Sorry GTX, I missed your response.
And I say yet again, the ALP opposition has expressed support for the buy
Labor has three conditions for the support of nuclear-powered submarines, which we have sought assurance on. Firstly, that there be no requirement of a domestic civil nuclear industry.
And I say, yet again, that building and maintaining nuclear powered subs in Australia
will require nuclear infrastructure and logically, a local nuclear 'industry' to support it. As I said above, they might try a special miltary nuclear technology legal carve-out to get around the existing legislation but that would still be politically fraught.
The alternative is to accept that they are a permanently locked in "client" of the US (or the US via the UK) military nuclear industry and 100% reliant on the US govt for repairs, maintenance, fuel and cores.
Naturally, under those conditions, if Australia decides at some point that it needs 10 rather than 8 boats to defend its shores, it will be a US decision that makes it happen, not an Australian one. Indeed, even operating them will require a certain amount of US permission and support so as to fit Australian needs into the already busy US/UK SSN maintenance schedule.
So once again, from a sovereign capability standpoint, the French nuclear option works better for Australia because Australia could buy in and store a multi decade supply of nntp unproblematic LEU ( for which there is already a mature international trading system) and build and/or refuel their own boats completely on their own schedule, and do so without having a local 'industry' beyond a LEU storage facility.
EDIT: Well not NO local industry but not a significantly larger government nuclear industry than it already maintains through their ANSTO nuclear facility.
ANSTO is home to Australia's only nuclear reactor
OPAL in Lucas Heights, Sydney. OPAL stands for "Open Pool Australian Lightwater (OPAL)" - OPAL is a state-of-the-art 20 megawatt multi-purpose reactor that uses low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel to achieve a range of nuclear medicine, research, scientific, industrial and production goals.
ANSTO has over 60 years of experience in nuclear science and technology...
It's going to be very interesting to see the results of the 18 month review. Very, very interesting.