About 500 engineers across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth airports started walking off the job from 3.30am. Follow live

• Building nuclear power plants in Australia could cost double CSIRO predictions, energy experts warn
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Bowen lashes Coalition plan to keep ageing coal-fired power stations open beyond middle of next decade

Under the Coalition’s plan, ageing coal-fired power stations would stay open beyond the middle of the next decade when most of the operators say they’ll have to shut – is that realistic?

The biggest threat to reliability in our energy system is coal-fired power now. We are dealing with … outages, breakdown, on a daily basis and that is what is the biggest threat to the reliability of our energy system and it’s a recipe for blackouts to keep ageing coal-fired power stations in the grid for longer.

What they have also done is very clearly in their costings of their own policy rejected the CSIRO and Aemo’s work. Now, CSIRO and Aemo have been talking about the cost of nuclear since way before we were in office as being the most expensive form of energy available.

Fundamentally what the Coalition is asking the Australian people to believe is this: that they can introduce the most expensive form of energy and it will be end up being cheaper. It won’t pass the pub test. It won’t pass the sniff test because it is just a fantasy.