This is an angle that many people won’t have considered:
The Australian Liberal-National opposition’s proposal to build nuclear power stations on the sites of old coal-fired plants is misguided. The policy would perpetuate Australia’s concentration of electricity generation and worsen our vulnerability to air and missile attack.
Renewable-energy installations, by contrast, are numerous, dispersed and therefore much less profitable for an enemy to destroy. They’re also far easier and quicker to fix. And energy storage capacity, another source of resilience, necessarily grows as they’re built.
Chris Douglas, ASPI Strategist
It’s unlikely we’ll be republishing a lot of ASPI content, but this is well thought through. There’s a reason why nuclear power stations are sometimes referred to as pre-deployed radiological weapons, and why tensions are so high around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine.