1966: Kaipara Nuclear Power Station

July 15, 2021

By AHNZ

The National 2.0 Government (Dec 1960–Dec 1972) certainly were an energetic gang when it came to Statist projects! They gave us decimal coins, Rotorua Museum, and the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point. Did you know they were also planning a nuclear power station?

South Head is where the land runs out if you trek north from Muruwai Beach to the heads of Kaipara Harbour (I’ve only been up there one time and it was to pick up a truckload of Christmas trees.) Turns out that here, at Te Kawau Point, National 2.0 was scheming to put down a nuclear power station!

“In 1966 the Minister of Labour was quoted as saying that the first nuclear power station would be north of Auckland, probably in Kaipara, then a second south of Auckland, which could serve both Auckland and Hamilton.

“However, the site investigation work at Kaipara was closed down in 1971, and New Zealand remained nuclear free.”- Wikipedia

“When a site had been selected by the Siting Sub-committee of the New Zealand Atomic Energy Committee, the timetable was: call for tenders in 1970, order the plant in 1971, start building in 1972 and start generating in 1977.” – Archives New Zealand (2019)

“Tom Shand was linked to the Cambridge spies and the project was seen as a front to steal British nuclear secrets as that was where the reactor design was coming from. His death was “convenient”…..” – Rob Staples, Comment to AHNZ (2020)

Perhaps it proved unpopular (there were protests) or perhaps it relied too much on that Minister of Labour, Tom Shand, who suffered a sudden death in 1969 and this project died with him? Had it been otherwise, if the plant/s had been completed, we would have had a very different history. Te Kawau Point Nuclear Power Plant never came to be (yet) although a similar (same?) group managed to start building a plant in Jervis Bay, New South Wales, but it too was abandoned due to a change of political staff.

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Image ref. Plan for a nuclear power plant on Kaipara Harbour, Archives New Zealand; Flickr

Image ref. Tom Shand, The Dominion; NZ’s Heritage

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