If you look at the linked article, baseload is just the minimum amount of energy required, usually in the wee hours of the night.
Australia has an excess of baseload power already.
Left off the list of nuclear plant accidents by @Wend was the Windscale fire of 10 October 1957,
I was in the UK when the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986. The UK Government chose to keep the contamination caused by the accident quiet, telling everyone via the news media that there was no danger to anyone from anything. At the same time, news coming out of Europe was don’t go outside if it wasn’t urgent, if you do, wear protective clothing, etc. Also, don’t eat anything grown outside, don’t drink the water from outside, etc.
It turned out that the UK Government was suffering from extreme sensitivity caused by the Sellafield accident almost 30 years before, and didn’t want to alarm the population with another accident causing contamination and possibly cancers. Ignorance is bliss!
60 years down the track Windscale is still a cause for concern. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sellafield-cumbria-nuclear-accident-whistleblower-panorama-cumbria-investigation-radioactive-a7226991.html
One reason not to consider nuclear here is that there is nowhere to store the waste. ANSTO is full with it’s own and cannot store any more in ‘temporary’ storage:
Despite several attempts, no-one in Australia seems to want nuclear storage ‘in their backyard’, and overseas governments are increasingly returning nuclear waste to the user, including France back to Australia, so in the foreseeable future there is nowhere to permanently store ANSTO’s existing nuclear waste held in ‘temporary storage’ at Lucas Heights. Of course, they are still and will produce more.
Until the permanent storage problem is solved, there is no point considering building a facility that will generate even more nuclear waste with nowhere safe to go.
