Coal and gas are major domestic industries and major export earners for Australia, so for a very long time it was a) political suicide to do anything that under

Coal and gas are major domestic industries and major export earners for Australia, so for a very long time it was a) political suicide to do anything that undermined them and b) simply way too expensive to bring nuclear power into the baseload mix compared to fossil-fuel plants. So the government wasn't going to subsidize it and private industry couldn't make a decent ROI on it. A decade ago Australia repealed its emissions trading scheme, which would have made nuclear much more competitive economically. If the politics at the time were different, and a strong carbon market brough nuclear power into the conversation then, some large plants might be nearing completion this decade. They'd be a reasonable chance to make a serious contribution to decarbonizing Australia's energy mix. But it's only in 2022 that the Australian population elected a government that took climate change seriously. With the timing of the net-zero pledges the new government has put in place, it seems like it's just far too late to put nuclear into the mix without paying hefty premiums for speed of completion. Finally, Australia is physically very large but the population is relatively small. Less than one-twelfth of the US population, less than half of the UK or France's population. It might simply be too small of an economy to establish a domestic nuclear engineering industry and training pipeline. If that's true, it'd be a very tough sell telling people it's time to pay extra on their power bill or taxes to stand up a nuclear industry from scratch ... and most of that money will go to foreign companies and immigrant SMEs.