Nuclear engineer and former Miss America Grace Stanke has entered the fierce debate in Australia over its future energy policy with a 10-day national tour extolling the benefits of nuclear power in a country where it’s been banned for almost 30 years.
The speaking tour is familiar territory for the 22-year-old former beauty queen, who said she studied nuclear engineering as a “flex,” but now works for US energy giant Constellation as a spokesperson and as an engineer on its nuclear team.
Her recent arrival comes at a delicate time in Australia, months before a national election that could put the opposition Liberal Party in power, along with its promises to build seven nuclear power stations – upending the current Labor government’s plan to rely on renewable energy and gas.
For several days, Stanke has been speaking to hundreds of Australians, in events organized by Nuclear for Australia (NFA), a charity founded by 18-year-old Will Shackel, who has received backing from a wealthy Australian pro-nuclear entrepreneur.
Most talks were well-attended by attentive crowds, but not all audience members were impressed by Stanke’s message.
As she started to speak in Brisbane last Friday, a woman in the audience began shouting, becoming the first of several people to be ejected from the room as other attendees booed and jeered. One woman who was physically pushed from the premises by a security guard has since filed a formal complaint.
Stanke reflected on the rowdy Brisbane crowd with the poise of a seasoned pageant entrant. “You know what? I respect people because they’re using their voices,” she said, describing the heckling as “probably the most vocal experience I’ve had.”
Those against nuclear power say it’s too expensive, too unsafe and too slow to replace Australia’s coal-fired power stations that would need to keep burning for several more years until nuclear plants came online.
The fact that people are even talking about the proposal shows how much public discourse has changed in the three years since voters last went to the polls, then electing climate friendly candidates and Labor’s pro-renewables policy.
Now, for the first time in decades, nuclear power is back on the election agenda, at the same time a backlash is building in rural areas against renewable energy projects that some say are erasing farmland, razing forests, and dividing communities.
A numbers game
Australia banned nuclear energy in 1998 as part of a political deal to win approval for the country’s first and only nuclear research facility that’s still operating in southern Sydney.
A change in government in an election, to be held before mid-May, would see seven nuclear reactors built in five states to provide power alongside renewable energy – a bold shift in direction that would not only require changes to federal law, but amendments to laws in states where premiers oppose nuclear power.
According to the plan proposed by Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, the nuclear reactors would be funded by 331 billion Australian dollars ($206 billion) in public money and the first could be working by 2035.
Both forecasts are disputed as underestimates by the government acting on the advice of the country’s independent science agency – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – which says renewables are still the cheapest and the most efficient way for Australia to reach net zero by 2050.
Shackel, NFA’s founder, wants the nuclear ban lifted, pointing to a petition he started two years ago that has quietly accrued more than 80,000 signatures.
“I think we need to move away from fossil fuels. Gas is a fossil fuel. So, I think that if we want to be able to move away from those sources, nuclear energy is something that’s going to be increasingly important,” he said.
Shackel met Stanke at the COP 28 climate talks in the United Arab Emirates in 2023, an event she attended as Miss America while finishing her degree in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She says Australia is “already kind of late” to nuclear energy, “so, you might as well start now.”
“I do believe that a strong grid requires both renewables and nuclear energy combined,” she said, referring to the argument for a “baseload” energy source that doesn’t rely on unpredictable weather.
That argument is challenged by experts worldwide, who say the need for “baseload” energy is an outdated concept, and that stability can be achieved by other means, including batteries.
Rural opposition to renewables
While nuclear has dominated recent discussion about Australia’s future energy mix, a steady rumble of discontent is growing louder from rural areas over the rapid rollout of renewable energy projects.
According to the Clean Energy Council, 85 renewable power generation projects are underway in Australia, along with 44 storage projects.
In the past two years, the number of petitions on Change.org opposing renewable energy projects has almost tripled, from 14 in 2023 to 37 in 2024 – alongside Facebook groups where communities are gathering to share stories and updates on protests.
Advance, a conservative campaign group that says it works to counter “woke politicians and elitist activist groups” is promoting a 48-minute documentary it claims tells the “untold stories” of farmers whose “lives have been upended by the rapid rollout of wind and solar projects.”
Murrough Benson lives near the proposed site of a massive battery storage plant in Hazeldean, rural Queensland, that’s currently moving through the council approvals process. He’s in favor of renewables. They “have their place,” he said, but “you could argue that some of them are misplaced.”
He and his wife Joy moved from Sydney to the area five years ago and hoped to enjoy a peaceful retirement. But now they’re considering selling their house, fearing the constant hum and potential contamination of the air, land, and water from the battery system, in the event of fire or flood. “We don’t want to live with something like that across the road,” said Benson.
Michelle Hunt has more immediate issues with the construction of a solar farm next to the “piece of paradise” she bought almost 20 years ago in the town of Gin Gin, also in rural Queensland.
She says a renewable energy company destroyed her fence without permission and replaced it with a wire “prison fence,” contravening a previous agreement to hide panels at the neighboring solar farm behind trees. Now they’re in full view of the house she planned to build. “Let’s face it, we are living beside an industrial electrical installation,” she said.
Rural areas where opposition is building to renewable projects are fertile ground for Shackel and his nuclear campaign. He’s already visited some areas earmarked for power stations under the Liberal proposal. And while he says NFA isn’t politically aligned with either of the major parties, he accepts he’s doing some of the groundwork to bring the community on side.
“I think nuclear energy positions itself as a solution to some of those communities because of its low land use,” he said. “And for those communities who are desperate for jobs but don’t see renewables providing that completely for them, having a nuclear plant there could be a good solution.”
Nuclear ‘foolishness’
Bringing a former Miss America to Australia was part of a plan to raise support for nuclear power among Australian women, who according to one survey are far less enthusiastic than men about the proposal.
According to several people who attended sessions in various states, the audience was dominated by older men, many of whom didn’t seem to need convincing.
“It’s just a way of spinning the fossil fuel industry out for a bit longer, and we cannot afford to do that,” she said. “You can see how the climate is collapsing around us. Look at Los Angeles. Those poor people over there lost everything.”
Others said the panel – which included local nuclear experts – made generalizations and didn’t get to the nub of issues specific to their area, like the potential strain they say a nuclear power station could have on resources in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
“There is literally no water for a nuclear power station. The existing allocation is already committed to mine repair,” said Adrian Cosgriff, a member of community advocacy group Voices of the Valley, who attended the Melbourne talk.
“Australians know nuclear power exists. That’s fine. It’s just not suitable for here. That’s kind of the argument,” he said.
David Hood, a civil and environmental engineer who attended the Brisbane talk, said: “Renewables are working right now. We can’t wait 10 to 20 years for higher cost and risky nuclear energy.”
Stanke and Shackel delivered a parliamentary briefing in Parliament House, Canberra on Wednesday, to politicians and aides across the political spectrum.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was unsurprisingly not in attendance, having already labelled his political rival’s nuclear proposal as “madness” and a “fantasy, dreamed-up to delay real action on climate change.”
Stanke says success at the end of the tour this week will be “knowing that I’ve made an impact in not just one person’s lives, but many.”
Albanese will be hoping that not too many Australians are convinced by her argument, which could lead to a change of leadership at a fork in the road that some say could lead to an even warmer planet.