OPINION
No doubt, being a more discerning group of media consumers than most, BFD readers already practise my Third Law of the Media: Always assume that ‘fact-checkers’ are trying to bullshit you. Especially when it’s a government-funded ‘fact-checker’.
Especially when it’s Australia’s very own taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda unit.
Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy Ted O’Brien has floated a 10-year timeline for having a nuclear power plant up and running in Australia. But Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen is sceptical […]
“I could point to the United States’ experience … with a very developed regulatory regime, with a very developed nuclear industry, the nuclear leader of the world. The average build time of a nuclear power plant in the United States has been 19 years,” he said.
Has the average build time of nuclear power plants in the US been 19 years? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
And here come the lies.
The verdict
Mr Bowen’s claim is exaggerated.
No, it’s not: it’s flat-out wrong. But this is the ABC we’re talking about, here. These are, after all, the same people who said that Craig Kelly’s claim that Australia has had more rain in the first 20 years of the 21st century than in the first 20 years of the last one. Kelly further said that there has been no nationwide drying trend over 120 years of records.
Both of these claims are 100 per cent true. But the ABC’s ‘Fact Check’ spun it as “flawed”.
So, naturally, the same lying ‘fact checkers’ are trying to excuse Boofhead Bowen’s blatant falsehood.
Even when he tried to walk back what he must have realised was a complete whopper, Bowen still tried to fudge the truth.
According to a spokeswoman for his office, the minister’s calculation only includes the three reactors constructed in the US between 1991 and 2022.
Although their average build time was 20.6 years, two additional reactors were connected to the grid in 2023 and 2024, with build times of 10.1 and 10.4 years.
In other words, Bowen is at best cherry picking a very anomalous tiny range of data and trying to pass it off as the rule.
Experts contacted by Fact Check said that two of the three reactors covered by Mr Bowen’s calculation experienced significant delays that were not typical of the US experience, and that there was no good reason to ignore reactors built earlier than 1991.
In fact, when you include the full data, every reactor ever built in the US, the average build time is less than half of what Boofhead claims.
Looking at all reactors built since 1950, for example, the average build time was 8.1 years.
For those built since 1970, a period Mr Bowen referenced in a later social media post, it was 8.8 years.
So, Bowen was just wrong.
And the harder the ABC tries to spin his lie, the deeper they dig themselves.
[Professor Todd Allen] argued that the two recent Vogtle reactors, as well as the Flamanville-3 reactor in France and the Olkiluoto-3 reactor in Finland, were better yardsticks for what might be expected in countries without recent nuclear power experience.
(These reactors have a wide range of construction times: from 10.1 years in the case of Vogtle-3 all the way up to 16.7 years for Olkiluoto-3. Flamanville-3 began construction roughly 16 years ago and has not yet been completed.)
Which would still not give an average of 19 years.
So, the ABC tries yet another fudge: claiming that planning and regulatory changes would push the build times out further than the US. Once again, though, their own numbers shoot down the spin.
[Professor Jacopo Buongiorno] said that to construct nuclear reactors, Australia would need to beef up its existing regulatory structure for nuclear research and other non-energy nuclear activities.
“Given the existing capabilities, this could/should take 1-2 years and proceed in parallel with construction project planning,” he wrote in an email.
ABC Australia
Which would push the average time out to nine to 10 years. Half of what Bowen claimed.
So, that’s three Pinocchios to Boofhead Bowen, and a great, big ol’ pants on fire to the ABC ‘Fact Check’. Again.