Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear power plan is one of those big ideas that has all but disappeared from the political landscape.

But it faces a hard row to hoe. The advent of a nuclear election represents a 180-degree swerve for Australians who endured nuclear bombs, anti-nuclear marches, supported Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and nuclear-free zone councils. Those days were put far behind when the Albanese government signed on to the AUKUS agreement to spend up to $368 million over the next three decades for a nuclear submarine program.

Dutton has weaved his nuclear thread through the bigger election issue – the cost of living – repeatedly blaming Albanese government policies for making Australians worse off, promising a nuclear future would help pensioners with airconditioning and heating costs.

Dutton claimed his $331 billion nuclear power plan, a cost and timeframe adjacent to the AUKUS program, would deliver massive savings over Labor’s renewables policy. It is based on a highly questionable assumption Australians’ power use won’t surge rapidly despite growing electric vehicle sales and hinges on running coal plants for potentially decades longer than forecasts, capping the rollout of renewables at just over half of energy supply and building the first nuclear plant by 2037 – 50 per cent more quickly than the CSIRO said is possible.

Dutton started talking up the nuclear option more than two years ago and last June, when he announced a Coalition government would build seven nuclear power stations across Australia we noted that, like a salesman who spruiks a product but won’t reveal the cost, the opposition leader refused to tell Australians how much his nuclear vision would cost.

Six months later, they are none the wiser. The modelling did not go to pricing and Dutton failed to provide a dollar and cents figure of how going nuclear will make power cheaper for each consumer.

The public’s understanding of the costs have been further complicated by two versions of a nuclear reality. One costing, prepared for the Coalition by Frontier Economics, found a system with nuclear input would be cheaper over a 25-year period than a system without it. That finding contradicts the finding of the CSIRO and energy market operator AEMO that nuclear is twice as expensive as renewables.

That sort of division is made for lampooning: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese noted that Friday the 13th was an auspicious day to drop the nuclear policy. And the retiring Bill Shorten evoked US fighter Mike Tyson’s quote that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. “All I can say about Peter Dutton’s plans is wait ’till they get punched by the facts,” Shorten said.

But the choice facing Australians is no joke. Our concerns with the Coalition plan stem not so much from environmental or safety issues, but the costs and timeline, coal’s continued use, and the perception that Dutton has made his signature proposal feel very political, rather than an energy policy designed for the right reasons.

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