VIDEO: Would you like a nuclear power plant in your backyard?
BRADLEY FROHLOFF, FROHLIES MEATS: We have had the butcher’s shop for, this is our 20th year. We have a property out at Upper Yarraman and I am the fourth generation there now. My kids are the fifth generation.
WILLIAM MURRAY, REPORTER: Yarraman is a town of just over a thousand people, about two hours inland from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
BRADLEY FROHLOFF: We don’t have a lot of industry in our area, so there’s not a lot of population. So a lot of good young people leave our area chasing work in the bigger cities.
WILLIAM MURRAY: Just a few minutes further west is the Tarong Power Station, one of seven sites on which the Federal Coalition wants to build a nuclear facility.
BRADLEY FROHLOFF: My initial thought was nuclear, bombs, danger so it was a little bit scary. But when I put some thought into it and I thought, if that brings industry to our area, that’s great for our town.
WILLIAM MURRAY: The finer details of the Opposition’s nuclear energy proposal haven’t been announced.
We still don’t know how much it’ll cost and how much of the bill taxpayers will foot or where nuclear waste will eventually be stored.
BRADLEY FROHLOFF: I guess the big thing for me is that we need to be assured that it's going to be safe and I think that's the big question on everyone's lips is how safe it's going to be but if we can be assured of that, I think it'll be wonderful.
WILLIAM MURRAY: But that cautious optimism isn’t shared by some across the country.
HAGAR COHEN, REPORTER: At this pub in Muswellbrook in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, the locals are also faced with the prospect of having a nuclear plant nearby.
VOX POP: We are approximately 30 minutes’ drive from Liddell Power Station and what we’re contemplating is the alternatives between one side of politics saying they'll use Liddell to manufacturer solar panels and another side of politics saying that they would use Liddell to produce nuclear power.
It’s pretty clear for our family which one is a safe, viable option.
VOX POP: I’m gobsmacked that Dutton would think it was a good idea, and I think, unfortunately, I don’t think most of the population are going to understand that it is really a trojan horse for the coal and gas industry.
VOX POP: You can’t stick windfarms up anywhere you want, big, huge towers, what are you going to make a fun park out of them later on?
Big solar panel farms, that’s just taking up everything. At least with nuclear power it’s underground. You might have a tower or something up. Less impact and we’ve got enough holes in the ground in our area to be able to hide it - no one would see it.
HAGAR COHEN: Each site earmarked for a nuclear plant is a current or former coal-fired power station.
There’s Tarong and Callide in Queensland, Muja in WA, Port Augusta in South Australia and Loy Yang in Victoria.
In New South Wales there are two - Mount Piper near Lithgow and here in the Hunter Valley, Liddell.
It has been decommissioned by its owner AGL last year after operating for over half a century.
STEVE FORDHAM, BLACKROCK INDUSTRIES: Our community is actually quite frightened.
At the moment, there's no forefront on what the job future is for this area. At the end of the day, we want certainty. We want to provide opportunities for our families, we want to be able to support our community, I want to focus on the fact that my employees, the ways in which we can keep them into a future.
HAGAR COHEN: Steve Fordham runs a business which does earthworks and site rehabilitation for the mining industry.
He says Liddell closing was a significant blow to the community and has created real uncertainty in the Hunter.
STEVE FORDHAM: People don’t understand, when these big companies leave, it's the little businesses, it's the local people who are the ones to suffer.
HAGAR COHEN: He believes with enough political imagination, nuclear power can be the saviour of the many regions impacted by the phasing out of coal by turning them into free power zones.
STEVE FORDHAM: My proposal to the Government currently is that all residents get local get free power, and also businesses. And I can tell you at the moment, if you want to create manufacturing, there's two ways to do it. You either have cheap labour or you have cheap power.
We live in an economy, in a country where we're not going to have the cheap labour force, but if we can create the free power or cheap power at the end of the day, we'll create it and within two years, I reckon you'll have Arnold's biscuit company here making Tim Tams.
DAN REPACHOLI, MEMBER FOR HUNTER: Look, getting nuclear power here to start with is the first fantasy.
HAGAR COHEN: Dan Repacholi is the federal member for Hunter.
His is the only Labor-held seat in which the Coalition would like to build a nuclear plant, but electoral boundaries could be changing, meaning the power station might soon be located in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate of New England.
DAN REPACHOLI: So currently, Liddell is in the seat of the Hunter and if it does change then we will actually lose the power station, that will go up into New England, but we’ll also still have a fair bit of land, a fair chunk of the land that AGL own, that will still be in the Hunter as well but I’ll make sure that I’m out there fighting for the workforce, for people in this area.
HAGAR COHEN: He says the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan for the power station is unrealistic.
DAN REPACHOLI: For him to say that it will be done by 2035 to 2037, there is no way known that they can do that. There’s nowhere in the world that that has happened at this stage.
WILLIAM MURRAY: There are a number of legislative hurdles the Coalition would need to get over for its nuclear plan to receive.
Firstly, it would need to repeal the national prohibition on nuclear power and then the bans currently in place in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.
Currently, all state premiers affected by this proposal are against the idea of nuclear power and here in Queensland, the state Liberal-National Party - who appear likely to be in government by the end of the year - also oppose it.
Kilcoy sits on the main road between Brisbane and the Tarong Power Station. It's a town built around agriculture and forestry and local Cameron Smart says it makes sense to re-purpose Tarong rather than building renewables elsewhere.
CAMERON SMART, KILCOY BUSINESS OWNER: Either you’re taking farmland or you’re taking forests or something and you’re developing renewable energies, and you’re actually taking that land away. Whereas this is already it’s already an area that has been disturbed.
WILLIAM MURRAY: Do you have any concerns about nuclear waste or the potential for a nuclear accident?
CAMERON SMART: It’s like anything. I have got a concern when I get into a car and drive a car but subject to due diligence and the appropriate controls in place, then yeah, I don’t see it as that big of an issue.
Would you live near a nuclear power plant? That's the question many are now asking themselves after the Coalition announced its plan to build nuclear reactors across the country if it wins government.
The locations, scattered across five states, are all home to current or former coal-fired power plants. William Murray reports from one site Queensland with Hagar Cohen at another in New South Wales.