Opposition landed quickly on Wednesday, not just from Dutton's rivals in Labor, who ruled out lifting the nuclear ban on power generation in NSW, but from within his own political alliance, including state MP Paul Toole, who he said the proposal raised “more questions than answers”.
“This could take 20 years, there will be several elections in between, so the question has to be asked: is it fact or is it fiction?” Toole said.
Lithgow resident Merridy Cairn-Duff.Credit: James Brickwood
Andrew Gee is the federal member for Calare, covering Lithgow. The former Nationals representative-turned-independent fielded a dozen questions of his own Wednesday afternoon.
“Why were the communities in the Lithgow area not consulted before this announcement was made?” he said
Dutton has been invited to Lithgow by Gee and the town's mayor, Maree Statham, who has made it clear she believes the town should be a “nuclear-free zone”.
Some residents are not convinced that it should continue like this.
Victor Smith and Mark Hawkins at the High Street Music store, Lithgow, run by Hawkins.Credit: James Brickwood
“Part of me says, well, it makes sense. There's certainly information around the site that says nuclear is a reasonable form of energy production – it's no worse environmentally than coal,” said Mark Hawkins , which manages High Street Music on Main Street.
“The other part of me says, not in our backyard. Even though it's reliable energy, we all face the problems of Three Mile Island and Chornobyl and places like that.”
The nuclear disasters that decimated parts of Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Ukraine in 1986, as well as the more recent meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, are raised as a threat by half a dozen Lithgow residents, especially since the Mount Piper plant would be a threat . sit close to the edge of a water catchment that flows to Sydney's 6 million residents.
But so is the prospect of wind farms and solar panels dotting the landscape, fueled by an increasingly aggressive social media campaign against renewable energy sources, and a preference for preserving the aesthetics of particular farming communities over the wider environmental benefits for the rest of the country.
“I'd rather see the ugly building repurposed for nuclear than acres of pine trees torn down for wind turbines,” Hawkins said.
The divide is both optical and generational. As in many regional areas, the youth population is increasingly concerned about the risk to their future than the visual comforts of their parents and grandparents.
“If there's a drop in the balance with nature, that's very scary,” said TAFE student Sienna Mansfield.
In the 1920s, Lithgow was described as “a transplanted pocket of Britain's industrial Black Country” because of its abundance of coal mines, steel mills and six pubs that filled daily with wary miners, many from 'they from the north of England.
Sienna Mansfield and Jamie Beifus in Main St Lithgow.Credit: James Brickwood
But a century earlier, it had several British visitors, including a young Charles Darwin, who first saw platypuses near Wallerawang, outside Lithgow, an animal that helped the naturalist define his theory of evolution.
“Certainly, it is a very extraordinary animal,” Darwin wrote in 1836. “What would the unbeliever say to this? Would two workmen have ever met with so beautiful, so simple, and yet so artificial a contrivance? One cannot think, thus which on the one hand has surely worked all over the world”.
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Today, Wallerawang is known less for its platypus and more for its power station, a decommissioned coal-fired thermal plant that drew cooling water from Wallace Lake and Thompsons Creek Dam.
But many Lithgow residents are pragmatic about the boom-and-bust cycle, and long-term environmental concerns sometimes take a backseat to the next paycheck.
“It's a bit of a one-horse town in terms of employment opportunities,” Hawkins said.
The Coalition bets that the next horse will be nuclear.
