Nuclear for Australia founder makes the case for nuclear energy on Q+A challenging the Youth Minister

Yesterday, our founder Will Shackel appeared on the Q+A BTN High Special with a panel of young people answering questions of a high school student audience live in Melbourne. Will had the opportunity to discuss why he supports nuclear energy debating the federal Youth Minister, Anne Aly MP and challenging another panelist over their claims that nuclear was 'extractive'. 

You can watch the nuclear energy segment here:

On Wednesday our founder, Will Shackel appeared on a special Q+A x BTN High School special broadcast live on social media and ABC iview and replayed on Friday night on the ABC News Channel.

The discussion commenced with a question from an audience member who asked "Recently, the CSIRO released a report concluding that nuclear energy does not currently provide an economically competitive solution in Australia. In the light of this, and the continual falling of renewable prices, why should we now invest in nuclear power plants that could take decades to build?"

In response Will explained how the numbers cited in the report for nuclear were outdated and that he believed "we can't fully understand the cost of nuclear energy until we legalise it because until we get proposals there are no way of knowing the true costs".

After explaining the benefits of nuclear energy, he directed a question at the Youth Minister Anne Aly MP, asking "what is the backup, what is the redundancy what is the plan B if our renewable centric plan fails besides from dirty and dangerous fossil fuels?". The Minister expressed that she believed nuclear was unsafe (particularly waste storage), too costly and too expensive but did not address the question if the government had a backup, redundancy or plan b. 

This was followed by an interjection from a fellow panelist who is an organiser for School Strike 4 Climate, who raised their concerns that nuclear was 'extractive' and that nuclear energy required mining and detrimentally impacted indigenous lands. In response Will said "I don't think this is an issue unique to nuclear" and that "there is 14x more mining required for solar panels" explaining that "renewable doesn't mean it is clean". 

You can watch the full episode of Q+A below:

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