This election Australians have a stark and historical choice: vote for Dutton and his seven nuclear reactors or build ocean wind farms off the coast.

The Coalition reckons reducing the roll out of renewable energy, extending the life of ageing coal plants and building publicly funded nuclear plants after 2040, will be cheaper and more reliable than Labor’s goal of sourcing 82% of Australia’s electricity from renewable energy by 2030.

Pull the other one.

It will cost the Australian tax payer about $330 billion to build seven water thirsty reactors in five states. If they started building them in 2040, they may be finished by 2060. Yet Australia’s coal fired power stations will run down by the mid 2030s.

The Illawarra ocean wind farm project will cost $9 billion and monies will come from offshore investors. It will generate green power to 1.8 million homes and the Port Kembla smelters by the early 2030s.

Remember the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Fukushima nuclear plants?

If you think ocean windfarms are a real estate marketing problem, try selling your property next to a nuclear reactor.

Doctors have warned that there is no safe level of radiation from a proposed network of reactors, citing long-term health risks including cancers for workers and surrounding communities.

Greenhouse gases will rise threefold under the nuclear reactors plan due to increased coal and gas use. They also produce plutonium-239 with a half-life of 24,000 years.

To keep a nuclear power plant operating at a steady 90 per cent when water was scarce, allocations would have to be bought from farmers or diverted from supplies intended for population centres like Sydney or Melbourne.

Offshore windfarms will provide clean, reliable energy to communities and local manufacturing and will create 900 long-term jobs in the Illawarra.

The biggest risks to whales are not ocean turbines, but entanglement in fishing nets, collisions with ships, whaling, plastic pollution, overfishing and climate change.

Benjamin Laws, deputy chief for permits and conservation with NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources, in the US said in the Sydney Morning Herald last year: “I want to be unambiguous: There is no information supporting that any of the equipment used in support of offshore wind development could directly lead to the death of a whale.”

Whales learn a map of the migration route and navigate around obstacles. Wind turbines in the Illawarra will be 20 kilometres out to sea, so whales can safely pass closer to the shore.

it is expected recreational fishers will be able to fish near the ocean windfarms, as fish gather at the base of the turbines.

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turbines do kill birds but not as many as are killed by cats, flying into buildings, or even the fossil fuel operations that ocean wind farms replace.

The most vocal critics of offshore windfarms source their anti-logic disinformation from campaigns funded by fossil fuel interests in the US.

They use social media to massively over-estimate the true level of community opposition. In the Illawarra, the Coalition has built its election strategy on it.

It’s no accident that saving the whales from offshore wind farms has become a major Republican talking point including president Donald Trump.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Nationals’ David Littleproud have jumped on board, although Littleproud now backs the Gippsland ocean windfarm project.

On Saturday May 3, we are voting to harness new sources of clean energy and build a safe future for future generations.