AUSTRALIAN-MADE goods will suffer under a carbon trading scheme, burdened by costs that countries with nuclear power will not incur, says the head of the nation's peak nuclear agency.
Ziggy Switkowski, chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, told a uranium conference in Adelaide yesterday that countries were turning to nuclear power to cut carbon emissions in response to climate change.
"Existing nuclear-powered economies will exploit their current cost advantages in having clean nuclear energy when competing with Australian products that will be newly burdened with embedded carbon costs," he told the Paydirt Uranium Conference.
Dr Switkowski, who headed an inquiry into the viability of a nuclear power industry for the Howard government in 2006 and is a former chief executive of Telstra, said later that Australia was progressively competing with countries that had embraced nuclear power. "So we are going to flip from a phase where we had a competitive advantage, where we had low-cost but dirty fossil fuels, to one where we're going to have our costs burdened by carbon costs through an emission trading scheme," he said.
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