The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has said he “would love to see Australia get in the game of supplying uranium and maybe going down the nuclear road themselves”.
Australia is already the world’s fourth-largest producer of uranium, but nuclear power remains banned at national level.
Wright was speaking at a major summit of international rightwingers in London, where he added that he was also “thrilled” to read recent reports about the development of shale gas in Australia, adding that it would be a “tremendous resource”.
Australia is also the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas, a proportion of which comes from fracking.
“I think Australia has a tremendous future, but it has some of the same struggles we have in the United States and even worse, in Europe, which is this desire for top-down control, for deciding what’s virtuous and what isn’t,” Wright told the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) conference.