislation in other states, form a dense thicket of statutory obstacles. Until they are removed, no serious investor or developer can advance a project beyond the conceptual stage.
Ironically, Anna Bligh’s post-political career has included advocacy for precisely the sort of reform that would make nuclear possible. As Chief Executive of the Australian Banking Association, she has argued that Australia cannot afford to fall behind the global race for world-leading technologies and that lifting living standards requires backing world-class research and removing barriers to investment. The message aligned with submissions from major business lobby groups calling for reforms to boost investment and innovation, cut red tape through better regulation, improve planning and major project approvals and pursue comprehensive tax reform. The same logic applies with greater force to energy. A jurisdiction that bans the world’s most energy-dense, reliable, low-carbon generation technology while chasing ambitious emissions targets and rising demand is not serious about either prosperity or reliability.
The barriers are not technical. They are political and legal. Removing them requires a clear sequence. First, the Commonwealth must repeal the explicit prohibitions in the ARPANS Act and the EPBC Act so that a nuclear power plant can lawfully be assessed and licensed. Second, Queensland must repeal or substantially amend the Nuclear Facilities Protection Act 2007 so that state planning, development and generating authority process can function. Other states with comparable bans will need to follow. Only then can Australia build the independent regulatory capacity, skills pipeline, supply chain arrangements and community engagement frameworks that turn legal permission into operating plants.
None of this requires abandoning renewables or coal for the short term. It requires the pretence that a modern industrial economy can meet rising electricity demand, electrify transport and industry, support data centres and AI, and reduce emissions while deliberately outlawing one of the few technologies proven to deliver all of those outcomes at once. The 2006 legislation was a product of its time – political theatre dressed as precaution, industrial protectionism dressed as environmental concern. Two decades later, the costs of that choice are becoming clearer. Constrained options, higher system costs, and a growing gap between the rhetoric about the future and the statutes that still forbid the tools needed to build it.
Repeal the red tape. The physics, the engineering and the economics are ready. The statute book is not. Switch on the future.
