THE NUCLEAR FILES #5: Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, right?
So it’s in the public interest to explore who was footing the bill for six people, led by opposition nuclear torchbearer Ted O’Brien MP, to spend more than a fortnight in North America visiting key nuclear industry players in the US and Canada.
It’s also good to know who all of those six people were, which has never been revealed publicly until now. And to get an idea of what they were talking about, as representatives from Australia, with some of the world’s most influential nuclear industry figures.
While they called it a “due diligence study tour”, it can now be revealed that it looked more like a trade mission for a nuclear Australia.
Except it was the opposition and Australia’s unofficial nuclear club putting themselves forward to represent the nation, rather than the official government, which remains committed to a longstanding ban on nuclear energy in Australia.
George Orwell himself would be proud of the “due diligence study tour” language. As readers will see, the evidence points to it being as much about selling as studying.
As for due diligence and the nuclear tour, which took place in January-February 2023, the thing the club was most diligent about was not going anywhere near anyone who didn’t have an ideological, policy or vested interest in the nuclear sector.
It’s the investment opportunity
The Fifth Estate has learned from communications between the tour party and one of the club’s key industry hosts that it the tour was promoting a potential emerging opportunity for nuclear energy investors and developers in Australia.
It’s an opportunity that will only exist if the pro-nuclear Liberal-National Opposition becomes the Australian government after the next federal election, due by May 2025, and overturns the ban, which has been in place since 1998.
This week in The Nuclear Files, we explore:
- For the first time, the full list of who was on the so-called study tour
- Who paid the bills for this expensive trip, which crisscrossed the US and Canada
- And what was said by the Opposition in nuclear sales mode behind closed doors
O’Brien’s tour party was travelling for 17 days, from 23 January to 9 February, with a hectic schedule to visit key nuclear companies, lobbyists and influencers. The slide below, created by one of the tour participants, shows all of the visits they made across Canada and the US.
The rooms where it happened
None of us was in the room where the study tour meetings happened with major players such as the Brookfield mega-investment group and uranium mining giant Cameco Corporation in Canada, which jointly own nuclear services company US based Westinghouse Electric.
But the coalition Opposition very much was in the room – in the shape of its Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Ted O’Brien.
Someone else in the room, at least for the Westinghouse stopover at its Waltz Mill complex nuclear decommissioning site in Pennsylvania, was nuclear industry heavyweight figure Dr Rita Baranwal.
Baranwal is now a top Westinghouse executive, and is a former senior US government nuclear official, who was appointed by then President Donald Trump in 2019.
Baranwal later very politely thanked the Coalition for Conservation (C4C), as the tour’s organisers, for the delegation’s visit to Westinghouse.
Addressing C4C’s President, Cris Talacko, who was on the tour, Baranwal wrote in a social media post: “It was our pleasure to host you and learn about Australia’s possible plan for nuclear in its climate policy. Grateful to have been part of the US tour of Ted O’Brien MP (Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy in the Australian government).”
It’s open to think that O’Brien was presenting himself as part of the next government of Australia, and its future climate and energy policy ambitions.
Yet, nuclear power remains banned under the current Albanese Labor government, which is committed to a renewables-led energy transition, and O’Brien is in the parliament, not the government.
Of course, the meaningful distinction between parliament and government in the Australian political context could be confusing for an American audience, although its federal system is not dissimilar to ours. It’s also likely, however, that O’Brien and his fellow travellers were talking up their own game.
The study tour’s full contingent
Baranwal also identified the full contingent making up the tour group, which until now has remained a mystery.
As well as O’Brien himself, the C4C’s Talacko, and the previously identified nuclear club experts Stephen Wilson, from Cape Otway Associates, now with the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA), a key pro-nuclear influence group that is close to the Opposition; and James Fleay, from Down Under Nuclear Energy (DUNE), now O’Brien’s Senior Adviser; there were two others acknowledged by Baranwal.
These two, who haven’t been revealed previously, were: Jon Chadwick, a Partner at PwC Australia and the big four accounting/consulting firm’s global energy transition leader; and Drew Roller, a videographer from Toowoomba, whose company is Roller Coaster Productions.
Yes, the O’Brien tour had a PwC Partner on board, and its own film-maker too! Next stop the Cannes Film Festival?
In logical terms, when the tour group met potential nuclear power investors and developers, you’d expect that O’Brien would have signalled how government policy could swing to pro-nuclear if the Coalition won the next Australian election.
Baranwal’s social mediamessage confirms that.
As The Fifth Estate revealed last week, in articles #3 and #4 of The Nuclear Files series, the tour coincided with Westinghouse’s majority owner, Brookfield, trying to buy one of Australia’s biggest energy retail and generation businesses, Origin Energy.
Ultimately, that multi-billion dollar deal fell through in December 2023, but it was very much alive when the tour group was in North America at the start of last year.
In a strange twistin August 2023, takeover target Origin Energy, appeared to publicly support a rethink on Australia’s nuclear ban, in this article in Bloomberg, headlined Brookfield Target Origin Says Australia Should Consider Nuclear.
The Fifth Estate has explored this with Origin Energy and is satisfied that the Bloomberg headline overegged its real position, which was and is more generally supportive of having all technologies as “part of the debate”, while clearly targeting renewables.
An Origin spokeswoman said: “Origin is focused on executing our strategy, including accelerating renewables and storage in our portfolio, having recently acquired several renewable development options and approving construction of large-scale batteries at our Eraring and Mortlake power stations.
“At this stage, our primary focus is adding more supply from these mature low-emissions technologies, however we will continue to watch progress with any emerging technologies that may be able to contribute to emissions reduction over time.”
So Brookfield, which holds its Westinghouse investment through its net zero business arm, Brookfield Renewable Partners (BEP), which also was involved in the Origin bid, could have found itself in an intriguing position.
It could talk about renewables with a Labor government, if Labor retained political power at the next national elections. Or nuclear with a new coalition government if the now Opposition pulled off a victory. The best of both worlds?
Both renewables and nuclear power are in scope for BEP, which co-owns Westinghouse with Cameco.
BEP is a little coy about its nuclear power side, describing itself in its FAQs like this:
Brookfield Renewable Partners operates one of the world’s largest publicly-traded decarbonisation platforms. Its diverse portfolio consists of hydroelectric, wind, solar, and energy transition operating assets and a robust development pipeline across North America, South America, Europe and Asia.
Presumably Westinghouse is an energy transition operating asset, but the nuclear power side is there more explicitly in the BEP corporate reporting if you look closely enough.
The study tour didn’t just happen by accident
It’s easy to see who could benefit from Australia changing the law and energy policy to go-nuclear.
You might wonder, therefore, who was paying for this obviously expensive, but very unofficial Australian mission to nuclear America?
The answer is that the tour was funded, at least in part, by overtly pro-nuclear lobbyists, through an organisation called the Coalition for Conservation (C4C).
According to his public parliamentary disclosures (see Open Politics), O’Brien accepted $5000 from the C4C towards his accommodation and domestic flight costs for the US-Canada trip.
The C4C is a conservative lobby group, which in recent years has become a very proud and active pro-nuclear proponent. Its chair is Larry Anthony AO, a former senior federal National Party politician, who is the chairman and a founding director of the SAS Group, a government relations (lobbying) and public affairs consultancy.
C4C’s president and director Cris Talacko was part of the tour.
The FIfth Estate provided Talacko with a detailed set of written questions asking what else C4C paid for, apart from the contribution to O’Brien’s costs, but at the time of publication had not received any response.[MOU1]
Non-politician participants are not required to publicly disclose any funding they may have received, even though the trip was led by a politician.
The flight, accommodation and other costs for the entire trip, however, must have been significant, with six people travelling to and from Australia, covering Canada and the US, east coast to west coast, over a period of 17 days. In addition, it’s unknown if any of the participants were being paid for their professional time, as well as their costs, or whether they donated it?
(PwC has indicated that it paid for Chadwick’s time in participating, although it remains unclear why he was there, and it predated PwC’s withdrawal from government consulting work, in July 2023, after a recent scandal involving its consultancy work with government).
COP28 UN climate summit: another trip
C4C’s funding support for O’Brien in 2023 didn’t end with the so-called study tour.
Funding coalition politicians for domestic and international travel is a key part of what C4C does, and it also funded a number of them, O’Brien included, for a December 2023 trip to Dubai for the COP28 UN Climate Summit.
This included attending a major net zero nuclear side event, and C4C hosting its own event called Australia’s nuclear energy potential: joining the global journey, with O’Brien as a keynote speaker.
The global lobby group Net Zero Nuclear describes itself as:
an initiative that calls for unprecedented collaboration between government and industry leaders to at least triple global nuclear capacity to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Its sponsors include Westinghouse and Cameco, Bill Gates’ TerraPower, and a number of other “study tour destinations”, such as GE Hitachi, Clearpath and Third Way. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) in Washington DC, another tour stopover, is a listed supporter of Net Zero Nuclear, and a key industry lobby group in the US and internationally.
Of course O’Brien and the Opposition aren’t the “government”, when it comes to Australia, but they have been embraced by the Nuclear Net Zero fraternity as though they were, or at some stage may be?
The St Baker connection
As a former colleague of mine, and long-time investigative journalist Marian Wilkinson explored recently, in The Monthly, a C4C patron, and dominant figure, is the wealthy Queensland-based energy and environmental services tycoon Trevor St Baker (see C4C patrons). He is extremely pro nuclear, as well as having invested heavily in both coal and new energy technologies.
St Baker also has a company, SMR Nuclear Technology, which is dedicated to campaigning for Australia to develop a nuclear industry. It was a prominent sponsor of the Australian Nuclear Association 2023 annual conference, where key study tour figures reunited, including Westinghouse’s Rita Baranwal and TerraPower’s Jeff Navin, and O’Brien and Wilson, among others.
SMR Nuclear Technology has been promoting a go-nuclear Australia for years, and its key personnel appear time and time again in nuclear club circles, submissions, publishing and other activities. They include its technical director, veteran nuclear technology guru Tony Irwin, who was quoted by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in his headland nuclear policy speech to the IPA on 7 July 2023, as was Wilson.
Many of the figures named in this article will keep cropping up elsewhere in The Nuclear Files series. You don’t move far in the close-knit world of Australia’s nuclear fraternity without encountering the nuclear club in one or more of its guises!
Questions to parties in this story
The Fifth Estate has put questions to and sought responses from Brookfield Australia, Cameco Corporation, Westinghouse Electric through Dr Rita Baranwal, C4C via its President Cris Talacko, PwC and its Partner Jon Chadwick, and videographer Drew Roller.
So far none of the above have formally responded.
NEXT UP: Getting to know Westinghouse’s Dr Rita Baranwal better!
