Usually you need a few genuine releases under your belt before you start putting out “greatest hits” albums, but when it comes to spruiking nuclear this hasn’t stopped Peter Dutton.

This week, the opposition leader gave a speech that some hoped – perhaps naively – would add some more detail to the Coalition’s scant policy proposal to build nuclear reactors at seven sites around Australia.

But instead, Dutton delivered a familiar run-down of “greatest hits”; nuclear will mean cheap power, everyone else is going nuclear (so why shouldn’t we?), and renewables are unreliable (did you know, for example, and I bet you didn’t, that “solar panels don’t work at night” or that “turbines don’t turn on their own”?).

Perhaps Dutton is banking on the illusory truth effect where, regardless of the truthfulness of a statement, the more people hear it the more they’re inclined to accept it.

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So far there are no costings, no details on what type of reactors or how large they will be, or who will build them. We do know Dutton wants to fund them through the taxpayer.

But let’s run through the track listing.

Take, for example, Dutton’s claim in his speech, at the Centre for Economic Development Australia in Sydney, that Labor is pursuing a “renewables-only” policy for the electricity grid – a phrase he repeated seven times.

Just as it has been for many months, the “renewables-only” claim is false.

While it’s true Labor does want the electricity grid dominated by solar and wind, backed up by storage such as batteries and pumped hydro, the current plan also........

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